Psalm 99: 1-9 (links validated on 2/5/25a)

I will give credit to my former CEP writing colleague Stan Mast for giving me this idea from a Psalm 99 commentary he wrote some years back. But many of us recall that in April 2024 parts of the U.S. saw a total eclipse of the sun and in many other parts of the country (including mine) a partial eclipse was on view. I attended the event on the campus of Calvin University with several hundred students, faculty and staff gathered on the Commons Lawn and we all had the same thing on: eclipse glasses. Not my best picture ever since I could not see well enough through the glasses to see if my phone was in the right position for this selfie (hence the look of concentration!). But that was the point of those glasses: they needed to be so dark that the only thing you could see through them was the sun as it went through the phases of being steadily obscured by the moon. Looking directly at it without the eye wear could seriously damage your eyes. As Stan Mast noted, we also cannot stare at the glory of God the King in Psalm 99 or the transfigured Christ from the gospels without risk of being undone by the spectacle. But we can safely see God’s glory through the lens of Jesus Christ or as John put it in the opening of his Gospel, no one had ever seen God so the Son of God came down here and explained God to us.

When we praise God for specific blessings in all the small and particular ways God works, then, as Walter Brueggemann has said, we bear witness to another world. We burst the narrow horizons and the shrunken boundary lines within which most people live to declare our belief in a larger world in which God is the King. “The act of praise opens a world for viewing but also for participation,” Brueggemann has written. In our act of praising God for his specific wonders we not only sing to God, we sing against the false gods of this world–the gods of self-sufficiency, of homemade salvation, of narrow human achievement in a world where everything is the result of luck or hard work but never the result of God’s work. But in our praise of God, we declare our faith not just in his transcendent power but in his down-to-earth love for us. C.S. Lewis once wrote that for now we can only tune up our instruments in preparation for the heavenly symphony of praise. But if you’ve ever been to an orchestra concert, then you know that there is something lovely and exciting about even the warm-up time. When you hear that cacophony of sounds, you know you’re getting close. And then, every once in a while in the midst of the jumbled sounds of percussion, woodwinds, strings, and brass, every once in a while someone plays a few measures of the Mozart piece that is coming up. And when you catch those few strains of the real music, your heart skips a beat in anticipation. In this sinful world we can but tune our instruments, but tune them we must. And as we do so, we shout “Hallelujah” to everyone around us, inviting them to join us in our chorus of praise to the Savior, to the God of small things, to the Lord of our everyday lives.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that for now we can only tune up our instruments in preparation for the heavenly symphony of praise. But if you’ve ever been to an orchestra concert, then you know that there is something lovely and exciting about even the warm-up time. When you hear that cacophony of sounds, you know you’re getting close. And then, every once in a while in the midst of the jumbled sounds of percussion, woodwinds, strings, and brass, every once in a while someone plays a few measures of the Mozart piece that is coming up. And when you catch those few strains of the real music, your heart skips a beat in anticipation. In this sinful world we can but tune our instruments, but tune them we must. And as we do so, we shout “Hallelujah” to everyone around us, inviting them to join us in our chorus of praise to the Savior, to the God of small things, to the Lord of our everyday lives.

I recently read The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. Perhaps you've seen the movie. It's set in Jackson, Mississippi and focuses on the role of domestic servants who serve wealthy families in the Old South. It's based on a unique plot: A daughter of a plantation family in the 50s wants to be a writer. She grew up being cared for by an older black woman named Constantine, who served as the family's maid for many years. In many ways, Constantine was her surrogate mother. So, she gets the idea of interviewing maids like Constantine and telling their stories of what it's like to raise white children – all the way from changing diapers … to potty training … to learning to read and write … to developing table manners … to going off to college and getting married … only to see them become young adults employing maids of their own. Potentially, the same child you raised could grow up to be your boss. She puts the interviews together in a book, and it becomes the talk of the town. But it turns out to be more than an exposé – it turns out to be a wakeup call and part of the larger catalyst for putting an end to segregation in the Old South, with its separate-but-equal inequities...