The Law of the Lord – by Michele Rizoli – March 11, 2012

View Archived Sermons

 

Psalm 19 

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart

Be acceptable to you, O God, my rock and my redeemer.

***

How could we not start with that classic prelude to a sermon, when we’re looking at this beautiful psalm 19?

It starts with the firmament and narrows down to talking about the sun:

v. 4,5 For in the heavens the sun has pitched a tent.

It comes forth with the grandeur of a wedding procession

With the eagerness of an athlete ready to race.

As I have shared with you before, living in Canada I’ve learned that I am sensitive to the lack of sun in winter. In this season, during my waking hours, my sense of wellbeing often quickly aligns itself to the state of the sky. Gray day, gray mood. Sunny day, better mood. Stormy days, headaches and lack of energy, etc. etc.  (As a matter of fact, on Friday as I drove to Stratford on Hwy 8, there was a snow storm to my right and bright blue sky on my left – I didn’t know what to feel.)

About a week ago, as I was coming home from work I realized that it was light instead of dark outside. Yay! The heavens were telling me of the glory of Spring to come, with its longer days and greater sunlight. Today we lined up our clocks to reflect what is already happening out there. (Yeah, that’s right all those of you who will arrive late and have to listen to this on the web, there was a time change! J)

There is something in me that resents being so connected to or dependent on sunlight. I guess it’s the stoic protestant labouring forward no matter what adversity; who is particularly adept at ignoring emotional fluctuations (because we all know those aren’t important); the Canadian who uses furnaces and air conditioners to control indoor temperatures to be a boring 20ish degrees and indoor lighting to be x amount lumens that keep us in broad daylight even in windowless rooms no matter what season.

But when I stop and think, there is another part of me that senses a kind of deep wisdom (unrelated to mood) in being sensitive to what is going on in nature. I like the changes, I aspire to be even more connected and to listen, as it were, to what the cosmos is telling. Part of me wants to embrace being increasingly under the influence of seasons, landscapes, light, dark, hot, cold, high, low, wet, dry. Because I understand that being human and being on this planet Earth are all part of the same story.

The writer of Psalm 19 (from here on called, “the psalmist”) – without the distraction of electrical lights and clocks trying to tell him/her what time it was – was tapping into this kind of wordless wisdom of connection: the heavens are telling the glory of God. Clearly the psalmist was in awe of the sheer power of the sun and the moon and the stars as he or she experienced them. The constancy and pervasiveness especially of the sun and the sun’s warmth said something about God’s handiwork; it said this in a deep way, it spoke without language.

Living in Toronto the bright lights, that we think we need, can distract us from this … glory. (Although it was pretty hard to escape the beautiful full moon these last few nights.)

Since this psalm was written, we do actually know a lot more about what is going on in the skies. We know things about the broader cosmos, even beyond our sun, the complexities of weather systems, tides and ocean currents, wind, and other things that “day after day tell their story, and night after night reveal the depth of their understanding” as one translation puts it. (In fact, some might say we’ve grown arrogant and meddled with the wisdom of these things.) Recently Jonathan S. posted a link online that shows a graphic representation of the scale of the known universe.[1] You can zoom in to quantum foam (0.000 000 0001 yoctometers) or out to the last visible border of the universe 140 yotameters (that’s 10 to the power of 24 worth of zeroes). 

The psalmist and I have vastly different worldviews, even if we have hugely dissimilar concepts about how the world came about and how we understand this power we name as God, we agree on one point: to behold the world we live in and the one we can conceptualize is to gain a deep and spiritual perspective on things.  I am in my own kind of awe of God’s handiwork, just like the psalm says. 

But half way through, the psalm seems to change topics: The Law of the Lord is perfect, the rules are trusted, the purposes are right, the commands are radiant, the fear of the Lord purifies, the decrees are true; more precious than gold and sweeter than honey.

Honestly, the psalmist kinda loses me here, I get awe for nature but I’m just not feelin’ the awe for the law, you know what I mean?

What is this about and what does it have to do with the first part of the psalm?

It would seem that the psalm is comparing the wordless witness and constancy and clarity of the “heavens” with the actual words of God, as in the Torah, as in the Ten Words (or Ten Commandments, as we call them) or as in all that stuff in Leviticus we heard about a few Sundays ago.  Clearly, the words “law, decrees, commands, precepts” don’t mean the same for me as for the psalmist or at least they don’t inspire us in the same ways.

As a first reaction, I’m biased against rules and laws. I tend to see laws as taking something away, not as refreshing the soul, making simple people wise, giving joy to the heart and clarity of sight. Or I just might skim over regulations, like when I click “I have read and agree to the terms” when Google or Facebook make another attempt at taking away my privacy. 

Because the psalmist and I seem to be on different pages, as it were, I think it might be time to apply a little something folks like to call “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It’s the idea that “accounts of events are told from a particular perspective and that all interpretations of those accounts are coloured by the perspective of the interpreter.”[2] In other words, there’s more to this text: there’s what I’m bringing to the reading and what the psalmist is bringing (not to mention what you’re all reading into this and what all of us might be missing altogether because of assumptions we make).

What am I bringing? 

Well, come to think of it, there is an instance of the law in the strictest sense that still amazes me here in Canada in a culture-shock kind of way even after 20 years. In Brazil, where I grew up, stop signs in traffic are a mere suggestion or perhaps even a dare. But here in Toronto, it’s different; just look at the four-way stop at the intersection of Rosedale Valley Road and Park Road, downtown. At rush hour, there is always a long line of traffic and all the cars come to a full stop e
ach at their own stop sign, then proceed in perfect turns once the other 3 cars that were there before have cleared the intersection. Nobody honks, nobody advances their turn, nobody swears. It’s a thing of beauty, I am in awe every time. 

