November 25, 1999
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the 1999 Chinese Christian Union Thanksgiving Day English Service.
Wind Instruments
When Felix played his saxophone, the melody full of breath and spirit filled the room. Just how are such beautiful sounds produced?
No one knows. Really. No one knows. Not Felix who has been playing the saxophone for many years. Not the craft workers who shaped it into a beautiful instrument. Not even the sharpest scientists of sound—specialists who spend their lives studying musical acoustics.
It seems that the soul of sound is an ancient and elusive mystery.
Flutes, clarinets, and their kin, including whistles, recorders and even pipe organs are among music’s oldest and most versatile instruments; yet, science has long had trouble understanding all but the most elementary aspects of how they work.
I read recently that only now researchers are starting to learn some of the secrets of how these old instruments work. The key seems to be turbulence. Jets, eddies and waves of air pressure come together to form the complex vibrations heard as agreeable tones and appealing tunes. And what they are doing is photographing the jets of air by using carbon dioxide in a glass pipe to show that tiny vortexes—little whirlwinds created in rising number and complexity as the sound developed.
Isn’t this amazingly interesting? This is what you heard Felix played. Notes rooted in subtle whirls and vortexes. Despite what these scientists are learning, just how such wind instruments work is still not fully understood.
In Tune with God
But when we hear Psalm 100, we know a great deal about what the soul in tune with God sounds like. It is the praise sound, the thanksgiving sound, the grateful sound. These are the whirls and vortexes of what the psalmist David wrote in Psalm 100.
“Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing.” We can get a glimpse of what this psalm means if we act like scientists for a moment and use our imaginations to do a little acoustical research on this marvelous song of praise. Picture with me, shooting this psalm into the duct of a researcher’s clear glass organ pipe, and then photographing the resulting jets, whirls and eddies. What can we see when our souls are in tune with God?
To be in tune with God, we come into God’s presence with our songs and praise.
Worship is the lifting up or pushing our breath to God with our souls of praise. If we can do what Felix did on his saxophone with our souls, we would be in worship.
It certainly begins with our attendance at weekly services and participation in the prayers and praises of the local church. But the sound to be in tune with God involves something more.
Worship means that our whole life and existence is oriented to God as our master. The word, “worship” points to God’s sovereignty, and it always occurs in the Psalms in relation to a royal figure, either human or divine. We do not come to God in worship as one equal approaching another equal, but as a servant who approaches a king. God is the choir director and we are the choir members. When we sing our songs, pray together, read Scripture together, share our testimonies, we are worshipping our Lord as people who are struggling to be faithful and obedient servants.
To worship the Lord with gladness is to praise God for his power, seen not only in the church but throughout the world. We give thanks to God for all the benefits and blessings of being his people. We express gratitude for God’s goodness, for God’s love that is steady as a long note, for God’s faithfulness that is never-fading; to serve God through sustained actions, to love our neighbor who may still be like a discord. When we worship God and our lives are oriented with God as our king, God is the conductor who directs our lives in faithfulness and obedience.
Busy and overwhelmed with activities and schedules, we still come down to Chinatown to worship. This is where God has identified as a place for us to serve and to take time to worship. There’s no doubt that we will watch our share of college football today, but we as faithful and obedient people have chosen to become oriented today and for the rest of our lives to worship God.
The psalmist also said, “Know that the Lord is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.” When we are in tune with God, our very identity begins and ends with God. We belong not to ourselves, but to the Lord, and this relationship is to be embedded in every aspect of life.
Belonging is one of those basic human needs. While at the same time that we desire and at times need to demand a respect for independence for our own selfhood to develop; we also have an essential need to belong. For the past few days, I have been struggling with my fatherly relationship with our daughter who will be completing her college education next month. She’s away for college or putting it in another way, when I accepted the call to come to San Francisco, we became “away” from her—about 3000 miles away. While she appeared to be more and more independent, I forgot that she was also wanting and needing more times when I might share with her that she still belongs. That even though she is finishing up with college, she belongs to our family. That even though she will be moving to Philadelphia, she still belongs to our household.
That even though we might all know that she’s doing okay, it is still nice and necessary to call sometimes and just to say to each other, “We still belong to each other.” Regardless of what stage in life we might find ourselves in, to know that we belong to someone is essential to living.
We belong to the Lord, and this relationship is to be embraced with thanksgiving in every time, in every place, in every aspect of life. God is not a concept so high that we cannot relate to him at all, but instead God is a power and a presence that we can hold close to our hearts. “It is he that made us, and we are his,” says the psalm. “We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”
When we know in our hearts that we belong to God, we sense the reassurance that God will never lose sight of us, never abandon us, never forget to call us and to say, “I am your God, and you are my people.”
