Speaker 1: Because the Psalms were never about God as much as they were about us. It doesn't mean God isn't in there, and it doesn't mean these words aren't inspired. It simply means that what we are reading is divine poetry inspired by spirit to speak to the experience of humanity before God. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here.
We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome today. My name is Jeremy, and this is it. I know June 21 is officially the start of summer, but here at Commons, it is always really the Sunday after Stampede breakfast.
And so let me say before we begin one more time, thank you to over a 150 volunteers who helped us pull off not one, but two Stampede breakfasts this year. All of you are amazing. Combined, we served 2,400 people, over 5,000 pancakes, and really, it was an amazing Sunday for us to be out there together with our neighbors. So thank you to everyone who came, everyone who served, everyone who ate. It really was an incredibly fun day.
And also, I know that this might not seem like a big deal, but last week, we served breakfast to 2,400 people. And by the end of the day, we had generated about eight bins full of compost and half a bag of trash total that was destined for the landfill. So thank you everyone for making it a lot of fun and also a really low footprint day, making sure that we composted all of our supplies that day. Now, along with that, we do also want to give you another quick update on what's happening with our denomination. We've been trying to communicate as clearly as possible about the ECC's decision to remove a church that had a similar posture towards the LGBTQ community as we do.
Our team is continuing to dialogue with the ECC, and we want you to know that those conversations have been full of grace and peace, and we really do appreciate that. At the same time, our commitment to our community and to the LGBTQ community within Commons remains absolutely unchanged. And so over the summer, our team and our board have committed ourselves to praying and to listening for God's leading as we navigate all of the different conversations and relationships that define and shape a church like Commons. We really believe that there is another way through difficult conversations, and that faithful people that love Jesus can and will come to different interpretations of scripture, and that we really can hold all of that difference within community if we keep Jesus at the center and we commit to treat each other with generosity and equality. And that's not easy because difference is hard, but it's also why grace is such an compelling concept in a world that struggles to hold together.
And so we invite your prayers during this season. We would love to hear from you as you reflect this summer because we really believe that we are better together. And that's why we believe that in the end that love wins the day. Now, at the same time today, we are jumping into a new series today because this summer, we are spending the summer with the Psalms. And I actually think this is going to be a lot of fun.
The Psalms are this beautiful collection of poetry that both the Christian and the Jewish traditions have found great comfort in over the millennia. They sweep through all kinds of different emotions and postures. I think one of the things that we miss sometimes in our contemporary expressions of church is the willingness of the Psalms to name some of the struggles that we often want to push to the side. The Psalms will call God a liar. They will call God unjust and aloof.
The Psalms have no problem calling on God to do sometimes some wicked things on the writer's behalf because the Psalms have some terrible theology, and that's what's so beautiful about them, That God isn't afraid of our bad ideas. And in fact, finding space to give voice to some of our misconceptions is part of how we disabuse ourselves of them. I have a five, almost six year old that's living in my house right now, and what I'm learning is that when he gets on a rant, interrupting him to correct him in the moment is not nearly as helpful as I thought it would be. And so sometimes the most gracious, the most loving, the most helpful response that I can offer as a parent is to sit and to listen and to wait until he has said what he needs to say so that after that and after I have listened, we can come back and we can talk, and we can begin then to heal what was wrong in the first place. And the Psalms often feel like that for me, and that's incredibly comforting for me.
And today, we're actually gonna start at the start with Psalm one, but before we jump in, we do need to ground ourselves in some background to the Psalms. So if you were to open your bible, you would find the Psalms in about the middle, and there are likely a 150 of them in your bible. I say likely because if you happen to be a Greek speaking Jewish person here in the room, then you get a 150 bonus psalm that was present in the Septuagint. Or, if you come from the Middle East and you use a Syriac bible, then you get the bonus of Psalm one fifty two all the way to one fifty five, so good for you. And just to make things even more complicated, if you are using a standard Hebrew Bible, then you will also have 150 Psalms, but they will be numbered differently than ours.
And this is something that every first year Hebrew student in our church inevitably emails me about because they are looking up a psalm in Hebrew, and the translation makes no sense to them. And that's because even though the psalms themselves are the same, they are actually reading a different psalm because the numbers are different. And without going into too much detail here, that comes from making different decisions about where one psalm ends and where another begins. You can imagine that when you have this big long scroll of poetry with no punctuation to signal the transitions and no verses to mark them out, that can be kind of confusing. That's kind of the beauty of the psalms, that they belong to the community.
Now, of course, somebody wrote these different poems at some time, at some point along the way, they put these words down. And we are going to do our work this summer as we try to uncover what is buried beneath these words and understand the depth of meaning that the authors invested in them. But this is what any good poetry does. It becomes the property of the community. It's why the rabbis say, you never do theology based on the Psalms because the Psalms were never about God as much as they were about us.