So I guess one piece of the puzzle of how law is positive, is in its ability to avoid chaos. But I’m still not getting much gold and honey from stop signs. 

Here’s another example from my experience. When I visited the small village of Taizé in Southern France, I expected a bucolic setting with amazing French food and wine and a prayerful atmosphere. What I found was a prayerful atmosphere and a very rustic camp-like setting, a couple thousand young adults needing to be fed each meal and very basic food (we’re talking lentils with a bit of spam and carrots and instant coffee at best served on a plastic plate with a spoon). On the first day, when I went to throw out about half of the gray goopy glob that had been plopped on my plate as lunch, I was quietly approached by someone who gently let me know that: “We prefer not to throw food away here. If you can’t eat it, try to find someone who will.” Alrighty, then. Over the course of the week, there were many unwritten rules that were gently modeled and that shaped the behaviour of everyone there: the habit of prayer four times a day, the habit of silence, the habit of volunteering for clean up, and of course, the habit of not wasting food. Because of the rules, we developed some new habits. None of it was written down, as far as I could tell. 

I came to see the precepts, as they were, as the structure that enabled thousands of people to get along, live simply, and worship together. We signed on willingly, for the good of all involved. By the end of the week I was used to it, didn’t even have to think about it. This might start to get at what the psalmist had in mind about rules being life-giving. 

OK, that’s some of what I’m bringing. What were some of the psalmist’s reference points about the Law?

Well, it probably meant the commandments given to the people of Israel at Sinai. As Doug reminded us when he spoke about Leviticus, the handing down of the Law wasn’t about imposing a bunch of restrictive do’s and don’ts but rather a huge shift from thinking the world was in the hands of capricious demons to living like the world is in the hands of the one God who gave people a choice about how to live together. The Law of the Lord is what set up a bunch of fugitive slaves as a new people with a new way of doing and thinking about things. It laid out the ways to be in relationship: personal, economic and in worship. It was God’s vision for how God’s people would live together as God’s people. That strikes me as tremendously life-giving and life affirming, honey and gold, just as the psalm says.

There is another important perspective to bring to our interpretation of this psalm:

As I mentioned, the word for Law in verse 7 is Torah. Torah, in Jewish tradition can mean many things. It can mean the first five books of the Bible (Can any youth or child here tell me what they are? Genesis, Exodus, Number, Leviticus and Deuteronomy), it can mean the Hebrew bible as a whole, the content of the scrolls in a synagogue, it can mean the whole body of Jewish law and teachings including a long tradition of rabbinic interpretations of scripture written and oral, it can mean the act of ongoing study of scripture, of ongoing application and devotion to God’s way of doing things. As one author puts it, Torah is revelation,[3] God’s voice, it is how one discerns the divine purpose in a given context. As I prepared this sermon I began to think of Torah, the Law of the Lord, in a similar way as we often talk and think about The Kingdom of God. And here I found echoes of the Sermon of the Mount: making wise the simple, giving joy to the heart, giving clarity to the eyes. 

I need to take a small detour to remind us that as Christians, our experience of the concept of “law” in the Bible can still be coloured by centuries of misunderstanding of the Jewish faith as legalistic – it could be, can be, but so can some forms of Christianity and many other religions. It happens when people try to reduce God’s voice to rules and regulations. Or we might mistakenly think of Jesus as aiming to overthrow the Law (capital L) in essence.  True, Jesus (and the apostle Paul after him) did offer up a serious critique of people who were sticking to the letter of the law but missing the spirit of the law. I don’t think either Jesus or Paul would have dismissed the loving and awe-filled sentiments towards Torah that are expressed in Psalm 19.

If we consider where we are in the Lenten story, it is precisely because Jesus treasured Torah, that he became so exasperated and cleared the vendors out of the temple in Jerusalem. He saw that what was meant for worship “had deteriorated to empty tradition, and at worst, to an excuse for financial extortion.”[4] This public and passionate display of wanting to restore the true meaning of the Law likely contributed in a big way to getting Jesus killed.

Back to the psalm. By putting the effects of the sun and the effects of the Torah side by side in this poem, the psalmist makes a comparison. Nothing escapes the sun’s scope, nothing escapes God’s purview. Both thoughts are wonderful and awe-inspiring.

So what is one to do with this realization – other than realize it?

Well, the psalmist was driven to prayer for more faithful living, effectively saying:  God, I’m reminded that living as you wish me to live is its own reward. Shine your sun on my life and show me what is hidden because I want to live up to your standards. 

Reading this psalm I’m driven further to wonder: What strikes awe in us? What do we have in place to reinforce our desire to live out God’s vision in our time? How are we avoiding being presumptuous and hiding our shortcomings? What are the rules and regulations, the unspoken and unwritten laws we are living under as we seek to be Christ’s church in the world? What habits are we developing and replicating? What instincts are we nurturing?  What will be the words of your mouth and the meditations of your heart after this psalm?

Some final reminders:

First a verse from a hymn we sang before:

Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill and everyone a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above would drain the oceans dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole, through stretched from earth to sky

The love of God, how rich how pure, how measureless and strong!

It shall forevermore endure the saints’ and angels’ song.[5] 

According to the Talmud, when Rabbi Hillel was asked to sum up Torah (while a potentia
l convert stood on one foot), he said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary – go and learn it.”[6] 

Christian scriptures[7] tell us that an interpreter of the law asked Jesus a similar question: ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ 

Surely this is more to be desired than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than the honey and drippings of the honeycomb. Amen.