Bless the Lord, O You His Angels

January 25, 2004

I read Psalm 103 again for the first time this week. That is, I came to a new appreciation of what has been called the “best known and best loved Psalm.” It is a favorite. We are familiar with the words. We are reciting them throughout the service today, from the greeting right through to the benediction. But the problem with familiar words is that we stop hearing them. We no longer listen carefully. We savor them and bask in their comfort without fully appreciating why such words became favorites in the first place. So I invite you to hear this Psalm again, as if for the first time.

Did you know that in this passage we are hearing “one of Israel’s oldest theological assertions about the nature of God?” I had that phrase underlined in one of the books I consulted this week, but I had forgotten! What an astonishing picture of God, not unfamiliar to us to be sure, but one of the oldest? Really? The key is to track the words of this Psalm back to their origins. So first today, I read Exodus 34: Moses back on the mountaintop a second time to get another copy of the ten commandments after smashing the first set in frustration when, returning from the mountain top, he interrupted his people worshiping a golden calf. A rather major offense! A huge disappointment. An incredible betrayal. But as I say, Exodus 34 is a story about a second chance, which already reveals something crucial about the character of this God, Yahweh. Listen again to the words Moses heard as God passed before him on the mountain:

“The LORD, the LORD,

a God merciful and gracious,

slow to anger,

and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,

keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation...

Steadfast love, merciful, gracious, slow to anger: a God of the second chance, and a darn good thing too, otherwise imagine what might have happened to the Hebrews; imagine where we would be, if God’s character was anything other than what is affirmed in Exodus 34, Psalm 103, and several other places in scripture.

We are not unfamiliar with this theological affirmation, but again, did you hear me say it is one of the oldest? That’s not our usual conception is it? Indeed that’s what brought me up short when I read Psalm 103 for the first time again this week. What is our typical stereotype of the Old Testament God? Punitive. Jealous. Angry. A god who crosses his arms and stamps his feet. We have to wait for Jesus to hear about a loving God, right? Well no, obviously, wrong!

First in the Psalm there is this wonderful list of descriptions of a God “who forgives,” “who heals,” “who redeems,” “who crowns us with love,” “who satisfies us with good.” We hear these words and savor them, and bask in the soothing comfort they bring. Who cares when and where they originated, let’s hear some more like them! So the poet continues, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does not deal with us according to our sins.” “As tenderly as a father treats his children... (to switch to the Jerusalem Bible for a moment), “As tenderly as a father treats his children... so the Lord has compassion for those who honor him.”

With Mel Gibson’s movie coming along, we are apparently about to revisit and reinforce many of the old and contemptible prejudices about the Jews. No matter what the Pope did or did not say, Gibson’s movie is NOT as it was! To hate the Jews is to hate Jesus, and his mother Mary, and his father Joseph and virtually everyone of his followers. We did not have to wait until Jesus came to be introduced to the Christian God. Jesus introduced us to his God, the Jewish God, who from the beginning, in the oldest theological characterizations of the Hebrew Bible was understood to be:

a God merciful and gracious,

slow to anger...

Jesus was a Jew through and through, steeped in the finest traditions of his people, and drawing from their oldest affirmations about God when he told a story about a father’s tender treatment of his wayward child. Jesus did not improve upon his tradition. He did not supersede it. He drew upon its finest sources and gave voice to them again, as if for a first time -- given how forgetful we are.

Does this mean that a punitive, jealous, angry God is not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or the Jewish tradition? No, such a God is there. But such a God is also found in the Christian New Testament and our tradition. There is if you will, a battle in both of these traditions, and in the Islamic one as well: a battle about the character of God, the heart of God, the nature of the divine. Psalm 103 is remarkable precisely because it comes down on one side of this battle, and it does so in opposition to Exodus 34, which seems to be of two minds about God.

Things go along swimmingly in Exodus 34. God is merciful and gracious and all that until you get to verse 7, and then the mood changes abruptly. To demonstrate just how bad things get, consider the contents of a wire-tapped conversation of the Gambino crime family released by the feds this week. Even crime families have standards: you don’t rat on your compatriots in crime, and you don’t whack their wives or children if those compatriots get out of line. Everybody has standards. Credit the Gambinos! But the family business has been lousy of late: a series of arrests and convictions, one betrayal after another; indeed things have gotten so bad that the wire-tap revealed a plan to rein in informers by killing their wives and children. Terrible. Horrible. A shocking betrayal of Gambino family values. But it copies a page straight out of scripture. Yes, God forgives “iniquity and transgression and sin,” says Exodus 34, but this God, “will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Huh?! What an abrupt change! What a complete contradiction! Is God merciful or not? There are civil law codes in ancient Israel forbidding the punishment of children for their parents’ crimes. But in the seemingly confused mind of the author of Exodus, God is above such well-meaning laws, and if he has a mind to do so, he will whack into the third and fourth generation. Appalling.

A primitive religion we think. Three cheers for Jesus we cry. But the battle about the character of God waged in Exodus was not resolved in Psalm 103, nor even by Jesus. Yes, Psalm 103 turns Exodus on its head, and asserts that instead of visiting “the iniquity of the parents upon the children,” that God will extend his love “from everlasting to everlasting,” and “his righteousness to children’s children.” Jesus develops the theme of a tender, compassionate father into the parable of the prodigal. But still today the battle continues. You’d never know Psalm 103 was in the Bible or the Prodigal Son either, if all you did was to listen to the voices which dominate America’s religious landscape today. Gays, lesbians, proponents of peace, and the poor be damned. In Mel Gibson’s mind, his poor Episcopal wife is going to hell because she’s not a member of the one, true Roman Catholic church, where preferably the Mass is said in Latin. Take it from other Christian authorities that there is no hope for you either, unless you subscribe to the belief that the Bible is absolutely and inerrantly true in every word. No matter that the Psalm contradicts Exodus. Don’t be confused by the facts. Get your beliefs straight. Get right with God. Or you’re going to get it.

This contest about the character of God is an old battle. Waged for centuries. All through the Testaments. Right down to now. And so it brings great comfort and relief to read the words of the Psalmist again, as if for the first time. God “does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” This is one of the oldest and most central themes in scripture, and yet we continue to miss it, generation upon generation.

This Psalm is an appeal to our better nature, isn’t it? Doesn’t the Psalm represent our highest aspirations? Isn’t our hope that not only will God act this way, but that we will as well? The battle which is played out in scripture, and down through the history of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions is a battle which rages daily within our own hearts. What shall it be? Vengeance and anger, or mercy and grace? Setting the score straight, or turning the other cheek? We see the struggle unfold in a door yard outside a party between a tender father and an angry older son. We see it when Israel bashes Palestine and Palestinians respond in kind. Society lashes back at gays and lesbians who ask simply to be treated as human beings with equal rights. Poverty is visited upon generation after generation of children into the thousands, with no end to the cycle in sight.

In your own heart, in your best, most vulnerable, least guarded moments, what kind of human being do you want to be? If it is true that we are created in God’s image, that we have a spark of the divine within us, should we not find that we are also capable of being merciful, gracious and kind? This today, has not merely been a story about the character of God, it also has everything to do about you and me, and our relationships to one another, and to our neighbors around the world, and across the street. How thrilling it would be, to have someone say of you: “my friend, my friend, my mother, my father, my boss, my neighbor, my partner:

merciful and gracious, slow to anger,

and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness...

How thrilling it would be – and is when we embrace our better natures and behave as if we were only a little less than God.