Trinity Sunday
May 26, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Interim Pastor

Psalm 103

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Bless the Lord, O my soul.

Uh, my soul?

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

Oh. My soul.

“My soul magnifies the Lord,” my soul; “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” my soul; “We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” my soul.

Oh. My soul.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord makes me to lie down in green pastures; leads me beside still waters; restores my soul.”

“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.”

“My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast …”

Ahh. My soul.

“And now my soul is poured out within me; days of affliction have taken hold of me.”

“Why are you cast down, O my soul?”

“My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is.”

Ugh. My soul.

“The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years: relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

Oh. My soul.

This is about our soul. Faith is about our soul. The Bible is about our soul. This worship space is about our soul. Our head is about our soul. This [rubbing stomach] is about our soul. This music is about our soul.

Now, when I say “soul,” you might call to mind some invisible essence, that part of who you are that is distinct from your body, that will outlive your body. That’s pretty common.

Most of us walk around every day with a bifurcated notion of the soul and the body: there is our body, which you can see, and there is our soul, which you can’t. They’re two separate things. Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett have sung it: “I’m all for you, body and soul.”

But that’s very different from how the Bible describes the soul. Especially for the Hebrew parts of the Bible, the soul is all of us. It’s our whole being. There is no difference or distance between your body and your soul for the Bible; the idea that there is a permanent essence to us separate from the perishable, impermanent physical part of us does not come from the Bible. It comes from Greek philosophy. For the Bible, all we are — hands and feet, brain, thoughts, feelings — it’s all soul.

In fact, the Hebrew word that our English Bible translates “soul” in the psalm Anita and I just read and in all those other references to “my soul” we heard is sometimes translated as something else entirely. Sometimes it’s translated “strength.” Other times it’s actually “body.” There are even instances of that word in the Bible that are translated in English as a particular part of the body, like the throat.

So when the psalmist sings, “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” he’s singing to himself, his whole self. You see, we bless the Lord, we praise God, with our whole being. Even just within the space of this hour, we praise God with our mouths, singing songs, and shouting “Bless the Lord!”

We praise God in here with our attention, listening to the scriptures, seeing and hearing one another. We praise God with our feet and our hands when we take real bread and real juice to participate in a physical ritual that has a spiritual impact.

But worship and faith are not constrained to this space and this hour, are they? No, when we leave here and go out to the rest of our day and into a new week, we go as whole selves, and the psalm’s charge to “Bless the Lord, O my soul” goes with us into our relationships, our jobs, our struggles, and our victories.

A life of faith is a life of soul, a whole life of loving God and loving our neighbor.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a day in the United States when we, as a country, honor by remembering them those women and men who have died in our armed forces. Memory is a critical part of the soul, our souls as individuals and the soul of a nation, of a people.

What we commit to remembering says a great deal about who we are. What we commit to forgetting says just as much.

It takes choice and intention for us to remember. Especially as we get older, we have to work to remember. I was at a meeting earlier this week, standing in a little cluster of people during a break, some of whom I knew and some of whom I didn’t. I turned to the woman next to me, whom I didn’t recognize, and I said (as politely as I could), “I’m Rocky. Have we met?”

And she said, “Yeah, we’ve met like five times. And the last time we met you asked me if we’d met.” It was pretty embarrassing, and it’s not the first time it’s happened. Maybe you can relate to this, but it seems to me like, especially since COVID, I don’t remember things — names, faces, events — that I used to be able to recall without any effort at all. And remembering whether I’ve met someone before feels pretty important, so my memory needs work.

For people of faith, what we remember shapes our soul. Jesus’ commandment to his disciples at the Last Supper was to remember: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Over and over again in the Bible God charges people to remember, but not just for nostalgia; because what we commit to remembering shapes who we are.

And this is what the 103rd Psalm would have us commit to remembering: that God works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. That’s not an empty phrase; it’s a memory. It’s the memory of the exodus, when the psalmist’s ancestors were enslaved in Egypt and God raised up Moses and Miriam to lead the people of Israel to freedom.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget: vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.

And this is what the 103rd Psalm would have us never forget: the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That is a bedrock truth about God, echoed in the Bible no fewer than eight times — “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” — but it, too, is more than a phrase. It, too, is a story.

It’s the story of how God led the people out, but then the first time God turned around they all made a golden calf for themselves and worshiped it. But it’s a story, ultimately, of forgiveness, and so God’s word to Moses on that mountain is “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness …”

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget: merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Friends, remember. Don’t forget. Because what we commit to remembering shapes our soul.

Action is the best aid to memory, isn’t it? We do this — Communion — in remembrance of Jesus, emphasis on the DO.

I used to teach Bible stories to preschoolers using a curriculum called “Godly Play” that requires you to tell the stories from memory. But while you’re telling the story, you’re also laying out these simple implements, like a square piece of felt to represent a field and then a crude wooden square for a sheep pen and then laminated paper sheep — one by one, in turn as you tell the story.

What I found was that if I didn’t have the action with the implement right, or if I changed something about it, my memory of the story got messed up. But doing the actions helped me remember the words and phrases of the story.

I wonder if it’s not so much that we remember faith in order to act it out as it is that we act out faith in order to remember it rightly.

For the life of faith, we remember that God is merciful and gracious not simply by repeating that phrase but by being merciful to people whom we may have every right to punish and by showing grace to people, even when they don’t deserve it.

We remember that God works vindication and justice for the oppressed by putting our shoulder to the cause of justice ourselves, doing whatever we can to see that all people have the things necessary for a life of dignity: healthy food, safe and affordable housing, security from bombs and guns, health care, freedom. We seek justice as our means of remembering the justice of God.

It's imitation, isn’t it? By imitating the justice and the mercy of God — that’s how we keep from forgetting that God is merciful and gracious. By imitation.

I’m reading a book about Judaism by a rabbi, and there’s this ancient Jewish aphorism about a king that I keep thinking about. Our psalm for today appeals to the image of a king and a throne to describe God, so I think it’s helpful. It goes, The king has a retinue. What must the retinue do? Imitate the king. Say that after me.

The author of the book suggests that by imitating God, we not only catch glimpses of the world as God intends it to be (what Jesus would call “the kingdom of God”), but we also create those glimpses for everyone else to see and to experience.

Catching and creating glimpses of the world as God intends it to be: if that’s all we’re doing in worship, it’s more than enough.

In the way we welcome one another — whether we’ve met before or not (or have and don’t remember); in sharing one bread and one cup, together, in communion; in giving to support the ministry of the church on behalf of the oppressed and all those in need of comfort and company.

Catching and creating glimpses of the kingdom of heaven, the world as God intends it to be now and the world as it will most assuredly be someday.

May what we do here bless God — O my soul! — even as we create glimpses of God’s beloved community for all to experience. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church