homily preached
at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
by the
Rev. Josh Hosler
Thursday
after Ash Wednesday, February 11, 2016
Lent begins
with obedience. In psalm 1, duty leads directly to well-being. But what sort of
duty is this, that urges us to avoid sinners? In stark, black-and-white
language, the psalmist creates a good “us” versus an evil “them,” and it
doesn’t take much sophistication or life experience to see that the theology
here is wanting.
Scholar
Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Psalms and the Life of Faith, writes
about the narrative sweep of the psalms. Did you know that there is one … that the
psalms aren’t just thrown together in a random order? It’s not necessarily
straightforward. But imagine for a moment, with Brueggemann and with me, that
the psalms actually tell the story of the life of faith, both from an
individual and from a communal perspective.
Psalm 1,
which we read today, speaks clearly: If you obey God, everything will go well
for you. If you don’t, you’ll be in big trouble. It’s a simple, childlike—or
dare we say child-ish?—perspective on faith. It’s naïve, as Brueggemann
is quick to point out, because it hasn’t yet taken any data from real life into
account.
This week I attended a community meeting about the recent rash of burglaries in our neighborhood. It was a good meeting, but the policeman who was addressing us kept referring to "bad guys." I know that the world cannot be cleanly bisected into "good guys" and "bad guys." Doesn't he? Yet the writer of Psalm 1 seems to think so.
Does that
make the psalm worthless to us? Definitely not. Sure, look around the world and
you’ll see the wicked prospering all over the place … but this is only the beginning.
Obey God, and wait and see. The simplistic worldview of Psalm 1 is immediately
shattered in Psalm 2, which many of us know from Handel’s Messiah: “Why
do the nations so furiously rage together? Why do the peoples imagine a vain
thing?” By the time we get to Psalm 25, disillusionment is plainly expressed:
the psalmist hopefully restates the naïve faith of Psalm 1, then sadly opines
the problems with this claim. In Psalm 73, we come to a believer’s commitment
to God despite all the world’s pain and injustice, simply because God is good. By Psalm 103, we’re into the territory of deep gratitude. And Psalm 150, the final
one, is a song of praise with wild abandonment. Brueggemann sees here a second
naïveté, with scars plainly evident, but no longer questioning … simply
praising God in joy.
Now, the
narrative journey through the psalms isn’t as direct as I’ve made it out to be
here. It takes many twists and turns, including the sharp turn from number
22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—to the very next, most beloved
of all psalms, number 23—“The Lord is my shepherd; I have everything I need.”
We find everything from Psalm 51, which pairs sincere repentance with
rock-solid faith in God’s forgiveness, to Psalm 88, the only psalm that wallows
in pain and sorrow without a single hint of hope.
But it all starts
with Psalm 1—obedience—and it ends with Psalm 150—praise. These two psalms serve
as bookends to the journey of faith. Faith is not a spectator sport; we only
come to understand it by actively participating in it, in community. We can’t
get to joy without first going through obedience, then facing our doubts and
fears with candor, then experiencing communion with all the other worshipers,
then living lives of gratitude in hope, and finally arriving in a place of
unrestrained praise.
The psalms
are raw, unfiltered expressions of deep emotion from the heart of ancient
Israel. And they continue to serve us today, as psalms are appointed for every
regular worship service. Sometimes they sing words we aren’t ready to hear,
from situations we can’t quite relate to. Some might actively repel us with
their anger, arrogance, and violence. But at other times, even the angriest of
psalms might meet us exactly where we are and call us onward.
