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Praise the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord; praise him, you servants of the Lord, you who minister in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God. Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing praise to his name, for that is pleasant. For the Lord has chosen Jacob to be his own, Israel to be his treasured possession. I know that the Lord is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods. The Lord does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths. … Your name, Lord, endures forever, your renown, Lord, through all generations. For the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants. (Psalm 135:1-6, 13-14)

On either side of the Psalms of Ascent, there are psalms of praise.  Psalm 135 picks right up where psalm 118 left off before we traveled through the law in Psalm 119 and to the Temple for Festival in psalms 120-134.  We left rejoicing, and we are to return rejoicing.

The theme that flows through Psalm 135 is how Israel is planted as God’s specially chosen nation amidst all the other nations to become the embodiment, example, and message of the Lord’s name and renown.  Those other nations make their gods, but Israel’s God has made all things, including his people.  The Lord is the one, true, sovereign God: the only God who can save—as he demonstrated in the deliverance of his people from Egypt and his defeat of the kings of Canaan to settle his people in the promised land.  For these acts, Israel has reason to continue to praise the Lord.

Of course, Israel continued to live among the nations even after these great acts of salvation were accomplished.  In this muddled middle of history, things were not always so clean cut as they may have seemed in the past.  And so a promise for the future also resides in this psalm.  Verse 14 says: “the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.”  Continuing to believe in the Lord as the great God above all gods who is trustworthy to save and deliver remained a difficult and contested act—especially when it seemed like the nations and their gods had the upper hand or the better life. 

We, in a very different and yet also very similar way, still live in an age of contested belief.  We may follow Christ, but we are fully aware that many of our neighbours, coworkers, and online friends do not.  Rather than being part of a nation geographically insulated by borders from these secular or spiritually or religiously other people in our lives, we rub shoulders, share roads, and exchange online comments with them almost daily.

How in this culture do we continue to be distinctly Christian, trustful of the work of our sovereign God, believers in the things we cannot see even when it seems like we’re increasingly in the minority?

The psalm gives a single solution: to praise the Lord.  The content of our praise is filled with memory.  It reminds us of what God has done in the past.  These are the things we praise him for.  But the act of praise itself is an act of hope that envelopes, as Pastor Michael said yesterday, our whole body and lives.  It gets our voice, or arms, our heart, our mind, our soul—all of it involved in responding to God, remembering God, being in grateful relationship with God.

As the Church in this culture we do not need walls, nor do we need policies.  What the Church needs in order to be the Church and to witness to the world in this secular age of contested belief is deep-throated, full-bodied, believing, hoping praise of our God.  Do we have a message of Good News or don’t we?  If we do, then let’s praise the Lord!