Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 9, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The Bible is our book. It is the book Christians have used for more than a millennium as their guide to the truth and as the basis of their faith. It is the book we use in public worship and private devotion. Some of us see it as the literal, infallible word of God. Others of us don’t, but even for those of us who don’t see it that way the Bible is an indispensable tool. We wouldn’t truly be Christians without it. Yet how many times have you read a passage in the Bible and failed to have it speak to you? Or how many times have you read a passage and thought: I like this bit. I get that part. It speaks to me. But this other bit down here, that I don’t get at all? Or, that I just don’t believe? It even strikes me as wrong? And maybe you’ve wondered how it can be that something in the Bible doesn’t speak to you, or how you could think that something in the Bible was wrong. It’s The Bible, after all. It’s supposed to be true. More than that it’s supposed to be God’s truth. I’m sure we’ve all had reactions like these to some things we’ve found in the Bible.

I had a reaction like that this past week when I read Psalm 1 in preparation for this morning’s service. I had the seemingly paradoxical sense that Psalm 1 addresses a profound divine truth but there were things about it that don’t speak to me and that I just don’t believe. And I thought: Perhaps sharing my struggle to understand and come to terms with that reaction will help some of the people of the church with their own struggles with Bible passages all or part of which seem to them difficult or even untrue.

Psalm 1 begins with a statement of two ways that people can be in the world. One is the way of wickedness, which the Psalm calls following the advice of the wicked and the path that sinners tread, among other things. The other is the way of righteousness, which the Psalm calls the way of taking delight in the law of God and meditating upon that law ceaselessly. The Psalm says that those who follow the way of righteousness are “happy.” It goes on to say that those who follow the way of righteousness lead fruitful lives and prosper in all that they do, while those who follow the way of wickedness are blown about like chaff in the wind. They are condemned at the time of God’s judgment and excluded from the congregation of God’s people. The Psalm sums up its teaching in the last verse: “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

As I said, my reaction to this Psalm this past week was paradoxical, ambiguous at best. There is much about it that I simply cannot accept. The first thing that I have trouble with is the Psalm’s contention that the way of righteousness involves love of and constant meditation on not God but on “the law of the Lord.” By “law of the Lord” this Psalm means precisely the Torah law, the law of Moses, those 613 separate laws found in the first five books of the Bible. Yet whatever may be true for our Jewish brothers and sisters, for us Christians the life of faith is not about loving and meditating on those 613 laws. It is about loving God in and through Jesus Christ, something Psalmist could not possibly have said because he lived centuries before the coming of Jesus. So Psalm 1’s line about taking delight in and meditating day and night upon the law brings me up short and leaves me a bit cold.

Even more troubling to me than its emphasis on the Mosaic law is the Psalm’s contention that the righteous prosper in all that they do but the wicked fail and ultimately perish. I just don’t see how any rational, aware person can believe that today. Good, decent, God-loving people fail all the time. Bad things happen to good people every day. Wicked people thrive and prosper among us every day. Unscrupulous behavior in business makes people rich every day. Unscrupulous, dishonest behavior and outright lying and fraud get politicians elected all the time and are the means they use every day to maintain and exercise their power for their personal gain or to further their ideological agendas regardless of the consequences of those agendas for ordinary people at home and around the world. I don’t see how anyone can look at the American political landscape today and not see that this is true. It simply is not consistently and universally true that the righteous prosper in all they do while the wicked fail and perish. So I find myself rejecting this Psalm’s central premise and its ultimate conclusion, at least as they are stated in the Psalm.

Yet I had another reaction to Psalm 1 at the same time that I was rejecting so much of it. It also struck me that there is something profoundly true about it. There is indeed a sense in which those whose delight is in the Lord are happy. There is a sense in which they are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit and withstanding the withering heat of life. There is also a sense in which those who follow the advice of the wicked and take the path that sinners tread are like chaff blown in the wind. If I find that much truth in the Psalm, why do I have so much trouble with the rest of it?

The answer lies, I think, in the fact that Psalm 1, like everything else in the Bible, is a very, very ancient piece of writing. It was written by an ancient person of an ancient time for other ancient people of that ancient time. It reflects certain ancient understandings about God and God’s relationship to the world. It reflects fundamental understandings that I, and I think most people today, do not share, specifically in this case the understanding that what God wants from us is obedience to Torah law and the understanding that God intervenes in human life to provide that the righteous prosper and the wicked perish.

So I asked myself: Is there a way to retain what is true in Psalm 1 while removing the parts that reflect those ancient understandings that I do not and cannot share? And I hit upon the idea, arrogant perhaps but so be it, of issuing a new, upgraded version of Psalm 1. So this morning I give you Psalm 1, Version 2.0. Think of it as Biblical beta testing, if you like. It’s in your bulletin, but let me read it to you:

Psalm 1 Version 2.0
By the Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

Happy are those who do not follow
the ways of the world
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seats of those without faith;
but their delight is in God’s law of love,
and on that law they meditate day
and night.

They are like trees planted by streams
of water,
which yield their fruit in their seasons,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do they bear
the fruits of the Spirit.

The worldly are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind
drives away.
They have no root to nourish their souls.
In times of trouble they wilt,
and their spirits shrivel;
for the Lord sustains those who put
their trust in God,
but those who follow the ways of the world
will know no peace.

Because we are doing Communion this morning I won’t take a lot of time explaining everything I have done with Psalm 1 right now. I will only say that for me my Version 2.0 of the Psalm retains the truth of the Psalm, the truth that the way of true happiness is the way of the love of God, while discarding the things about it that I simply do not believe. I invite you to take it with you and, if you care to do so, to compare it with the actual Psalm 1 from ancient times and see if doesn’t express Psalm 1’s fundamental truth to you better than the original does. If it does, good. If it does not, also good. You may say: Who are you to change Scripture? I answer, who are any of us not to, when our task as people of faith is to discern God’s teaching and will for us in our time and place and not only what people a long time ago in a place far away thought God’s teaching and will was for them? My Version 2.0 isn’t the Bible, but I believe that it is true to the Bible’s central message for us today. If it expresses that message in a way that makes sense to you my efforts have not been in vain. Amen.