Communion Service on Psalm 103

22:02 The 103rd Psalm. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits. who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

22:39 The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel, The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made, he remembers that we are dust. As for mortals, their days are like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field.

23:41 For the wind passes over it and it is gone. its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments. The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all. Bless the Lord. Oh, you his angels, you mighty ones, who do his bidding obedient to his spoken word. Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers that do his will. Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion. Bless the Lord, oh my soul. This is the word of the Lord.

24:33 Thanks be to God.

25:03 The Lord is filled in kindness, above the kingdom of God. The wonderful Mississippi short story writer Eudora Welty once wrote a memoir. It was called One Writer's Beginning. And in her memoir, she used this fascinating image. She said that writing about her own life thoughtfully and reflectively was like riding on a mountain railroad at night.

26:06 It was only when the train went around a bend, around a curve, and threw suddenly a light on what had passed that she was able to see a mountain of meaning rising, rising still along the path that she had traveled. There is, I think, just such a moment of retrospective illumination in this beautiful 103rd Psalm that we just heard. Most of the psalm is an exuberant song of blessing and praise. The psalmist's cup is full and flowing over. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless God's holy name. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is the steadfast love of God. As deep as is the compassion of a mother and father for their own children so deep is the mercy and forgiveness of God.

27:04 But what allows the psalmist this moment of ecstatic praise is the fact that his train has gone around the bend and the light has flashed on a mountain of sacred memory. He puts it this way, the Lord made known his ways to Moses and his acts to the people of Israel. What he's remembering there, of course, is the great story of salvation that we have just seen acted out. How God took a goatherd and a shepherd named Moses and made him a liberator in the face of the powerful tyrant Pharaoh. how God took a weak and oppressed and enslaved people in Egypt and took them through the churning waters of the Red Sea to liberation on the other side and in Sinai gave them the law and made them holy and then took them into a land dripping with sweetness and promise and flowing with milk and honey.

28:08 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless God's holy name. but that's not all that he sees in retrospection the way he put it was God made known his ways to Moses and his acts to the people of Israel now that's Hebrew parallelism as you know and I was taught in seminary that Hebrew parallelism is a poetic device by which a poet says something and then says it again in slightly different language in order to reinforce it and to repeat it for emphasis. But we know better than that now. Hebrew parallelism is not mere repetition and reinforcement. It's where the poet says something and then extends it, elaborates it, and deepens it in the second phrase. God made known his ways to Moses. He's telling the great story of salvation and his acts to the people of Israel, extending, elaborating, and deepening the great story of salvation into the everyday lives of the people of God. The ways to Moses is the big story. The acts to the people is the domestic story of how God's salvation is known in their sleeping and in their rising, in their gathering around the table, in their tending to the children and the flocks in their caring for the widows and the orphans.

29:53 Now, I don't know, but it is my guess that if there are people around us, or maybe even ourselves, who have difficulty saying from the bottom of our hearts, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God's holy name, it is not because they do not know the big story. It is because we have not experienced the smaller story, the salvation of God as it irrigates the fields of our own lives and ripples through our every day. And sometimes I think people have difficulty with that because of the kind of preaching that some of us have done. One of the greatest teachers of preaching in our country is a man named Richard Lisher. He teaches at Duke Divinity School, and he wrote a beautiful book several years ago called Open Secrets. It was a book about his first year out of seminary, his first parish, a tiny Lutheran congregation in the cornfields of Illinois.

30:56 And Lisher says in the book, I came out of seminary fancying myself as rather a good preacher. It was because I could turn a beautiful phrase and I could deliver it with a kind of Kennedy Esk urgency. I had even mastered JFK's gesture of two fingers poked into the air. Ask not what your country can do for you. I stood there with my preaching hanging like a cloud of glory over my head and I must have looked ridiculous to my Illinois farmer congregation. Every week I told them the big story of human angst and how the gospel comes demanding authenticity, I gave them a cocktail of existentialism and psychology. Why couldn't I see, said Lisher, the redemption that was taking place before my very eyes in my little congregation?

31:59 There were people in my congregation who had volunteered every week to exercise the arms and legs of a little girl with cerebral palsy so that her muscles would not atrophy. There were people in my congregation who helped their neighbors get their hay out of the fields. before the rains came. When one of our neighbors lost his farm, we were heartbroken and we refused to bid on his tools at auction. Every April we went out into the fields and we prayed God's blessing on the seed before we planted it. Why couldn't I see these events of salvation happening right before my very eyes? It wasn't, he said, that I despised them. I just couldn't see them. And there are a lot of people around us who cannot see them. In Judith Guest's novel, Ordinary People, she writes about Calvin Jared.

32:55 He's a middle-aged man having a midlife crisis. And he says that when he's at cocktail parties or in restaurants or even riding in an elevator, he'll often hear a conversation that begins, now I'm the kind of man who... And he always leans over to hear how the sentence will end, hoping to get some wisdom for his life but he never does. And finally he admits, I'm the kind of man who hasn't the faintest idea what kind of man I am.

