The Maddening Beauty of Grey: Psalm 1
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
2 but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
3 They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
4 The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
6 for the Lord watches over the way of the
righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish. (NRSV)
There’s a show
that aired a few years ago on NBC called “The Good Place” starring Ted Danson
and Kristin Bell that is one of my favorites.
The show follows four humans—Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani—as they navigate
the afterlife and the reality of there being a Good Place and a Bad Place. In the third season, the group meets with
Judge Gen, an eternal being played by Maya Rudolph, who has never been to Earth
but judges the souls all the same. The
system is rigged, insists Eleanor; you can’t get into the Good Place because no
decision is free of terrible side effects.
“Life now is so complicated,” she says, “it's impossible for anyone to
be good enough for the Good Place. I
know you don't like to learn too much about life on Earth to remain impartial,
but these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are
unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to
global warming.”[1]
The Judge thinks this is ridiculous
but finally agrees to go to Earth to see for herself. When she returns, she is rather shellshocked: “That was rough…Earth is a mess, y'all. Woof! Also, I guess I'm black? And they do
not like black ladies down there.” “Where
did you go, exactly?” asks one of the humans. “Tanzania, Paraguay, Vietnam, Denmark. It's terrible everywhere and always in a
different way…The last place I went was a Black Friday sale at an outlet mall
in Michigan…I thought it was going to be so easy to make good decisions…Life is
chaotic and messy and unpredictable….even if you do somehow manage to make good
decisions, you still lose points because of the unintended consequences.”[2]
“Happy are those who do not follow
the advice of the wicked,” begins this psalm, the very first in the Book of
Psalms that contains 150 explorations of the full range of human emotion. These days, however, it seems nigh impossible
to avoid the advice of the wicked; everything has a catch. What is the way of the righteous when there
are so many unintended consequences?
Where can we find the clearly written law of the Lord in which we are
supposed to delight?
Christianity, especially the
Christianity of recent years that finds itself splashed obscenely bright across
editorials and news snippets, has a great many ways in which we say that we
know exactly what the law is and how we are to find righteousness, but we miss
that mark more often than we are comfortable admitting. The Olympics are happening right now, for
example, in Beijing, China; several countries are not sending diplomatic envoys
as a political boycott because China is under review for so many human rights
violations that even political machinery has taken notice. The most prominent one, perhaps, is the state
of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from the northwestern
region of China. There are
accusations—that the Chinese government denies—of internment camps that include
forced labor and forced sterilization.
The treatment of the Uyghur people has been called genocide.[3] There was an uproar when Beijing selected a
Uyghur athlete to be one of the final torchbearers to light the Olympic fire
and begin the games; columnist Victor Cha called it “a crass and insensitive political ploy
seemingly designed to show open defiance of Western charges of ethnic genocide
committed by China against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups.”[4]
And yet the Olympics have brought
advances, as they always do, to the possibilities of the various sports with
new records in snowboarding and ice skating.
They have allowed quite a few Asian American athletes to shine in the
spotlight, a welcome celebration after months of intensified racism here in the
States with heightened attacks on those of Asian descent.[5] And they have reminded the world that we are
still trying, sometimes, even in a pandemic, to cheer together for the
incredible possibilities of human perseverance.
The Olympics are terrible. The
Olympics are wonderful. Keep meditating
on the law, day and night.
“They are like trees / planted
by streams of water, / which yield their fruit in its season, / and their
leaves do not wither. / In all that they do, they prosper.” How do we put down roots that deep; how do we
become the righteous who are blessed, when there is no soil that is not at
least a little bit polluted?
“It’s important not to overemphasize
this stark opposition between the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’ in a simplistic,
black-and-white way,” writes Professor Mark Throntveit. “This most wisdom-like of the Psalms is not
claiming that there are no shades of gray in our commitment and walk of faith.
People are complex; life is not so simple. Rather, this psalm strives to depict
the two ways and their consequences for us in all their stark reality.”[6] It is helpful to break down the language a
bit, not least because all English versions of the Bible are translations and
so do not and cannot mean exactly the same thing as the original
writings. Hebrew has ideas and idioms
and ways of expressing things that simply don’t exist in English, and vice
versa, and we who read this text we call holy several thousand years after it
was written must remember that there is always a little bit of a remove for us.