It doesn't mean God isn't in there, and it doesn't mean these words aren't inspired. It simply means that what we are reading is divine poetry inspired by spirit to speak to the experience of humanity before God. But today is Psalm one. So let me read it before we pray. Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever they do prospers. Not so the wicked. They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. Let's pray. God of song and singing, of poetry and praise, would we learn to make the Psalms of your scripture ours today? Might they become our words. Might they give voice to our hurts.
May they express our joy. Would they bring us more closely into your presence today? And even as the language is sometimes unfamiliar, we pray that your spirit would be present in our reading. That you might help us to see ourselves hidden in these songs. If our spirits are dry and we need to be refreshed.
If our minds are dulled and we need wisdom. If our bodies are in pain and in need of healing. May we come to find each of these moments met and renewed as we engage the poetry of your people. Speak life and truth and remind us that beauty really can change the world. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen. K. Today is Psalm one, and so we need to cover contrasting parallels, compounding parallels, chiastic parallels, and how God is always for you. But to do that well, we have to remember that this is poetry that we are looking at today. And I don't know about you, but I am no poet.
I love words and how we blend them, and I do spend a lot of time crafting how I speak after all. But I also remember studying poetry in public school and being sort of unimpressed with the whole operation. Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forest of the night. What a mortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? I mean, that doesn't even rhyme.
What's going on here? And why does he spell tiger with a y? What kind of hipster wrote this poem to begin with? But then as I got older, I started reading more poetry for myself, and I kind of fell in love with certain poets. One of my favorites is Billy Collins.
You are the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew or the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard or the plums on the counter or the house of cards. You are certainly not the pine scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine scented air. It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the general's head, but you are not even close to being a field of cornflowers at dusk. A quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in the boathouse, but it might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of the rain on the roof. I mean, come on. Who knows what that's about, but it's beautiful, isn't it?
By the way, both of those poems continue well on past what I read. The Tiger by William Blake and Litany by Billy Collins. You should read them both. But there is this interesting tension where analyzing poetry can sometimes rob it. And yet at the same time, in any good poem, there are things going on between the words that we miss if we don't slow down for them.
And Psalm one is no different. Now, this poem has six verses broken into four stanzas. And there are a couple different poetic devices employed throughout, and we're gonna take them piece by piece today. Our first stanza is verses one and two in your bible. Let's read it here.
Says, blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. And already here, there are two distinct Hebrew things that are going on. As in Hebrew poetry, the primary structural feature is what we call parallelism. Now, are rhymes and rhythms in Hebrew poetry, and there are actually some in this poem, but it gets very difficult to translate ideas faithfully and make them rhyme in a new language. And so usually, it's the thematic parallelism that wins out in our bibles, and that's okay Because the primary feature of Hebrew poetry is parallel.
And this is where you say something, and then you say it again. And that comes in all kinds of different forms. And we're gonna look at three different types of parallelism in this poem. But the basic structure of Hebrew poetry is couplets that are playing off of each other. And here, you can see that basic structure in the way that I've laid it out on the screen.
Blessed is the one who does not follow the way of the wicked. Blessed is the one who does follow the way of the Lord. So for this writer, these ideas are the same thing. Now that might not sound all that dramatic just yet, but listen to what that parallel is saying to us. It's telling us that the way of God is not ascetic, it is joyful.
Now that's not aesthetic or ecstatic. It's ascetic, and there's a big difference. Aesthetic is having to do with severe self discipline or punishment characterized by abstention and humorlessness. By paralleling these two ideas, the writer is saying right off the bat that not walking in the way of the wicked, not standing with sinners, not sitting in the company of mockers, this is not primarily about all of the things we don't do. This is actually all about where we choose to find our joy in the world.
I was sitting with someone this week over coffee, and they were recounting to me this list of choices that they wish they could take back, mistakes that they had made. That's okay. We all have things that we would do differently now, things we see differently in hindsight. That's fine. We have to remember that frustration over who we were won't actually help us become who we want to be.
And look, it's good to be introspective. That's healthy to take stock. But part of what the poet is reminding us of here is that you're going to need more than regret to move you forward. Willpower isn't enough. You need a source of joy on the other side.
And we all need something that we're moving toward, not just something that we're moving away from. In fact, I think what the poet is saying is that avoiding wickedness only works when it is matched by an investment in something beautiful. I tend to think that a lot of our religious effort is far too caught up in avoiding evil instead of embracing the goodness that will actually change us from the inside. But there's more than that here. Let's look at the verbs in this sentence.
