PRAYER - THE SACRIFICE OF PRAISE
Notes and quotes from a talk given to adults who have decided to follow Jesus
by Bishop David Chislett

We all battle with self-centredness and negativity in our daily lives. But how often do we notice the self-centredness and negativity at the heart of our praying? What I mean is . . . have you noticed how much of our conscious prayer time is spent on asking God for things or complaining about our circumstances. Even worse, are we prepared to admit how much of our praying is done in order to achieve warm and cosy "spiritual" feelings.

Of course it is right that we that we pray about our problems - the Scriptures tell us to. God wants us to! And it is proper to ask God for things - the Scriptures tell us to do that, too! We should also not be surprised when we have moments of elation - after all, there are plenty of examples of those in the Scriptures.

But, remember from last week's talk, that Christian prayer is our participation in the prayer of Jesus to the Father. In other words, the focus of our prayer is GOD, not US.

There is the story of Leo, the friend of St. Francis of Assisi, who was feeling really depressed one day. He eventually plucked up the courage to ask Francis for advice. Do you know what St. Francis did? He wrote on a piece of parchment (which is still in existence):

"Thou art the Lord God,
Triune and One;
all good.
Thou art good,
all good,
highest good,
Lord God living and true."

By getting him to praise God, Francis liberated Leo. He shifted Leo's focus from himself and his problems back to God.

This thought is parallelled by some words of Tom Smail:

"All other prayer - especially intercession -
needs to arise out of the prayer of praise,
if it is not to be centred on problems
and so become heavy and hopeless."

To praise God is to lovingly turn ourselves towards him who first loved us. It is to recognise his supreme worth and to submit our lives to him. It is the fitting response of the creature to the Creator, of the beloved to the Lover. In that sense, to praise him - in our Church's old fashioned language - is both our DUTY and our JOY. Until we really become praising people we haven't even begun to fulfil the purpose of our existence.

WORSHIP comes from the old English "worth-ship." To worship God is to recognise and respond to his real worth. One of the remarkable things about human beings is the universality of the instinct to worship, or give ultimate value, to SOMETHING.

Maybe you remember the famous outburst in Peter Shaffer's play Equus:

"Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that . . . I shrank my OWN life."

WE ARE A PEOPLE OF PRAISE

Our hearts and our lips should always be praising God for his great goodness and his unconditional love.

This is easy to do when everything is going well for us and when we "feel" close to God. But it is sometimes very difficult when we feel dejected and the only thing that seems real to us is the distance between us and God.

The reason we give God praise, however, is NOT that we feel like doing it, but because HE IS WORTHY of the praise of the whole creation . . . and that includes us. This point is emphasised by St. John the Divine in his amazing description of the vision he was granted of the worship constantly taking place in heaven:

"And the four living creatures . . . never cease to sing,
'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come!'
And whenever the living creatures give glory and honour and thanks
to him who is seated on the throne, who lives for ever and ever,
the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne
and worship him who lives for ever and ever;
they cast their crowns before the throne, singing,
'WORTHY ART THOU, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honour and power,
for thou didst create all things,
and by thy will they existed and were created.'"
(Revelation 4:8-11)

Through faith and baptism you and I became part of the "Royal Priesthood" - the Church. The function of the Royal Priesthood is to offer PRAISE and WORSHIP to God . . . to extol his greatness, his beauty, his holiness and his majesty, to be drawn out of ourselves in recognition of his unconditional love that undegirds all things in creation and redemption. In explaining to the newly baptized this amazing thing that had happened to them by God's grace in the baptismal waters, St. Peter wrote:

". . . you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a consecrated nation,
a people set apart to sing the praises of God
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light."
(l Peter 2:9)

To the degree that we really love God we will praise him. Praise will sometimes well up within us as our breath is taken away by God's love or something he has done. In Charles Wesley's words, we are "lost in wonder, love and praise." We cherish those moments.

But - as I have already said - there are those times when we praise God, not because we feel like it at all, but just because HE IS WORTHY of our praise. We do our "duty" even when we don't feel like it because we know our creaturely status; we know the greatness of God; we know what he has done in creation and redemption; we have been let in on the secret of the ages and we know that he shall reign for ever and ever. And apart from being our vocation, we just rember that it is "fitting" that we praise him. The other thing is that becoming a people of praise really helps us to see everything else in our lives (good and bad) in its proper perspective.

Praise is the Christian way of life, because it signifies a restored relationship between ourselves and God the Father. St. Augustine in commenting on Psalm 84:5 says that our vocation is "To love and to praise: to praise in love, and to love in praise. 'Happy are they who dwell in your house! Continually they praise you!'"

In Old and New Testaments alike, PRAISE and WORSHIP is seen to be the primary vocation of the people of God.

". . . I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my chosen people to drink,
the people whom I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise."
(Isaiah 43:19ff)

St. Paul says that God has:

"destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ,
acording to the purpose of his will
to praise the glorious grace he has freely bestowed on us in the Beloved."
"He is the pledge of our inheritance,
the first payment against the full redemption
of a people God has made his own,
to praise his glory."
(Ephesians 1:5,6 & 14)

THE MASS - OUR SACRIFICE OF PRAISE

During his earthly ministry, Jesus frequently praised God the Father in verbal prayer, and in the prayer of his heart. But in his "High Priestly Prayer" the night before he died on the cross he tells the Father that HIS WHOLE LIFE has been a sacrifice of praise (See John 17:1-4). A little earlier in John 12:27-28 (on the first Palm Sunday) Jesus sees HIS DEATH in the same terms. He likens his coming death to a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying. His first impulse is to ask that he be freed from the necessity of dying. But in these verses he accepts death FOR THE FATHER'S GLORY.

