Celebrate: Clap Your Hands, Stomp Your Feet
by Debbie Poer
Celebrations come in all shapes and sizes. We celebrate birthdays, marriages, graduations, job promotions, and the lives of those who have gone to their eternal homes. But the best celebration is when a person acknowledges Jesus as their Lord and Savior. At my home church, The Creek, when someone is baptized you will hear a thunderous applause and whistles from the congregation as the person being baptized is raised from the water into their new life in Christ.
Celebration goes back to the beginning of time. Genesis 1:1-31 tells us in the beginning “God saw all that he had made, and it was good.” In the second chapter of his Gospel, John (2:1-11) describes Jesus performing his first miracle at the celebration of a marriage. In the early days of the church, Acts 16:25 records, “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them.”
When we view celebration as a Christian discipline it takes on a whole new meaning. Celebration is the culmination of all of the other disciplines. We already examined an outward discipline (simplicity in January), an inward discipline (prayer, last month) so let’s now think about a discipline we can’t do without others, the corporate discipline of celebration. In his book, The Making of an Ordinary Saint, Nathan Foster says, “When the substance of our life is formed and conformed and transformed into Christlikeness, then celebration becomes possible.” What better way to express our faith than to celebrate it?
Like any celebration, celebrating our faith can take many forms. While we might not celebrate like David who was wearing a linen ephod as he danced before the Lord (2 Samuel 6:14), we certainly can clap our hands and dance before the Lord during our worship. Even children sing with actions “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” Many modern worship songs talk about raising our hands in praise, shouting with joy, clapping our hands, or stomping our feet. Why do we allow ourselves to lose that ability to be free in worship just because we are “grown-up?”
We can celebrate our faith with laughter. A couple years ago at e2’s staff Christmas party, it was suggested we play Bible Charades. It was an evening filled with belly laughs as we tried to guess “Balam’s donkey” and several other phrases and stories from Scripture. If our desire is to be more like Jesus, that should include laughter. Again, think back to the wedding at Cana. Jesus attended a wedding; has there ever been a wedding where nobody laughed?
We can celebrate our faith by volunteering to work in the children’s areas of our churches. That can be refreshing to our spirit as we watch young ones celebrate Jesus with a freedom we have forgotten. Or simply go for a walk outdoors. To experience the sun and wind on our body, the aromas around us, and the sounds of nature can awaken us to moments of celebrating the many ways God has blessed us.
This month I want to issue a special challenge. Easter is just a few short weeks away. As you prepare for Resurrection Sunday, walking through the last days of Jesus’ life, take more time, be more intent on what happened each of those days. Place yourself in the narrative, experiencing in a different way the actions and reactions of Jesus and those who were with Him. Then on Resurrection Sunday, clap your hands and stomp your feet with a newfound joy as you proclaim, “HE IS RISEN INDEED!”
