Glory and Praise

“I love you.” “I love you to the moon and back.”  “Love ya.”   There are so many ways to say “I love you.”  Perhaps that’s because loving another human being is so powerful, having only one phrase to express our emotions just won’t do!   When we truly love, we are so filled with happiness, so filled with life, we often have no choice but to spill out awe, wonder, praise and gratitude on everyone around us!

This sense of praise is captured in the Gloria which we sing at the beginning of our liturgy.   The Gloria is a song of praise to God.   This is why we sing it more often than we recite it.   The words of the Gloria are being changed in the New Roman Missal to reflect the original Latin.   The revised Gloria gives us more ways to say “I love you” to God:  “We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you.”  The first line of the Gloria is also being changed to “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to people of good will.”  This line comes from the scriptural account of the birth of Jesus:

“Suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in high heaven, peace on earth to those on whom his favor rests.’”  Luke 2:14

The angels’ burst of praise to the shepherds is now echoed by the human voice of the assembly of believers each time we sing the Gloria.  May we sing this hymn with the awe, the wonder, the vitality and the gratitude of people who are in love, in love with the God who first loved us into being.  May our praise resound far beyond the walls of our church each Sunday, spilling out even into the world.  Amen.