Archbishop Peter Jensen
March 1st, 2009

When the lame man was healed as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, he went about walking and leaping and praising God for what had happened to him. As you would.

The other day I went for my usual walk. I often pray as I walk, but on this occasion I decided to confine my prayers to the praise of God for what he has given us in creation. There was no shortage of things to praise him for, and no shortage of beautiful and wonderful things. Mind you, the beautiful and the wonderful are so common that we often take them for granted and forget just how remarkable the world is – and how remarkable and kind is the God who made the world.

Now what did I praise him for?

* Trees, grass, flowers and other vegetation. Colour – isn’t that extraordinary?
* Water in the harbour, the choppiness of it, the wind disturbing it.
* The 18ft sailing boats coming in after a day on the harbour.
* The human face, excited, reposed, young, old.
* Children in a playground – and parents proud but anxious.
* Friends, lovers, families.
* People from different parts of the world.
* Dogs. Light. Sand.
* Buildings – large and small; some the exquisite work of human hands.
* Food shops and book shops and places where people congregate and talk.
* I think I meant food and books and community.

This was not all. But the business of praise forced me to open my eyes again to the sheer privilege of living in the world which God has created. I suppose, too, that I did not see anything which was more precious than people. When we look at the human being we are seeing something wonderfully and fearfully made, which must surely make us think of the Creator and how marvellous he must be.

Three further thoughts about this outburst of praise.

First, although God created the world ‘good, very good’, and when he did ‘the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy’, our praise for him can never be without more than a tinge of sadness. Even when we look at ourselves we see not perfection but the ruin of perfection. Beneath the surface of what I saw in families and lovers and yachties and friends and buildings, there is also envy and greed and suffering and carelessness about God, together with our abuse of creation. And some very bad architecture.

Second, in the Bible our praise of God usually takes the form of specific praise for specific things. It is nothing like the sort of meditative technique which takes us into ourselves and leads to a mind empty of thought. The praise of God begins with something we have seen or experienced and then takes us to God himself as he has revealed himself to us. We need to be careful about creating God out of the figments of our own imagination.

Third, in the Bible our praise of God includes our joy in his creative power and wisdom, but it is even more often directed to what he has done for us in redemption. It is ‘the old, old story’ of his salvation which occupies most of our thoughts and our thanksgiving.  Of course it is wrong to separate creation and redemption too sharply, for redemption involves a new creation, and creation is the arena in which our redemption has been wrought. But the focus of our joy is the Son of God ‘who came into the world to save sinners…’

One more thing. Sometimes we think that there is a sort of hierarchy in prayer, as though praise is the highest form of prayer and petition is the lowest. We have achieved great spiritual heights when we can simply praise God and not bother him with our mundane requests. The Lord’s prayer should show how wrong it is to think like that – it is made up of six petitions. The fact is that all prayers, including our intercessions, are capable of honouring God equally.

All true prayer is a work of faith. When we praise God we are acknowledging him as the source of our blessings. When we ask him for his blessing we are doing exactly the same thing – we are acknowledging our dependence upon him and that he is the source of all good things.