Read Psalm 103.

¹ Praise the Lord, my soul;
    all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
² Praise the Lord, my soul,
    and forget not all his benefits—
³ who forgives all your sins
    and heals all your diseases,
⁴ who redeems your life from the pit
    and crowns you with love and compassion,
⁵ who satisfies your desires with good things
    so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

⁶ The Lord works righteousness
    and justice for all the oppressed.

⁷ He made known his ways to Moses,
    his deeds to the people of Israel:
⁸ The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
    slow to anger, abounding in love.
⁹ He will not always accuse,
    nor will he harbor his anger forever;
¹⁰ he does not treat us as our sins deserve
    or repay us according to our iniquities.
¹¹ For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his love for those who fear him;
¹² as far as the east is from the west,
    so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

¹³ As a father has compassion on his children,
    so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
¹⁴ for he knows how we are formed,
    he remembers that we are dust.
¹⁵ The life of mortals is like grass,
    they flourish like a flower of the field;
¹⁶ the wind blows over it and it is gone,
    and its place remembers it no more.
¹⁷ But from everlasting to everlasting
    the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
    and his righteousness with their children’s children—
¹⁸ with those who keep his covenant
    and remember to obey his precepts.

¹⁹ The Lord has established his throne in heaven,
    and his kingdom rules over all.

²⁰ Praise the Lord, you his angels,
    you mighty ones who do his bidding,
    who obey his word.
²¹ Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts,
    you his servants who do his will.
²² Praise the Lord, all his works
    everywhere in his dominion.

Praise the Lord, my soul.

Let’s Pray.

Over the past year – this first year in ministry – I have found myself in many situations I never could have seen myself in a few years before. I’ve found myself having to sit with people in their pain and love them in it and through it and offer them the love of God in those situations. It’s been… jarring, to say the least. But none more jarring than sitting with a man after he was told that he was in his final hours of life. That experience – those experiences – just hit a little different. All of the world goes away and your only thought or desire is to just be with them and make them comfortable, joyous, hopeful, and at peace. The entirety of the room softens, and the best of humanity can be experienced in some of those worst moments. Compassion takes over the situation and drives it because in the face of death nothing else, really, will do.

And, sooner or later, you know that you have to leave. You can’t spend the rest of your day, night, or week there with them and that’s why their family is there, and you continue to make yourself available. But every single time I’m driving away and trying to decompress from the situation, I find myself wondering what that is going to be like when it’s not one of my congregants. What about when it’s the person that I love most? Am I going to be strong enough, is my faith going to be strong enough to handle it? And then my mind wanders further down the rabbit hole, and I wonder, “What if it was one of my kids?”

That is always the rock-bottom thought for me now. Before being a parent, I always had a hard time with tv shows and movies that had plots where a kid is sick or hurt and dying. But, after becoming a parent, those shows are a complete no-go for me. It’s just too hard! It’s too unbearable to think of that kind of devastating loss. Do y’all know what I mean? There are thoughts or situations like that for all of us that are just to taboo a thought to allow time or space inside of your head… but that, really, is the beautiful point that David is trying to make in our Psalm for today, Psalm 103.

David begins the psalm by praising God, but the real meat and potatoes of the psalm hit between verses 9-16. He is guiding us into these verses delicately because the message they put before us to contemplate too, is jarring. Wisely, David softens the message with the imagery he creates. David paints the picture of our lives being incredibly fragile. So fragile, in fact, that he equates them with grass in a field that flowers before a gust of wind.

Hold that image in your head of a dandelion seed ball and how easily it blows in the wind. How quickly we did that as kids pulling those flowers and making a wish and blowing the seeds away and never thinking twice about it. Heck, most of us probably can’t even remember the last time we did that. That is how fleeting our lives really are in the grand scheme of the world and the histories that it entails. To paint the picture more plainly, the estimated age of the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the average life expectancy of a human today is 70. That means that your entire life is just 0.000000005% of history, and time just keeps on marching on… Insignificant is the word that I would use, but the word that David’s son, Solomon, would use in Ecclesiastes and the word that David himself would probably use would be “hevel” which means “mere breath”. And when we think about our own lives and existences and legacies in terms of a mere breath it can be a little scary, but when we think about it in terms of our family members or our loved ones, it’s a jarring shock to the system. I don’t want to think of my sons’ lives like that: a mere breath.

This isn’t anything new or a thought that any of us haven’t had before, but David is telling us this because he wants us to know that God remembers this too. Too often we picture God as this distant or uncaring entity that we’ll have to deal with when we move on to the afterlife or we’ll call upon when we’re really in need, but David wants us to know God as he knew God. He wants us to see God as our Heavenly Father. Our Creator. The one who, with his own hands, sculpted us into statues from the dust he created. The one who breathed his own breath of life into us and gave us not only life but the same spirit that animates all life. He has an intimate knowledge of our creation, and he knows just how fragile and perishable our bodies were made to be.

But he isn’t distant or uncaring. He is a Father that has given life. He feels that same taboo feeling we feel about losing something we love so dearly. He feels that expedient urge to comfort us, to let us know it’s going to be alright, and to make everything about this short time as bearable as it can be. David tells us this by reminding us again and again that the Lord is overwhelmed with compassion for us. He wants us to feel joy. To know what it is to have the burden of our sin removed from us. He sees us as his children and all he has ever desired from his children is a simple thing in return: that we honor him. That we revere him as being this wonderful creator who breathed life into us to begin with. That we commit ourselves to him as obedient children who honor their Father by obeying his commands and desires to the best of our ability. And when we do slip up. When we do, inevitably, fail. When we do sin, that we would remember and know God not just as Creator but as Redeemer. As the Father who removes our sin from us as far as the East is from the West and reveals himself to us with never-ending compassion and grace.

So, as we remember our ashes this week, David would have us remember that God remembers our ashes too. And because he remembers our ashes, he is like a Father who has been told that his child only has a day to live. Born out of that urgency and his steadfast love, he desires to offer us all of the things we ought to praise him for: for forgiving our iniquities, for healing our bodies, for redeeming our very lives from the Pit, for crowning us in sonship (and yes, I mean that for both men and women), for satisfying even the mere breath of life we live, and for renewing our body through the death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. Because of that incredible gift we now know that just as an eagle molts its feathers to reveal new birth beneath, we will shed this sinful shell to reveal the new birth reserved for us in him.

For true gifts like that, and to honor our Father who gives them so freely, we can be good children. We should strive to be good children. To revere him. To remember him. Too often find ourselves with voluntary amnesia towards God when it suits our desires best, and this should invite us into a season where we can repent of our forgetfulness of Him and his ways and, instead, obey him as a dutiful child would. And, finally, to praise him. As David reminds us, God is worthy of our praise. “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.”

As we remember our ashes this week let us reflect the same urgency we see God experiencing in David’s psalm. As God is driven towards a heart of love and compassion for our nature, let us be driven towards a heart of repentance and obedience for his faithfulness and provision. And, out of that repentance and the glories that are showered upon us through it, let us find ourselves once again, like David, caught up in a never-ending praise of our Lord who gives them so freely. Let us move into this season of Lent – a season of surrender and sacrifice, remembering that our ashes were given life again by the surrender and sacrifice of our Lord and Savior. And let us join in with the heavenly host, and with all of creation, and praise his heavenly name.

Let’s Pray.