University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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Psalm 1
A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
July 4, 2010

            Of all the Old Testament books, my guess is that the book of Psalms is the most treasured and beloved of all.  In season and out of season, generation after generation, faithful people have turned to the Psalms as a most helpful resource for conversation with God about things that matter most.[1] Many of us, at least of certain age, can remember memorizing some of the psalms as children, and their verses may well accompany us still in times of trouble or grief, celebration or memory.

            We will look at a few of the psalms this summer, but we begin today where the book of Psalms begins...with the first psalm. The first psalm and the second lift up themes that are central to all 150 psalms and thus provide a kind of theological introduction to all of the psalms that follow.[2] The first is arguably better known than the second, in part because of its rather dramatic distinction between the wicked and the righteous... all in the context of an affirmation about "blessedness" or "happiness."  Professor John Holbert says,

This first psalm is the first psalm, precisely because it wants to announce in no uncertain terms how persons of faith are to navigate life's choppy waters.  Happiness and blessedness (the first word of the psalm needs to be translated in both senses at once) are the direct result of choosing rightly the places to walk, stand and sit, and the persons to whom to listen.

For ancient Israelites, religious terms like wickedness, sin, and scoffing had a more immediate resonance with hearers than they do now.... But [that doesn't mean] we should consign the psalm to the dustbin.... The advice the psalmist provides for those who would be blessed and happy remains important even now...[3]

            And what is that advice?  Who are the "blessed" ones?  They are those whose delight is in the Law of the Lord... those whose delight is in Torah.  Now, what does that mean?  Professor Holbert explains:

Torah is "law," but it is much more than laws.... Torah comes from the verb "to teach," and hence means instruction. But even that does not quite capture the full sense. More [fully], Torah means the sum total of all the gifts God offered to Israel in what became the Bible: laws, poems, stories, wisdom, covenants, and rituals. To delight in Torah, to ponder Torah, is to swim in the vast ocean of God's love of and commands for God's people.

What Psalm 1 affirms is that all we need to know about God and ourselves can be found in Torah, in a deep and rich appropriation and meditation on its surprises. The psalmist believed that only if one is steeped in Torah can one hope to survive the risks, the dangers, the ever-new horrors that the world continues to present. However grayer [our] world...is now... [we need the psalmist's clear proclamation that] in the Torah may still be discovered the resources needed to steer our boats past the shoals of [life's choppy waters] and toward the still waters promised by the God who gave Torah to us all.[4]

            What becomes clear, as we read the words of the inaugural psalm in the summer of 2010, is that there is something of a disconnect between what the psalm affirms and what many people - maybe even we ourselves - believe.  Indeed, Psalm 1 proposes an understanding of happiness, life, prosperity, good and evil that is at odds with much of popular wisdom in our time.  At the heart of that tension is the firm belief of the Psalmist that God is and should be at the center of human life. Old Testament scholar Clint McCann says it this way:          

The understanding of reality in Psalm 1 is thoroughly God-centered; the perception of reality among [most of our contemporaries, on the other hand,] is almost inevitably self-centered.  This means that happiness tends to be understood essentially as enjoying oneself; one's life goal is understood in terms of...self-fulfillment; prosperity becomes a matter of attaining what one wants; and righteousness and wickedness become moral categories that are measured among some by the ability or inability of persons to [live by] a certain set of rules and among others by the ability or inability to enact particular programs and policies. In either case, righteousness is measured in terms of a capacity of the self; it is essentially self-righteousness.

For Psalm 1 (and the rest of the psalter), happiness involves not enjoying oneself but delight in the teaching of God. The goal of life is not to be found in self-fulfillment but in praising God.  Prosperity does not involve getting what one wants; rather, it comes from being connected to the source of life.... The righteous are not primarily persons who make the proper choices or implement the proper policies, but those who know that their lives belong to God and their futures are secured by God.  In the book of Psalms, the righteous are constantly assailed, persecuted and threatened, while the wicked visibly prosper. The prosperity of the righteous is real but hidden.

What is so unsettling about all of this is that what Psalm 1 and the rest of the psalter call "wickedness" is perhaps what North American culture promotes as the highest virtue - autonomy.  What generally marks maturity among contemporary North Americans is self-sufficiency.  Wanting or needing help, whether from others or from God, is taken as a sign of weakness or instability. The effect is to produce a society of isolated selves.  The irony is tragic - the pursuit of self-fulfillment yields self-alienation....

