Living Well
“Living Well” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! I am happy to back in the pulpit and feeling better than I did last week. It was a gift to me and I hope to you to hear more about SAWs, Servants at Work from their staff who was with us, and also to see photos and hear about the ongoing Brethren Disaster Ministries work in Kentucky from Anne Griffith. Service which we do for others without expecting payment for ourselves is part of how we build up communities, and build our own sense of community.
Last week was the first Sunday of Lent, but this is the day that I am going to be digging into our Lenten theme, The Wondrous Works of God. I hope you have been able to pick up a copy of the devotional book — there are more available and some are in the mail — and the bookmark provided by Worship Team. I’ll be referencing these through our services in March. Today’s text is definitely one which is setting the stage for things to come. Before we look more closely at it, I have a question for you:
Slide What kind of tree are you today? Here are nine options — I’ll give you a few moments to think about which one fits you best this morning. There are no right or wrong answers, but there is a range of expression here for sure. Ready? We’ll start in the upper left corner as 1: 1, 2, 3 4,5,6 7,8,9 etc. Kids, you can do this too.
Here’s another question: what kind of tree does God want us to be? I think the answer might look something like this Slide Tiffany tree
This brings us to Psalm 1. There’s a lot of rich material in the psalms, and it certainly isn’t all about trees. The Thee Seekers Sunday School class is studying the psalms currently, and for others who have studied the psalms this might be familiar, but here is a quick overview: There are 150 psalms in the collection, also called the psalter, which comes from the Greek word for “song.” Many of these would have sung in worship, although we have no record of what they would have sounded like. Many are attributed to King David, although some reference historical events which happened after his death and could not have been written by him. Types of psalms include prayers for help, songs of praise, and instruction for life. The collection took shape over centuries, and it became grouped into five books within the total of 150. Some psalms are long, some are fairly brief. Lodema read the entirety of Psalm 1 for us this morning — it’s only 6 verses long. All of the psalms are worth our attention, but this one is significant because of its position and its intention.
Psalm 1 was composed as an introduction to the 149 psalms which follow, and like any good introduction, it lays out the rationale for what is to come. If you have your Bible with you, I invite you to open it to Psalm 1. My study Bible has headings in italic which would have been much later additions. Do any of your Bibles include those? What does the heading form Psalm 1 say? Mine says The Two Ways. Psalm 1 is a signpost which says this collection of prayers, worship, and instruction is to tell the people of God how to live well. It is a prescription which also has a warning label: live well . . . or else. In order to live well, we must follow the law of the Lord, the path of righteousness. There are other paths — the path of sinners and scoffers — those paths lead to destruction and death. The psalmist uses an illustration to give us a picture of the wicked — they are like chaff blown away by the wind, impermanent and disposable. In contrast, those who delight in God’s law are like trees planted by streams of water which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all they do, they prosper.
Which brings me to the tree you see here — a fruit tree, with a stream of water in the background. This, as you probably noticed, is not a real tree. It’s an image of a tree, designed by an artist who worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany. Its fruit is always in season and its leaves will never wither because they are locked in place in this beautiful and unchanging stained glass window. This is an ideal of a tree, not a real tree.
The description of those who love the Lord and delight in God’s law in Psalm 1 is a bit like this; it portrays an idealized and stylized version of what a righteous life is like. This is a fine and understandable thing to do at the beginning of the psalms: to hold up a beautiful image of flourishing and fruitfulness for the righteous, and a life of impermanence and judgement and death for the wicked. Thankfully, the next 149 psalms fill in some of the nuance which comes with trying to follow God’s law — feeling lost, abandoned, or mocked by sinners, as well as proclamation, praise, and the care of God. An underlying theme of the psalms is God’s steadfast love, the Hebrew word is hesed. God’s steadfast love is the river which sustains us whatever our circumstances. The rest of the psalms in no way contradict this image of flourishing trees which we get introduced to in Psalm 1, but they flesh it out, and add texture and nuance and reality. Because although the big picture of our lives is that God’s love never forsakes us, most of us have experienced in our daily living that not everything we do prospers — even when we are trying to do the right thing.
This Lent, as we ponder the wondrous works of God, I hope we can consider what it means to live well. Surely living well is more than simply getting everything we want at little or no inconvenience to ourselves. That sounds more like the path of hedonism or self-indulgence to me. Neither does living well seem like denying ourselves all happiness or pleasure; I find plenty of joy in the image of tree bursting forth with foliage and fruit, and there’s that delight in the law of the Lord. Perhaps living well is not about me at all, or at least not about only me. Psalm 1 begins, Happy are those . . . I believe that to live well means that our first allegiance is to God, to love the Lord our God and to take delight in God’s law even when it does not take us down the path of least resistance. But to live well also means, in the words of our favorite New Testament prophet, Jesus, to love our neighbor as ourselves. We do not grow and bear fruit simply to prove how good we are at making fruit; we are called to help those around us flourish, too. Trees grow together so they can shelter each other from storms, and so that they can cross-pollinate. They share equally in God’s resources of sun and rain.
Carol Davis in our Lenten devotions — spoiler alert, this is coming in the next week — notes that after humans, the living thing most often mentioned in the Bible is trees. In some religious traditions, trees are considered sacred because they are a bridge between earth and heaven: they are rooted in the earth, but reach into the sky. That is a pretty good metaphor for God’s people, and for being human. How we live on earth and how we enable those around us to grow and be fruitful is determined by how deeply we are rooted, but it is being rooted which allows us to reach toward heaven.
I want to close with a word about the metal tokens that are glued to the Lenten bookmarks. You can leave it glued on, or pull it off to hold or to carry in your pocket or your wallet or someplace you will see it. The tree is on the front, and on the back it says, Live Well. The paths of righteousness and the ways of sinners have been laid out in God’s law: not only the writings of the psalms, but other places in the Bible as well. Those are God’s paths, and they don’t change just because we wish they were different, or because we have plausible excuses, or whatever. But our lives are not set in stone, or cast in metal, or frozen in stained glass. We always have the choice to put our feet on the path of righteousness; we don’t make that choice once when we give our lives to Jesus Christ or when we join the church, we make that choice every day, many times a day, every time we choose delight in God’s law and the flourishing of ourselves and others. We are works in progress, and like trees planted by streams of water, we are part of the wondrous work of God. Amen