Thy Word Psalm 119 February 5, 2017 In my newsletter article that went out this past week I quoted a few scriptures. One from Deuteronomy where God tells us to love foreigners because we were foreigners in Egypt. Another from Leviticus that says When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. Leviticus 19:33-34 I also through in Because of the Lord s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. Lamentations 3:22 This was a bit out of character for me. Our sign has had scriptures on it as well. Usually I put quotes on there but the Bible seemed to speak with more gravity in our current context. Friends of mine UCC and otherwise have been texting me scriptures. I have a few Southern Baptists friends and usually there is a scripture or two in most texts from them but not the UCC folks! It s funny because last week as I was preparing for a sermon on confession I read a sermon entitled, Why Confess, I m UCC and similarly us UCC folks are not the ones to typically quote bible passages to friends and acquaintances. That doesn t mean we don t care about the Bible. I preach from scripture every week. Our Dig class has doubled in size as we are doing an Introduction to the Bible. I was once asked to preach at a Unitarian Universalist Church and found it troubling that a sermon would not be based solely on the Bible. It could be, they were very open to that but it didn t have to be. That was new to me. In my last church in a small town in Eastern Colorado people would ask members of my church if it was a Bible believing church (assuming we were not since they had a woman as their preacher). So my members would come to me and recount these exchanges. They were confused we were right? A bible believing church. And I
would tell them absolutely but that doesn t mean we read the Bible the way the person asking the question would accept. I think we all and not just UCC folks but most Christians and even beyond have a strange if not strained relationship with the Bible. We think of it as a book, an authoritative book, and yet most folks who talk about it have not read it even in part and certainly not in its entirety. There are parts of the Bible, of course that have moved from the Christian realm to the secular. Anytime someone helps a stranger we call the helper a Good Samaritan, it is even the title of the news segment. The expression the writing on the wall is from a story in the book of Daniel where a hand appears and writes a prophesy, literally on a wall. We also get from the Bible popular expressions like apple of my eye at wits end the blind leading the blind and many more. There is some cultural literacy of scripture and yet there is probably more misrepresentations than not. I have considered doing a sermon series on what the Bible doesn t say. Like the oft repeated expression God helps those that helps themselves nowhere in the Bible. Everything happens for a reason not said once. Same goes for more theological things like the trinity while you can point to scriptures that have led some to this conclusion, there is nothing explicit. So there are things we don t know are in the Bible and things that are not in the Bible we assume to be. Then there are the texts that are within these pages that have been quoted to harm or to exclude. Some call these texts of terror. Whether or not the text is terrorizing in and of itself, it has been used to judge, accuse, blame and condemn others. (even though Jesus says very clearly things to the opposite such as stop judging, love your neighbor as yourself, pray for your enemies and do not curse them, etc.) Don t get me wrong the Bible is not full of happy-go-lucky phrases to make us feel good. There is some of that. And there is drama and intrigue and chaos and creation and questions and confusion and doubt and death and disaster and just about everything else you could think to name. Because ultimately this is not one book it is 66 books for us Protestants. For Catholics and Orthodox Christians the bible has 7-15 more books. So basically this is a library. It has books of poetry and books of prophecy. It has letters and memoires, it has myth and mystery, it has romance and comedy and history and fiction. There is more diversity in these pages that any of us no matter our theology - want to acknowledge. And yet we have agreed that this text is sacred, it is holy or set apart from any other book or library we might read through.
