Hallelujah!

Sunday, October 27, 2019
Pastor Mark Aune

Psalm 150

Dear friends in Christ, grace and peace. Amen

Hallelujah!

Can I get a hallelujah this morning – let’s try it again. Hallelujah.

I know what you are thinking? Am I in the wrong church this morning? Perhaps I should have stayed home. Did Pastor Aune have two Red Bull energy drinks this morning?

No you are not in the wrong church this morning. No I did not drink any Red Bull energy drinks this morning. You are right where you need to be on this Reformation Sunday, this commitment Sunday.

We don’t have to save our hallelujahs just for Easter Sunday. Why not on Reformation Sunday? Why not on commitment Sunday?

“Hallelu is the plural imperative to the verb hallel which means to praise.

And jah is shorthand for the personal name of God – Yahweh.”[1]

Hallelu – jah means praise the Lord.

The word hallel is used 13 times in our psalm for today.

Praise times 13

It is not without reason that the very last psalm in the book of psalms is a psalm of praise.

Praise is our final landing place with God.

Praise is where we need to go as God’s people.

Praise is what God wants us to do. It is what we have been create for in the eyes and heart of God.

When a cardinal sings its cheerful song it is doing what God created it to do-praise!

Psalm one hundred and fifty is a perfect ending to the part of our bible that allows us to pray and sing every conceivable emotion and experience that is known to humanity.

From the depths of heartache and despair to the heights of God’s loftiest mountain and everyplace in between, the prayers and songs of the psalms captures it.

Notice how the writer of Psalm 150 compares and contrast the reasons for our praise.

Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty firmament!
²Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his surpassing greatness!

These first two verses tell us where we are to praise God and why we are to praise God.

We praise the Lord in the sanctuary and literally out under all the heavens.

We praise God because of God’s deeds, what God has done and we praise God just because God is great and God is good and we thank him for more than just our food.

The where and why of praise.

Where do you praise God and why do you praise God?

I wonder if for some of us praise is considered just an emotion or a feeling and when we aren’t feeling it, when life hasn’t been easy, we think we can’t do it. Or we are more reserved about our feelings and emotions and so praise as an outward expression of faith can make us uncomfortable.

But what if we considered praise a faith practice like prayer, worship, giving or reading scripture.

What if we were intentional about adding praise to the list of things God invites us to do in order to be in relationship with God in a manner that changes our lives and in a way that God can use us in the world.

What if in your prayers, instead of listing the things you want God to do or you need God to fix or the concerns and worries you carry about the people in your life, you were to begin your prayer with praise and end your prayer with praise. What do you think will happen?

How might praise frame your prayers in a new and different way?

How would praise begin to change you and your relationship with God?

When we praise something or someone we are drawn closer to it and when we praise God and God alone the effect of that praise will be to draw you into a closer and deeper relationship with God. And God likes that. God wants that from us. Hallelujah.

What if in your giving, instead of viewing it as an obligation or a burden, you framed your decisions about giving to the church and to other organizations as an act of praise.

We talk a lot around here about giving and stewardship as something we do out of gratitude and thanks for what God has done in our lives and in our church and we want to respond to that by giving back to God.

By sharing in what God is up to in our midst. By our heartfelt desire to see the love and the grace of God shine brightly in our work and in our local communities.

If this is true and I believe it is and these are all reasons why it is a joy to give and share then what we give and how we give is also praise.

We are called to praise God for his mighty deeds. For what God has done for you and for me and for the power of God at work in our lives and in our midst and when we give, when we are intentional about how we do that and why we do that we are praising God for what God has done.

Praise is stewardship. When I fill out a giving plan I am praising God for his surpassing greatness and the mighty deeds God has done.

Praise God for this church.

Praise God for Sunday school and preschool and confirmation and youth group and loaves and fishes and the Boys and Girls club. For those who serve and those who lead.

Praise God for church choirs and bell choirs, worship bands and instruments and for singing.

Praise God for befrienders, care team ministry and the Gathering and for the hospitality extended to family’s at our funeral lunches when they are grieving the death of a loved on.

Praise God for how clean and beautiful our campus is kept each week. Praise God for matrix housing and the ability to use our building to house the homeless. Praise God for the columbarium and for Neighbor’s Inc. and for the Union Gospel Mission and LSS and all the organizations who depend on us to help feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and care for the widow and the orphan.

Oh yes, stewardship is praise. Giving is praise. Generosity is praise.

Praise God for what God is doing in our midst and with our lives and for the gift and the privilege we all have to be part of a community of believers that take the call to praise seriously and joyfully. Hallelujah.

We could even continue the psalm by saying: praise God with your one dollar, praise God with your 10 thousand dollars; praise God with your one hour, praise God with your entire day. We give any and all things in praise to God who does everything.

We praise a God who is always at work reforming and changing the church. For a God who is changing our church as well. What the protestant reformation began 502 years ago needs to continue. We praise a God who is always reforming and renewing the church not in our image but in God’s image.

A church that in all ways points primarily to Jesus as the one through whom our lives are transformed and changed and through whom we are empowered to go forth into the world in peace and in praise and in good courage.

We praise God in this sanctuary as a way to know who we are and how we are in relationship with God. We are God’s children. Created for praise. Called by God to a life of generosity.

We are the church. Always new. Always being reformed. Sent out to love and serve the world. And so we say – Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!