A few verses later, Jesus refers to his coming crucifixion:

"When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself."

St. John adds:

"He said this to show by what death he was to die."
(John 12:32-33)

The death of Jesus is his supreme praise of the Father. At the Last Supper he offered to the Father the sacrifice of the cross. Jesus himself is the sacrifice that makes up for the sins of the whole world, the sacrifice that takes our sins away, the perfect gift, the only gift that gives the Father perfect praise.

When he told us to "do this" as his memorial ("anamnesis"), Jesus gave us his perfect praise of the Father to offer as our own. His sacrifice is absolutely PERFECT PRAISE in itself both, because of the infinite worth of him who offers it (God's own Son) and because of the perfect dispositions of his heart and soul in offering it. (Compare John l5:l3, John l4:3l, John l5:9). Jesus, out of love for the Father and for us is the spotless Lamb sacrificed for us and for the Father's glory; he is the perfect sacrifice of praise.

In the Mass he has given us this sacrifice of praise to be our own, so that "through him, with him, in him" we can give perfect praise, "uttering the Amen through him, to the glory of God" (2 Corinthians l:20).

Fr. Paul Hinnebusch says something that is so crucial for catholic Christians to take hold of regarding our participation in the sacrifice of Jesus:

"The Eucharist is not simply a matter of our standing outside of Jesus
and watching him offer perfect praise of the Father on our behalf.
It is a matter of our entering into the perfect praise of Jesus,
becoming one with it,
making it our own through our identity with Jesus
and with his dispositions in offering himself."

And in a beautiful passage Fr. David Rosage writes:

"The Eucharist is a perfect act of praise. We are not offering it alone. The entire Church throughout the world, the whole Body of Christ, joins us in offering each Eucharistic celebration . . . I met a man on a plane who was very much depressed about the standard of morality in the world and the difficulty of trying to rear children in this spiritually polluted atmosphere. He was not a worshipper and did not understand the Mass. However, as we streaked across the sky at some 30,000 feet, we could see the earth very clearly, even though there was a thin, cloudlike vapour rising from the earth upward. This gave me an idea.

"I explained to him that the Mass was perfect praise of God, that every two seconds there was another Mass beginning somewhere on the earth. This paean of praise rising from the earth like the vapour-cloud below us and ascending to God was not in vain and would counteract the myriad crimes disturbing the face of the earth. As S. Paul assures us: 'Despite the increase of sin, grace has far surpassed it.' Again S. Paul encourages us" 'Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good' (Romans l2:2l)."

In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is seen as "the Lamb upon the throne" (chapters 4 and 5). This is a way of saying that the heart of the heavenly worship is the sacrifice of the cross by which the Son of Man glorified the Father (John 13:31), the sacrifice which took place in the world of time and space but which is also an eternal reality. As our great High Priest (see the Letter to the Hebrews) Jesus continues to offer his perfect praise to the Father, and we are drawn into that offering with him every time we celebrate the Mass.

Heaven and earth are joined together in that great offering of praise, and that's why the Mass is the focus of our fellowship with Blessed Mary and all the saints and angels, and all the departed who have gone before us. We are lured by the eternal breaking into our lives.

A great priest and mentor of mine, Father Austin Day of Christ Church St. Laurence, Sydney, loved to speak about worship, the sacrifice of praise, and the instinct to reverence and awe that overtakes us when the scales fall from our eyes and we begin to see the truth of these mysteries. Being a literary man he would often revert to reading this beautiful passage from The Wind in the Willows, when Rat and Mole rowing down the river hear the sound of strange music. They follow the music to a place of solemn stillness. Suddenly:

"Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror - indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy - but it was an awe that smote and held him, and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very very near. He raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness and incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper . . . Rat! He found breath to whisper, shaking. Are you afraid? "Afraid?" murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. "Afraid! of Him O, never never! And yet and yet O Mole, I am afraid!" Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship."

PRAISE AND EVERYDAY LIFE

Of course our growth to Christian maturity involves allowing the praise into which we are drawn through the Mass to filter through into our daily lives, influencing both our "personal" prayer and our thinking. In the lives of many Christians there develops a spontaneity in their praise of God - usually in Biblical or liturgical language that has become part of themas they extoll God for his goodness, simply because he is worthy of praise. This can even help us see what God is doing through our present circumstances. At the very least our anguish and confusion are reined in.

St. Augustine says:

"'Sing to the Lord a new song'.
Sing with your voice, your mouth, your hearts,
sing with befitting behaviour.
'May his praise ring out in the gathering of the saints'.
The singer is himself the praise that must be sung.
Do you want to praise God?
You are the praise that must be said.
You are his praise if you live righteously."

In our Baptism we were set apart to be a priestly people offering worship and praise to God the Father, in, with and through Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. By becoming part of the prayer of Jesus we are caught up in the worship and praise that is forever taking place in the heavenly sphere.

This is most beautifully summed up in the Third Eucharistic Prayer from the Roman Missal:

"Father, you are holy indeed,
and all creation rightly gives you praise.
All life, all holiness comes from you
through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,
by the working of the Holy Spirit.
From age to age you gather a people to yourself,
so that from east to west a perfect offeringmay be made
to the glory of your name . . ."

And Romans 12:1-2:

"I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Do not be conformed to this world
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,
that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God."