Praising

Psalm 138

What does it mean to praise God?

It seems obvious to think of praise as something we do in worship, where we sing, pray, and proclaim the good news. And then we might say that praising God also looks like a life lived out in service—an embodied faith that results in the hungry being fed, thirst being quenched, the sick being cared for, the imprisoned being visited, and the naked being clothed (Matthew 25:35-40).

Is praising God an emotional experience? A mental one? An experience we feel in our bodies?

I remember in my teenage years the pressure of “looking” like I was praising God. Our church would take the youth group to worship services in big arenas where teenagers from all around would come and a band would play and a preacher would preach. All around me I noticed people with their hands up. Some had tears in their eyes. They were singing with emotion, or standing with their hands raised up and eyes closed. There was the look and feel of euphoria and collective effervescence in the room.

And I struggled with that because I didn’t feel the same way at that time.

I used to think that so much of all of that was a fake performance, but not anymore. I have met many devout Christians who express praise in this way and who have great integrity with how they live out their faith.

Praise looks different for each of us. That might be obvious to say, but it is still worth remembering. When I was younger, my judgmental feelings about how other people worshipped wasn’t about them. It was about me—it was about the struggle I had in “praising God” while also not acknowledging all of the different ways I was in pain as a teenager. I didn’t feel God’s “steadfast love” back then. My faith and embrace of a Christian identity didn’t last very long, even.

I decided I must be agnostic by the time I went to college.

But, ironically, there was one thing I never connected to my faith and praise of God while still continuing to do it even as I claimed “agnosticism” as my faith: I sang in choirs.

I can’t fit everything I could say about choral singing into a blog post like this—but, suffice it to say that singing with other people is how I praise God. My hands might not be up in the air. I might not be outwardly expressing emotion. But I understand the Psalmist’s enthusiasm in Psalm 138 when they said, “before the gods, I sing your praise.”

It’s a bit defiant to say that—I am sure the Psalmist was referring to the many gods that were at work in the world in the region who were in “competition” with YHWH.

Perhaps today it might mean something different—for we are surrounded by all kinds of “gods,” aren’t we? But praising God (with a capital G) connects us with someone bigger and more vast than any of the “small g” Gods at work in the world around us: greed, fear, dominance, violence, vice…

Perhaps praising God, in whatever ways we can connect with, is how we remember God’s steadfast love. Praising God is something we do when we feel confident and grounded in our faith, or when we feel despair. Praising God is not just an emotion, though emotions are often felt. It’s not just a thought or meditation, though our minds are engaged. It’s not just a gesture, but our bodies are involved!

We praise God in all the ways it can be done so we don’t lose our faith in that steadfast love that is with us, even when we have a hard time feeling it.