(Psalm 1)
This morning we’re starting a sermon series from the Psalms. I say from the Psalms rather than on the Psalms because there are 150 of them and we don’t want to spend three years on this; but that very fact that there are 150 makes it a challenge to figure out where to look. When starting anything, I tend to defer to the King of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who instructed the White Rabbit, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” But does that really matter here? Stories have beginnings, and essays—like the ones our middle-school English teachers have to pound their students through—but the book of Psalms?
Thing is, though it doesn’t have the same sort of throughline as a story or an essay, the book of Psalms does have an introduction and a conclusion. In fact, it has a two-part introduction—that’s why some ancient manuscripts of the Psalter combined the first two psalms into one. Psalm 1 operates at the level of the individual, and then Psalm 2 speaks of the community of faith among the godless nations. Both areas of focus are important throughout the book; but you can’t really do both in one sermon, so we’re just doing the first part this morning.
This raises a question: if we understand Psalm 1 as an introductory psalm, does that change its message to us? I think it does. Before we get there, though, let’s begin by looking at what this psalm is. It’s generally taken to be a wisdom psalm which is intended to teach us a simple message: it pays to obey God, and the wicked will pay for defying him. This reading is reinforced by the standard translation of the Hebrew word torah as “law.” Robert Alter in his version, which we read a few minutes ago, translates it “teaching,” but any Bible you pull off your shelf or pull up on your phone is going to say something like, “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”
It seems logical enough: follow God’s rules willingly, and your life will go the way you want it to. Disobey God, and he’ll punish you. That sounds like something we’d expect to find in the Bible. But is it something we expect to find in the world around us? Does that fit our experience? The righteous often don’t prosper, while many of the rich and powerful have little or no use for God; even the most committed capitalist would have to admit many of them are wicked, as God judges things. Do we really imagine every corporate executive who’s guilty of fraud and malfeasance gets caught, or everyone in D.C. who takes bribes gets found out? On the flip side, take George Floyd—a man who had turned his back on the way of the wicked and spent years devoted to spreading the gospel in Houston’s Third Ward before moving up to Minneapolis to make a new start. Sure, he was sinner as well as saint, but so am I, and so are you—as long as we live in this world, even the most righteous are still sinners. His delight was in the Lord’s instruction, and yet he died the death of the wicked.
All of which is to say, if Psalm 1 is supposed to be an advertisement for obeying God, we have every right to ask if it’s false advertising. The thing is, I don’t think that’s what it is. I believe it’s actually a beatitude, much like what we find in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not pronouncing a blessing on the righteous or expressing a wish that they would be blessed, it’s declaring that they already are blessed. Now, take that declaration and read it in the context of the Psalms as a whole—because the psalmist is painfully aware the wicked grow rich on the backs of the poor while the righteous take it on the chin; that theme pops up as early as Psalm 10, and it’s far from the last time. This is true, and yet it’s also true that those who delight in the Lord’s instruction are blessed with life like trees planted by the riverside. If we take this seriously, it dislocates our expectations of blessing, because it tells us the life God calls blessed looks quite different from the sort of life we would call blessed.
So if blessing doesn’t mean life working the way we want it to work—whatever that looks like for us—what does it mean? First, this very dislocation of expectations is a blessing. Consider Proverbs 14:12: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” This world teaches us false definitions of life and false definitions of death, and so leads us into disaster. To the addict, the thing to which they are addicted—drugs, sex, or whatever it may be—feels like life to them, and so they let it lead them into ruin. To the proud and judgmental, humbling themselves to repent and confess their sin feels like death, and so they twist and destroy their relationships with others, ending up isolated and alone. Those to whom gaining riches feels like life may grow wealthy, but will they find satisfaction? When Andrew Carnegie was asked how much was enough, he replied, “One dollar more.”
To delight in the Lord’s instruction—to put our trust in him, as the parallel passage in Jeremiah 17 has it—is to open ourselves up to the Holy Spirit’s work, usually painful and often disconcerting, of stripping bare and stripping away our false views of life and death. That doesn’t feel like mercy, it doesn’t feel like blessing—surgery never does—but it is. The false ways to life that we pursue may satisfy us for a time; they may make us successful and fortunate in the eyes of the world; but they will betray us in the end. Those who pursue the Lord as the source of life will pass through many things that feel like death, for it is not promised that we will avoid the valley of the shadow; but we are promised two things. One, when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will not walk alone, and we will not walk undefended; and two, even death is not the end. The blessing of God is not happy circumstances, though it does often include them. The blessing of God is life that sustains us and gives us meaning and purpose and hope no matter our circumstances, and the ability to see his goodness even when nothing we see seems good.
With that said, we come back to the first question I posed: why does it matter that this psalm opens the book? To answer that question, I need to raise a point that I’ve only touched on so far, which is the meaning of the Hebrew word torah. I noted that “law” is the standard translation, because this is the word used for the five books of Moses. The thing is, though, its basic meaning is “teaching,” just as Alter renders it. The fact that the Law is called torah doesn’t mean that torah means “law” in our sense, it means we need to understand God’s Law differently—as teaching, as instruction, first and foremost.
