Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 12, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 1

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It’s getting to be graduation season, and so all across the country, over the next several Saturdays, robed and capped high school and college seniors will be addressed with advice for their futures.

These commencement speeches will both congratulate graduates on their academic accomplishments and offer them guidance for the future that awaits them once they’ve turned across the stage and collected their diploma.

I expect that the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken” will echo through several of the gymnasiums, stadiums, and auditoriums holding these commencement exercises. You know the one: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

It’s a fitting poem to offer to young people who are setting out on a journey that will inevitably require choices, hard choices, about what major to declare, what relationships to prioritize, what commitments to keep or let go.

But I’m afraid that our constant employment of it — at graduations and long, long after — hides a hard truth, and that is that the choices life demands of us are rarely as simple as this-road-or-that-one, so that there can be a simple rule you can follow for choosing: the one less traveled by.

Finding our way in life — not just finding our way, but finding and following a way, a good way, in life — takes more than simple rules, doesn’t it?

I expect we are all here together at church this afternoon because we wish to find and to follow a good path in our lives. In our being here together, lifting up voices in song and prayer, attending to words from scripture, we are seeking out a good life —the good life — a blessed life, even a righteous life.

This is the path we’re on today, and this is the life that the scripture James just read for us would have us live: the good life.

The vision of the good life —the blessed life, the happy life — that our scripture for today gives us is marked first by things it avoids. This shouldn’t be surprising: anyone who has ever committed themselves to a good and righteous path, or the pursuit of any kind of virtue in their life, has discovered that doing so demands saying no to certain vices.

You cannot embrace goodness and virtue with one arm while simultaneously wrapping your other arm around corruption and half-truth.

You cannot strive for honesty in your personal life — among your spouse and kids, say — only to go to work the next morning in a profession that requires you to lie to people or even to obscure the truth.

You can’t pursue a life of charity by working in a “helping” profession even as you spend your personal time taking advantage of strangers and neighbors for personal gain.

The good life the Bible envisions and urges us to is characterized first in this first-of-the-Psalms by negation. The blessed or happy people the psalmist celebrates do not do certain things: They don’t follow the advice of the wicked. They do not take the path that sinners tread. They do not sit on the seat of scoffers.

The good life is partly a matter of choosing those things we don’t do, things we won’t do.

It will help to spell out a little bit what scripture has in mind when it names “the wicked” and “sinners” and “scoffers,” because those terms can sound a little arcane, if not downright judgmental (they are judgmental).

The wicked in the Bible — especially in Psalms — are those who mistreat the poor and the lowly, who take advantage of the vulnerable and the weak.

Sinners is a simple enough shorthand for people whose lives are all about willfully gratifying their own desires, whether that be for bodily pleasures or ambition. Another part of scripture refers to those whose “end is destruction,” whose “god is the belly,” whose “glory is in their shame,” and whose “minds are set on earthly things.” Sinners.

Scoffers are the least self-evident of the groups of people the righteous forswear. Proverbs 21, just a few page turns ahead from our psalm, says, “The proud, haughty person, named ‘Scoffer,’ acts with arrogant pride.” Another proverb says, “Scoffers do not like to be rebuked; they will not go to the wise.”

I think that gives us a clear enough picture of what the Bible means: exploitation, indulgence, arrogant pride. These have not disappeared from human experience since biblical times, yet these are the very things we will turn our back on if we desire to lead a good life.

Living a good life requires a measure of refusal, doesn’t it?

But is that all the Bible has in view for the good life? Is a moral and a righteous life strictly a matter of keeping our noses clean, not tarnishing our character by trafficking with the wrong crowd? Is the truly pious life the one who marches most in step with the chant of “Thou Shalt Not?”

Jesus didn’t seem to think so, since Jesus spent a lot of his time hanging around with sinners, tax cheats, and the like. Jesus is the example that Christian faith looks to first and foremost for guidance in righteous living, for growing into the people we believe God desires us to be. And the picture of that life we get in Jesus contains far, far more than simply dodging sins and keeping himself morally unscathed.

Jesus teaches us that the good-and-Godly life is the one that bears fruit. “Every good tree,” he said, “bears good fruit.” This is how you tell the life of righteousness from the wicked one, in Jesus’ teaching: “You will know them by their fruits.”

I wonder if Jesus had Psalm 1 in mind when he said that, specifically the very striking image in Psalm 1 of trees planted by streams of water, “which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.”