I like to visualize the Bible at the center and all of us moving around it, looking at it from different perspectives. Really all of us UCC folks, Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, nondenominational folks, Mormons all of us Christians who sometimes it feels like we have nothing in common but ultimately we have this in common. We agree to read this text, not to live every word because contradictions within do not allow us to do that. Instead we agree to read, to listen to the stories, to wrestle with them, to hold them and ask questions of them searching for their meaning. Which maybe sounds different than our passage from Psalm 119. Oh, how I love your law! It is my meditation all day long. 98 Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies, for it is always with me. 99 I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your decrees are my meditation 102 I do not turn away from your ordinances, for you have taught me. When we read this it sounds like the law is pretty straight forward. That it is something we can easily choose and follow but in a few ways I want to challenge that. First of all the Bible and the law are not synonymous. There were the laws, referred to as the Torah for the Hebrew people and certainly Jesus built on those by calling us to love God and neighbor as ourselves, as well as all the times he said, the law says do not kill but I say do not think violence or hostile thoughts. So the Psalmist is not bragging about reading the Bible literally and living from there. A few folks in the last 15 years have tried to do this and well when they started stoning people for wearing poly-blends it didn t go well. Instead what I hear in this text is the word meditation. It is my meditation all day long your decrees are my meditation. I wonder if you have ever meditated on scripture. That is different than reading it. Kind of like the difference between reading a text book and reading poetry. And of course some of the Bible reads like a text book and some like poetry what if we allowed it to be all that it is if we allowed it to tell the big picture like a text book and to reveal depth in each word choice like poetry. Meditating on it allows it to do all of that. It brings us into relationship with the text and thereby with people the people of the narratives from Abraham to Noah to Moses and Jesus, to the Israelites who got turned around and lost on the wrong roads more times
than we could count, to the disciples who often had no idea what Jesus was talking about. We enter into relationships with them and are called to enter into relationship with those the Bible speaks of the vulnerable The orphan, the immigrant, the refugee for we were immigrants/refugees in another land. As we seek out relationships with the vulnerable we are connected to those who have passed down these stories and this call to compassion - with those who shared these stories with each other orally and those who started to write them down and those that copied them and read them and committed them to memory or wrote songs or sermons or prayers from these words to the people today that I spoke of earlier who are all walking around this text trying to listen to it and learn from and with it. I know that sounds a bit more romantic than it is. Because there were those people in my last community who assumed we were not a bible believing church because Paul says that women should be silent in worship. Paul also says there is no male or female for we are all one in Christ Jesus so it isn t a biblical contradiction, Paul himself isn t sure where he stands on that one. But what I want us to hear today is the word meditate and then the oft repeated scripture and song (which as a child of the 80 s should only be sung by Amy Grant!) I have known this song for years and not spent much time thinking about it and certainly I hadn t read all of Psalm 119 to understand its context. But as you read this entire chapter all 176 verses what we hear is not adherence to the word of God but a relationship with it. Sometimes a close and faithful relationship sometimes a strained relationship but there is a connection between the psalmist and the text and I believe verse 105 tells us what that relationships is. Ultimately if we all sat down and read the Bible all of it we would be inspired sure, but also shocked, horrified, embarrassed, hopeful, confused, on a good day. The Bible is full of all kinds of stories stories not just of arks and rainbows, and coats of many colors and small boys fighting giants with a sling shot, angels, baby in a manger, cross and an empty tomb. But stories of hands that write on walls threatening death and babies being killed, an argument between a prophet
and a donkey, and a few others that truthfully didn t feel appropriate to bring up in church. I know ironic right? The Bible is full of stories and theology and poems and quips and it is beautiful and disgusting and messy but so is life. And I think that is the point. We hold these stories and words as sacred because We have talked about light for weeks and weeks now and again it offers us soemting new. The word, is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path. We bring the text into our lives, we meditate on it, and it shines its light on the roads we are walking on, it gives them meaning. As we read stories of Jesus healing a blind man and we struggle with that which we can t see thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Friends I know many of you are weary now. Personal and political struggles feel overwhelming for many of us. And I think we just need to be reminded that we have a tool to support us through it a tool that brings gravity or grounding, a story that is honest about pain and oppression and hopelessness and the ways that hate mingles with fear but ultimately this is a story of resurrection. Of new life in the face of death. A story of light like you heard me say a little more than a month ago a light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. Yes even us UCC folks need to hold to scripture. It shines a light of meaning and hope on the paths that we are on, to remind us that we do not walk alone and we do not walk or work in vain. This is a book that calls us to stand up and stand with the weakest among us whomever that may be on any given day or under any given executive order. But it is also a book that gives us strength when we are tired or without strength or hope. As I read earlier one of my favorite scriptures comes from Lamentations 3 right smack dab in the middle of an entire book or complaining and worry and distress comes the words that can hold us Because of the Lord s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.
Our feet have work to do and places to go but this text has something to offer us along the journey. Not instructions. Not rules. But meaning. And ultimately that is what we have been searching for all along. Amen.