Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow

My wife recently received a new full time position at St. Joseph’s Home for Children as an assistant supervisor for daytime treatment and schooling. She was showered with congratulations from family, friends, and those from the realm of social media. However, not a one expressed praise to God! Have we forgotten how to thank and praise God for all blessings great and small? Or is it easier to give ourselves credit for such work? We need to shift our thinking from everything being our doing, and to praise God from whom all of our blessing flow. Additionally, we need to recognize that this needs to occur not just within worship, but in every aspect of life.

The hymns of praise in the book of Psalms can help us to refocus how we praise God. The purpose of these writings are, “to tell who God is by telling what God has done” (Jacobson and Jacobson, Invitation to the Psalms, 45). In other words praise psalms are explicit testimonies to God’s very identity and God’s unfolding action within the people of God. This testimony is completed through a call to praise as well as unfolding testimony to God’s actions. The same could be said of our congratulating of others. The flow is as follows:
Congratulation / Call to Praise
Reason(s) for Congratulation / Reason(s) for Praise

Let’s be honest though, we want to give ourselves credit for doing all of the hard work for things. My wife is the one who has worked her tail off at St. Joseph’s for over a year to get this promotion, shouldn't we tell her what a good job she has done? If we take such a road, we quickly forget where such gifts, talents, and abilities came from, God. Instead we create a world where we are the rulers and must take responsibility for all of its happenings, we limit our possibilities by saying no to God’s options, and finally we negate the polemical and political power of praise (Jacobson, The Costly Loss of Praise, 381-383). By praising God we are making God’s abundant blessings realized and recognized. Perhaps when we do this on a more regular basis we can begin to make praise a part of our everyday language.

But why should we do this? We praise God because we offer thanks for blessings and also to make a new world known. Both are important, but the latter deserves a bit more attention here. When we praise God we make God’s activity in everyday life known. Lutheran theologian Rolf Jacobson writes, “Praise assumes a world where God is an active agent, and then praise evokes this world by naming God as the agent responsible for specific actions and blessings. There is no such thing as uninterrupted reality. By ascribing agency to God for specific transformations, praise interprets reality in such a way that God is evoked as an active agent in daily life” (Jacobson, The Costly Loss of Praise, 377). Praising God acknowledges God as an active and thriving God who is not cloistered away in the heavens. Praise makes the bold statement that God loves each and every one of God’s creation to be involved at an intimate level, to come to us as a baby.

I propose the following to help us praise God anew: we ban the word “congratulations” as a reminder to praise God and embark in an Advent of praise. The refusal to say the “C” word will remind us that it is not our efforts that generate our blessings, but it is God. For example, when a friend has a new baby praise God with them for this new life and blessing. Or when someone graduates from school, praise God for the blessings of education and leadership.

Finally, such focus will praise God for all that God has done in the past to deliver God’s people and it will praise God for coming to us as a child. But furthermore it will evoke God as the incarnate Word as an active agent in the world who is deeply needed to make a new horizon of healing and justice for the world. If we do not praise God, this radical reality of God coming to us is not recognized and may go unseen. Let us praise God from whom all blessing flow on Thanksgiving day, then let us look to the manger as the proof positive of God’s active agency and bring forward the gift of praise.

Peace,
Tom Westcott
tomw@stmarks-nsp.org