This sermon is based on Psalm 147.

Some of us might find it ironic that the psalm prescribed for the last Sunday of the year exhorts us to sing praises to God. Has this not been a terrible year? Have our shares not lost much of their value? Has the threat of terrorism not hung over our heads?

Of course, we could also say, how wonderful that most of us still have a roof over our heads and a chicken in our pot! What a blessing that for most of us terrorism has just been a media event, sufficient to agitate us but not causing us any real discomfort.

To acknowledge as much would of course fly in the face of human nature -- or rather, the smug disposition Goethe mocked when he pilloried his fellow-countrymen's tuck-tucking in their taverns "wenn hinten, fern in der Tuerkei, die Voelker aufeinanderschlagen" (when far, far away in Turkey the nations clobber each other).

Feel free to substitute for Turkey other parts of the Orient.

Since time immemorial, though, humans have found it easier to "sing to the Lord with thanksgiving," as the psalmist urges them to, when they have been through hell or seemingly are right in the midst of it.

Some of the greatest hymns of Protestantism were written in the bloodiest of times, while the fat years often only produced asinine grunts, to wit some of the "lyrics" in the popular music of the 1990s.

The beauty of Huguenot chants is directly linked to the persecution of French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. The stirring hymn, "Now thank we all our God," which modernist theologians tend to malign as the anthem of unacceptable Christian triumphalism, is was in fact written during the most murderous phase of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which annihilated one third of Germany's population.

American slaves understood what the psalmist meant when he sang, "He heals the brokenhearted and binds of their wounds" or, a little further on, "The Lord lifts up the lowly and casts the wicked to the ground." And so they shouted out their Hallelujahs in a new genre of music, which was to evolve into America's greatest contribution to musical history -- Gospel song, blues, and jazz.

It seems incomprehensible that dirt-poor Africans, or the ever-expanding Chinese church, which lives under the constant peril of imprisonment, torture and death, have no problem responding to the psalmist's appeal: "Praise your God, O Zion!" For they know: "He is not impressed by the might of a horse; he has no pleasure in the strength of a man."

We know that faithful Jews praised God on their way to the gas chambers. On a level of suffering much below that, I do remember that when my parents' home burned out in an air raid just before Christmas almost 60 years ago, and we had nothing left except the clothes on our backs and the family Bible, we howled out hymns of praise in the roofless Thomaskirche in Leipzig -- Bach's church.

This, too, was part of human nature. It is in suffering that we acknowledge our maker more readily than in comfort. For it is comfort, which seems to further what Luther called man's "shameful unthankfulness." Luther, never one for mincing words, thought that man's inclination to ingratitude reduced him in status below that of swine.

"No animal would live as disgracefully as does this world, no, not even a sow. For a sow knows the housewife or maid from whom she receives her slops and swill; she runs after her and cries to her," he said. "But the world does not know and honor God who so richly and boundlessly blesses it."

Why is this so? I suggest because of man's arrogance. When man feels strong, he considers himself divine and wants no God beside him.

But then what does it matter to the Almighty if humans don't applaud him? Why does he ask for songs of praise -- out of vanity, perhaps? The answer may gain great relevance as we enter a new year full of dangers.

Singing songs of praise is the lightest and most cheerful fulfillment of the First Commandment -- the acknowledgment of the Lord our God. We may fancy that as things are going so well in our lives we can live merrily without him.

But listen to the haunting hymns of the persecuted Huguenots, the witnesses to the Thirty Years War, the black slaves, the concentration camp inmates on their way to those lethal showers, or those of us suddenly rendered homeless and penniless in one night's air raid:

It is in times of woe that the psalmist's words go straight to our hearts: "Be still, and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations. I am exalted in the Earth." (Psalm 46:10).