NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Generous God, your Son gave his life that we might come to peace with you. Give us a share of your Spirit, and in all we do empower us to bear the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Psalm 19:14.
A lot of preachers I have heard over the years begin their sermons with a recitation of this verse. It serves as a prayer that the preacher’s message might faithfully convey the good news of Jesus Christ and its implications for the hearers. Though I have never used this verse of scripture in that way, I find no fault with such usage. Nonetheless, the scope of the psalmist’s prayer far exceeds whatever concerns we might have about the quality of our preaching. These words concluding the psalm must be understood in light of all that comes before. This psalm is a meditation on the “Torah,” translated in our English Bibles as “law.” That is an unfortunate rendering. We tend to think of “law” in terms of rules, statutes and legal requirements. American Christians, deeply individualistic as we are, view law as antithetical to faith or “spirituality.” The Pharisees get a bad wrap in a lot of our preaching because they have been painted as “legalists” who put rules ahead of human needs, compassion and justice. No doubt some of them fit that description-as do a lot of Christians today. But, on the whole, modern Judaism, which derives largely from the Pharisaic tradition, views the Torah much differently.
While the rituals, customs and requirements spelled out in the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures might strike us as restrictive, they were designed to guard Israel’s liberty won for it by its God in the Exodus. A reminder of God’s faithfulness was found in each task of daily life. Preparing and eating meals, washing clothes, butchering animals and planting crops all contained seeds of meditation, symbolic acts and reminders of the new existence to which the people of Israel had been called. It is also important to understand that the Torah is not a changeless prescription written in stone. Judaism has always recognized that the Torah speaks to the here and now. It requires interpretation, reinterpretation and fresh application to ever changing circumstances.
It is for this reason that the psalmist meditates on the Torah. Its commandments are not a collection of dry regulations. They are windows into a deeper understanding of God and the world God made. They are not a legalistic prison enclosing the heart and mind, but a platform from which the psalmist is enabled to look into mysteries, a launching pad for the imagination.
I think there is much to be learned from this understanding of Torah. A lot of Christians I have encountered over the years, some within my own Lutheran tradition, tend to view the Bible as the sealed container of divine truth. There is, in the minds of these folks, a single “biblical worldview” built out of a fixed set of doctrinal assertions and moral absolutes found within the four corners of the biblical text. For such a constricted perspective, information, learning and imagination are dangerous. They can lead one to question the truth and doubt the integrity of the Bible. Banning books, restricting the academic freedom of teachers and subjecting text books to legislative mandates are all simply desperate efforts to protect a feeble and unsustainable faith from the rigors of intellectual critique. Such an outlook kills the kind of interaction with the Bible to which the psalmist testifies. It is hard to meditate on the Bible when you are expending all your energy and attention to protecting it.
While my own biblical training in seminary was nothing like the literalist approach I just described, it did little to encourage meditation. The historical critical method in which I was instructed acknowledged and even celebrated the complexity of the scriptures and the diversity of voices in and through which it speaks. But the method brought with it the same rationalistic and colonialistic biases of the nineteenth century in which it was birthed. We were warned against letting our imaginations run away with us when interpreting texts. Our job was, through a dispassionate application of textual criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction analysis and properly framing of the text in its “Sitz im Leben” (roughly translated, “historical setting”), unearth the grain of historically valid biblical truth to be proclaimed. Though much of what I learned about the Bible’s composition, history and transmission was helpful in a general way, it was not particularly useful in preaching or in meditating on the Word.
Of equal concern regarding the historical critical method is the nineteenth century baggage that comes with it. There is in the method a bias toward rationalism and empiricism that tend to boil all of reality down to what can be demonstrated in the lab. No doubt, empiricism has proven enormously useful in advancing the physical sciences. Applied to history, anthropology and religion, not so much. Nineteenth century protestant Christianity tended to view itself as the pinnacle of world religious evolution just as western society viewed itself as the peak of human civilization. Having shaken off the primitive beliefs in spirits, magic and divine agency, the church had evolved into a rational religion compatible with western culture as a whole. As a result, “lesser” religions tied to inferior cultures were generally dismissed as “superstitions.” This is precisely the same sort of arrogance that fuels the engines of right wing Christian nationalism.
Thankfully, there are many pastors, teachers and theologians who have moved beyond such narrow thinking. Liberation theologians, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino encourage us to read the gospels imaginatively through the eyes of the poor, oppressed and exploited. Black liberation theologian James Cone invites us to recognize the cross and resurrection as lived out by Black Americans struggling against systemic racism. Womanist theologians like Natalia Imperatori-Lee, Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Ivone Gebara call upon us to read the scriptures through the eyes and experiences of Black women. Employing the imagination to scriptural interpretation unleashes its redemptive power and makes space for the Holy Spirit to work. This, I believe, is what the psalmist means by “meditating” on God’s words.
Here is a poem by Billy Collings about the transformative power of books. In many respects, I believe it mirrors the dynamics found in the psalmists’ meditation on the Torah and the way in which we are invited to meditate on scripture as disciples of Jesus.
Books
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
an immense choir of authors muttering inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitching into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, panelled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across the page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
small brown birds flutter down to consume them
and we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the perilous woods.
Source: Poetry (April 1988). Billy Collins (b. 1941) is an American poet. Though born in Ireland, he grew up in Queens and White Plains, New York. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Collins has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and was selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. Collins has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. You can read more about Billy Collins and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation Website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 
Ah…..
LikeLike