Bless the Lord, O My Soul | A Sermon for Ash Wednesday
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021.
Psalm 103
At 1AM Roy Thigpen, Mobile, Alabama, photographer, gets a call from his lookout at Manci’s Antique Club tavern in Daphne. “Roy, grab your camera and get over here. We’re about to have the best Jubilee of all time.”
“How do you know?” asks Thigpen.
“Eels, Roy, eels. I swear I’ve never seen anything like it. The beach is crawling with them.”
Local seers and scientists agree. Tonight’s the night. The seers see it in their tea leaves, read it in their cards, feel it in their bones. The scientists say conditions are right. Incoming tide. Northeast wind. Tepid weather. Eels (the eels are advance scouts for everything else in Mobile Bay). If the predictors are right, flounder, stingray, shrimp, mullet, and crab are going to creep, flop, wiggle, and crawl up in the shallows and on the beach until the tide takes them back out or people gather them up.
The whole event is called the Alabama Jubilee. It happens along a 20-mile stretch of beach on the east side of Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico and has been happening there for as long as the most ancient local can remember. . . . It comes in the middle of the night, off and on from May to October, three times a week, once and month, once a summer, or, perhaps, not at all. You can watch it for weeks then turn your back for an hour and miss it. [1]
Pictures of the event record women in curlers and nightgowns knee deep in water, and shrimp. Men who have obviously run from the local watering hole to the Bay’s edge, disheveled and tipsy yet perfectly capable of pulling flounder one after another into large, plastic tubs. Teenagers arriving in beat-up pickup trunks. Everybody hollering.
As reliable as it is through the years, in its moment the Jubilee is sheer miracle.
A little like Ash Wednesday. A little like God’s forgiveness.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me bless His Holy Name (Psalm 103:1).
Today we meet the psalmist at his most elated, brimming over with euphoria. I picture him with closed eyes and open arms, face turned heavenward as the Jubilee’s riches flop and froth at his feet. What a moment.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me bless His Holy Name.
The cause of his elation is, of course, the extravagant means of grace and hope of glory, which is rooted in the inestimable love of God and made manifest in the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And do not forget all his benefits—
Who forgives all your iniquity,
Who heals all your diseases,
Who redeems your life from the Pit,
Who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy (Psalm 103:1-4).
Do you believe it? Can you believe it?
Some would say we live in an age when people think far too highly of themselves; believe with a sort of certainty that they are worthy of the Lord’s favor, His faithfulness, His forgiveness. Or, taken further, that they are so worthy they are without need, God seemingly unnecessary.
In that case, perhaps we should talk about sin. Perhaps I should call your attention to our sin-soaked world, our sin-weary lives. If you are under any delusions about our power to sort things out on our own, well, just look around. If you are certain of the Lord’s favor, His faithfulness, His forgiveness and have sustained that certainty for any measurable length of time, well, good on ya.
In my experience, it is far easier to speak of our own self-worth as something we control, through the means of sin, rather than something we relinquish, through the measure of grace.
We are bound by sin, imprisoned by it. Iniquity, diseases, death. We know them intimately. And yet, if we cast them in terms of morality than we can eliminate them from our lives, certainly. Through our own hard work, perseverance, attentiveness to our faults and dedication to clean living we can climb the rungs to Glory, everlasting. We can justify our own forgiveness. We can forgive ourselves.
The other side of the coin, so to speak, is the belief that we are unworthy altogether; unlovable; unforgiveable. Hopeless, so sin-sick and clothed in misdeeds and inadequacies that even God’s gracious gaze cannot touch us.
Most of us, I’d wager, oscillate back and forth between these two extremes –self-importance on the one hand and worthlessness on the other—like a battered old fan moving hot air around.
Remember you are dust,
And to dust you will return.
These words certainly take care of our self-importance, don’t they? Our lives on earth will end. There is nothing we can do about it. We are in bondage to sin. There is nothing we can do about it. We cannot free ourselves.
But, before we fall into desperation, a reminder: then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being (Gen. 2:7).
Remember you are dust,
made a living being on the very breath of God,
And to dust you will return.
Our self-worth is quite out of our control. Instead, it rests in the grace of God’s very breath, animating our lives.
As a young woman, Flannery O’Connor kept a prayer journal, which was later published. I often wonder what she would think about that had she lived to see it happen, but I digress. In this journal, she prays:
“Dear God, I cannot love Thee in the way that I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my-self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself to the side.”[2]
Whether we deny our worth or deny our need our self-shadow grows large and we judge ourselves by the shadow that is nothing. And the only cure for that is God, who is everything.
“I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself to the side.”
More than giving up indulgences and bad habits, this is what Lent is about: getting out of God’s way. Letting God claim us, name us, and yes, even forgive us.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me bless his holy name . . .
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love . . .
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
Nor repay us according to our iniquities (Psalm 103:1,8,10).
Do you believe it? Can you believe it?
The season of Lent asks us to live like we believe it. It isn’t about denying our sinfulness, our humanity, it’s about breaking down the lies we tell ourselves and the baggage that we cling to and getting real before God and one another.
What if I were to tell you, even now on Ash Wednesday, that your sin –all that gross stuff that you’re hanging onto, all the ways in which you’ve failed, all the people you’ve hurt, even that one thing that I can’t imagine that you’ve done but that you’ve done—what if I were to tell you that your sin is the least interesting thing about you to God.
The least interesting thing about you.
Do you believe it? Can you believe it?
I suspect we hold on to our worst things -and, as it were, to other people’s worst things- to retain control of the ways in which we explain them away or caste them off. With them, we have something to work on. Without them, well, we have no sin economy by which to prove our worth, or lack thereof.
What is so wonderful and so challenging about Ash Wednesday, and Lent as a season, is its insistence that we are free. Free of the trappings of the world which lie to us. Free of the sins which stain us. Free of the death that is inevitable.
Free. And, forgiven.
For he knows how we were made;
He remembers that we are but dust (Psalm 103:14).
So come on out. Come on out in your curlers, your waders, your pickup trucks. Come on out from the watering holes. Come on out from bed, from work, from begging, from dreaming. Come on out, all ye servants of the Lord. The time is right. The Jubilee is here. Forgiveness teaming at your feet and life overflowing from all sides.
Do you believe it? Can you believe it?
This is what God wants for you: abundant life. Through and through. You’ve never seen anything like it, and yet it more reliable than the Alabama Jubilee, and as miraculous as it comes.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me,
Bless his holy name.
Amen.
[1] William Allen, “If You Blink, You May Miss the Alabama Jubilee,” 7 May 1972, archived at https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/07/archives/if-you-blink-you-may-miss-the-alabama-jubilee-along-the-east-coast.html.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
