Psalm 113 - "Celtic Praise"

         Once there was a preacher who was trying to sell his horse.  A potential buyer stopped by and wanted to try it out.  The buyer mounted the large animal and was all set to take off.                           

         "By the way, before you start," the preacher said, "you should know that this horse has been trained to respond only to certain instructions. Go is ‘praise the lord’ and stop is ‘amen.’"

         The potential buyer sitting on the horse said, “Well, that sounds easy enough.”  He patted the horse on the neck and said, "Praise the lord," and the horse started to trot, just as the preacher said it would. The man again said, "Praise the lord," and the horse started to gallop. 

         All was going well until suddenly the rider spotted a cliff a few feet in front of them and yelled "Amen!!!" The horse stopped just in time, right at the very edge of the cliff. The man let out a sigh and wiped the beads of sweat from his brow and murmured just loud enough for the horse to hear: "Praise the Lord."  Oops!

        Our relationship with God is grounded in praise – not because God is ready to trip us up and send us flying over some cliff or because God is vain and needs praise in order to build up sacred confidence and self-esteem.  No – we praise God because God is so worthy of praise.  Look around you!  What blessings abound!  God has done such wonderful things. 

         In fact, many of the Psalms that we find in our Bible do not merely suggest that we praise God.  They do not casually call us to an attitude of praise when we might feel like it.  They actually demand us to praise. 

         At least, Psalm 113 that we just heard does.  Read in the original Hebrew, that opening sentence – “Praise the Lord!” – is not simply a recommendation or a passing thought.  It is a command.  “Praise the Lord – you and you and you.  All of you!  All of us! Praise the Lord!”

         And then the Psalmist goes on to tell us just why God is deserving of such praise.  As Reformed Church pastor Scott Hoezee notes, “The message of the psalms is that if only we could see and understand God better, we would be naturally led to praise him. Unhappily, we don't see so well, and so the psalmists need to order us to do what should come naturally.”

         What is God like then to evoke from us such praise?  Well, the Psalmist has lots to say about that too.  In this psalm in particular, nothing is left in the abstract. 

         Hoezee goes on to note, “In this case the psalmist mentions two specific things for which to give praise: one has to do with the sheer splendor of God, the other has to do with the attention God pays to us in the mundane details of our lives. Why praise God?  Because (God) is exalted—(God) made everything there is. Not only that, however, this God's real splendor is that (God) takes care of the poor and is deeply concerned for the plight of childless women.” 

         And the Psalmist can say all that too because “the Old Testament makes consistently clear that God stunned the imagination of the ancient Israelites not just because of (God’s) awesome power but even more so because of (God’s) tender care…. this was a God who could spin quasars with one hand and lift up some nameless poor person with the other.  

This was a God who could make mountains smoke and who could at the same time tenderly smile on a childless woman.” 

         In short, the Psalmist paints a picture of God as a Sacred Being who spans past, present, and future, who connects the vastness of heaven with the mundane reality of life on earth.  Here is a God who encompasses the whole universe beginning at the moment of creation, but also focuses downward and inward in order to embrace and love, to be known to, and intimately be involved with, each one of us.  Here is a God – our God – who is, at once, super large and super small.

         Personally, I love Psalm 113, this short psalm of praise – and it is a perfect one on which to reflect as we acquaint ourselves with Celtic spirituality at the start of our new worship series.  By holding up this two-pronged nature of God – expanding infinitely outward as the universe unfolds while at the same time zooming intimately inward to the most mundane circumstances in our world community – this Psalm touches on several characteristics of Celtic Christianity.

         But, first off, who were the Celts, and what is this brand of Christianity that resonates with so many people today?  Though the word, Celtic, covers a whole culture that includes pagan and pre-Christian elements, we are drawn to the form of Christianity that developed in the British Isles through the missionary work of St. Patrick and St. Columba and St. Cuthbert among others.  It was an expression of Christianity that integrated some of the ancient beliefs with more orthodox Roman Christianity. 

         The word, Celt, comes from Keltoi meaning stranger or hidden ones.  The Gaelic word is “ceilt” and means “an act of concealing” from which our English word “kilt” is derived.  And you do not need to have watched even the first season of Outlander to know what a kilt conceals under it!

         In the centuries before Christ, the northern neighbors of ancient Greece and Rome were known as the Keltoi.  Over time, these wandering people were pushed to the outer edges of the Roman Empire – to Scotland, Wales, parts of England, and Ireland.  They were rural, tribal, nomadic people, so different from those in other parts of the Roman Empire where the church was predominantly centered in powerful cities.  Besides that, they were simply too far away from Rome to be incorporated effectively into that church.

         As Trevor Miller reflects in his “Beginner’s Guide to Celtic Spirituality”, “the Roman church was unsure how to respond to these people as they were relational rather than rational, inspirational rather than institutional.” 

         As Saints Patrick and Columba and Cuthbert and the others preached the Gospel message to these nomadic tribes, what emerged was a unique form of Christianity that was grounded in the native traditions of family and community, in the wonders of the natural world, and in the sacredness of all of life.  They embraced a God who connected the vastness of heaven with the mundane realities of the lives they experienced.

