I’ve thought about that when I look at the last six psalms David wrote.  All of them begin with “Alleluia” or “Praise The Lord”.  They all are reflections on the larger themes of life and the faithfulness of God through it all.  “Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, the maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them – the Lord remains faithful forever.” (Psalm 146)

As well, I can easily imagine David re-reading the story of creation in Genesis and being amazed and only able to say to himself “Alleluia” because that is how this psalm begins.  Alleluia…and then a long pause.  How do I put into words what I have just read and felt?  Is it an essay or a paper or a long treatise on creation?  No, David’s deepest thoughts and emotions were always expressed by poetry.  That’s what poetry is for and what it does.

Robert Frost said, “A complete poem is one where emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.”

Christopher Fry said, “Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.”

William Wordsworth said, “Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.”

That is a good description of Psalm 148.  It is David’s amazement at God’s act of creation put into words.  It is not simply speechless amazement or emotion.  It is putting that into words that allows us to praise the Creator as well when we read it.

2.  So David begins with Alleluia and then with the first day of creation.  All the created beings who were with God when He created the world are there to praise Him – the angels and the heavenly hosts.  Praise is not the same as countless millions of angels and heavenly hosts standing around and giving God compliments.  It is literally shouting.  “Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:  Alleluia!  For our Lord God almighty reigns.  Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!”  Revelation 19:6-7

I don’t know what that must be like in heaven but it means all of creation in one way or another and in ways we cannot hear is shouting God’s praise.  The sun, moon and stars are all praising God for their very existence.  They are not passive and inert. How are they doing that?  Why are we deaf to it?  St. Augustine said: “… the beauty of all things is in a manner their voice, whereby they praise God. The heaven crieth out to God, “Thou madest me, not I myself.” Earth crieth out, “Thou createdst me, not I myself.” How do they cry out? When thou regardest them, and findest this out, they cry out by thy voice, they cry out by thy regard.”  We enable them to praise God just by our noticing them.

When we stop and consider what the King James version calls “thy handiwork” and the beauty of creation and are amazed then we are giving a voice to the praise of God’s creation.  The way creation praises God is through our recognizing the beauty of his creation.  Mary Oliver says, “I believe God is disappointed if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.”  Frederich Buechner says, “We learn to praise God not by paying compliments but by paying attention.  Watch how the trees exult when the wind is in them.  Mark the utter stillness of the great blue heron in the swamp.  Listen to the sound of the rain.  Learn how to say “Hallelujah” from the ones who say it right.”  Praise is recognizing we and all of creation are His.  The heavens declare the glory of God.  It is he who made us and not we ourselves is the way Psalm 100 puts it.  There is no need for big events ramping up our emotions.  All we need is our unamplified senses.

Creation is not random or accidental.  It is intentional and God spoke it into existence.  Created things are more than so much matter in space.  They are set in place.  They are ordered and to such a degree that the smallest variation would make life impossible.  But it is not the kind of heartless order standing outside our world that Javert in Les Miserables describes in “Stars”.

Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light
You are the sentinels
Silent and sure
Keeping watch in the night
Keeping watch in the night
You know your place in the sky
You hold your course and your aim
And each in your season
Returns and returns
And is always the same

It is not deism that declares God created the Universe with certain impersonal laws and then stepped away leaving it to function on its own and for us to be our own masters.  The universe was not created as a machine but as a living thing and work of art and beauty in which God is intimately involved.