It is not surprising that contemporary societies of [autonomous,] isolated selves consistently fail to produce people who are "happy," even though these societies are among the wealthiest, healthiest and most educated in human history. In [the psalms], to be autonomous, to be alienated from God and other people, is to "perish."[5]

            All these centuries later I think there is still great wisdom in that conviction.  And it weighs heavily on my heart today. Today, as all of you know, is the Fourth of July. It is the 234^th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.  I imagine that there is a hidden irony in choosing to read this psalm on this day of national celebration... on the day when we celebrate a document that trumpeted the "certain unalienable rights" granted to humankind by their Creator - "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 

            Psalm 1 wants to tell us about happiness, and it begins by saying what won't help us get there. "Happy are those who don't follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers."  Three things to avoid, it seems to say, perhaps ranked in order from the most to the least important.  "Beware of the advice of the wicked" seems like important counsel.  But "scoffing?"  Given occasionally to my own fits of sarcasm, my first reading was that scoffing seemed more like an art form than a real danger.

            But Biblical scholar Artur Weiser says I'm wrong... that I miss the subtlety of the Psalmist's words here.  Psalm 1 does list the dangers in ranked importance, he says, but in reverse order... from the smallest to the greatest iniquity.  "The worst sin," he says, "is...taking a seat in the meeting of scoffers and actively participating in their mocking of the things that are sacred." [6] And why is that so bad? It is because in scoffing cynicism we mock the very things that might make us whole, blessed and happy.  In scornful superiority, we separate ourselves from one another and from God in prideful autonomy.  The most seductive thing about cynicism is that it sounds so wise, so sophisticated.  That's why the Psalmist sees scoffing as such a danger. The first psalm is a wisdom psalm, concerned with separating what is truly wise from that which merely appears to be wisdom. Cynicism is pseudo-wisdom masquerading as the real thing. It was a cynic that Oscar Wilde once described as one "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."  Cynicism, real cynicism, poisons the very wells from which we drink.[7]

            There is, I believe, a growing and corrosive cynicism at play in this country, and I fear it is tearing apart this land we love.  Our inability to be civil in our dealings with one another has a deleterious effect on government at every level.  Our lack of respect and our mockery of others infect everything from senate hearings to online message boards.   We have become a nation of scoffers, deeply divided, more interested in casting blame and in attacking the character of those with whom we disagree than in doing the hard work of finding common ground and of pulling together for the common good. 

            In his apocalyptic novel, Love in the Ruins, southern writer Walker Percy envisioned a time in the future of America when the polarization and the corrosive cynicism have done their damage and the nation is in total disarray.  Near the beginning of the novel, on a future Fourth of July, the protagonist-narrator Tom More wonders aloud if God has removed at last his blessing from America; "Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places," he says,[8] sounding for all the world like the Psalmist. He looks around and describes the extent of the damage: 

Our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other, race against race, right against left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago against Cicero.... Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during the Black Plague. Some southern states have established diplomatic ties with [African nations]. Minnesota and Oregon have their own consulates in Sweden (where so many deserters from these states live).

[Partisan polarization has become even worse than it used to be.] The Old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party .... The Old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party....  The Center did not hold [even though] the Gross Domestic Product continued to rise.... There are Left states and Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns, but there are no center towns.[9]

A bit later, More looks around at the dysfunctional, dying country all around him, and says:

Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it down was things stopped working and no one wanted to be a repairman.[10]

            But of course, it will always be easier to sit on the sidelines and scoff than it will to roll up our sleeves and try to make things work... always easier to shout disparaging remarks than to struggle to find common ground and common good. Besides, it's merely a piece of fiction, one could say. One could say that. What I sense, however, is that we have become a nation of scoffers and cynics in these days.  And I wonder if maybe the Psalmist wasn't right, after all.  Maybe such cynicism is indeed our most pressing danger.

Happy (blessed) are those    
   who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
   or sit in the seat of scoffers;
² but their delight is in the Torah of the Lord,
   and on Torah they meditate day and night.
³ 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.

⁴ The wicked are not so,
   but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
⁵ Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
   nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
⁶ for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
   but the way of the wicked will perish.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, Minneapolis, Augsburg Publishing House, 1984, 15.

[2] Carolyn J. Sharp, "Psalm 1: Exegetical Perspective," Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 2, Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 533.

[3] John C. Holbert, "Psalm 1: Homiletical Perspective," Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 2, Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 533, 535.

[4] Holbert, 535, 537.

[5]J. Clinton McCann, Jr., The Book of Psalms, New Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 4, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1996, 686-7.

[6] Artur Weiser, Old Testament Library, Psalms, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1962, 104.

[7] This paragraph draws on the insights of my colleague Patrick Willson and a sermon he once preached on this text.

[8] Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: the adventures of a bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, 5.

[9] Percy, 17-18.

[10] Percy, 62-63.