Sermon 9/13/2020 “Breathe God’s blessing”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection at VTS in Alexandria, VA
Text: Psalm 103:1-13
Day: 15Pentecost, Proper 19, Year A, during a pandemic
There’s a story we preachers tell about a pastor who had been very wayward as a youth. And, though he had long ago confessed his past, one especially bad deed he had done still haunted him.
One day, as he sat at the bedside of a comatose, dying parishioner, the pastor blurted out, “Ida Mae, when you get to heaven ask God about me. Ask God if this very bad thing I did will keep me from heaven and let me know what God says.” Then the pastor told Ida Mae what he had done. Ida Mae just lay there, unresponsive.
A few weeks after Ida Mae had died, though, her daughter called on the pastor. She told him about a dream she had the night before. In the dream, she said, her mother told her she had spoken to God, as the pastor had asked. But, she said, although God knew all about the pastor, God said he had no memory at all of what God called “the incident in question.” The mother had suggested that if God didn’t have any memory of what was troubling the pastor, maybe he should let it go, too.
On this subject, our Psalm today says God deals with us much more righteously than we deserve. Our Psalm says God doesn’t reward our wickedness. Instead, God redeems us and heaps mercy and loving kindness on us. God forgives us and—if we let him—God heals us.
Now, don’t think this means God turns a blind eye on our sins. God is always ready to forgive and forget the sins we confess and atone. But our Psalm today doesn’t say anything about confessing and atoning. Our Psalm presumes that we have done those basic actions to put right what we have done wrong. And, like our Psalm, what I want to focus on today is what comes after the confessing, after the forgiving and atoning—in other words, on how to live a forgiven life and breathe God’s blessing.
Elsewhere in scripture, Hebrews 8:12 to be exact, we learn that when God forgives us, he “remembers our sins no more.” Not like a crossed-out offense in the great judgment book of life but erased and gone forever.
Today’s Psalm says the same thing, but more poetically. The Psalmist says God removes our sins from us “as far as the East is from the West.” In other words, “infinitely far” or beyond all remembering and beyond all reckoning.
Our “logic brains” might kick in here to wonder about the consequences of the wrongs we do. The consequences of our deeds remain, even when we have confessed and atoned the deeds themselves and God has forgiven and forgotten those deeds. But even though the consequences remain, the blame and the shame we can cripple ourselves with are all gone. We can then breathe God’s blessing and give thanks to God from the innermost part of our being.
Someone once told me, passing along what she had found helpful, that holding on to the guilt of a sin after doing the work of confessing and atoning, is a kind of pride. Holding on to the guilt is like saying, “MY sin is so bad even GOD can’t forgive me.”
Perhaps—maybe—holding on to the guilt of a past sin is a sign that we haven’t done all the work necessary to confess and atone for where we’ve “missed the mark” of living in right-relationship with all. But that’s OUR work to do. As our Psalm says today, GOD “redeems our lives from the grave and crowns us with mercy and loving-kindness.” The only appropriate response is to praise and thank God—as we are doing today.
I must warn you, though. Refusing to deal with sin doesn’t make the sin go away. We can’t deny sin, we can’t push sin underground, or hide sin. Sin grows in dark places, unexamined places, breaking out much later in ways we neither imagine nor expect.
Our Psalm promises righteousness for all who are oppressed and hints at judgment for the oppressors. God is slow to anger, but not anger-free. And, while God won’t hold his anger forever, we learn that God does, indeed, get angry at those who discount him.
In our world today, the consequences of discounting God are all around us: “We can’t breathe.” Literally. We are dying of a respiratory pandemic. We are inhaling the smoke of raging wildfires. We are strangling under “the knee” of oppression. We are drowning in the tears of our melting planet. And we are choking on the ashes of fallen twin towers.
But there are far, far more things “right” in our world: The very God who made us loves us like a father, and he wants the very best for us. The very God who made us loves us beyond measure:
- God forgives us and remembers our sin no more, as we are to do countless times when others sin against us.
- God heals us from whatever truly ails us if we but recognize the healing.
- God crowns us with mercy and loving kindness, showing us the way of life.
- God satisfies us with good things and renews us when we are depleted.
- And God judges those who oppress others.
Our Psalm today calls these the “benefits of God,” the things for which we must thank God when we call on him. If the Psalmist were living today, he might add something like, “Fills us with breath and life.”
These are the “benefits” for which we should bless the Lord. When should we bless the Lord for these benefits? When we get up in the morning and when we go to bed at night. When we eat and are when we fast. When we are thankful for what God has given us and when we mourn for something taken away. All day, every day—especially on the Sabbath. And we should even bless the Lord when bad things happen. Even when people mean to do us harm, we know that God means everything for good, and can redeem all for the good, turning “bad trouble” into “good trouble.”
Today, as we prepare to physically receive the Eucharist for the first time in six months, we follow the Psalmist’s lead and pray, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy name.” Let every breath you breathe bless the Lord; breathing God’s blessing on all.