And here in this psalm? I think it means we are to understand the Psalms as torah as well—as instruction from God for us, and thus as a source of God’s life. Which might sound like a giant “Captain Obvious” moment: of course the Psalms are God’s word, they’re in the Bible. That’s not all this means, though. What was this book to the editor or editors who collected it? It was Israel’s hymnal, and their worship book. What would you think if I picked up a hymnal, or pulled up Evernote and showed you a list of the songs we’ve done as a congregation, and said, “This is the word of God”?
I’m not saying that exactly, because we don’t have a collection of songs that we can say confidently was directly inspired by God. There have been many brilliant, godly, wise hymn writers over the years, from Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley to Keith and Kristyn Getty and Stuart Townend, but I’m not foolish enough to pronounce any of them 100% divinely inspired. But—I do believe we should understand our worship as God’s torah, and I think there are three points we should draw from that.
The first has two parts. One, true worship is about the desire for God, not about what we can get out of it. If we participate in worship for how it makes us feel, for instance, we’re misaligned. Two, worship connects us to God in a way that opens us up to receive his life. To be like trees planted by the riverside, we need to be worshiping God . . . though that means worship is only a source of life for us if that’s not why we’re doing it. Which is a useful reminder that true blessing doesn’t come when we’re looking for blessings and striving to make them happen—it doesn’t come when we’re thinking about ourselves, but in and through self-forgetfulness.
The second point is to those of us who plan and lead worship. Just as there is the individual temptation to make worship about ourselves, so there is a corporate temptation for organizations and leaders to play to that individual temptation. After all, we want people to come, and to keep coming, and as much as a focus on “numbers” is derided by some, those numbers do represent individual human beings whom Jesus loves. It’s right to want to reach more people with the gospel, to want to see more people come to faith, to want to help more people grow to maturity in Christ. Unfortunately, that desire can make it easy for us to convince ourselves whatever gets people in the door is worth doing, figuring whatever we compromise now, we can make up for later. The thing is, as the author Jared Wilson has put it, “what you win them with is what you win them to.” Those of us in leadership must be careful that our overriding purpose in planning and leading worship is to focus the minds and hearts of the congregation on God. It’s not bad to have other concerns as well, but they must be secondary.
Third, honest worship is more than just praise and thanksgiving. There are more laments in the book of Psalms than any other type of psalm, and some of them are quite bitter and angry—even vengeful. We don’t need to exclude our grief, pain, anger, and fear from our worship, and in fact we shouldn’t. The way of the righteous is often hard and painful, and one of the things the Psalter shows us is that we can go to God as we are. To pull from an early song by Margaret Becker, God’s not afraid of our honesty. He already knows what we’re thinking and feeling. We don’t need to hold back or hide our negative thoughts and emotions—and he doesn’t want us to. If we don’t talk about them to anyone, that’s bad, and if we talk about them to everyone but him, that’s worse. But if we bring them to him, as long as we’re talking to him—even if we’re yelling at him; I’ve done my share of that over the years—God can work with that, and even that can be a source of life to us.
This is why this series is a standing invitation to each of us to try writing psalms of our own. This, too, is God’s torah. There are many modes of expression in the Psalms. Lament is several of them—not just expressions of grief, but cries of injustice, demands for vindication, and pleas for deliverance—and of course there are different kinds of praise and thanksgiving as well, and then other types of psalms beyond that. As we look at some of them together, the hope is that we will take time to write for ourselves in these various modes, to express our own griefs, our own joys, our anger at injustice done, and our reasons for gratitude. In preparation for that, I strongly encourage you to take time this week with God asking him to open your eyes and your heart to see what’s there, to see what you need to begin to say.
I realize writing poetry is not a familiar activity for many of us, so I want to note there are various resources available to you if you’re interested. For one, Emily has been working on a guide to psalm-writing which she’ll be sending out. For another, as those of y’all who’ve been around a while probably remember, we did this a few years ago, and some of the psalms people wrote were collected in a binder [where?]. And there’s another of which God reminded me this week, a lovely little book I’d forgotten I owned: Jim Schaap’s book Honest to God: Psalms for Scribblers, Scrawlers, and Sketchers. James Calvin Schaap is a writer and a teacher of writing—out of my home Dutch Reformed tradition, so I may be a little biased, but this book is truly a gem. If you’d like to borrow my copy, I’ll be happy to loan it out, but it’s well worth the $12 on Amazon. I’m going to close this morning with the back-cover blurb, because as terrible as those usually are, this one is perfect; I’d like to say of our messages in these weeks what he says of his book:
In this series of meditations on the Psalms, he invites you to take off on a riff the way a blues saxophonist might. Even if you don’t have a musical bone in your body, he wants you to pick up a pen or a pencil and respond to the melody these meditations bring to mind. Let loose. Let yourself go. Let yourself dream. You don’t have to wonder whether your thoughts pass muster or if you’ve got it right. The Psalms teach us that God has really thick skin. So write your honest hopes, doubts, and dreams. In the process, you’ll find out what you know and believe. Honest to God.
Photo © 2017 Sherifchalavara. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