“Happy are those who do not follow
the advice of the wicked” seems straightforward; be part of the group that
doesn’t follow the advice of the wicked and you’ll be happy. It is, however, more complicated than that, as
important things usually are. The Hebrew
here is not plural and is not quite “happy.”
Throntveit writes, “[A]shre celebrates ‘a life that takes
real pleasure in living according to God’s will.’… But pluralizing the Hebrew
singular obscures the common trope, found in other passages of the wisdom
literature, of comparing a singular devout individual to
a group of the ‘wicked,’ rhetorically maximizing the contrast
and perhaps suggesting an emphasis on individual righteousness in the face of
societal or communal evil.”[7] In every choice we make at every minute of
every day, it is ours to find joy, pleasure, happiness in choosing to stand on
our own two feet against evil, against that which diminishes the
God-blessedness of creation. We—supported
by those around us but ultimately choosing by ourselves—are called to avoid the
“path that sinners tread” not because it is easy but because it is necessary to
our ability to experience joy. The
righteous are not happy if they are participating in others’ unhappiness,
others’ destruction.
It is exactly as difficult and messy
as it sounds because making those choices often runs against the grain of the
world in which we live. There are set
limits that guide us: we have things like the ten commandments to be the law of
the Lord in which we delight. The exhortations
to fidelity, honesty, integrity, and compassion are the soil in which we are to
put down the roots to yield our fruit in season. And such things do not immediately, if at
all, grant us wealth, or power, or success in the ways the world encourages us
to want such things.
That push and pull of the way of the
righteous and the prevailing way of the world is not new to us. Reverend Doctor Alan Brehm writes, “Israel
had been founded as a commonwealth with an equal distribution of wealth—in this
case the land. Apparently, it didn’t take long for the unscrupulous wealthy to
buy up the land from those who were struggling. Effectively, instead of a
nation founded on the justice that gave everyone a means of making a living,
Israel became a nation of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Whenever the Hebrew
Bible mentions the ‘wicked,’ it typically refers to the wealthy who took every
advantage of their wealth to enrich themselves further no matter what it took
or whom they had to trample. And they typically trampled on those who had no
means to defend themselves and no recourse. The ‘wicked’ the Psalmist
refers to were these rich land barons who couldn’t care less about justice...
We must beware when we disregard the welfare of the least and the last and the
lowest, because as the Psalmist warns us, that is the way of the wicked, and it
is a way that will perish.”[8]
Buying a tomato these days has a lot
of consequences about who grew it and how and whether the people in the supply
chain were properly compensated.
Watching the Olympics these days has a lot of consequences about what we
are tacitly supporting and what we are comfortable ignoring so we can watch
people achieve remarkable things. Being
alive these days has a lot of consequences because we are entwined with each
other, we humans who build relationships and learn things and hurt each other
and love each other and sometimes confuse those two things. There is not a clear black and white
understanding that this thing is always irrevocably bad and this, this is the
path of the righteous, brightly lit and newly swept. It doesn’t work like that, much though we may
wish it did.
But the consequences come back to the
dichotomy the psalmist presents here, in the opening to this collection of
poems that John Calvin called “the anatomy of all the parts of the human soul.”
It is not black versus white or right versus wrong but righteous versus
wicked. It is compassion versus arrogance. It is delight versus callousness. It is love, and love, and love, and love as a
free choice, over and over and over again, love like streams of water that
bring life to the trees with deep roots against the winds of hatred and
dismissal, love that reaches out to the least and the lost and the last, love
that refuses to join in the circles that ignore those whose voices desperately
need to be heard. That is
righteousness. Delighted is, joyous is,
happy is the one who avoids the advice of those who demean others. The Lord watches over the way of the
righteous, the way paved with wonder at the maddening beauty of grey struck
through with the clear, bright prism of love.
May we choose that path. May we walk it faithfully. And may we keep our ears and our hearts open
for God’s words leading us always to love ourselves, our neighbors, and our
God. Amen.
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