Hilton Head Island, SC – October 6, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 103:1-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! (Psalm 103:1a);
Bless the Lord, O my soul! (Psalm 103:22b). (RSV)
The longer I have been the pastor of The Chapel Without Walls, the more I realize I have fallen into fairly predictable patterns regarding what kinds of sermons I preach in certain periods of the year. For example, naturally I always preach about Jesus during Advent, the season leading up to Christmas. I do the same during Lent, the season leading up to Easter.
Aside from those two times in the year which virtually mandate the kinds of sermons I preach, at other times I preach sermons that are not necessarily related to one another, but which have themes which interest me, and I hope interest you as well. Then, usually in the fall and in the spring, at least in recent years, I will preach from the Psalms.
Listed in the bulletin are the titles of sermons coming up between now and November 17. You have no way of knowing this, but I will tell you now that every sermon between now and then will be based on one of the Psalms. A few years ago I made it a goal to preach through the whole Book of Psalms while I was serving as pastor of this congregation. I never intended to preach from every one of the 150 Psalms, because that might be lethal for all of us, and perhaps especially for me. However, I want to get through most of them, and as of Nov. 17, we will have made our way through Psalm 133. I will not do a sermon for each of the remaining seventeen Psalms in 2014, but I will likely do at least a dozen or so.
And why, you may ask, is the parson so fixated on the Psalms? There are 66 books in the Bible; why concentrate so much on the Psalms? In a few words, I believe the Psalms contain some of the greatest, most majestically written, and most profound words to be found anywhere in holy scripture. They are, in my subjective opinion, the greatest book of poetry ever composed, even greater than all the poems of Emily Dickinson and Robert Burns put together. We don’t know the identity of everyone who wrote all of the Psalms, but it is claimed that King David wrote almost half of them. That is very doubtful, but whoever were the authors who contributed to this collection of 150 religious songs are all to be commended for their literary handiwork.
And that brings us to the first and last verses of Psalm 103, which is claimed in the superscription at its beginning to be a Psalm of David. It begins and ends with a familiar but somewhat problematic declaration, “Bless the Lord, O my soul!”
The Hebrew word for “bless” or “blessed” is baruch, or, depending on the context, barak.
It is the same word in Arabic as in Hebrew. Thus Barack Obama is “Blessed” or “Bless-ed” Obama. Just how blessed he feels these days is very debatable, most of all by him, I suspect. It seems to me that no one who is President of the United States, particularly in the last two or three decades, is blessed very much. Cursed, maybe, but not blessed. What a thankless job it is!
There is a common Hebrew prayer before meals that says, “Baruch atah Adonoy Elohenu, Melech ha-olam, ha-motzi lechem min-ha-aretz, which means, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth.” Incidentally (and this parenthesis in biblical linguistics is tossed in free-for-nothing), the word for bread is lechem. “Beth-lechem” (Bethlehem) means “House of Bread.” The other congregation which meets in Beth Yam (House by the Sea) knows this, and now you, ersatz Beth Yamers, know it too.
So now I will come to the genuine linguistic concern which follows from the previous verbal detour. How could David or anyone else say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul”? It is God who blesses us, isn’t it? Can we bless God? Is blessing the God who blesses even possible?
We are far more likely to speak of the “blessings of God” than we are of “blessing God.” A prayer before a meal is often called “a blessing.” But in it we are not blessing God, really; instead we are thanking God for His blessing us by providing us the food. Strangely, at least in terms of language, we also call such a prayer “grace.” In our family my father always said “grace,” and it was always the “grace” that had been said in my mother’s family going back a few generations, I suppose. But in saying grace, are we thanking God for His grace shown us or for our grace expressed to God? And in saying a blessing before we eat, are we expressing gratitude to God for all His blessings, or are we blessing Him with our thanks? And does God need our blessings or our thanks, anyway?
I doubt that anyone here has ever lost sleep wondering about these matters. Nor have I. But there is a theological issue to be addressed in the first and last verses of Psalm 103, it seems to me, and I hope you will continue to indulge me and my peculiar way of thinking as we pursue what “Bless the Lord, O my soul” really means.
When someone sneezes, our immediate response may be, “Bless you!” What does that actually mean? If you sneeze in Germany, the correct response is, “Gesundheit!”, which literally means “healthiness.” But in extended words it means, “May you live in good health, now and forever.” You probably know that word. But what does it really mean to say either “Bless you” or “Gesundheit” when someone sneezes?
Some teacher way back there told our class (and I can’t remember which teacher or which class) the origin of those expressions. In the Middle Ages, when people sneezed, it was widely believed that a demon had just been expelled by them, via their mouth. Thus “Bless you” or “Gesundheit” implied that now they were rid of another demon, and thus they were blessed and would continue to be blessed with good health. That seems very peculiar to us, but that apparently is what they believed.
The Doxology (which literally means “good word,” which is what “benediction” also means), begins, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” “All good gifts around us/ Do come from heaven above,” says the old children’s hymn. Every good thing comes from God, and therefore every good thing is a blessing. That we understand intuitively. But can WE be a blessing to God? Or is it linguistically possible for us to bless God?
