A Well-Lit Path
- Psalm 119:105-112
- June 17, 2012
- Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
- First United Methodist Church
- Decorah, Iowa
It was a kind invitation and I took him up on it. I had a great time. I say it was a kind invitation not just because of the invitation itself, but because he had invited me on a summer camp out. His favorite time of year for camping is winter. He likes the challenge of staying warm when it’s really cold. My way of meeting that challenge is to stay inside where it’s warm.
Now there are very few really dark places left in lower forty-eight states. That campground in Indiana is in one of them. Or maybe it just seemed that way the first time I tried to find my way to the restrooms in the middle of the night. There were a couple of those so-called security lights near the lodge building where the restrooms were, so I see my destination. The trouble was I was trying to walk toward them and they were all I could see. They were great for direction-finding but they didn’t help me find a path. The stars were shining about as brightly as they ever do, but without a moon, none of the light was getting down through the trees to the ground where I was trying to find a path. I could really have used my flashlight, but by the time I thought of that I was some distance away and didn’t want to go back to search for it.
Well, I did manage to find my way to the road with only minor injuries. Once there, the starlight was enough to see where the road went. As long as I didn’t look at the lodge lights or screened them with tree trunks, I could manage. The way back was easier with the lodge lights behind me. And besides, by that time I was wide awake. Still, it would have been good to have had my flashlight.
In ancient times, long before any of the Bible was written down and certainly before Psalm 119 was crafted, the people of God were wanderers. A statement like “the journey is our home” was not a metaphor for them but was the literal truth. The journey metaphor is a rich one and lends itself to all sorts of extensions. If you are on a journey, paths become very important. So do directions. We have Mapquest.com and GPS navigators; they had...what?
They had the torah. We usually translate torah as “law” and we’re no fans of law. Law sounds Jewish to us and Jesus was all about grace and faith, at least the non-Jewish Jesus taught to us by Luther and Calvin and the other Protestants reformers. Some of us can remember a version of Christianity from a half century ago or more. It had a lot of rules: No drinking, no dancing, no card-playing, no fun, especially not on Sunday. In fact, the reason why a lot of us are at First United Methodist at all is because the version of Christianity that we practice here doesn’t have a lot of rules. We don’t like rules.
Actually, that’s not quite true. We are fond enough of rules when they apply to someone else or when they protect us.My father-in-law used to complain about how much he had to pay in taxes on the money he made on the stock market. The money that he had invested had already been taxed, he said, when he earned it as salary. He couldn’t see why the federal government should want to tax it again when he made money on the market. After all, he said, the government didn’t have anything to do with his making money on the market. Well, that was the gist of what he said. His actual language was somewhat more colorful.
But the fact is that the federal government had a lot to do with his being able to make money on the market. After all, he was a very small fish swimming in a very large pond. The reason he didn’t get eaten by the big fish is because there are rules, rules that prevent insider trading, for example, or deliberately manipulating the prices of a stock by dumping shares or by floating rumors. The rules required companies to make reliable information available, information that he depended on to make his investment decisions. Those rules were put in place and enforced by the federal government so that investors like him have a level playing field. How much that might be worth is debatable, but it’s surely worth something. We never debated it, because I didn’t like to get into arguments with my father-in-law, but it was certainly not true that the federal government had nothing to do with his stock market profits.
How we feel about rules probably depends on how rich and powerful we are or aren’t. I suspect that the really rich and powerful don’t mind the rules very much because in most societies they’ve been able to buy their way out of having to follow them. They’ve been the rule-makers, so they’ve written the rules in such a way that they don’t really have to worry about them. Was it Anatole France who said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_France)?
I guess that the rich and powerful in most times and places do not so much love the rules as find them useful for controlling the lower orders of society. The lower orders probably mostly know this and regard the rules as intended to keep them in their place (while not seeming to). They may find following them prudent, but aren’t likely to love them.
It’s the folks in the middle, I suspect, that supply most of the lovers of the law. So, I further speculate, we may have found out the social location of today’s psalmist. Man, does the psalmist love the rules! This psalm is certainly a monument to them.
Let me ask something: How many of you have brought a copy of the Bible? How many of you at least know where your copy is and can get to it without having to guess which box it’s packed in? I ask that because there is something about this psalm we can’t really appreciate without seeing the whole thing in front of us,something we can’t do when we only print short sections of Scripture in our bulletin.
The psalm is massive, for one thing. It is one hundred seventy-six verses in length. Every verse contains a word that is a synonym for law: decrees, ways, precepts, statutes, commandments, ordinances, word and words, and promise. Each verse has one or more of these words. How many different things can you say about these? The psalmist found one hundred seventy-six.
This psalm has another special feature. Its one hundred seventy-six verses are grouped in stanzas of eight apiece. That makes twenty-two stanzas. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and one of them is used to begin each verse of a stanza. Each of the first eight verses begins with the letter aleph. The next eight verses begin with beth. The next eight with gimel, and so forth, right through taw at the end. This form of poem is called “acrostic.”
Why would the psalmist go to the trouble? Because for the psalmist the rules, at least when the rules are God’s torah, aren’t just a list of things that must be done or avoided. Taken together they create a world in which there is order, predictability, justice and wisdom. They create a world in which the psalmist has found a home. The torah gives the gift of a life that is both human and humane. Torah for the psalmist is not just a collection of rules. The torah is a complete package of a way of life with God and with the other people in God’s covenant community. And the torah comes as a gift from God.
There is no plot to this psalm, no thematic progression, even. Nothing much happens in the world of this psalm,because that world is pretty good: any change would be for the worse. Torah supplies all that is needed.
If there is confusion about where to go and what to do, the torah provides clarity. If there is temporary injustice, the torah promises that it will be put to rights. If there is danger, the torah provides instruction. If the psalmist is surrounded by a web of conspiracy, the torah provides a refuge of safety. And, yes, if the way forward lies in darkness, the torah illuminates the path.
So the psalmist sings this complicated, well-organized and very long song to give God thanks for the gifts of torah, to celebrate the life that torah creates, and to make public a commitment to live within that gift of life. This is better that Mapquest.com. It’s even better than a flashlight on a moonless night.
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