33:28 And if we hope that people will get to the place that they know what kind of people they are, that they can spill over with, bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God's holy name, then maybe the faithful community is simply going to have to shine the light of retrospection on the mountains of meaning and grace and forgiveness that have risen up along the way that people travel. When I was 10 years old, I was standing in the gravel parking lot of the Doraville, Georgia, Presbyterian Church. My mother rolled down the window of our Studebaker and said, I'll be back in two hours. That's how long it should take. She then peeled out of the parking lot, gravel spitting up from behind the car. I took in a deep breath because I had an appointment that afternoon in the basement of the church with Inez McElroy.

34:32 I went into the church and down into the basement. I knew where Miss Inez would be, third Sunday school classroom to the right. That's where she always was. In fact, I thought she lived in the third Sunday school classroom. When I pushed open the door, there was Miss Inez, about the age of the Old Testament. And approximately the same disposition. There were no learning centers in Miss Inez's classroom other than Miss Inez. There was only a Calvinistically austere table on which there was a Bible, a box of gold stars, and a children's catechism, which I was there to recite. Without a word, she motioned for me to sit down. I did, and she began, Who made you?

35:28 God? A long, bony finger plucked a gold star out of that box, pulled it over a lizard-like tongue, and stuck it in the catechism. Why did he make you? For his own good purpose.

35:53 Back and forth the questions and answers and the fire of pride burned in Miss Inez's eyes because there in the basement of the church we were about the most important business in the world. Now I've been a lot of places and I've learned a lot of things but I've never learned anything more profound than the light of retrospection that Miss Inez shone on the mountain of meaning and grace, that I am not only my own, but that I belong body and soul to Jesus Christ, my Lord, that God made me for God's own good purpose. In every community of Christian faith, there are moments of memory and sacred mountains of meaning right there in the fabric of the everyday life of the congregation that need to be lifted up and remembered so that people will know that the ways that God has shown to Moses have come home to the acts of God among the people of God, among the people of Israel.

37:02 I have a friend who is a pastor in Seattle. There is a family in his congregation that decided, after they had their own children that as an act of their Christian faith, they would adopt a special needs child from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Calcutta. When the time came for them to go over to Calcutta and pick up their child, they found their new baby daughter in a cardboard cradle nesting on carefully laundered soft rags, her legs disfigured and distorted. They took her home and began a series of operations to restore her ability to walk, one operation after another, until finally, at age 12, she was able to walk with the assistance of a crutch on her own.

37:59 It was then they realized that with all the attention to her medical condition, they had never gotten her baptized. So they made arrangements and set a Sunday for her to be baptized. And my friend said, every minister knows about this family because they are the family who never manages to make it to church on time. They always come during the singing of the first hymn. You know the family. Well, because of the preparations for the baptism, on Baptism Sunday they were late, and even later than usual, they arrived during the reading of the New Testament lesson. It happened to be the 11th chapter of Matthew, where John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus, are you the one, or should we look for somebody else? And Jesus says, you go tell John what you see. The blind regain their sight and the lame walk. And as that was read, coming down the aisle radiantly beautiful, wearing her baptismal dress, walking on her own, was this child. My friend said we didn't need a sermon that day. We had seen the ways of God made known to Moses and the power of salvation had become present before our very eyes.

39:24 Which means that worship is not simply worship. It is also a dress rehearsal for the people of God to look back in retrospect and to see the mountains of forgiveness and compassion and divine mercy that rise up along the pathway of life, to go to Walmart on Thursday afternoon at 2 o'clock and to see it for what it is, the theater of the glory of God. To gather around a bowl of spaghetti and Italian bread and to see it for what it is, the Messianic Banquet. I was about a year ago at a conference like this one at lunch time I happened to strike up a conversation with a man we were comparing notes and it turned out that both of us had lost our mothers a year before in hospice he said that his mother was in hospice for three weeks he said the first week you know what you do you say all of the things that you wish that you had said and that you ought to say you spend the whole week saying i love you mom thank you mom you've blessed me mom i love you mom but after a week you stop saying those things because it seems like to keep on saying them would cheapen them and a certain kind of silence falls over the room i nodded in recognition. I understood. He said, in the second week, my son and my two sisters and I were keeping vigil one night in hospice, and the room was filled with silence. No one knew what to say. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, my sister began to sing that great version of Psalm 46, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. We were all Lutherans, he said. We all knew it, so we started singing it.

41:30 when we had finished A Mighty Fortress, somebody started another hymn, and we started singing every hymn we could think of out of the Lutheran hymn book. One hymn, one psalm, one spiritual after another, and suddenly he said it dawned on me, this is the reason we learn these hymns and psalms for a moment like this. He said, I turned to my son, he's a teenager, he's not interested in church, and I said to him, I said, son, listen, I'm not trying to crimp your style, but you have to learn these hymns. One day you're going to need to sing them at my bedside. And indeed we will, as the light of retrospection shines on the mountains of grace and meaning that have risen along the way. If people don't see them, maybe as the church, we'll just have to shine the light for them so that they wish.