“He who sacrifices thank offerings
honors me,
and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of
God."
Psalm 50:24
Several years ago, I wrote a
history of the denomination I’ve been a part for all the days of my life, the
Christian Reformed Church in North America, a project I was asked to do. When I put down the pen, it struck me that I
could create a stage presentation of that history that would be interesting and
even inspiring. So I tried.
That play—I had a role myself—was,
I believe, very successful, playing to large crowds of denominational members across
the continent. But something happened
one afternoon in Michigan
that I’ve never forgotten.
We’d just finished the
presentation—a 2 ½ hour show telling the story with all its joys and sorrows—when
a man came up to the stage, a retired gentleman—white shoes, pastel sport coat. He pumped my hand with the kind of vehemence
I could tell wasn’t perfunctory. “Thank
you,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Thank
you very much.” And then he bit his lip
as if to stop himself from going too far.
I never caught his name, and he never said another word. Just “thank you.” Then walked away.
It wasn’t the kind of accolade I’d
come to expect. Generally, people came
up and said good things—how professional the show was (we had a cast of
non-professionals), how interesting, how it told them stories they’d never
known. I don’t remember another time,
however, when someone came up to me and simply said thanks.
Today, denominations are dying. The sociology of ecclesiastical structure in
American evangelicalism has been revamped by largely independent mega-churches,
where thousands of parishioners gather, often drawn by mise-en-scene, or spectacle—or, in particularly American fashion,
by the celebrity of the preacher. Denominations,
most of them at least, may well be artifacts of evangelicalism’s European
roots. Today, in the highly charged
spiritual atmosphere of post-modernism, few seem to care about the doctrinal
character of the ye olde fellowships, things people once upon a time actually
went to war about.
I say all of that because, in that
retired gentleman’s single-word response, I believe he was telling me something
he didn’t have the words to say himself.
He was thanking me for telling his story, his joys and concerns in a
lifetime’s membership in the CRCNA. Around
him, he could feel things change, but the story we had told he must have considered
his story, and by our telling it, simply
by its telling, we’d given his story—and thereby him—some measure of dignity. That wasn’t anything I’d intended.
This very difficult song, Psalm
50, that carries the spit and vinegar of some quarrelsome minor prophet, has,
as its core, honor. It takes the entire
psalm to get there, but the final verse makes it clear. All the vituperation of a snarling, angry God—all
of that is aimed at a singular warning: honor is what God wants of us and what
he deserves. What stinks is dishonor—even
though his nostrils are full of the scent of blood, of perfunctory praise.
The last verse is the whole story
of this harsh song. God wants us to
honor him and honor his story by treasuring it deeply, and by telling his story
in a million ways.
He wants us to know—every time we
see them—that those cattle on those thousand hills, just like everything else
in this world, belong, as we do ourselves, to Him.
That’s the whole story in Psalm 50--and not just there either. It’s all about honor.