Stand, Stoop, Stay

Stand, Stoop, Stay

In Psalm 120, the first of the Songs of Ascents, we saw the theme of repentance developed. The word in Hebrew is teshubah, a turning away from the world and a turning toward God—the initial move in a life-goal set on God. It was addressed to the person at the crossroads, inviting each of us to make the decision to set out on the way of faith. Each of the psalms following has described a part of what takes place along this pilgrim way among people who have turned to God and follow him in Christ. We have discovered in these psalms beautiful lines, piercing insights, dazzling truths, stimulating words. We have found that the world in which these psalms are sung is a world of adventure and challenge, of ardor and meaning. We have realized that while there are certainly difficulties in the way of faith, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called dull. It requires everything that is in us; it enlists all our desires and abilities; it gathers our total existence into its songs. But when we get to where we are going, what then? What happens at the end of faith? What takes place when we finally arrive? Will we be disappointed?

Psalm 134, the final Song of Ascents, provides the evidence. The way of discipleship that begins in an act of repentance (teshubah) concludes in a life of praise (berakah). It doesn’t take long to find the key word and controlling thought in the psalm: bless God, bless God, God bless you.

There are two words which are translated “blessed” in our Bibles. One is ’ashre, which describes the having-it-all-together sense of well-being that comes when we are living in tune with creation and redemption. It is what Psalm 1 announces and what Psalm 128 describes. It is what we experience when God blesses us. The word in Hebrew “is used only of men, never of God, [and] in the NT there are only two instances in which it is used of God (makarios in 1 Tim 1:11; 6:15).”3 The other word is berakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out his own life for us, he shares the goodness of his Spirit, the vitality of his creation, the joys of his redemption. He empties himself among us, and we get what he is. That is blessing. When the first word is teshubah, the last word is berakah.

God gets down on his knees among us, gets on our level and shares himself with us. He does not reside afar off and send us diplomatic messages; he kneels among us. That posture is characteristic of God. The discovery and realization of this is what defines what we know of God as good news—God shares himself generously and graciously. “Whichever form the blessing takes, it implies an exchange of the contents of the soul.”4 God enters into our need, he anticipates our goals, he “gets into our skin” and understands us better than we do ourselves. Everything we learn about God through Scripture and in Christ tells us that he knows what it is like to change a diaper for the thirteenth time in the day, to see a report over which we have worked long and carefully gather dust on somebody’s desk for weeks and weeks, to find our teaching treated with scorn and indifference by children and youth, to discover that the integrity and excellence of our work has been overlooked and the shoddy duplicity of another’s rewarded with a promotion.

A book on God has for its title The God Who Stands, Stoops and Stays. That summarizes the posture of blessing: God stands—he is foundational and dependable; God stoops—he kneels to our level and meets us where we are; God stays—he sticks with us through hard times and good, sharing his life with us in grace and peace.

And because God blesses us, we bless God. We respond with that which we have received. We participate in the process that God has initiated and continues. We who are blessed, bless. When the word is used for what people do, it has, in Scripture, the sense of “praise and gratitude for blessing received.”5 The people who learn what it is like to receive the blessing, persons who travel the way of faith experiencing the ways of grace in all kinds of weather and over every kind of terrain, become good at blessing. In Israel this became “the distinctive expression of the practice of religion.”6 In Judaism to this day all forms of prayer that begin with praise of God are called berakoth—that is, blessings.7

An Invitation and a Command

There is no better summarizing and concluding word in all of Scripture than blessing. It describes what we most prize in God’s dealing with us and what is most attractive when we evaluate our way of living. Every act of worship concludes with a benediction. Psalm 134 features the word in a form that might be called an invitational command: “Come, bless GOD . . . . Lift your praising hands . . . and bless GOD.”

The persons who first sang this song had been traveling, literally, the roads that led to Jerusalem. Now they had arrived and were at the temple to worship God in festival celebration. Some would have been on the road for days, some for weeks, in some instances perhaps for months. Now they were at the end of the road. What would happen? What would they feel? What would they do? Would there be the “deadness inside”?

Read one way, the sentence is an invitation: “Come, bless GOD.” The great promise of being in Jerusalem is that all may join in the rich temple worship. You are welcome now to do it. Come and join in. Don’t be shy. Don’t hold back. Did you have a fight with your spouse on the way? That’s all right. You are here now. Bless God. Did you quarrel with your neighbor while making the trip? Forget it. You are here now. Bless God. Did you lose touch with your children while coming and aren’t sure just where they are now? Put that aside for the moment. They have their own pilgrimage to make. You are here. Bless God. Are you ashamed of the feelings you had while traveling? the grumbling you indulged in? the resentment you harbored? Well, it wasn’t bad enough to keep you from arriving, and now that you are here, bless God. Are you embarrassed at the number of times you quit and had to have someone pick you up and carry you along? No matter. You are here. Bless God.

The sentence is an invitation; it is also a command. Having arrived at the place of worship, will we now sit around and tell stories about the trip? Having gotten to the big city, will we spend our time here as tourists, visiting the bazaars, window shopping and trading? Having gotten Jerusalem checked off our list of things to do, will we immediately begin looking for another challenge, another holy place to visit? Will the temple be a place to socialize, receive congratulations from others on our achievement, a place to share gossip and trade stories, a place to make business contacts that will improve our prospects back home? But that is not why you made the trip: bless God. You are here because God blessed you. Now you bless God.

Our stories may be interesting, but they are not the point. Our achievements may be marvelous, but they are not germane. Our curiosity may be understandable, but it is not relevant. Bless the Lord. “When the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled” (1 Cor 13:10). Bless God. Do that for which you were created and redeemed; lift your voices in gratitude; enter into the community of praise and prayer that anticipates the final consummation of faith in heaven. Bless God.

