The Road Less Travelled: Psalm 1
Ordinary Time
Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the
wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of
mockers, 2 but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and
who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That
person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in
season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers.
4 Not so the wicked! They are like
chaff that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not
stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6 For the LORD watches over the way
of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. (NIV)
My midterm, I
think it was, for medieval Latin in my Master of Arts program was to translate
this psalm. I was so thrilled; it’s
short, it’s a bit repetitive, it doesn’t have any ridiculously complicated
grammatical structures to untangle with tense shifts or dependent clauses. If you’re going to have to translate a Latin
psalm, this isn’t a bad one to have.
As relieved as
my grad school self was, that was just an exam.
It becomes sticky if my relief that this was uncomplicated to translate
transitions into considering these verses as uncomplicated to put into practice. This is the very first of the 150 poems
collected in what we call the book of Psalms.
Many of the later psalms are so culturally specific or strangely dense
that it may be tempting to see this as a softball beginning—oh, sure, follow
the law and you’ll be fine, don’t be wicked and everything will be okay.
Except we as
Christians put this in context with verses like Romans 7:4 in which Paul says
we have died to the Law so that we might belong to Christ, so is this psalm no
longer relevant? Maybe now it’s “belong
to Christ and you’ll be fine, don’t be wicked and everything will be okay.”
Except there are things that go
wrong in our lives that have nothing to do with whether or not we’ve been
wicked; cancer doesn’t wait for sin, and car accidents don’t happy only to the
unrighteous. So is it “belong to Christ
and things will at least be bearable; don’t be wicked and you’ll muddle through
somehow”? That doesn’t sound very
blessed. It sounds like a terrible
translation.
Maybe this
psalm isn’t a softball, after all.
“The
traditional translation ‘law’ is quite misleading,” says Professor J. Clinton
McCann, Jr., “and in the history of interpretation, it has led to very negative
assessments of Psalm 1, which many commentators have construed as legalistic
and retributional. But torah [in verse 2, the ‘law of the Lord’] does
not mean ‘law.’ Rather, it means ‘teaching’ or ‘instruction’… and in the
broadest sense, it suggests God’s will.
“So, Psalm 1 does not mean that
happiness [or blessedness] can be reduced to a mechanical process of following
a set of rules, for which one is duly rewarded. Instead, happiness is a dynamic
process that involves — indeed requires — constant meditation (‘day and night’)
upon God’s will, in order to discern what God would have us do in any and every
situation. In short, as Jesus would later summarize the torah,
happiness derives from discerning what it means at all times and in all places
to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your mind … And … your neighbor as yourself’”.[1]
It’s wild how often this faith boils
down to that idea, really.
Blessed is the one, then, who loves;
who chooses the path of loving with all the heart, soul, and mind, for this is
what it is to be “righteous.” “Wicked” shifts
considerably when it becomes a matter of love rather than a matter of legality. We have so many ways to tell people—usually
other people, people who don’t come to church on Sundays or don’t have the
Lord’s Prayer memorized in the King James translation—what wickedness looks
like. It’s what we Christians have
become known for, that kind of judgment; look upon our righteousness, ye
sinners, and despair, for we are the wheat and you are the chaff.
But this psalm tells us that blessings
come not from being able to compare ourselves to others, not least because
judgment is not ours but God’s, but from throwing our whole selves into the
long process of learning to love. What
does love look like, this teaching on which we are to meditate as a blessed
person should? What must happen to love
such that our leaves never wither and we yield our fruit in season?
In the Judeo-Christian tradition,
love is anchored in justice. Ours is a
just God. In Zechariah 7:9–10 God says,
“Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; 10 do
not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise
evil in your hearts against one another.”
In today’s gospel reading in the ninth chapter of Mark, Jesus says to
His disciples, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of
all.” Love speaks with the tongue of
integrity, with the language of service, with the heart of change.
