Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Praise to God:  Demanded, or Freely Offered?"
Date: November 18, 2007
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Psalm 100

Sermon requests:  1) “I have always understood—and had difficulty accepting—that God demands praise from us.  Is this correct?  If so, why is this not selfish?  If it is, why is that OK?”  2) “We pray a prayer of thanksgiving for our many blessings (health, shelter, love, all the good things in our lives), so what then is our prayer when we are faced with adversities (illness, loss of a dear one, financial difficulties, etc.).  Are we no longer blessed?”  3) “Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.”

I must begin by confessing that I pondered this first request for a long time.  The drawback of sermon requests, 90% of which are anonymous, is that I don’t know who submitted them, so I obviously cannot engage them in conversation about the nature of their request.  Why I pondered this one for so long is that I have never understood that God “demands” praise from us.  I thought it was something humanity would naturally want to offer back to our Creator for all our blessings.

But this requester seems to believe that God demands praise.  So I began to look back in the Old Testament for such a theme.  I came to the story of Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Issac as a burnt offering (Genesis 22).  A lot of people have trouble with that story.  But a careful re-reading shows that the God of the Old Testament is not asking for praise, so much as God is asking Abraham to trust God.  After all, God is about to make Abraham the spiritual father and ancestor of our faith, from which Jews, Christians and Muslims are all descended.  At the very point at which Abraham raises the knife over Issac, an angel of the Lord calls from heaven, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”  The story is not about offering God a praise sacrifice; it is about trusting God—something we are all called to do every time we pray to him.

I looked next at the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20).  Surely that would be a place where God demanded praise, as the first four deal with our relationship to God, not humans.  The first states we shall have no other god before our God.  The second states we shall make no idol, nor bow down and worship them.  The third demands we not use the Lord’s name in vain.  The fourth declares we are to work six days, but rest on the seventh day and make it a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

All four of these commandments speak of reverence, respect, even awe of God, but I do not take them to be ones in which God demands praise.  The very notion of setting the seventh day of the week aside as a Sabbath allows us to take a break in our regular weekly pattern and use it to worship God.

In my mind, you should be coming here to church at 9:30 of your own free choice, and in this place have an opportunity to offer praise and thanksgiving to God, and/or pour out your fervent needs in prayer.  Thanksgiving should be an act that is freely offered, not demanded.  We all remember our mothers saying to us, when we were young, “Say ‘thank you’ dear” to some doting relative who gave us a gift we didn’t really want.  And we all know we were quite capable of parroting back a simple but insincere “thank you”.  But true, earnest thanksgiving should come from our hearts, minds and mouths, whether verbally to others or in prayer to God, as a reaction to the gift, act or blessing we’ve received.

The appeal of the lesson I selected for this Thanksgiving Sunday, Psalm 100, may lie in part in its brevity and simplicity, as well as in its explicitly instructional tone.  The message is remarkably simple yet deeply profound:  God rules the world, and consequently we belong to God.  A few of you, of the proper Presbyterian persuasion, might remember the first question and answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism:  “Question:  What is the chief end of humankind?  Answer:  The chief end of humankind is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.”

Yet if you look carefully at Psalm 100, it was written by man.  The Psalmist is the one who encourages us to “Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing. … Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise.  Give thanks to him, bless his name.” (100:2, 4)  It is man writing that this is what we should want to do, not God demanding it.

The second prayer request asks that if we faithfully offer such prayers of thanksgiving for our many blessings, what do we pray when we are faced with adversities—personal, family, physical, financial?  Are we no longer blessed?

I have just read two books by Walt Larimore, M.D., Bryson City Tales and Bryson City Seasons.  In them, Dr. Larimore, Duke Medical School educated and board certified in family medicine, details the joys and trials of his first two years of medical practice in the rural mountains of Bryson City, North Carolina, at the edge of the Smoky Mountains.  Dr. Larimore is an admitted man of faith.  His books are found in the inspirational non-fiction section of religious bookstores.  He is known to pray with his patients, including a man he treated on Christmas Day in the late 1970s.  He was critically ill with pneumonia and strange infections on his legs.  He wished he had a relationship with God.  Dr. Larimore prayed with him that day, as the man asked God forgiveness for his sins and accepted Christ.  The patient died later that day.  Only years later, when the strange disease was finally named, did Dr. Larimore realize he had treated his first patient with AIDS.

The Larimores are parents of a daughter who suffered from cerebral palsy.  When she was about five or six, the tendons were stretched so taut in her legs that he knew as a doctor she must have surgery, even though as a father he agonized over the pain she would endure in her recovery.

They took her back to Duke Medical Center where he was trained, and in that experience, he truly had to maintain his role as dad, not doctor.  In spite of his own faith, his wonderful wife, two children for which he repeatedly through the books gave God thanks for, he was the same basket case any of us would be were it our child facing surgery.  Yet, in spite of his own parental anguish, he was still able to whisper prayers in his daughter’s ear just before surgery.

Walt Larimore, M.D. in spite of his education, his responsibilities as a health care provider in a small community, was a human just like any of us.  He realized he had blessings in abundance.  But that didn’t protect him from suspicion by the older doctors in town, or the folks who lived in rural valleys and never went to a doctor unless they were dying.  It didn’t protect him or his wife, a woman of even stronger faith, he admitted, from having to face the responsibilities of raising a daughter missing half her brain and dealing with crippling palsy at the same time.

Just because we are called to grapple with “adversities—illness, loss of a loved one, financial difficulties, etc.”—doesn’t mean we are any less blessed by God than someone we perceive has it all, with no worries, no problems, no adversities.  Being a Christian does not mean we are clothed with an invisible armor that will deflect any such ills.  Life happens.  Family crises happen.  Cancer happens.  Alzheimer’s happens.  Death happens.  Everyone of them to the best of us.  And in spite of them all, we are still blessed.  We still have a God to whom we can pray our fervent fears and heartfelt requests.  Last Sunday I received this prayer card:  “Thanks be to God for always being there for us—through the peaceful and stressful times.”

The third prayer request—more of a statement than a request—sums it all up:  “Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.”  I’m sure many of you have heard the story of the man who was faced with a flood in his community.  He went to the second story of his house as the water rose.  A motor boat came by and neighbors asked him to get in.  “No, God will take care of me.”  The water rose higher and he climbed unto the roof.  The National Guard came by in a power boat and urged him to climb in.  Again he refused and prayed instead.  Finally, a helicopter hovered overhead; the Coast Guard wanted to send down a rescue line, but he refused.  He drowned.  He got to heaven and complained to God that he prayed; how come God didn’t answer his prayers?  God replied, “I know; I heard them.  I sent two boats and a helicopter.  What more did you want?”

Apropos to this notion is the quotation on the little daily tear-off calendar on my desk for today:  “God promised a safe landing, not smooth sailing.”

You offer your thanks to God, not just this Thursday, not just this week, but every day for your many blessings.  And because you are blessed to have God your Creator, and Christ your Savior, in your life, you pray for help to endure, survive, even recover from your adversities as well.  To the same God, who deserves, but may not demand, our praise; to the same God who heard the fervent prayers of his own Son, both in Gethsemane and from the cross.