It’s striking to me because it illustrates those happy people the psalm says don’t do all the wicked things. What do they do instead? They bear fruit.

The way of the righteous, then, is a productive way. It’s a constructive way. The way of the righteous is nurture and care and growth, not just moral self-preservation. The way of the righteous produces life in abundance.

Think of the best people you have known in your life, the people who would name if I asked you to tell me about a good person, like a truly good person. Now say that name or those names out loud. Go ahead. You don’t have to say anything about them, just say their names.

I may not know anything about the people we all just named, but I suspect that if you and I were to talk further and you were to tell me what made your person a good person, you would describe for me things they did more than things they avoided doing. That’s my hunch.

You would talk about the fruit your person bears or bore in their life, the kindness they showed to people, the patience and forbearance they extended, the joy they exuded when you were around them.

The people in our lives who model for us a righteous way are fruitful people, aren’t they? They’re giving people. They’re loving people. They’re faithful people — they share faith with the people around them who need it.

They show us that a good and blessed life says no to things that corrupt and diminish and break down, but over and over again the good life also says yes to those things that build up and make peace and promote the thriving of people around them.

The good life is yes as much as it is no.

They must be tireless, these saints. They must volunteer in their communities for hours each week, chair the boards of nonprofits. They must never skip a protest against any kind of injustice or even a Sunday church service. They must pray first thing when they wake up in the morning, before every meal, and then last thing before they go to bed each night.

They must be the most morally optimized people there are. They must keep rigorous schedules and to-do lists to accomplish all the good they accomplish. They must be religious superheroes.

Were the people I asked you to call to mind and name out loud a moment ago superheroes? Probably not. I have no doubt many of them did a lot of these things — participate in church, give to people in need, protest injustice — but I suspect the source of their goodness was not the activity they generated.

That’s because the way of the righteous — to use that phrase from our psalm again — is more a way of stillness and endurance than it is a way of constant urgent activity, even holy activity. It’s a way of delight and meditation.

This is what I mean: in contrast to all of the activity associated by the Bible with the way of the wicked — uttering deceptive advice, treading sinful paths, sitting and scoffing — the way of the righteous is relatively passive.

Listen: “Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on God’s law they meditate day and night.”

The good life, the life of faith, is focused on the ways and the instruction of God more than anything else in life. The word our English Bible translates as “law” in these verses is “Torah” in the original language, Hebrew, which you’ve probably heard before.

Torah is used in a few different senses. For one, “The Torah” refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. But in another, broader, sense, “Torah” simply means biblical teaching more broadly.

So the “law” of the Lord includes actual laws and commandments, things like “Don’t murder” and “Honor your father and mother.” But it’s also all those stories of the faithful in the Bible, the women and men who sought God and who were sought out by God, who called themselves by God’s name and committed themselves to living in the ways God showed them, as often as not failing in their faith.

Faith delights in and meditates on those stories.

The “law” that roots and grounds the life of faith is all of the instruction and challenge and encouragement and grace found in the scriptures, the grand story of creation and redemption that we hold to for our identity and our purpose in life.

So, then, in order to be good in the way of the Bible do we have to spend all our time reading the Bible? No. Certainly we will make it our business to read the Bible, and not only to read it for comprehension but to delight in it, to take comfort from it in times of struggle and wisdom in times of uncertainty.

And I hasten to add that we won’t just do that by ourselves; the author of the psalms certainly didn’t. When he says that those who are happy “meditate” day and night, he uses a word that means something more like “murmur.” People didn’t read silently to themselves back then — to read was to read aloud, and probably in the company of other people.

Because not everything about the Bible is self-evident. In fact, great swaths of it are opaque, and parts of it seem to offer contradictory guidance. So the way of the righteous is a way of communal listening to scripture and supporting one another in following it — kind of what we’re doing right now.

The important thing is that the life of faith follows instruction, and that instruction comes from God. The way to this good life leads back to a source that is beyond us and our finite understanding of the world and our place in it, back to the one who created it, created us. And it leads forward, to the realm of peace and justice that God is still bringing about, the kingdom Jesus preached and taught was coming into the world in him.

So if we want to know how to walk in the way of the righteous, the psalmist — and really all of scripture! — tells us that we will never walk by ourselves, and we will never walk without the guidance and the instruction God has given us in the scriptures, and God will indeed watch over our way every step of the way.

Amen?

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church