Yes, it surely seems that we can be blessings to God, and that we also can bless God. If we do what God wants, we bless Him, just as when we were children if we did what our parents wanted, we blessed them and were blessings to them. (Sometimes we didn’t and thus we weren’t, but that’s another story, just as sometimes we don’t do what God wants, and therefore we aren’t a blessing to Him, nor do we bless Him, but that too is another story.) Nevertheless, if we follow God’s laws and commandments, we inevitably bless God by means of that fundamental human commitment and dedication.
God constantly showers us with goodness. In the words of Psalm 103, God “forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy” (vs. 3&4). What kind of God is our God? “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love….He does not deal with us according to sins, nor requite us according to our iniquities….As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (vs. 8,10,13,14).
When we become fully conscious of the nature of God, and the power of His majesty sweeps over us, we are driven to prayers of profound gratitude for the kind of God He is. He might have been a God of terror - - - but He isn’t! He might have been a fearsome deity - - - but He isn’t! He might have been a God who holds permanent grudges - - - but He isn’t! If in fact it was David who wrote Psalm 103, he had good reason to declare what he said about God, because nobody tested the blessings of God like the Sweet Singer of Israel, who was too often a holy terror when he wasn’t singing sweet Psalms to the God of Israel.
Despite David’s deficiencies, however, he was a blessing to God and he blessed God by means of a long and extraordinary life, devoted to God. We would not be who we are, at least in part, were it not for David being who he was. He was a great king with feet of clay. He also was a profound theologian with some widely recognized flaws, both in his thoughts and in his actions. But because of David, biblical faith is ever so much richer and fuller and more abundant.
A couple of weeks ago I was mailed a clipping from The New York Times by friends who live on Cape Cod. It was about a Methodist minister who had lost her faith in God. She felt she could no longer serve the Methodist Church with integrity, but she greatly missed the fellowship of the people among whom she had ministered. She heard about a program sponsored by a foundation associated with Harvard University for establishing communities for atheists. So now she is what we in the Church would call a “new church developer” for atheist congregations. Atheists need to gather with like-minded folks, just like the rest of us, so good marks to her for her new and highly unusual ministry. Even if she doesn’t believe in God anymore, she is blessing Him and she is a blessing to Him, simply by starting communities of non-believers who believe in one another.
Last week my ever-faithful clipper of London Times articles, Trudy Yates of Shipton-under-Wychwood (I am not making up that village moniker) sent me two articles, among many others, about new atheist churches in England and elsewhere. Only eight months after starting a congregation for atheists in London called the Sunday Assembly, the organizing group has founded other such congregations in twenty cities around the world. Probably some of these new communities will become fundamentalist atheist congregations, with people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in charge, but there is definitely something to be said for connecting people with like-minded people, because we all need to be connected to others, lest we wither on our own vine. Even those who don’t believe in God can be a blessing to God and can bless Him without knowing that is what they are doing. Evangelical atheism is apparently alive and well, and it may be growing all over God’s world.
Trudy Yates also sent me a story from the Times about Jean Paul Getty, one of the first American billionaires. He founded the Getty Oil Company, which didn’t quite turn out to be Standard Oil or Texaco, but which has done very well nevertheless. Mr. Getty was married five times, and none of his marriages was a towering success. Part of the reason for that is that he was incredibly parsimonious. He could pinch a penny so hard that the head of Abe Lincoln was scrunched into the Lincoln Memorial on the back, with a Getty-created air passage in between. As an example of how tight he was, he installed a pay phone booth outside his palatial Sutton Place estate in England so that guests would have to pay for their own phone calls.
One of his wives, Teddy Getty Gaston, has just published a book called Alone Together about her late ex-husband. She wrote her book more than fifty years after they were divorced. Teddy Getty just turned 100 this year. We may deduce she took her time to tell all, and even at that, she no doubt didn’t tell everything. Getty scolded his wife for spending too much money on doctors when their young son was dying. Can you imagine a billionaire doing that? Later one of his grandsons was kidnapped. The kidnappers demanded $17 million as a ransom. He refused, saying that if he gave in to them he would have 14 other grandchildren kidnapped. After the criminals cut off one of the boy’s ears and sent it to an Italian newspaper, he did agree to pay $2.2 million, which his accountant told him was the highest amount that would be tax deductible. God forbid he might not get a full tax deduction for the ransom he paid.
How we live determines whether or not we bless God and are blessings to God. Jean Paul Getty was a man who amassed billions of dollars, but who had no concept of the meaning or value of money. What a tragedy to have had his brains but also to have had no sense to go along with all his business savvy.
What we do with our lives is the deciding factor in whether or not we bless God and if we become blessings to God. He who created us did not create us to be automatons, protoplasmic robots who automatically do the bidding of their Maker. Even though we ordinarily don’t think of it in this way, each of us has the capability to bless God by our actions. We also can become blessings to God as surely as many people through our lives have been great blessings to us.
“Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word” (v. 20). That’s us, folks. The word angel means “messenger.” We are all messengers of God, whether we know it or not or affirm it or not. “Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers who do his will!” (v. 21). That also is us. The word minister simply means servant, and we are all servants of God.
Sometimes we’re too embroiled with what we want to do that we refuse to do what God wants us to do. Or we might not even perceive God’s will for us because we are too busy doing our own thing.
We need to be continuous blessings to God and to others. When that becomes the purpose our lives, we will able to declare with David, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name!”