The psalmist says, “For the Lord is good: his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”
Make a Joyful Noise
As God’s people with our lives oriented to God in worship and knowing in our hearts that we have a place to go for “Thanksgiving dinner” because we belong, then our lives are in tune with God. When our souls are in tune with God, we “Make a joyful noise to the Lord.”
Did you know that the Hebrew word to “make a joyful noise,” means simply “to make a racket.” All the earth is summoned to a commotion of praising God with boundless exuberance. There’s a joy in our lives from God that surpasses all national and historical boundaries.
I like to think that the reason why we have an ecumenical Thanksgiving Day service when all the churches in the Chinese Christian Union gathers for joint worship is so that we can “make a joyful noise” that we can’t make when we are worshipping in our own churches. We come here from our various rich and distinctive traditions to worship in tune with the one Lord. In the spirit and sound of thanksgiving, we set aside any national, language, historical, denominational, racial and any other boundaries to “make a racket for God.”
For probably most of us in this sanctuary today, we will be having some kind of Thanksgiving dinner. The sounds of a Thanksgiving dinner are the paring, chopping, and mashing of potatoes. It’s the dripping sound of the big turkey roasting in the oven pan. It’s the conversations and laughter around the table that we are thankful for all the blessings and challenges in life. The sound of Thanksgiving dinner also includes “burping.” I was told that to burp in public as a Chinese person means that you enjoyed the meal. When we burp, we make the bodily sound that our stomachs are grateful for
the turkey, sticky rice, the cranberry sauce, and the apple pie. When we make a racket thanking God, even our stomachs join in the symphony of praising God!
Remember the time when Jesus on his way to Jerusalem came upon ten lepers. Luke said, the lepers, “Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” You see, the lepers didn’t believe that they belong to God or for that matter to any respectable community. They kept their distance. They didn’t belong.
When Jesus saw them, he told them to “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Jesus was telling the ten lepers to have faith that they can be healed. As they were running to the temple to see the priests, they started to be cleaned from their diseases. In their obedience and faithfulness, they were healed.
Although all ten lepers were healed, only one turned back to thank Jesus for what he has done for him. This man who happens to be a Samaritan made a joyful noise for what Jesus has done for him. He “praised God with a loud voice.” He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. This man “made a racket.” The sounds of thanksgiving were heard by God and others. When he bowed at Jesus’ feet, he must have felt near to God. Now he belongs to God’s community of faith.
Make a Joyful Noise in Chinatown
The ultimate note that one sounds in worship, then, is the note of thanksgiving and praise. This is how we are to relate to the Creator. “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name.” The only truly proper response to the self-giving of the Lord God is one of gratitude and joyful praise, because we are a community blessed by the presence of the Holy One.
Remember the key to the mystery of how music comes out of these musical instruments. It’s turbulence—jets, eddies and waves of air pressure coming together at the heart of the musical instruments to form the complex vibrations heard as agreeable tones and appealing tunes. It sounds credible, but I still don’t really understand it.
But what I do understand is that when we as a community of Christians from our vibrant churches, coming together in the name of Jesus Christ, the heart of our faith, we can make beautiful music. Whether we are Presbyterians or Episcopalians, or Congregationalists, or Lutherans or even Baptists or any other community of faith, we create a turbulence. We are the “jets, eddies and waves of God’s spirit coming together to form complex vibrations heard as agreeable tones and appealing tunes.
And when we are playing these agreeable tones and appealing tunes, we can’t just play them for ourselves. We must play them for others to hear. Our racket-making has to be as loud if not louder than the gongs and drums of the lion dancers and the firecrackers. Our racket-making has to be louder than the marching bands in a funeral procession. Our racket-making has to be louder than the busses and traffic that fill our tourist-filled streets. Our racket-making of making a joyful noise to the Lord in all the earth has to be
loud enough to turn our lives around from the hassles and bustles of new millennial lifestyles so that we might return to Jesus, prostrating ourselves at his feet and giving thanks for all the good things he had done for us.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord in all the earth. Make a joyful noise of appreciation and affirmation when you see your friends and family today. Make a joyful noise of encouragement and hope when you hear of pain and struggles. Make a joyful noise of love and acceptance when you express the invitation and reassurance that we belong to each other. May your stomachs make a joyful noise that they are satisfied for all the good things to eat. May we make a joyful noise—sounds of thanksgiving that God has made us and we are his people.
Let us pray.
Gracious and Almighty God, we give thanks for all the blessings of life. Lead us to make a joyful noise to you in all the earth. Blow into us the Holy Spirit so that we might become the sounds of thanksgiving of your steadfast love and faithfulness to all generations. In Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.