[1] Commentary on Psalm 150 by Kathryn M. Schifferdecker Working Preacher

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

The book of Romans is a letter. An actual letter. Like, a letter written by hand and then sent to someone else for them to read. Paul, the author of this letter, wrote a lot of letters. Paul was an apostle, that is, someone who is sent – in this case, he is one who is sent to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the furthest reaches of the known world. He’s really, really good at it.

At the time that Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome, he’s been doing this work for probably twenty years and is at the peak of his career. He’s developed a great pattern in his work: visit a place, get to know the people, continually share his faith with them, help gather a community of believers from all walks of life, and stay with them while they learn how to be followers of Jesus. Then Paul leaves – after all, he’s got other places to visit and more people to teach. He is an apostle – he is sent. But he doesn’t leave the church abandoned. He writes letters back to these churches, especially when he hears about crises or conflicts. Sometimes they need comfort, sometimes challenge, sometimes critique, but always he writes as one they know and love. They welcome his input.

The letter to the Romans is not like that. Paul has never been to Rome. There is already a Christian church there, one brought over likely from Jerusalem very early in the faith. And the church in Rome has recently seen conflict. A few years before the writing of this letter, the Roman emperor expelled all the Jews from Rome. Because Christianity was effectively a form of Judaism at the time, Christians were also exiled. After the emperor died and the Jewish Christians returned, they found a church that had continued to grow and develop – this time with Gentile Christians.

It’s hard for us to understand how shocking and despicable this would have been. Two weeks ago I preached on Acts 10, and how Peter’s vision of God calling all animals clean and good to eat flew in the face of millennia of culture, history, and society for Jewish Christians. Jesus himself was Jewish and kept these laws – surely if anyone else wanted to be Christian, they could likewise follow these rules. Peter’s vision and the general movement of the church revealed otherwise.

That didn’t mean it made things easy. It is hard to let go of tradition and expectation and legislation as the Spirit moves us to new places. I hear people struggle when someone sits in their pew or wears sweatpants to church. Let’s be honest: those are enormously trivial things. If still we grind our teeth at the thought of these worthless infractions how much more might faithful people be driven to despair by moving on from the purity laws ordained by God?

This is the faith community to which Paul writes. He writes to a church redefining and fighting. It is a church that feels a deep rift, a painful split, one that goes deep into matters of identity and righteousness, one that threatens to dissolve into name-calling and condemning and finger-pointing and disgrace to the very name of God in whose name they mean to gather – and if we’re honest, we know how that feels. Those fears are not unfamiliar.

So how does Paul start his letter? He has no standing in that church in Rome. They don’t even know who he is – and if they do, it’s possible that they might still remember him as he was in his youth, an aggressive persecutor of the early faith. What can he say that would possibly invite them to listen to him, to hear the word he will share, to receive the message that he hopes will join them together in the work of the gospel?

He keeps it simple: he tells them the truth. He tells them who he is, and it is fully wrapped up in who Jesus is. His self-introduction is the story of the gospel. Nothing he can say about himself means more than who he is in Jesus Christ.

He tells them he wants to come see them, that he wants to be with them, that he hopes he can share some spiritual gift – but even more than that, so that they might mutually encourage each other in faith. He doesn’t want to come to them because he’s better than them, because he can fix them so they can get things right, because they’re obviously sinful mess-ups who just haven’t been taught the truth. No, he wants to join them for mutual encouragement in faith. He wants to walk with them. He hopes he has something to offer them in his teaching and leadership, but just the same, he knows he will grow by being with them as well.

What if that’s how it’s supposed to be? What if we’re supposed to talk about what we believe and why, not because we’ve got it right and we want to establish our superior knowledge, but because we know that God works through our mutual encouragement in faith? What if we were not ashamed of the gospel, not afraid of getting it wrong, not worried that someone would think we were weird for talking about what we believe and why and then asking others the same? What if we trusted that the power of God was at work in this mutual encouragement? What if we were not so proud and short-sighted as to think that the way we see God is the only way God works in the world? What if we actually believed that God is at work in the world, that God has already been working long before we showed up, that we arrive as much to learn as to teach?

Ah, but I know the argument against it: we’re supposed to keep polite conversation, right? What don’t you talk about at the dinner table? Religion and politics, right? Look where it’s gotten us. It’s gotten us to a place where we can no longer have civil discourse, where we are more likely to condemn than to seek to understand, where we claim a Christian can only look one way, live one place, vote one direction, take one moral position. It’s gotten us built up and walled off and fighting against our own beloved members of the family of God.

So don’t do it. Take Paul’s example. Tell people who you are. Tell them where you’re from. Tell them what you believe. And then invite them to do the same. Make your story of faith as natural a part of your introduction as where you work and where you live and who’s in your family. And when someone’s story is different, listen to it. Hear it. See God at work in it. Be amazed. Allow for the mutual encouragement of faith, because this is how the gospel is shared.

No matter where you go from here, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what comes next for you – you can do this. You are called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel which is the power of God for salvation for everyone who has faith – no matter what. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Hallelujah!

Sunday, October 27, 2019
Pastor Mark Aune

Psalm 150

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

Reclaiming our Place as Creatures of God

Living a New Life with Christ

The Power of God’s Love

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Hallelujah!

Sunday, October 27, 2019 Pastor Mark Aune

Psalm 150

Past Sermons

Sermons

Mutually Encouraged by Faith

Sunday, May 19, 2019 Pastor Megan Torgerson

Romans 1:1-17

Past Sermons

About Augustana

Quick Links

Contact Us

Worship Hours

Sunday, October 27, 2019
Pastor Mark Aune

Sunday, May 19, 2019
Pastor Megan Torgerson