In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’m the last person to ask for advice about plants. I’m not sure if it’s overwatering, underwatering, a lack of fertilizer, or putting them in the wrong places, but not even a cactus that would make it in the barren desert is safe in my care. So don’t take my advice about plants, but do listen to Jeremiah and the Psalmist, they have something worth listening to. Jeremiah says “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals… they shall be a like a shrub in the desert… But blessed are those who trust in the LORD… they shall be like a tree planted by water.” And Psalm 1 declares that those whose delight is in the law of the LORD are “like trees planted by streams of water… everything they do shall prosper.”
A lot of people tend to think of Christianity as a religion – meaning a set of doctrines and rules that bring us into alignment with how God wants us to live. And there certainly are those religious aspects to our faith. Not as many people though would describe Christianity as a philosophy – which is generally more about our perception of the world and wisdom about how to live the good life. However, it is just as true that the way of Jesus is philosophical in this sense – faith is concerned about how we interact with the world in pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. Wearing our philosopher’s hats this morning will aid us in reading these texts.
Psalm 1 is, obviously, the first psalm, and as such it is an overture to the entire Psalter. It cues up the themes that we’ll find throughout the book. What we find in this introduction is that in the worldview of the Psalms, there are two paths in front of us, two ways of living. The first is the way of the wicked – who bring about their own ruin and cause calamity for others. Jeremiah might have had this Psalm in mind when he also wrote about these two paths. He notes that we fall into this category when we put our trust in mortals, rely on the strength of our bodies, and have hearts turned away from God.
It’s not so much that God punishes this group, but rather that they receive the consequences of their choices. They will be like shrubs in the desert – meaning they will not flourish, they won’t be able to withstand the winds of change when they blow through, they won’t have roots deep enough to draw water in times of drought. Anytime we give our loyalty or obedience to anyone or anything other than God, whether that be a bank account, a political party or candidate, or a résumé, we will eventually end up parched in the wilderness. All resources eventually run out, and if that is where our confidence and strength lie, we will end up lacking.
As St. Augustine put it, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” Heart here is a way of saying our desires, allegiances, and ambitions. When we cannot trust that we are enough, we will constantly seek out other things that make us feel good enough – things that will disappoint and drain us. This is where things like reputation, the success of our children, or the ideal body image creep in and become the things that we pursue above all else and evaluate ourselves by. And when we can’t achieve those things, sometimes we turn to substances and habits to dull that sense of insufficiency.
However, when our hearts are planted near the green pastures and still waters of God’s love, we find rest for our souls. When our sense of being enough comes as a gift from God instead of the product of our striving, we are set on the path of the good life. But it is not so for those who put their trust in their own strength; their fists are clenched tight, holding onto all of those vanities that they think are so important but amount to nothing. And with clenched fists, they are not able to receive the grace, mercy, and peace of God that passes all understanding.
Contrasted with this first group is the group that Jeremiah, the Psalmist, and Matthew all refer to as “blessed.” They trust in God and are like trees planted by waters, meaning they are rooted and grounded in love, a love that allowed them to endure hardships and always be nourished from the riches of God’s grace. To be clear, the righteous won’t live a life free of struggle or challenge – Jesus makes this clear when he says that blessings do not preclude poverty, hunger, weeping, or persecution. But this group is promised God’s redemption; they are assured that God remains with them. It is not so with those who trust in their own cleverness, boldness, and strength to save them. Even if they are rich, full, laughing, and well liked now, as we all know, the tables can turn rather quickly and they will find themselves on the other side of things with no relief in sight.
The thing about roots is that you’ll never know when you need them. No one thinks to build the ark when it’s not raining. It can be tempting and easy to assume that because things have been going fairly well for us, that they will continue to go well. Challenges though can show up at any moment, and roots aren’t something that can be grown overnight. This is why the way of the righteous is commended in Psalm 1– it’s not that God needs our obedience like a demanding parent, nor is it that God needs our contributions as if God is incapable of doing anything without us; it’s that God desires us to thrive and grow in Jesus-like love.
It really is all about love. God created us because God is love. And the love that God is so magnificent, so abundant, so effusive that it explodes out from the heart of God and makes all things. That might not be what astrophysicists say the Big Bang was, but it’s the spiritual reality behind it. Everything that exists flows from the cascading and overflowing love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So one way to define love would be to say that love is knowing ourselves to be enveloped in this eternal and gracious love, and thereby participating in the very life of God.