Blessed in the one who does not walk or stand or sit, but instead blessed is the one who delights and meditates. And so even while we've got this contrasting parallel between what it means to pursue good or evil, we've also got this sort of straight line intensification that's happening in the verbs that are linking it all together. Walk, stand, sit, delight, meditate. Now verbs are always important in any language. Obviously, they convey the movement of the story.
So a good rule with any poem is to think about the verbs and what they're saying. But in biblical Hebrew, verbs are actually incredibly important because the language is so limited. A working vocabulary of biblical Hebrew actually has less than 1,000 words in it. That's because the language is very concrete and very visual. So in Hebrew, if you are angry, your nose is red, and if your spirit leaves you, your throat closes.
And so when we picture someone who walks and then stands and then sits with someone, who delights in them and then meditates on their words, what's being described here is the progression of a relationship. Imagine you meet someone, along a path somewhere, and you strike up a conversation, and you find yourself engrossed by it. And eventually, you reach the point where your paths are set to diverge, but you decide to stop and talk for a while. And then eventually, you choose a coffee shop to sit, and you go, and you talk, and you converse, and you have a really great time, and you find yourself thinking about what they said to you that night as you go to bed. And I know that sounds like a montage from a rom com starring Gwyneth Paltrow, but you kinda get the idea.
Right? The language here is inherently visual, and it's exactly what the original audience is hearing and picking up on as they read. Let me go to John Goldingay's translation of this stanza. I think he does a really good job bringing this across. He says, the blessings of someone who has not walked by the counsel of the faithless or stood along the way of the wrongdoers or lived in the settlement of the arrogant is his delight in Yahweh's instruction.
He murmurs about it day and night. So he's being a little less strictly literal here, but I think he's actually done a really good job in making it harder for us to miss the intent of the poet, making it flow right from the first into the second half or the parallel, this building intensification. What's beautiful about that in the context of the parallel is that that movement works both ways. None of us end up living in the settlement of the arrogant after one choice, and none of us find ourselves fully invested in the story of God because of one good moment. What matters is a lifetime of choices.
Eugene Peterson wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. That book was actually about the Psalms of Ascent. Those are Psalms one twenty to one thirty four in your bible, but the title applies just as easily here. Because if you find your place or yourself in a place that you don't want to be, surrounded by people that you know aren't helping, you living in the settlement of the arrogant, it's important to realize you didn't get there by mistake. Now I don't mean you got there intentionally.
Rarely do we ever end up where we don't want to be purposefully. What I mean is that wherever you are, you got there through a series of choices. You walked, you stood, you sat, you meditated, and actually I'm realizing that my notes here say medicated, which might be also true what's going on even though it's a typo. What that means is that you got here through a series of choices, and you get out of there through a series of choices as well. Life is about compound interest, and I'm not talking about your bank accounts.
I'm talking about the fact that your choices pay dividends somewhere down the line. Often, the way that you turn things around and the way that you make change in your life is not particularly dramatic. It's subtle, and it's fragile, and it starts small, and it builds over time into something remarkable. I think sometimes we have this image of our lives drawn in big sweeping gestures, but the truth is more often like this poem, it is actually a long series of small steps in the right direction that define us. So here's my advice.
You wanna make changes? You wanna forgive someone? You wanna switch careers? You wanna be more generous? You wanna tell a new story about yourself?
Start small, celebrate wins, stick with it, and know where you're going. Because you ended up here after a series of choices, and you will end up there at the end of another series if you can be patient and kind and generous enough with yourself along the way. Right now, maybe you're not ready to delight and meditate on the word of God, and that's okay. Because maybe walking along the path with God, standing and sitting come first, and your direction where you're pointed is always going to be more important than your position. Now, that's the first stanza.
The second says this, that person who we've just been introduced to, they are like a tree planted by streams of water. A tree which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever they do prospers. And again, we can see that parallel structure here, although this time it is much more straightforward. The second half is simply a restatement of the original idea whose leaf does not wither because they are planted by a stream.
Whatever they do prospers because they produce fruit in season. But again, you can notice the intensification that's happening in the verbs of the poem. We've gone from walking to standing to sitting to delighting to meditating and now being planted. And there's even this neat little thing in the Hebrew here that helps to link it all together because the poet is doing something interesting with pronouns here. In Hebrew, what it technically says is that person is like a tree planted by streams of water.
He yields his fruit in season. Its leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. So it's kinda subtle, but basically we have the poet switching back and forth between pronouns that refer to the tree as the simile and pronouns that refer to the person who's the subject of the poem. It's flipping back and forth, and it's sort of this neat linkage that we miss by cleaning up the grammar in English.
It's not a mistake, though. It's very intentional in choice to further the imagery for us. But being planted might not seem like a big deal. Remember, we're talking about The Middle East here. This is not an area where trees grow willy nilly.
