Psalm 103 Thanksgiving
for God’s Goodness
Of David.
1 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is
within me,
bless his holy name.
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not
forget all his benefits 3 who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your
life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
5 who satisfies you
with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
6 The Lord works vindication and justice for all
who are oppressed.
7 He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel.
8 The Lord is
merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always
accuse, nor will he keep his anger for ever.
10 He does not deal
with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as the heavens
are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear
him;
12 as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our
transgressions from us.
13 As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has
compassion for those who fear him.
14 For he knows how we were made; he remembers that
we are dust.
20 Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty
ones who do his bidding, obedient to his spoken word.
21 Bless the Lord,
all his hosts, his ministers that do his will.
22 Bless the Lord,
all his works, in all places of his dominion.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Here
we are again continuing our fruity series. The fruit of the day is “Kindness.” Actually I started
thinking about a guy I knew in law school. I hadn’t thought about him in years. Perhaps I started to think about this
guy because he was one of the kindest law students I knew. The words law student and kindness do
not always go well together. But they did with this guy. Ken was so nice. He
would do things just to make your life easier or because he saw a need. Once a
friend of mine came down with a fast moving flu and he drove her home. That was a good deed in and of itself
given the daunting task of catching a bus while sick. But Ken went on to go to
the grocery store and buy some chicken noodle soup, Kleenexes and Tylenol. Ken was that kind of guy. He went the second mile out of
kindness. He was also very good looking. He was working his way through law
school as tennis pro at a country club.
But frankly lots of people in law school thought Ken was a little bit of
a “himbo” That is the male equivalent of a bimbo. Ken had a problem. He was failing law school. And this
failure was really hard to understand. Ken wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t lazy. But
he was really struggling. No one
wanted this guy in their study group. Because law school is all about getting
ahead and class rank, many study groups didn’t want a student who was dead
weight. They wanted a study group
member that would bring the whole groups GPA up. But Ken was so kind that a
group of us invited him to study with us.
As
we would study together I realized what Ken’s problem was. He couldn’t connect the dots. He looked
at every case we read and every fact in every case, and Ken tried to remember
it all, each and every dot. For Ken all the legal precedent looked like a huge polka
dot world. He was drowning in
little pixels and couldn’t see the big picture. Ken didn’t know what was important so he tried to remember
everything. The fact is we can’t remember everything. But if we remember the most important things, then we will
get it right.
God
knows this about us. We are
limited people who used to be dust. You can’t expect a pile of dust to remember
everything. Every dot is too much for us. But we can remember nine things.
These are the big themes, the primary colors that give life meaning. The nine colors that we paint with in
life are the Fruit of the Spirit; Love. Joy, Peace. Patience, Kindness, Goodness,
Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control. Nine things. That’s one less than a telephone number and
area code. Get these right and we
will be bearing the right fruit.
Get these things right and we will bear a resemblance to God. You see we
often need to draw back from every little dot and see the whole picture.
Whether it is Ken’s study problem or our hectic lives we need a way to sort out
the most important things.
But
why? When we talk about spiritual fruit I don’t think we get it. But listen.
You identify a tree as an apple tree because it grows apples, a pear tree
because it grows pears. You identify the tree by its fruit. God says we should be able to look at
our lives and see where we are coming from. A tree should look like the parent
tree. It is the same with spiritual fruit. We should start looking more and
more like God. We don’t get to BE God, but we should start to bear a
resemblance. We were made in the image of God. But we drifted or wrenched
ourselves away from that good root.
Now as we grow, we should start bearing all the characteristics of
God. Those dots of our life should
start to come together to create and image of God’s character in us.
Back
to my friend Ken, he needed to know what the big idea was. Every case should stand for one legal
principal, not 500 facts. When he got the big picture Ken’s understanding took
off. We need to know the themes,
the essentials, the basic colors that God uses to blend our life into God’s
image. Our scripture today is
Psalm 103. I chose Psalm 103 because
it talks about the fundamental essential characteristic of God. Four times in
this psalm the character of God is described in our translation as steadfast
love. The Hebrew word is hesed. The
primary characteristic of God is this heavy hitter word, HESED, STEADFAST LOVE or LOVING KINDNESS. This loving kindness is essential
to how we understand God and how we imitate God.