But because God loves us so purely and deeply, we are given freedom to embrace or reject this love. Love, fundamentally, is non-coercive. As we know from First Corinthians, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude. Love does not insist on its own way.” This is why these two paths are available to us – for love to be love, it has to be chosen, not forced. The wicked will choose to give their hearts to all the things that promise us success and comfort not because they are necessarily bad people, but in our freedom, we often fall for what is easy instead of holy.
To be clear about this, the wicked aren’t those people over there. We are the wicked. We are, at times, also the righteous, but we are not immune from the temptation to choose wealth over poverty, laugher over weeping, power over meekness. The way of the good life is a life lived in the love that we were created in, by, and for. But there are choices to make along the way.
The message of grace persists – we don’t have to earn our belovedness. There are no oughts, should, or musts, but there are choices to be made. Thomas Cranmer, the composer of the first Book of Common Prayer said that “What the heart wants, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.” How true that is. Once our heart has decided it wants something, meaning that it is not resting in the enoughness of God and is looking for more, we so easily decide to pursue that desire, and when we are questioned about it, we are so very good at coming up with all sorts of justifications. We are living contradictions who so easily judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Somehow, our context is always a bit different from the absolutes that we declare about others. We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and a free pass for all of our inconsistencies and duplicitousness.
And so the good life, living the abundant life that Jesus talks about, being among the blessed, is a matter of a few things. The first is what sort of stories we tell ourselves. Psalm 1 says that the happy, or the blessed, are those who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, meaning they are those who have not surrounded themselves with a worldview that blames others for their problems, nor do they live in a world of scarcity in which they are in competition with everyone for everything.
No, instead the happy know the story of the Cross which proclaims that Christ is risen despite the fact that he was rejected, tortured, and killed. The happy know the story that death is not final and that all things are being redeemed and made new by the love of God. As we heard in the Epistle, “If Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile… But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” The happy are those who enjoy those fruits of mercy and hope because they don’t tell themselves the fearful stories of the wicked, instead they know the story of God’s abundant and gracious love.
The good life is also about not lingering in the way of sinners. Notice that Psalm 1 doesn’t say that we never sin – we’re all imperfect, we all have lapses in judgment, we all react before we think ,we all have moments of weakness. And God meets all of ours mistakes with mercy and has shown us that love paves the road of reconciliation and restoration. Instead, Psalm 1 says that we are to not linger in the way of sinners. Meaning that the happy are those who confess and turn from their sin and pursue holiness.
Last Sunday, I mentioned that holiness is about not purity or perfection, rather it’s about being different. Yes, we all make mistakes, but we can also choose to take steps to at least make different mistakes that are moving us in the direction of greater love. This might mean therapy, it might mean meditating, it might mean not putting yourself in situations that you know will cause you to keep making the same mistakes, it might be not spending time with people who bring out the worst in you. If you need help praying and thinking about a new and holy way forward, it would be my duty honor to talk about this. The point is, yes, we always have to contend with sin, and sometimes we fall into it, but that doesn’t mean we have to make it our home and linger there.
Lastly, the happy are those who do not sit in the seats of the scornful, but rather they mediate on the law of the LORD. “Law” does not mean regulations or policies; the word is “Torah,” which means “teaching.” The way of love includes meditating on Scripture. The word “meditate” here does not mean to think about something. No, it’s the word that would be used to describe the low growling of a lion or the cooing of a dove – it’s about having words on our lips. The Jesus Prayer is an ancient practice that many people have found to helpful – “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” You can use that as you take a few deep breaths as a way of meditating on God. There are so many words of teaching we can use: “all shall be well,” or “the LORD is my shepherd, or “the LORD is my light and salvation, of whom then shall I be afraid,” or “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.” Those are just some examples, and I am confident that God has a word for you to meditate on which will root you in the story of your chosenness, enoughness, and belovedness.
And where all of this connects to our worship, which is a focus of the sermons leading up to Lent, is Baptism. The waters that the happy are planted next to are the waters of Baptism; of our immersion into the story of God’s love for us. The waters of Baptism cleanse us in mercy, nourish us in grace, and transport us along the ways of justice and righteousness. This is why the procession into the church always goes through the Baptistry. The bit of water that we pour into the wine as Communion is prepared is a reminder that through the waters of Baptism, we are united to the redeeming story of Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection. All that we do in worship flows from the eternal stream of God’s gracious love. This is the good life that God intends for us, to be rooted and immersed into this story in which all things are being made well.
