 |
 Eugenia Gamble "In Good Times and in Bad" Program #4713 First air date January 11, 2004 |
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Biography
The Rev.
Eugenia Gamble
is pastor of the historic First Presbyterian Church in downtown
Birmingham, Alabama. Rev. Gamble has preached throughout the United
States and is a writer who loves to help the Bible come alive in
people's lives. She writes a regular column for Horizons Magazine and
won the Associated Church Press Award of Excellence for her Bible study
called: Glimpses of Home: Biblical Images of the Realm of God.
[Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted
above.]
"In Good Times and in Bad"
The Psalter is the song and worship
book of God's people. In it we find expressed all that it is possible
for a human being to feel: hope, joy, love, lament, anguish, fear,
thanks, and praise.
Today's psalm begins the final section of the song book. This section
repeats many of the themes that have been heard in the earlier psalms.
Today's psalm gives us an imperative call to praise. This is not a text
that simply says to us, "Say thanks to God when good things happen." It
is a text that calls us to praise God in every circumstance, not because
we want to or feel like it, but because of the very character of God.
Listen for the word of God in Psalm 146 [NRSV]:
Praise the Lord!
As the book of Psalms comes to a close, the worship leader who prepared
it for us recognizes, after all of the sometimes heady and sometimes
horrible expressions of human emotion, that when all is said and done,
we must always come back to praise. The theme for today's message is
gratitude. Interestingly enough, the word gratitude rarely appears in
Scripture. In some translations, such as the King James, it does not
appear at all. Still the concept of gratitude permeates every story and
every encounter.
Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God
All my life long.
Do not put your trust in princes,
In mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they
Return to the earth;
On that very day their plans perish.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
Whose hope is in the Lord their God,
Who made heaven and earth,
The sea, and all that is in them;
Who keeps faith forever;
Who executes justice for the oppressed;
Who gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets the prisoners free;
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
The Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers;
He upholds the orphan and the widow,
But the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The Lord will reign forever,
Your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Lord!
In the Scriptures that concept is most often talked about with the word
"thanks" or with the word "praise." Thanks is what we feel toward God
for specific acts of kindness or help. Praise is gratitude in action. It
is not an emotion so much as a way of life lived in response to who God
is more than what God does for us. Praise is the offering of the whole
self to God in worship and work. The opposite of praise or lived
gratitude
is unhealthy trust in oneself or human agencies for security and hope.
In the Hebrew Scriptures praise is a central reality of life, perhaps
the central organizing principle. Even death is largely only seen as
evil because our ancestors believed that it silenced the praise. Well, I
don't know about you, but it is not hard for me to see that, praise is
not often the central organizing principle of my life. Is it yours? Now
I don't mean it never happens. When things are going well we may toss
off a gleeful, "Thanks God!" Or maybe we even experience a deepened
sense of self-giving to God in the presence of blessing. But often we
don't. Often, when things are going well
we have the secret tendency to take the credit ourselves. We
congratulate our hard work or our brilliant handling of a tough
situation, or our well-practiced masks that keep others from seeing the
inward quaking or insecurity that we fear will result in a loss of power
or control.
We may thank God for giving us an idea, or the stamina to do what had to
be done, but that is not praise. Praise is not thanking God for
something. Praise is giving ourselves more deeply to God in the presence
of something. Sometimes, I think we have a tendency to give ourselves to
the something and not to God. Praise is a choice that requires
discipline, not an emotion that waits for recognition.
Now, while we may not be terrific at praising when things go well, many
of us have an even harder time when things do not go well; when life
hurts, and in our inward being we wonder about the character of God,
about God's care for us; when we wonder how we will endure, whether God
is there at all, and if so what good does it do anyway, then praise may
be even harder.
In the dark nights of the soul, when we feel like we are swimming
through black velvet
or at best going through the motions with nothing concrete to hold on to
or to hold us together, gratitude enacted may seem like it is just
beyond us, a faint memory at best. Yet our psalm tells us that praise is
not an option. It is not one option among many. It is an imperative. So
what do we do?
