The topic of praising God is not something we folks in the mainline Christian community do a lot of talking about, or at least in the places that I’ve served and been a part of over the years. Even when I was a teenager and ensconced within a Southern Baptist setting, I don’t remember a lot of conversations about what it means to praise God and why we humans do it or should do it. Maybe it’s nothing you’ve ever thought about twice, because we often are given the words with which to praise God, in hymns, songs, Scripture readings, like the one you heard a few minutes ago from Psalm 150. Honestly, I had never really thought twice about our praise of God until something early on in my ministry, in which I was told how to praise God in a particular kind of worship service. As you know, I once worked in a large congregation that had multiple and different kinds of worship services during the week. As some point, the Senior Pastor asked/told me that I would be leading up the Wednesday evening service, which at that time was a contemporary worship service with a 30-minute slot for preaching/teaching, usually connected to some clever and contemporary hot TV show of the moment. One time they had a series on relationships based on the Simpsons, another time it was around the first round of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy series, but it was renamed Queer Eye for the Soul. Yes, some of it was a bit much, but I didn’t get to pick the themes or the contemporary connection to pop culture! Anyway, so all of sudden I am leading a Wednesday evening worship service with a 6-piece band, all them quite good, with 6-8 gifted vocalists leading us in a contemporary Christian worship style. This means that in this particular service there was a lot of music for the first 20 minutes of the service for the 200 souls gathered there, with the lyrics projected onto the screen, and lots of repetition, singing the choruses of these songs over and over again. And there were people raising their hands in praise, often standing up with their eyes closed and their bodies swaying. Then I would preach or teach for 30 minutes, do a prayer, and then the service with another round of repetitive choruses, all of which usually were short, uncomplicated and effused with words of praise for God. I had not grown up in that worship style, and here I was leading a worship service that was built around it. It probably wasn’t the best decision the Senior Pastor ever made putting me as the lead on that service – I think he was desperate after a number of our clergy were fired or resigned – since it was pretty clear early on that I couldn’t easily engage in that style of worship – it just simply wasn’t in my bones. One Wednesday he was standing next to me in the front row, with his hands raised and closed eyes, and he leaned over asked me and told/asked me to do the same. I just shook my head “no,” because, frankly, it just wasn’t me, it just wasn’t the way I showed my adoration of the Divine, my praise of the Holy. Needless to say, that experiment of me leading that service was a short-lived one, though I like to think that I wasn’t that bad at the preaching/teaching part of it.
 
Now, to be clear, just because I didn’t easily fit into that style of worship, one that tended to focus heavily effusive and emotional it its way of praising God, doesn’t mean that I think it was the wrong way of praising Divine – it just wasn’t my way of offering praise to God. One of the things I often say to the confirmands was that Protestant Reformation gave birth to such an incredible diversity in the church, diversity that was there from the very beginning and was just waiting to come out when the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time got challenged in the 16th century. It allowed for new ways of engaging and praising God, rather than the one-size-fits-all way before the Reformation. Some people may find diversity in the church disconcerting, but I find it exciting b