I.
C.S.
Lewis referred to Psalm 19 as the greatest of the Psalms and one of the
greatest poems in all human literature.
It starts out with a magnificent praise of God whose presence and power
are perceived in creation. Anyone
who believes the creation to be merely an object God gives us to use as we
please is not paying attention to this Psalm or the rest of the Bible. Creation is alive and praises and
points to the One who made it. The
heavens themselves proclaim the grandeur and goodness of the Creator, giving
particular attention to the glory of the sun.
Then
the Psalm shifts gears in verse 7, and immediately transfers its praise from
creation to the Torah, the law of
God. What the sun is to life on
this planet, the Torah is to human
life: a powerful force illuminating and giving life to everything. Without the Torah, God’s law, in our lives, our existence freezes over and we
become spiritually blind and effectually dead. There is no true human life apart from the law of God.
The
sun can be experienced in at least two ways. For one thing, we are more conscious today of the sun’s
dangers. When I was a kid and we
went to Ocean Grove for the summer, there was no such thing as “sun
screen.” No one ever heard of an
SPF, “solar protection factor,” rating.
Who wanted to be screened from the sun? You went to the beach to soak up as much sun as
possible. What you brought with
you was not sun screen but sun tan
lotion. You didn’t want to burn,
of course, but, at least in my family, you wanted to get deeply tanned. Now of course we are much more aware of
the sun’s dangers what with skin cancer and the depletion of the ozone layer
and so forth.
But
more obviously, the sun is the source of all life and energy on this
planet. Even the energy we get
from fossil fuels was, they tell us, originally solar energy stored in
vegetation on the earth eons ago.
Without the sun we live on a dead rock.
The
Psalmist tells is that the Torah
functions in the same way in human hearts and communities. It is incredibly beneficial and
essential. We are spiritually dead
without it. Without the law we
fall into situations of toxic injustice and violence where the strong oppress
the weak and society freezes into fear, hatred, and anger.
But
the Torah also has the effect of
revealing our own shortcomings and sins.
When we are confronted with the law we see clearly how far from keeping
it we are. We perceive the
wretchedness and brokenness of our lives.
The law burns us and can even become as spiritually deadly to us as
radiation is to growing life. The
Torah is both lethal to life and necessary for life, depending on how we use
it, how we receive it, how we process it.
II.
With
the sun, though, something has to come between
the earth and the sun’s rays, acting as a filter, converting lethal radiation
into beneficial sunlight. For the
earth, of course, this filter is the atmosphere. God’s law can also seem like unadulterated, destructive
wrath, with ethical demands that we cannot possible live up to, leaving us
guilty and condemned. There must
be a mediator, a filter that turns the Torah from destruction to benefit.
You’ll
notice in the structure of this Psalm, in verses 7 through 9, there is a
pattern. Each verse starts with a
synonym for the Torah: law, decrees,
precepts, commandments, and ordinances.
Then a word of description: perfect, sure, right, clear, true and
righteous. And finally a
beneficial effect in human life: reviving the soul, making wise the simple,
rejoicing the heart, and enlightening the eyes. But stuck in the middle of that series is a verse that is
slightly different. That is verse
9a: “The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.”
The
Psalmist is giving us the attitude we
need to have if we are to appropriate and ingest and receive the law. And this attitude is the deep respect
and awe and submission that the Bible describes with the word “fear.” This is an awareness that the law is
from God and therefore holy, and way bigger than we are, and not to be trifled
with.
Approached without this kind of fear,
without awe and respect and reverence and wonder, we reduce the law to some
words that we can use as we please.
We start abusing the law, making it a weapon against our enemies, or an
excuse for retaining our privileges and status. Both Jesus and Paul recognize the lethal character of the
law when taken literally and objectively and wielded against people, especially
the weak.
We
are called to be subject to God’s law;
it is not subject to us. We serve
it; it does not serve us. We do
not define God’s Word; God’s Word defines us.
“The
fear of God is pure,” says the Psalm.
One ancient writer understood this to mean that the law not about blame or dread. It is not a self-centered terror about
what will happen to us.
Rather,
the fear of God is a radical openness to God and a desire to conform to God’s
will. When we fear God it means we don’t fear anything or
anyone else in all the world. To
fear God is to behave fearlessly in
this world. To fear God is to live
in full-hearted love for the world God made. It is not a fear of punishment, but an awesome awareness of
what we have been given and of who we truly are. To fear God is to let go of our illusions about ourselves,
and to welcome the transformation God brings into our lives.
III.
And
so the Psalmist realizes that, along with the sweetness and surpassing value of
the law, it also contains a warning.
By the law’s light we see our own defilement and shortcomings. We see our own sin.
The
Psalm talks particularly about “hidden faults,” the sins we don’t even know
about. Our unconscious, repressed,
denied, and casual acts of complicity in evil that we would rather not bring to
mind.
For
when we subject ourselves to the light of God’s law, when we open ourselves to
this fearsome radiation of the truth, we are forced to see what hides in the
darkness within our own souls.
