Psalm 148: 1-14 (links validated 12/10/24a)

We expect it in children’s books. In the Margaret Wise Brown classic pictured above, we are not startled when the little bunny at the heart of the story systemically goes around his bedroom to say goodnight to each object in turn. (We are also not surprised to find it is a rabbit who seems capable of speaking in the first place!) Goodnight to the moon but also to a telephone, a red balloon, a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. Stuffed animals, actual kittens, mittens, a dollhouse—all of it is directly addressed with a goodnight wish. And just for good measure we conclude with a goodnight to “noises everywhere.” We expect this in a book for children but less so in the Bible as we encounter something very similar in Psalm 148. Maybe we are tempted to chalk up the address in the psalm to hail and snow and birds and fish as just poetic license, as strictly a metaphor. But what it if it is actually more literally meant than just that? What if, as suggested above, all those non-human creatures and objects and things really do have a role to play in the wider economy of praise to God?

It’s a wonderful insight that has been used here on the CEP website more than a few times probably and in connection to more than any one passage of Scripture too. Some illustration ideas are utility players who work in multiple settings. The one I have in mind is from near the very end of the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. At one point the characters who have been brought to the New Narnia (think New Creation biblically) enter what looked to be a modest sized building and yet when they enter it, it is a huge edifice. “Its inside is bigger than its outside” one character exclaims. This in turn prompts one of the humans to say that something very much like that once happened in their world. One starry night inside a very small stable and contained in the narrow confines of an animal’s manger lay the Son of God incarnate. The manger was small but it contained the whole world. The inside of that stable was definitely vastly bigger than its outside.

the conclusion of the final C.S. Lewis Narnia novel, The Last Battle, is a fun, imaginative way of thinking what the New Heavens and the New Earth will be. As the characters in this stories arrive at the New Narnia, Lewis writes this: “It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean.”

The Bible is full of surprises though seldom more so than in how the Book of Job concludes. After around 37 whole chapters that are chock-full of deep theological and spiritual and philosophical wranglings and the pondering of perplexing questions of theodicy and why bad things happen to good people and the ways of God, the ways of the righteous, the fairness or unfairness of life . . . suddenly (and none too soon) God shows up to have the last word. But God’s last word turns out to be somewhere close to being the opposite of what most any rational person would have expected. Theology is not at the forefront...

The Bible is full of surprises though seldom more so than in how the Book of Job concludes. But God’s last word turns out to be somewhere close to being the opposite of what most any rational person would have expected. Theology is not at the forefront. The obvious questions that have preoccupied Job and his friends are not touched. Instead God takes Job and all of us on a tour of the cosmos. We go to the zoo, in essence. We discover that for all the other things God might have to do, he apparently spends a lot of time delighting in watching mountain goats frolic, wild donkeys cavort, eagles soar, and hippos just being hippos. Chapter after chapter God goes on and on about storehouses for snow, spectacles of the night sky, deer giving birth to fawns. What does all of that have to do with anything given the overarching (and wrenching) concerns of the rest of the Book of Job? Well, in part it has to do with the deep mysteries of creation by which God reframes the questions of Job and his friends. But let us not fail to notice something else: the splendors of his own creation and the wide panoply of creatures he fashioned is never far from God’s mind. God loves all that stuff. He delights in all those things and creatures. He receives a kick out of it all and feels praised by it all. All of which is pretty much the point of also Psalm 148.

Recently “60 Minutes” did an update on a previous show about the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has given us hitherto unimaginable information about the far reaches of the universe. But now, it has peered even further into deep space to show us that what formerly seemed to be empty black spaces are, in fact, filled with billions of galaxies. Such scientific data can be a challenge to our faith, or it can move us to even more praise. Our God is “exalted above the heavens….” Can you imagine? Those distant galaxies and any planets in them that might be inhabited by sentient beings are commanded by Psalm 148 to join us humans in giving praise to Yahweh. That puts the miracle of Christmas in an even brighter light.

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Fifteen years ago I wrote an article in a magazine for preachers about the different voices of preaching. It had occurred to me that preachers can make use of a variety of voices in our preaching to bring the Word alive for those who are called to listen. Now, I don’t mean ventriloquist voices, but rather the voices of speech: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and so on...

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