We
need to examine this word. In fact “word” is too narrow an idea. Hesed isn’t a word. It is a star. More than a star, it is a constellation
of stars, a constellation that shows a profound aspect of God. Hesed is the big dipper in the points of
light that is God. Hesed is used
240 times in the Old Testament. It is translated with these words, loving-kindness,
steadfast love, covenant loyalty, grace, mercy, faithfulness, goodness and
mercy. This definition includes four of the Fruits of the Spirit rolled into
one concept. In general, one may
identify three basic meanings of hesed. These three meanings always
interact -- strength, steadfastness, and love.[i]
Any understanding of hesed that
fails to suggest all three inevitably loses some of its richness. Love by itself easily becomes
sentimental mush. Strength alone is daunting and distant. Steadfastness alone suggests only the
fulfillment of an obligation. But hesed
is not only a matter of obligation but is also of generosity. It is not only a
matter of loyalty, but also of mercy. Hesed implies personal involvement
and commitment in a relationship beyond the rule of law. Hesed
is not merely love, but loyal love; not merely kindness, but dependable
kindness; not merely affection, but affection that has committed itself. The Bible often speaks of someone
“doing,” “showing,” or “keeping” hesed. Hesed is always about action not
just an idea or psychological state or an attitude. Love in action is Kindness.
We think of kindness
as the little things we do, small dots of light in our life. But they are hugely important because
they help us be the image of God. This is what the loving kindness of God is
like. A man was
fishing off a community-fishing pier. As he cast his line into the water he
suddenly finds himself falling off the pier, down, down, down into the bay. Weighed
down by his clothes and fishing gear, he begins to struggle to stay afloat. And
so he lets out a cry for help. A fellow fisherman rushes to the end of the pier
and asks the fisherman what he can do to be of help. The struggling man in the
water shouts back, “Give me something to hold onto.” Loving Kindness and Steadfast Love is what we hang on to
about God. This is what we give to each other, not small things but little
things that mean everything.
One
of the best examples of loving kindness is the story of the Good Samaritan. But
what the Good Samaritan did is simply a series of small kind acts. He stopped instead of walking by. He
bent down and covered a wound. He gave someone a ride on his donkey. He walked
to an inn. He gave two coins to the innkeeper. He said he would come back with
more if necessary. Each item in the chain was a small step that led to the next
and the next. They added up to a life saved. These were the dots of action that God connected with the
big theme of Loving Kindness. You never know when one small kindness may lead
to another. You never know the results of some little gift of kindness.
We
don’t even know the good those little acts of kindness do for our own health.
Bob Hope said, “If you don’t have any charity in your heart, you have the worst
kind of heart trouble.” Well the
opposite is true too. A little loving kindness does wonders for your heart, and
your mind and your soul. Kindness makes us happier. On a biochemical level doing a small kindness raises your
levels of dopamine. So you get a
“Helpers High.” Kindness makes
your heart healthier. With emotional warmth a hormone oxytocin is
released. Oxytocin relaxes blood
vessels, lowers high blood pressure. Kindness slows aging. It reduces
inflammation and free radicals. Kindness helps your relationships. It creates
bonding. Kindness is contagious.
One anonymous 28 year old donated a kidney. This one act had a domino effect of creating ten donors from
the families, friends and acquaintances of the recipient. It seems so logical that imitating God
and growing into the person that God envisages in you would create a climate
for health and happiness. God is
growing you dot by dot into God’s image.
God’s
love is contagious if it is lived out. You see this in our Psalm today. The ending is a crescendo of
blessing. Angels bless. Hosts
bless. Works, that is you and me and mountains and hills and leviathans and
fish, all blessing. All that blessing leads to blessing the Lord with our very
souls. Maybe we should do a little more blessing with kindness. Barbara Taylor
Brown in the last chapter of her book, An
Alter in the World suggests that we should start a spiritual practice of
blessing. We have gotten the wrong
idea about blessings. We think only clergy can bless or only God can bless. But
what if we lived lives that blessed. What if wherever we are we looked around
and blessed, at the airport, in our work, at the store, in Fellowship Hall. We
don’t bestow holiness with our blessing. We are just recognizing that God is
already present with whoever we are looking at. Our blessing just says we want
to be in on what God is doing. We want to look and act with steadfast love,
with loving-kindness. Try it as a discipline for a week, for 40 days, for a
lifetime. When we do this we start
to see God’s hesed everywhere and we
get to be part of it. That changes us so we look more and more like the image
of God, a fruit off the God tree.
Connecting the dots
is important if it helps us to see God. We want the image of God burned into
our heads and into our actions. So before we close our eyes for our closing
prayer I have an activity for you all. Look at this slide and stare at the four
dots in the center. There are four small dots horizontally spaced in the
center. Look hard at these four
dots for about 45 seconds. As you do ask for the gift of sight, that you will
see God’s face before you and so see the world more clearly. As I pray us tilt your head back and close
your eyes.
Holy and Gracious God.
Help us to see what is most important in life. Let your spirit guide us as we seek to bless all we
meet.
Amen.