None of us is pure. We are
entangled in a web of deceit and evil in which we are breaking, shattering! God’s
law all the time.
The
moment I open my eyes in the morning, this complicity becomes apparent. The first thing I see is the cotton bed
sheets I slept in. God’s law is so
inconvenient because it forces us to see beyond this comfortable fabric, and
ask where did this come from? How
did it get here? Who grew the
cotton plants? Who harvested
it? Who processed the cotton and
turned it into yarn? Who wove it
into sheets? Who bleached it,
colored it, cut it, sewed it, packed it, transported it, and sold it? Was that all done in a way that
glorified God? Was it all done
with care and respect for God’s creation?
Was it all done with justice and equality for workers and families and
communities, according to God’s law?
When I bought them, was I not becoming a willing participant in the
whole process?
That’s
just in the first second of wakefulness!
I then proceed through my day asking these kinds of questions about where
all the things I enjoy came from, by the light of God’s law, and I have no
choice but to realize my hidden faults.
I am living off the blood, suffering, poverty, degradation, pollution,
exploitation, and destruction of God’s creation and God’s people.
So
of course the Psalm has to plea desperately to God: “Keep back your servant
also from the insolent; do not let them have dominion over me.” The “insolent” are the proud, the powerful,
the self-righteous, self-important, successful leaders of our society and
economy, who exert “dominion” over others by force. These are the ones whose sinful control over the way we
exist has spawned this whole system by which we are all complicit in murder, theft, rape, and other kinds of evil.
Fearing
God means knowing the inevitable consequences of this kind of thing, and
realizing that we are so in for it.
IV.
Fearing
God also means recovering our blamelessness and innocence, at least of great
transgressions, by separating
ourselves from this kind of corruption as far as we are able. At the very least, do not give the insolent a toe-hold in your
own heart. Do not let the sinful
have dominion over your soul. At
the very least pay attention, and do
what you can to balance this evil in
your own life, in whatever small ways you can. Support people trying to free child-slave cotton pickers in
Uzbekistan, for instance (just to continue with the cotton theme). Buy things produced less destructively,
and traded fairly. We’re all in
this together.
The
law, the Torah, at its heart, is
about love. God gives the people the law so that they do not fall back
into the hateful, iniquitous corruption they bore the brunt of when they were
in Egypt. Do not be like that! Do not enslave and exploit your
neighbors! Do not let an insolent
ruling class and a Pharaoh congeal over you! Do not let some have dominion over others!
And
it’s not just about those thousands of escaped slaves gathered at Mt.
Sinai. They and their descendants
– including those of us who have been adopted into Abraham’s family by faith in
Jesus – are to be the exemplary
nation, revealing in their life together God’s will of peace for the whole world!
Jesus
Christ is the living Word of God, who became flesh to dwell among us. He is
the Torah, the law, the fulfillment
of the commandments. Obeying him is obeying God’s law, and
vice-versa. And in him we see most
clearly that the essence of the law is love, God’s universal love for all creation and all people.
In
the gospel reading for today we hear Jesus even say that whoever is not against
him is for him. So it is enough simply to not work against what Jesus is doing. Someone doesn’t even have to be a
card-carrying member of Jesus’ circle, they don’t have to have taken on his
name; if they imitate and obey him by
casting out demons, that is to say, by bringing liberation into people’s lives,
by lifting people up out of bondage, that is enough.
Then
he talks about the consequences of insolence and dominion, when it causes
others, particularly the weak, to stumble or go astray. In other words, when they do things in
people’s name and with their tacit authority that actually separate them from God because they are so violently in
disobedience of God’s law. Even if
these are done by responsible leaders, the “hand,” the “foot,” and the “eye,”
this constitutes a grievous betrayal.
Jesus doesn’t talk about hell very much, but he never talks about it so
graphically as here. Causing a
gentle soul to sin unawares is a terrible thing to do.
V.
What
is most imperative in human life and the life of the whole planet is that
people follow Jesus, that we keep the law of God, that we observe Torah, that God’s commandments about how
to live together in peace be obeyed and cherished. For if we do not,
then we draw down upon ourselves the consequences, which are unrest, disorder,
inequality, violence, injustice, and fear.
This
Psalm concludes with a famous verse asking for God’s acceptance of one’s words
and thoughts. “May the words of my
mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock
and my redeemer.” It is a
beautiful general conclusion to a prayer or a sermon.
We
pray that we will be acceptable before the living God who is our rock, that is,
the sure foundation of our faith and our actions, and our redeemer, the One who
forgives, renews, and transforms us.
We pray to be made acceptable because we know how unacceptable our words
and thoughts have been. We pray
that God make us acceptable, and give us courage to fear nothing in this life,
least of all the insolent who seek dominion over us. That, fearing only God, we obey God’s law with all our hearts,
and follow God’s Messiah, Jesus, with all our words and actions.
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