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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
February 5, 2025
Reading: Psalm 103: 1-2, 13-18
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 forget not all his benefits.
13 As a father cares for his children, *
so does the Lord care for those who fear him.
14 For he himself knows whereof we are made; *
he remembers that we are but dust.
15 Our days are like the grass; *
we flourish like a flower of the field;
16 When the wind goes over it, it is gone, *
and its place shall know it no more.
17 But the merciful goodness of the Lord endures for ever
on those who fear him, *
and his righteousness on children's children;
18 On those who keep his covenant *
and remember his commandments and do them.
Meditation: Jo Ann B. Jones
Psalm 103 begins as a shout. “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” Here is an outburst of praise and awe from the very core of the Psalmist. It is a cry of joy from the very depths of the Psalmist’s being. Imagine what could have led the Psalmist to such an exclamatory remark. This shout then turns quickly to catalogue of blessings that God has generously given to the Psalmist. Between the cry of thanksgiving and the introduction of the heavenly resume, the Psalmist offers a warning that we should always heed: Do not forget all of God’s blessings. At some point during the past weekend something occurred that upset, but did not end, my plans. It was thinking about God being with me, even in the moments of difficulty that kept me focused on God and God’s goodness. It was sort of a moment of “weeping may spend…”, in this case, the afternoon, but joy comes……. And indeed, in holding on to that very hope I navigated the difficulties to a better conclusion that I thought at all possible.
We humans have a complicated relationship with memory. We are the only species that has conceived of history and has made any attempt to record that history for the sake of remembering it. Chloe, my cat, does not care about yesterday. The neighborhood stray dog is not plagued by regret. The wrens do not write books for posterity’s sake. Part of what it means to be human is to remember. This is what makes a disease like Alzheimer’s so insidious. It attacks the very core of us, the inner very private place where we build our identity according to where we have been, what we have done, and whom we have met. Alzheimer’s dehumanizes us by eroding our memories.
To be realistic, we would find it quite difficult to manage the present without the assistance of the past, and without integrating that past into our ongoing story. As humans, we make sense of the present and produce visions of the coming future within the context of the past. To forget is to risk recreating and refining all of the ways to dehumanize our neighbors and worship other gods.
What led to this joyous exclamation and this outburst of praise and awe is integrally connected to the past deeds of God. The Psalmist remembers the forgiveness, the healing, the redemption, the satisfaction, the vindication, the justice, the teaching. The Psalmist speaks in generalities but we could fill in these actions with many stories of Israel’s past. Indeed, a nation who dined on the stories of the past would have no trouble in expanding this song with details from the journey from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert, the deliverance of the judges, the times of the prophets and the kings.
I imagine that each of you reading this meditation could fill in the details. Even given this short portion of Psalm 103, one can imagine that within it one could find an incalculable number of stories. The beautiful part about poetry is that it inhabits the in-between spaces of our lives. Our language is capable of such specificity, and yet, even with a vocabulary that grows with each passing era we still fail to capture the full breadth of our experience. The wonderful thing about poetry is that it does not aim toward specificity but toward evocation. It combines words, images, and lines in order to give us an experience that is outside the limits of our language. The beauty of Psalm 103 is not just in its recollection of God’s good acts, but also the remembrance of the feelings and stories that accompany those acts.
A Collect for Guidance
O heavenly Father, in whom we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray thee so to guide and govern us by thy Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget thee, but may remember that we are every walking in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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