It is love, then, that made New York
governor Kathy Hochul signed the “Less Is More” act on Friday to release 191
inmates imprisoned at Rikers Island for low-level parole technicalities,
recognizing that the cycle of incarceration cannot continue to eat generations
of men and women trying to re-enter society after serving time.[2] It is love that made State Representative
Sarah Anthony introduce the Crown Act to the Michigan legislature to ensure
that no one in a professional or school environment can be discriminated
against on the basis of hair texture or style, combating the undercurrent of
racism that considers natural hair to be unacceptable.[3] It is love that has music venues in New
Orleans opening themselves to serve free food to people without power after the
hurricane—and the extra foot of rain this past week.[4] It is love when we get the vaccine for
COVID-19 to protect not only ourselves but those around us. It is love when we admit a wrong, love when
we listen to someone whom we have hurt, love when we have the courage to call
out the hurt done to us, love when we tear down the systems that oppress people
for not fitting into some box of acceptability set by those who see only finite
resources and never infinite mercy.
Blessed is the one who loves like that,
who delights in that law of the Lord.
Blessed is the one who meditates on that kind of justice not just in
meek silence but in all the loudness of our humanity. Professor Paul K. -K. Cho writes that, “To
meditate on the psalms means first and foremost to speak the human words of
each psalm to God, that is, to lament, petition, give thanks, and to praise God
day and night. John Calvin rightly called the Psalter ‘the anatomy of all the
parts of the human soul.’ What the meditation on the psalms requires, then, is
the honest presentation of all the parts of our human soul before God. It
requires us to give heartfelt thanksgiving and praise, joining the heavens, the
earth, and even the sea. It also requires us to cry aloud from upon the ash
heaps — in complaint, in sorrow, in anger, in protest — to God. To borrow words
from Kierkegaard, to meditate on the psalms is to choose to will to be
ourselves before God, to sing full throated songs of praise when that is
appropriate and to give honest articulation to our despair when we are sad. To
present our very ordinary selves, our daily selves, to God, that is the advice
of the Psalm.”[5]
Blessed is the one who speaks with
God honestly, for “that person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither”.
We welcome two new members to the St.
Luke’s congregation today, a holy and wondrous gift of their declaring their
kinship with us and this church declaring its hope for and commitment to them. Episcopal Archbishop William Temple said at
one point that “the Church is the only society that exists for the benefits of
those who are not its members,” and sometimes we forget this. We join a church and it becomes ours,
our family, our corner of the world, and we forget that it is not ours at all
but God’s way of collecting us together to transform the world. Blessed is the one who walks in love and not
in wickedness, who recognizes that God is at work everywhere and always and
that we are invited along for the adventure of holiness that goes so far beyond
our part of creation.
The two who join us today will be
speaking vows not only of loyalty to the Church—loyalty that means challenging
as well as upholding, for loyalty without accountability is simply pandering—but
the vows will also be to the faith they practice. This moment of their membership reminds those
of us who have taken such vows to speak them again, to say again that this is
what we believe, this is the instruction we have taken on, this is what
righteousness looks like as we live into it every day.
Blessed is the one whose delight is
in the law of the Lord, whose feet walk the path of the justice named love, who
put down deep roots not for a moment but for a lifetime of growing, of
changing, of being remade in the image of the God Who calls us by name to go
and serve in this world. Blessed is this
reminder to each of us to reexamine the ways in which we are following,
to look at the path on which our feet step.
Are you yielding fruit in season,
church? Are your leaves resisting the
pull of withering from the insistence that “it’s always been done this way,”
the idea that “it’s someone else’s job,” the protest that “I have what I need
and that’s enough”? This psalm begins an
entire book of poems that pull us into the complex and wondrous and frustrating
relationship that is faith, complex from the very start and yet beautifully clear: the Lord watches over the way of the
righteous, the road less travelled but oh so rich as we love and are loved in
the never-ending dance. How much more
than a simple translation that is; how much less than the reality of living
that is.
May we, too, find ourselves blessed by
the paths we take as we delight in God’s teachings of love; may we sink our
roots deep into the living water; and may our lives give glory to the One Who
invites us to life, and life abundant.
Amen.
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