Last week I spent a lot of my time sitting with a dear friend at the
bedside of her dying twenty-two year old daughter. As strange as it may
seem to say, during that week of waiting, I learned some things about
praise, about gratitude. As I sat by her bedside and watched her
breathing become more shallow and her beautiful dark eyelashes lie
across her precious cheek, covering the pupils, fixed and dilated, as
the cancer attacked the brain stem moment by moment, I learned some
things about praise.
I learned as I watched her family gather and roam and weep and gather
strength from each other. I learned some things about praise as I saw
her mother submit to the pain she could not control and somehow find the
strength to hold herself together, if with nothing else but habit and
skin. I learned some things about praise as I watched her father
struggle with his helplessness and seem to fade a little more with each
shallow breath she took.
What I learned is this: We are called to praise who we trust God to be,
not the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We praise that love
is, that God promises,
that whether we feel it or not, whether it makes any difference in the
outcomes we desire or not, God is with us in the pain of life, setting
captives free, binding up the brokenhearted, opening blind eyes, even
those that are fixed and dilated, lifting up those who are bent double
by life and death and love and loss.
Sometimes I think there are really only two ways we can do that—praise
in the darkness, I mean. First, we can do it through the love and faith
of others who will carry us through on the wings of their own confidence
in God's character, love, and power when we cannot lift ourselves to
that truth.
And second, we can praise God with our tears. Sometimes, we praise God
with our tears. Tears, you see, are rooted in hope, even if it seems to
be a dashed hope. Tears are rooted in the belief that somehow things
could or should be different and the belief, even if underground and
unconscious, that things can again someday be different, not by our will
or efforts but only by the actions and love of God.
Tears are sometimes praise because they are the ultimate submission.
They come when we cannot do anymore. They come when we cannot fix our
lives. They come when all we have and are is not enough. They come, when
our only hope is God and God's promises.
And they come and praise our God, whether we know that is happening or
not. What I learned about praise this last week is that it may begin in
tears but it always returns to the majesty of love. So today I invite
you; no, I command you as our psalmist did, Praise the Lord!
Interview with Eugenia
Gamble
Interviewed by Floyd Brown
Floyd Brown:
What a marvelous message! It's so nice to have you here. You talked about
praise, you talked about faith, but not about prayer.
Eugenia Gamble: Well, I think prayer happens
in a number of ways. Prayer happens, obviously, when I was sitting by the
bedside of my friend just in the holding of her hand, just in the lifting of the
situation to God. I think prayer is relationship as much as it ever is words or
actions. Sometimes I think the deepest prayers of the heart are our tears.
Brown: Has there been an incident in your
life where you were under stress and someone did something, made an act or a
gift, that has been very meaningful to you?
Gamble: Oh, yes. Actually, just in the last
couple of days. It's been a difficult time in my life and I had a friend give me
this cross that I'm wearing today. The story that she told about it, I think, is
wonderful. It is made from spent shell casings. She said that the symbolism of
that is simply that even from that which can destroy, something beautiful can be
made for God. But even more beautiful, I think, is that in the cross bar of the
cross there is a kaleidoscope. It's a beautiful thing. She said what that
symbolized to her was, through the lens of the cross all of the broken pieces of
human life can be put together into something that is a brand new whole and that
is beautiful beyond our imagining. I so treasure this and hold on to it with
gratitude.
Brown: That is so unique and so meaningful.
Has there been a single incident in your life that has been that changing moment
that made your faith greater than at any time before?
Gamble: There have been so many times when
God has drawn near to me. Actually, my earliest memory of life was a faith
memory. It had to do with a time that my grandmother died and I was only about
four years old. She was very precious to me. In those days in the South,
funerals were often held from the home. The decision was made that I was too
young to stay for the funeral and I was taken across the street with a cousin to
play with electric trains. I remember walking across the street, looking back at
the house and seeing the mourners coming onto the steps. I don't know if I saw
or I felt it, but my memory is that I saw a beautiful kind of golden aura around
the house! I remember knowing, even as a little child, that was God, that it was
a wondrous presence and that everything was going to be ok.
Brown: Is that what lead you to the
ministry; these kinds of visions?
Gamble: Well, via a circuitous route I would
have to add! I think God had been working with me since that small time.
Brown: How wonderful! And what a marvelous
message. We're so delighted to have you with us here on 30 Good Minutes.
Gamble: Thank you. It's a treat.