Psalm 148 Commentary

The first Sunday after Christmas in 2025 is also a mere three days after Christmas Day.  By then most of us, if we are honest, are a bit worn out and worn thin by all the holiday hustle and bustle.  Good times were had perhaps.  Or maybe the holidays were more stressful than good as certain wrinkles of family dysfunction became more visible again.  Or perhaps there was that proverbial “empty chair” at the table, the place where a loved one once sat but who has now gone to be with the Lord.  Or perhaps it’s a place at the table where we wish someone would take a seat but lingering anger or resentment over some past bad thing means this person does not show up even when invited.

Whatever our experiences over the last week or so, we’re tired and ready to be finished with the holiday season.  It’s often striking to me when I would take a walk in the early evening or even late afternoon of Christmas Day only to see how many people had already heaved their Christmas tree to the curb.  I mean, the poor tree didn’t even get to see the whole day through!  Now that’s being eager to put the holidays behind you.

But as we turn to the Lectionary Year A Psalm, we get anything but some soothing or quieting song that would best befit our weary states of heart.  No, what we get on this final Sunday of 2025 is a full-throated, creation-wide call to crank up the praise until the needle on the Enthusiasm-O-Meter is well into the red.  Psalm 148 is relentless.  It begins and ends with the command statement hallelu yah and in between that bookended summons to sing is a long litany of who all simply must get in on the worship.  Everyone from angels to earthworms are called upon to belt it out for Yahweh.  Sun, moon, and stars: sing!  Rain, snow, hail, lightning: sing!  Mountains, hills, fruit trees, cedars: sing!  Whales, foxes, cows, chickadees: sing!  Kings, queens, old folks, young folks, men, women, girls, boys: sing!

As the Hebrew Psalter comes in for a landing, the editors of this collection really ramped up the joy of worship with a series of songs that grow ever louder in decibels until the whole collection of 150 songs concludes with the catch-all command, “Let everything that has breath praise Yahweh!”

But are our congregations up for this level of praise just now?  It’s not just the post-holiday fatigue noted above.  For many of us the entire year has been an exhausting never-ending news cycle of troubling developments, corruption, fear-mongering, unending wars and conflicts, and economic anxiety.  As if the year of 2025 did not have enough to discourage a person as it was, December in recent weeks brought us another deadly shooting at a university, a devastating anti-Semitic slaughtering of multiple Jewish people in Australia as they began to celebrate Hannukah, and the high-profile killing of a famous Hollywood couple.  And that was just the first two weeks of December as I write this sermon commentary on Monday the 15^th.

Does all of this ever make singing full-throated praises to God something that sticks in our throats?  Are at least some of the people to whom we preachers will preach at the end of this year far more inclined at the moment to cry out, “Where are you, O God!?  How long, O God!?” than they are to say with the writer of Psalm 148, “Let them praise the name of the Lord for his name alone is exalted . . . he has raised up a horn for his people!”?

Maybe.  Probably.  At least for some.  And we need to be understanding and compassionate about that sad fact.  But we need also to remember that we really do serve the Creator of all things and that the majesty of his power is on display at all times.  All those non-human entities called up to join Israel’s choir in Psalm 148 really are awesome.  The spectacle of powerful rain and snow storms, of hurricanes and tornados: some of those things can be terrifying too but the Bible always claims they are also testament to God’s strength.

Those majestic humpback whales that are enlisted here to praise God are wonderful enough to make tears leap to your eyes when you get the chance to see them.  The swift gazelles that race across the African veldt, the song birds and the fish inhabiting coral reefs that dazzle us with a riot of vibrant colors on feathers and scales: these are all testament to God’s wildly rich creative imagination.  Those images of towering purple and pink gases and nebulae that the James Watt space telescope keeps beaming down to earth reveals a universe whose sheer size and scale staggers us.  And God made all that and keeps all that going.

What’s more, as many of the psalms testify, even more stunning than witnessing things that testify to God’s majesty and imagination is the fact that this huge God sees us and loves us in all our littleness.  He cares for us.  Three days after Christmas we have just received fresh reminders of the most important message of them all: The Child born in Bethlehem’s stall is Immanuel, God with us.  God.  With.  Us.  Stunning.

So let’s admit we’re tired.  Let’s admit we live in a season perhaps better characterized by lament than by praise.  But let’s also allow Psalm 148 to remind us there are galaxies of reasons to praise our great God in Christ and let’s join the chorus being sung by the entirety of creation to follow Psalm 148’s lead: Hallelujah!  Praise the Lord!

Illustration Idea

My friend Deborah Haarsma is an astronomer and when she makes public presentations related to her work, among her favorite images to show from the Hubble and now James Webb telescopes are of some of the enormous gaseous nebulae that are found all over the galaxy.  What delights her the most is that the nebulae are actually star nurseries.  In the image above you can see a new star that has formed from all the dust and gas and other matter in the nebulae.  Haarsma always points out that when in Genesis 1 we read the almost casual line “He made the stars also,” we have to appreciate two things: the sheer number of those stars is staggering even just inside our Milky Way galaxy—on the order of a billion stars, most vastly larger than our yellow sun.  But the other wonder is that God is still making new stars all the time.  He never stopped.  He never will stop.

So let’s cue up Psalm 148 again: Praise the Lord!