This is a semi arid climate, and everyone knows that trees, particularly fruit trees, do not grow uncultivated in this region. Again, the point, like the whole poem so far, is intentionality. The idea that good things take time and good work is worth the effort. So this poem is meant to be beautiful. It's meant to capture our imagination.
It's using a bunch of Hebrew techniques, but really this poem is meant to teach us and form us. It wants to point us in a right, good, healthy direction. That's why this poem is known as a wisdom psalm. Peter Craggy was a British scholar who actually taught most of his career here at the University of Calgary before he passed, and he once wrote, this psalm was probably not composed for use in formal worship or singing, but rather as a literary and poetic composition expressing with remarkable clarity, a category of wisdom literature. Now that's great.
But you may be looking at your watch and realizing that we are exactly now halfway through Psalm one, and our time is almost up. And I wish I had another half hour to talk about the second half in the same kind of detail, but, actually, we now already have all the tools we need to see what's going second half of this poem. Because the second half of Psalm one is the final example of a parallel we'll see today. In verses one and two, we have an example of a contrasting parallel, the way of the wicked set against the way of the Lord. In verse three, we have an example of a compounding parallel, a tree that bears fruit, a tree that does not wither.
Well, the second half of Psalm one is an example of what we call a chiastic parallel. And this is where the second half of the poem tells the same story backwards. Looks like this. Stanza a is verse one about the different paths available to us. Stanza b is verse three about the well planted tree.
Stanza b two is verse four where the poet says, not so the wicked, they are like chaff that the wind blows away, which is the opposite of a well rooted tree. And then the final stanza a two consisting of the final two verses five and six, which parallel verses one and two begin with the line, the wicked will not stand in judgment, which is exactly the opposite of where the poem began in verse one with the blessings of those who do not stand in the way of the wicked. So you actually have all of the tools now to start reading the Psalms and start looking for some of these patterns, and your homework this week is to finish Psalm one and look for some of the ways that this poet is looping back on his ideas and reinforcing these concepts and finding ways to weave this throughout the imagery. As I said at the start, there can be a point where we rob poetry of its beauty through analysis. But sometimes, it's simply knowing the rules that helps us to dig up everything that's been buried in there.
However, there is one more thing that I wanna talk about before we go today. Because earlier when I read the poem, I read it from the NIV translation. And I love the NIV, although as you know, I am I want to pick on them from time to time. They have done a really good job with this poem right up until the very end. Because you see the last line of this poem has been rendered, for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.
And that is technically fine, but it's also probably misleading. And the problem here is the word destruction. First, because the Hebrew word is not destruction, it is the word avad, which means to get lost or to run away, to wander aimlessly, or to perish. So there's an incredibly wide semantic range carried in this this word of odd. But generally, when we use the word destruction in English, it carries the idea of something that is external to us.
So something destroys us or someone destroys us or in this case maybe God destroys us. And that is exactly the opposite of what the writer has in mind here. Remember, look for the parallel. The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the wicked, they get lost. They run away.
They wander. They may even perish. The idea here is not it's never that God does anything to destroy us. In fact, the outcome of the wicked is precisely because they have wandered away from the God who desperately wants to watch over their steps for them. And so I much prefer the way that Robert Alter has translated this final line.
He says, for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is lost. And again, the NIV translation is actually fine because you can read it and come away with the understanding that it is the way of the wicked that leads them to ruin. It's just that sometimes I think all of us carry this toxic theology that God is just waiting for us to mess up or slip up. God is just on us waiting for us to drop the ball so God can pounce on us and destroy us if the chance presents itself. That is exactly what the writer here wants to disarm.
In fact, it's the whole point of the psalm. There's always time to change. There's always time to chart a new course. There's always time to start down a new path even if that starts with small choices that point in a new direction because God is always for you. God is always cheering you on, always trusting that you have more in you than even you realize.
Because God is always believing that small steps in the right direction are worth celebrating. Because enough of them strung together will change everything for you. And that's what this psalm wants to invite you to realize. Let's pray. God, as we begin this summer to dig through this poetry that has been gathered and curated and handed down to us.
May we at once dig and sift to look through all the devices and the techniques that have been used to bury wisdom and emotion in these poems. But at the same time, may we read by your spirit, to see ourselves here, to recognize ourselves in these words, to glean new understandings of the ways that you interact with us through these poems. And might we begin today to recognize that small choices are worth celebrating, that new directions are worth joy, That you are behind us, cheering us on with every small choice that we make to head in a direction that is good for us and healthy for us, that draws us closer to you. And that God, as we can string those choices together, being generous and kind with ourselves, we can actually become the people you imagine us to be. More like your son, more close to your heart, more representative of your love and grace in the world.
May our choices begin small and do something incredible in your world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.