         Here then are five foundational characteristics of that Celtic Christianity.  First, Celtic Christianity was based on monasticism.  However, do not be imagining hermits or be thinking of singing monks shut off from the world.  On the contrary, an essential element in the Celtic church was living in community.  That is what monasticism meant.

         The role of the church was not simply to declare doctrine, but rather to live out the Gospel of Christ in the world, in community.  The central message was less on knowing and more on doing. It was personal and relational and so reflected Celtic culture.  It was seeking to be “at home” with Jesus.  It was as St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel; if necessary, use words.”

         Second, Celtic Christianity was a sacred celebration of the ordinariness of human life and the world.  For Celtic Christians, nothing was secular because everything was sacred and nothing lay outside of God’s grace.  God could be seen – not in mystical visions or necessarily even in church – but God could be found in and through everything around the Celts – in what they saw, heard, tasted, smelled, and touched.  It all spoke of God, and it was incarnational living at its best. 

         As Miller writes in his Guide,  “There was no false divide between the sacred and secular. Where an integrated life, of body and soul, work and worship, wonder and ordinariness; prayer and life are the norm. A sacramental outlook that, because it sees God in everything, encouraged a reverence for God’s creation and a respect for the care of his world. An everyday spirituality of ordinariness accessible to all.”  The ever-dynamic presence of God was infused all of daily life, having the potential to transform it. 

In this interweaving of intimacy and awe, every little occurrence could be an encounter with God. 

         Third, Celtic Christians were committed to pilgrimage, in the very best sense of the word.  In Celtic Christianity, a pilgrimage might be a physical wandering from place to place – but never with a specific destination, as we might think nowadays.  Pilgrimage might also be an inner journey of the heart.  Either way, it was a pathway to connecting with people, building community, and exploring spirituality.  It was a living into (and out of) the story of faith. 

         In other words, for the Celtic Christian, all of life was a pilgrimage, “a journey without maps” (to quote Frederick Buechner).  It was a moving into the known and the unknown, following the nudge of a Spirit born out of the wildness of the British Isles, seeking God in both the excitement and the ordinariness of life.

         Fourth, Celtic Christians believed in hospitality of the heart.  They believed in welcoming God into their lives each day and welcoming others as well because, who knows, one of them might be the Christ.  It was an all-embracing welcome – not fettered by age, gender, or ethnic background. 

         Celtic Christians looked for the sacred soul in everyone.  It is as the ancient Irish rune declared: “I saw a stranger last night. I put food in the eating place, drink in the drinking place, music in the listening place, and in the sacred name of the Triune, he blessed myself and my house and my cattle and my dear ones. And the lark said in her song, ‘Often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.’”    

         Fifth, Celtic Christians were creation affirming.  They believed that God would redeem all of creation – all of it - through Jesus Christ.  They embraced the wonder of creation as well as their own immediate physical environment.  They maintained a strong sense of place and understood the importance of roots and identity.  

         They knew that God could be found in nature, especially in what they called “thin places” where the veil between the worlds was lifted.  Even time was a sacred dimension.  For Celtic Christians, time was not chronological with one historical even following another.  It was eternal time where past, present, and future were all linked.

         All those characteristics of Celtic Christianity we will be exploring the next four Sundays.  We will be like the three ancient Irishmen who were adrift on the sea from Ireland for seven days in small boats without oars. They landed in Cornwall in the west of England and were brought to the court of King Alfred.   He asked them where they had come from and where they were going.  They answered that “they stole away because they wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we care not where.”

         So it will be for us.  We too will be on a pilgrimage.  We too will be wandering and, in our wandering, we shall be wondering about Christ and where the Spirit might be calling us.

         Each Sunday, as we enter this sacred space and walk beneath the branches of the trees at the back, symbolically we will be entering a new world.  For some, it may be just another week in church.  For others, it might be a thin place. 

         Each week we will begin with visuals of the landscapes of Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.  We will see, as theologian John O’Donohue said in a public radio interview:  “The diversity of the landscape, the amazing kind of light that’s in it. There is something in the (Celtic) landscape that naturally anchors a spirituality which somehow reveals or discloses the eternal.” For all of us, this worship series will be an opportunity to praise God as we are commanded in the Psalms to praise God.  We will praise God through the Celtic melodies we will hear and sing.  We will praise God through the ancient and modern Celtic prayers we will pray.  We will bless one another with ancient Celtic blessings.  We will anchor our worship and praise in the notion that all of life is a blessing and that God can be found not only in great cathedrals but also in our little church. 

         As one blogger I read this week wrote, “We may not be able to travel to faraway places, but there is yet benefit in being a ‘heart’ pilgrim.  (That is,) having that nomadic approach to life that is always open to moving on, not getting stuck in a rut, open to new experiences, new relationships and understandings – open to the ever onward call of Spirit, (the Spirit that) Celtic Christians perceived as ‘the wild goose’!" And who knows, on our travels, we might even meet St. Patrick, St. Cuthbert, or St. Columba on the way.  But surely, somewhere, somehow, we will have an opportunity to meet the Christ.