Feelings Don’t Run the Show

We are invited to bless the Lord; we are commanded to bless the Lord. And then someone says, “But I don’t feel like it. And I won’t be a hypocrite. I can’t bless God if I don’t feel like blessing God. It wouldn’t be honest.”

The biblical response to that is “Lift up your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD!” You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; it is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motions of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along. “For why do men lift their hands when they pray? Is it not that their hearts may be raised at the same time to God?”8

It isn’t quite the same thing, and there are many differences in detail, but there is a broad similarity between the directions in the psalm and the contemporary movement known as “behavior modification”—which in a rough-and-ready way means that you can act yourself into a new way of being. Find the right things to do, practice the actions, and other things will follow. “Lift up your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD.” Act your gratitude; pantomime your thanks; you will become that which you do.

Many think that the only way to change your behavior is to first change your feelings. We take a pill to alter our moods so that we won’t kick the dog. We turn on music to soothe our emotions so that our conversation will be less abrasive. But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

One person says, “I don’t like that man; therefore I will not speak to him. When and if my feelings change, I will speak.” Another says, “I don’t like that person; therefore I am going to speak to him.” The person, surprised at the friendliness, cheerfully responds and suddenly friendliness is shared. One person says, “I don’t feel like worshiping; therefore I am not going to church. I will wait till I feel like it and then I will go.” Another says, “I don’t feel like worshiping; therefore I will go to church and put myself in the way of worship.” In the process she finds herself blessed and begins, in turn, to bless.

Most probably the people who were first addressed by this command were the professional leaders of worship in the Jerusalem temple, the Levites (“you priests of GOD, posted to the nightwatch in GOD’s shrine”). They worked in shifts around the clock during festival time, and through the night some of them were always on duty. The great danger in those hours was that the worship might be listless and slovenly. What can you expect at three o’clock in the morning? “No excuses,” says the psalm singer, “your feelings might be flat, but you can control your muscles: lift up your hands.”

Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.” That goes for a Christian too. Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that. Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.”9 The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.

Taking God Seriously but Not Ourselves

It is as easy to find instances of people who bless in Christian ranks as it is to find examples of people who curse in the world’s.

Karl Barth is one of my favorites. He is one of the great theologians of all time, but the really attractive thing about him is that he was a man who blessed God. His mind was massive, his learning immense, his theological industry simply staggering. He wrote a six-million-word, seven-thousand-page, twelve-volume dogmatics plus forty or fifty other books and several hundred learned articles. Impressive as that is, what is far more impressive, to me at least, is what he called Dankbarkeit. Gratitude. Always and everywhere we are aware that Barth was responding to God’s grace; there is a chuckle rumbling underneath his most serious prose; there is a twinkle on the edges of his eyes—always. He never took himself seriously and always took God seriously, and therefore he was full of cheerfulness, exuberant with blessing. Speaking of his own work as a theologian he said, “The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science.”10

Once Barth was on a bus in Basel, the Swiss city in which he lived and taught for many years. A man came and sat beside him, a tourist. Barth struck up a conversation, “You are a visitor, yes? And what do you want to see in our city?”

The man said, “I would like to see the great theologian Karl Barth. Do you know him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Barth, “I shave him every morning.” The man went away satisfied, telling his friends that he had met Barth’s barber.

Because he refused to take himself seriously and decided to take God seriously, Barth burdened neither himself nor those around him with the gloomy, heavy seriousness of ambition or pride or sin or self-righteousness. Instead, the lifting up of hands, the brightness of blessing.

Charles Dickens described one of his characters as a person “who called her rigidity religion.”11 We find that kind of thing far too often, but, thankfully, we do not find it in Scripture. In Scripture we find Jesus concluding his parable of the lost sheep with the words “Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue” (Lk 15:7). Not relief, not surprise, not selfsatisfied smugness. And certainly not the “deadness inside me.” But joy.

Blessing is at the end of the road. And that which is at the end of the road influences everything that takes place along the road. The end shapes the means. As Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” A joyful end requires a joyful means. Bless the Lord.

The Chief End

I have a friend who is dean in a theological seminary where men and women are being trained to be pastors. Sometimes he calls one of these people into his office and says something like this: “You have been around here for several months now, and I have had an opportunity to observe you. You get good grades, seem to take your calling to ministry seriously, work hard and have clear goals. But I don’t detect any joy. You don’t seem to have any pleasure in what you are doing. And I wonder if you should not reconsider your calling into ministry. For if a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to teach or preach convincingly that the news is good. If you do not convey joy in your demeanor and gestures and speech, you will not be an authentic witness for Jesus Christ. Delight in what God is doing is essential in our work.”

The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?” What is the final purpose? What is the main thing about us? Where are we going, and what will we do when we get there? The answer is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Songs of Ascents have shown some of them. But it is extremely important to know the one thing that overrides everything else. The main thing is not work for the Lord; it is not suffering in the name of the Lord; it is not witnessing to the Lord; it is not teaching Sunday school for the Lord; it is not being responsible for the sake of the Lord in the community; it is not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbor; not observing the golden rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”

“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”12 God is personal reality to be enjoyed. We are so created and so redeemed that we are capable of enjoying him. All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced. Every step of assent toward God develops the capacity to enjoy. Not only is there, increasingly, more to be enjoyed, there is steadily the acquired ability to enjoy it.

Best of all, we don’t have to wait until we get to the end of the road before we enjoy what is at the end of the road. So, “Come, bless GOD . . . . GOD bless you!”