Lift up your hearts

Have any of you worshipped at what are known as praise churches? You know – words on the screen – hands in the air – joyous, contagious singing – Praise music! Musicians are normally driven crazy by it! It’s not complicated music, and it’s not usually of the genre that will become classic – it’s a more in the moment style, a lift up your heads and your hands and your hearts and say thank you! Praise you! Bless you!

It’s not the kind of music we Episcopalian normally sing! Or the kind of worship we usually go in for. But I have seen it’s effect for the good.

On mission trips into Mexico during Easter week, the teams that I led spent Holy Saturday at an Episcopal church in Fullerton. We slept on the floor of their parish hall, and worshipped at the early Easter service the next morning – before driving the rest of the way across the border into Tijuana.

Fullerton was a praise church – a praise Episcopal church – and the teens had usually never experienced anything like it. Some were deeply deeply moved – and on those mornings, dedicated their lives to Christ – some out of the emotional moment – but others in ways that opened up their lives in surprising ways. Two went into the Peace Corps to countries that I’d never heard of before - and even now, years later, are working in Africa in public health and community development. One is the senior warden of his Vestry and offers technical support to several nonprofits, several went into the military to serve their country.

I’m not suggesting that our choir suddenly break into clapping – and that we wave our hands in the air – but it has been my experience that giving free reign to our joy, to externalizing our joy at our salvation in Christ, gives spaciousness and extra room for God to create something new in our lives and in the life of our community. The truth is - there is something about out loud praise and joy that moves us – that saves us – that makes us whole and healthy inside and outside.

Our Eucharistic prayer begins with praise: Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give him thanks and praise. It is right and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

The core of our lifestyle as Christians is enshrined in the prayer that is the high point of our worship. Thanksgiving is at the heart of a life of faith and love. And it’s not just for the highpoint of worship, or for that lofty feeling we sometimes get on Sunday morning –it is for every part of our mundane, ordinary, trivial, everyday lives.

So how do you lift up your heart? How do you give God thanks and praise not only as your duty – it is right – but as a joyful thing – always and everywhere?

I don’t know about you - but there are many days when I wake up, and the first thing I’m aware of is not a lifted up heart, but a cast down heart. One that is already burdened before the day has even begun! That’s partly the personality I’ve been blessed with ☺, and partly because I am very aware of the needs of the world and this community and my own needs. We live in a time of rather extreme dislocation – a stubbornly high unemployment rate, veterans arriving home from Iraq and Afghanistan in very bad shape - traumatized emotionally as well as physically. I’m aware that every time I get in my car to drive here – I’m contributing carbon to the atmosphere. I’m aware that my retirement investments are most likely earning money from corporations that profit from sales of weapons around the world or in other ways that do not coincide with the gospel of Christ. And the list can go on. I’m aware that we’re sitting on top of a lawsuit that could go any number of ways. You see – there are plenty of reasons to be cast down. I’m guessing that if we all pooled our troubles – the list would be long and discouraging.

But the scriptures over and over remind us to lift up our hearts. They do not say – when things are going well, lift up your heart. Or when things have all worked themselves out, lift up your heart. They just say – Lift up your heart – now. Wherever you find yourself and in whatever circumstance.

Paul wrote some of his most comforting and challenging letters to the churches while he was in chains in prison. Jesus lifted his heart in the Garden of Gethsamene as he was about to be arrested. The first Deacon, Stephen, lifted up his heart as he was being stoned for his faith. Our first reading from Jeremiah was from a letter he wrote as he and a few others were left behind in Jerusalem, and all of the scholars, and artists, and builders and stonemasons and carpenters and anyone of means had been carted off in chains to Babylon by the Persian emperor. Exiled. And what did he say – in essence, lift up your hearts, and live fully – even in your very reduced and circumscribed change of fortune.

In the slums of Tijuana, we were invited into circles of worship - outside without any altar or piano or vestments or candles – only pure voices lifted up in praise and thanksgiving by Christians living in circumstances that I cannot adequately convey - no clean water, no kind of sanitation other than terrible outhouses, no comfortable places to sit or sleep, substandard shacks for shelter.

I KNOW that joy and praise and thanksgiving are entirely a matter of an orientation to God like the sunflower to the sun and not dependent upon the world going your way. And when it’s not the way you wake up, or the way that you feel throughout the day - you can still, through intention, turn towards hope in God and find something for which to thank Him.

King David knew this as well. Psalm 43 verse 5: Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, [who is] the health of my countenance, and my God.

This is precisely what the lepers are doing. They cry out to Jesus – they don’t give up in shame and embarrassment at their condition, they don’t give in to despondency or apathy. They cry out – they lift up their hearts to the one whom they’ve heard can help them. And their hope is not in vain.

And for the one who pauses long enough to not only recognize that his leprosy is healed – but to really see what has happened and by whose word it has happened? He received an even deeper healing – a salvation kind of healing when he stopped long enough to reflect and turn around and lift up his heart, this time – not in a cry for help, but in worship. There was salvation healing for the one who gave thanks to God – not just in the prescribed, ritualistic way that the others had gone off to the temple to do – but right there, in the open air, he lifted up his heart in praise and thanksgiving –seeing both himself and Jesus in a new light. In the new light of spiritual sight that does not take anything for granted.

The truth is – all ten lepers were healed. As they lifted up their hearts and cried out in their need, Jesus saw them and had compassion upon them. Their healing is not dependent upon their worship of God through the word of Jesus. His word is faithful and it cannot be chained – and it is powerful.

This is the foundation of our praise and thanksgiving – that whether we see God at work or not - God sees us – sees us in our lightest places and in our darkest places – sees us thriving in community and sees us hunkering down in isolation, in secret self abuse and lack of caring – God sees us and is infinitely compassionate towards us –He accompanies us, rescues us, saves us – this is the ground we stand on – not our faithfulness towards God, but God’s never failing faithfulness towards us – this it the ground we stand on as we lift up our hearts, cry out our need and offer our joyful thanksgiving – always and everywhere.