Reading: Psalm 1
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, the prosper.
Do you ever wonder
what people will say about you at your funeral?
How people will think of you when you’re gone?
Okay, okay! I know it’s not a normal thing to worry
about! And I don’t. Usually.
But at a number of
funerals lately I’ve used Psalm 1 as the main reading for the service – the
scriptural focus for remembering and celebrating the life and spirit of the
person who has died.
Happy are
those …
whose
delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his
law they meditate 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.
Given
how the person who died, lived, and how their family and friends remembered
them, the psalm seemed only fitting. And
as we have gone through the service, at some point I have found myself thinking:
how different from that my life sometimes seems. I start thinking of the unfinished projects
and dead ends, the broken promises and relationships, the withered hopes and
dreams, the disease and rot I feel from within, the isolation I create and
emptiness I carry with me. Ever have
days and thoughts like that?
Scholars
note that Psalm 1 is a simple, finely crafted introduction to the rest of the
Book of Psalms – a nice little precis of two ways of living that the rest of
the 149 psalms that follow then explore bit by bit in both ecstatic and
agonizing detail, in real-life experiences of contentment, joy and deep peace
on one hand, and turmoil, anguish and even rage on the anger.
On one
hand, there is the good life – the true life – the life that lasts. “Happy are those … whose delight is in the
law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.” The original readers of the psalm would have known
that “the law of the Lord” is three things – the three parts of their
Scriptures that we call the Old Testament.
First, it is the Torah – the law of God revealed through Moses in the
first five books of the Bible. Second,
the books of history and prophecy, that tell the stories of what happens when
God’s way is followed and when it’s not.
And third, the Wisdom books – including the Psalms, that work at bringing
life, in all its different sides, into line with God and God’s Word and Spirit
in the world.
And to
meditate on this means to spend time with it.
To let the law, the history and the hard-won wisdom of God’s people –
whatever parts of it catch our attention, sink into our consciousness and our
understanding of life … to let it draw us into the larger picture of
how God has made the world and made us to work well … and let ourselves be
drawn by it to a life beyond self-interest and greed, beyond anxiety and fear, beyond
illusions of control and of saving ourselves, to simply, honestly and
gratefully love God in all we do and with all we have, and to love our
neighbour as ourselves. And thereby find
our place among the truly good people of the world.
Unlike
those whom the psalm calls “the wicked” – which in the Bible means those who
live for themselves by themselves, just by the world’s common sense and by
their own rules, for their own security and comfort, status and reputation, superiority
and separateness – many of the things our culture teaches us to value and
strive after. “The wicked” in both Old
and New Testaments is most often a term applied to people who instead of
trusting their lives to God and using what they have to serve the well-being of
all, try to save their own lives by isolating from others, getting more and
more control of more and more things, and effectively cutting themselves off
from humanity – from the rest of humankind around them, and from their own
humanity inside.
And really,
the Psalm says, can such a life stand in the end? When God is the God of all the world and all
people, can those who cut themselves off really have any future? How can their lives and their work not help
but wither and die, and be blown away life chaff when the wind blows, as it
will?
And so
the question comes: on which side of the
great divide in Psalm 1 do I stand? Or
fall? When I’m gone and people remember
me, which side of Psalm 1 will be true of me?
Or …
is that even the point of it? Is the
purpose of Psalm 1 that we start to draw lines between those who are righteous
and those who are wicked? Make
judgements now about people’s – or even our own, eternal spiritual state?
Or is
the purpose of the Psalm to point out that there are different ways of living,
that they can be boiled down to two – one wicked and the other righteous, and
that every day we live, in every situation we find ourselves, in every
relationship that makes up our life, we have a choice about which way we will
live at that moment. That over our
lifetime we all choose a variety of ways, that our choices tend to add up in
one direction or the other, but that in each moment that comes we have a chance
to choose anew, and we can choose best when we know what the options really
are.
I’m
intrigued by two different translations of the psalm.
One is
the translation by Scott Mitchell:
Blessed
are the man and the woman
who have
grown beyond their greed
and have
put an end to their hatred
and no
longer nourish illusions.
But they
delight in the way things are
and keep
their hearts open, day and night.
They are
like trees planted near flowing rivers,
which bear
fruit when they are ready.
Their
leaves will not fall or wither.
Everything
they do will succeed.
I
really like the words he uses to convey the meaning of the psalm for today. It’s this version I usually read when I read
it at funerals. And one reason is the
way he focuses on, and includes only the positive. Did you notice that? No focus here on the wicked and their fate,
as though telling us what happens when we sin and fall short, and scaring us
with the fate of the wicked will ever save us from going that way.
Rather,
he speaks of the righteous and what they enjoy, letting the example of their
life be the encouragement we need to live our lives as well as they do. And the only mention of the bad stuff is what
they learn to outgrow and leave behind. In
other words they also struggled. They had
their bad days and impulses, their own times of sadness at living a smaller, more
self-directed self-focussed life than they were meant too. But they also found ways to grow up and grow
beyond that and to live love more fully and openly – as we can, by meditating
on the ways of true and good living.
Which
brings me to the second thing – another translation, and one verse in
particular. It’s the Common English
Bible translation of verse 3. In the New
Revised Standard, verse 3 reads, “they are
like trees planted by streams of water;” in the CEB it’s “they
are like a tree replanted by streams of water.”
Re-planted! Which means no matter how firmly and how long
I may have been planted somewhere else, growing in some other direction or not
growing at all, bringing forth poor fruit or no fruit at all, there is always –
even at this late date in my life, the chance to be re-planted in some better
place, to be nourished in some new and good way, to grow some leaves that
aren’t going to wither quite so quickly, and start bearing better fruit –
appropriate to the season I’m in now,
And you know, I’ve
found that to be the case. Without
getting into it right now – that’s really a whole other story for some other
time, I’ve found it to be true. That
it’s never too late, because life really is lived one day at a time, one
situation at a time, one relationship at a time. And each time is a time to choose anew, and a
time to be fruitful as may be appropriate now.
So maybe the
question is not, what will they think of me, and say about me when I’m
gone. But what do they, and I and God
think of me now in this moment – and what does the law of God tell me, right
now in this moment? And this moment
now? And this moment now?
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