Click on the wild fall asters above - the field flowers mentioned in psalm 103. Some thoughts about the psalm's verses follow.
Verse 1: The psalmist begins with the little phrase, Bless the Lord, my soul. To bless means to extol, glorify, acclaim, celebrate, tell out! He's talking to his soul - his inner life, the center of his spiritual energies. Then he invites this invisible interior life to delight in God: calling to his energies, his breath, his knowledge and creativity, his powers of imagination, even his sighs.
Verse 1: The psalmist begins with the little phrase, Bless the Lord, my soul. To bless means to extol, glorify, acclaim, celebrate, tell out! He's talking to his soul - his inner life, the center of his spiritual energies. Then he invites this invisible interior life to delight in God: calling to his energies, his breath, his knowledge and creativity, his powers of imagination, even his sighs.
Verse 2: Let us not forget God's benefits. The Latin word bene means good. Don't forget the many hundreds of good gifts given to me this day: this cup of tea, this breath of air, these hard working eyes, this fresh taste, this returned smile...
Verse 3: God forgives and heals. The psalmist uses the word infirmities, which is sickness. But sometimes the sickness is emotional or spiritual: sick with anger, resentment, complaint or negativity. Sometimes a whole family can be sick, or our lineage.
Verse 4: Israel didn't have a well defined sense of the afterlife. But for the Christian, perhaps this verse hints at Easter. "God redeems your life from the grave." Or maybe "grave" is used poetically to express the deadly things that can befall us on earth - the serious matters that can harm us, like the litany of addictions that are common today.
Verse 5: God renews our youth. I knew an elderly French nun whose convent was seized by Hitler's Black Shirts during the Second World War. The nuns had to sneak out at night to find something to eat. But she never soured and always kept a happy heart - joyful, awed and youthful.
Verse 6: God executes righteousness. There are Christians who love this word righteousness. I wonder if they think it means that God is like an inspector general. They hope God's righteousness is going punish all the people who are not like them. How we burden God with our own agenda! The second half of the verse tells us what it really means: God is on the side of all the world's people who are ripped off, pushed aside and ignored. There are billions of them.
Verse 7: God has revealed God's self to Israel throughout their long history. But you have a story, and I have a story too. And God is no less revealed through our own personal stories.
Verses 8-10: God is patient, like a mother who teaches her child to walk. What a delightful thought! God isn't an angry accuser. How did we ever get that so wrong - this idea of God "upstairs" filling out his report card, angry red check-marks on his clipboard list! This is called negative belief. Someone long ago invented negative belief because it's easy to control and manipulate people if they're afraid.
Verse 11: Fear God? St. Antony of the desert said, "I no longer fear God, but I love him." I fear only what can take me away from God.
Verse 12: God doesn't hold onto our sins, nursing a heavenly grudge against us, but hurls them as far as the east is from the west. Very neat!
Verses 13-14: The psalmist tells us twice that God's love is parental. God remembers that we are fragile and vulnerable. Think of how a good parent holds a newborn.
Verses 15-16: We come and go - like field flowers that last only a short time. As a seminarian I used to cut grass in a huge cemetery with graves going back into the 1800's - graves no one had visited in a very long time, the glorious headstones so worn, the names and dates erased.
Verse 17: God's kindness is extended to children's children, the psalmist says. God knows our lineage, the people we have descended from and those who will come after us. God has called each of us into existence and brought us to today!
Verse 18: Notice how the psalmist fine-tunes his thoughts: God's commandments are not something we think about, or memorize, or even pray about but something that we DO.
Verse 19: God's kingship is first. We're reminded of the prayer Jesus taught us: "Thy Kingdom come (but what does that mean?) Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In seminary we often sang the hymn, The King Of Love, My Shepherd Is.
Verses 20-22: We might imagine these verses are a great chorus of praise, the psalmist summoning all the angels and all of God's visible and invisible creation - this last call to hear God from our very deepest interior place. God, who is full of hope for us, and who holds us so carefully and closely.
Verses 20-22: We might imagine these verses are a great chorus of praise, the psalmist summoning all the angels and all of God's visible and invisible creation - this last call to hear God from our very deepest interior place. God, who is full of hope for us, and who holds us so carefully and closely.