Robert Jastrow (self-proclaimed agnostic): “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

It is like Job’s response:  “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”

And now, finally, God answered Job from the eye of a violent storm. He said:

“Where were you when I created the earth?
Tell me, since you know so much!
Who decided on its size? Certainly you’ll know that!
Who came up with the blueprints and measurements?
How was its foundation poured,
and who set the cornerstone,
While the morning stars sang in chorus
and all the angels shouted praise?
And who took charge of the ocean
when it gushed forth like a baby from the womb?
That was me! I wrapped it in soft clouds,
and tucked it in safely at night.
Then I made a playpen for it,
a strong playpen so it couldn’t run loose,
And said, ‘Stay here, this is your place.
Your wild tantrums are confined to this place.’
And have you ever ordered Morning, ‘Get up!’
told Dawn, ‘Get to work!’
So you could seize Earth like a blanket
and shake out the wicked like cockroaches?
As the sun brings everything to light,
brings out all the colors and shapes,
The cover of darkness is snatched from the wicked—
they’re caught in the very act!
Have you ever gotten to the true bottom of things,
explored the labyrinthine caves of deep ocean?
Do you know the first thing about death?
Do you have one clue regarding death’s dark mysteries?
And do you have any idea how large this earth is?
Speak up if you have even the beginning of an answer.”

3.  And that (verse 6) is where the Psalm transitions from the creation of the heavens to the earth.  Mary Oliver is a poet and she wrote “Song of the Builders” that illustrates how a poet’s mind moves from the eternal to the particular.  The heavens declare the glory of God but so does the earth.

“Song of the Builders” by Mary Oliver:

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

That is exactly what David does.  He moves from the eternal to the temporal and still everything was created to praise God.  Paul says that creation “groans” as it awaits redemption.  I think that is exactly right.  What was once able to sing is now able only to groan but there is still beauty and order even in a fallen world.  It is what Leonard Cohen called the “cold and broken hallelujah” in a piece he wrote in 1984.  While it was never recognized for decades, it is now something of an anthem for many artists.

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled,” Cohen has said, “but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’…

“The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand …. at all – Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”

That’s what Paul meant when he said in all things break bread and give thanks.  Life is difficult and messy and painful but we still break bread and give thanks.  We still say Alleluia.  It may not be a shout.  It may be a whisper or a groan but we find a way to say God is faithful and we can trust him because we are His.

4.  All creatures great and small praise him.  There is nothing insignificant in our world.  There are things we overlook or call common but only because we do not see them for what they are.  I like the story of silicon – or what we call sand.  It is everywhere.  It is the seventh most common element in the universe.  We use it for the most unremarkable things – like cement or forging steel.  But in the last century this unremarkable substance became the key element of integrated circuits and that has changed the world.  The world is like that.  Common things praise God in unnoticed ways.  If you have read Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” or seen a Georgia O’Keefe flower you will never see “small” things in the same way again.

5.  Everyone in authority and with power should praise God.  We are all to aware of the temptations and consequences of losing sight of God.  We worship other things.

6.  This is one part I love because it describes the power of a normal life to praise God.

“Young men and maidens, old men and children.”

Our natural and everyday lives praise God.  There is no need to go to extraordinary measures or to extremes.  The normal course of our lives praises God.  The stages and responsibilities are different.  This one phrase describes the whole life of a family.

Of course, I am drawn to the “old men and children” part because that is where we are in life.  “One generation will commend your works to another” is a good description of our role in the lives of our children and grandchildren.  “When your children ask you what these stones mean then tell them about the acts of God in your life.”

7.  And then there is a second and final transition.  Just as Mary Oliver’s poem connects thinking about God and a cricket – so David’s poem connects the eternal and the physical.  The angels and the earth.  The seen and the unseen.

“He has raised up for his people a king, the praise of all his saints, of Israel, the people close to his heart.”

The king is the one who is the expression not just of God’s order but of his love.  He is the one who connects the splendor of God that is above the earth – the splendor for which we have no words or understanding – with all things great and small.  When we are praising him we are praising God as well.  That is why this whole poem is about Christ and his becoming the visible image of the invisible God – the firstborn over all creation.

“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

Alleluia is how it begins and how it ends.  We live in between those two.  We live in both amazement and groaning.  But we know that all of creation will one day be restored to what it once was and the dwelling of God will be with men, and he will live with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of this will have passed away.

“Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:  Alleluia!  For our Lord God almighty reigns.  Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!”