Worship Weblog
Monday, March 05, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 1: Rooted
The helpful online guide Praying the Psalms, from Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, includes a schedule for reading through the Psalms from the Book of Common Prayer. It suggests doing a reading and letting one verse—maybe even one phrase—jump out at you, stop you, comfort you, convict you, and then bounce around your brain for the rest of the day. I’ve decided to try taking it one step further, and choose one focal phrase and then one single word that captures that phrase or idea for me. (I was motivated to read through the Psalms after reading John Witvliet’s new book, The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship.)
On a 60-week reading schedule (using the BCP’s 30-day, morning-and-evening breakdown but slowing the pace for contemplation), let’s start with Psalms 1 through 5, and the focal phrase and word that jumped out at me when opening this book.
Reading 1: Psalms 1-5
Psalm 1 focal phrase: “they are like trees planted ...” focal word: rooted Psalm 1 amounts to a prologue to the 149 other psalms, an overview, a set of ground rules for the rest of the book. The righteous prosper; the wicked wither. That’s how it works. Later in the Psalms, of course, we get a more nuanced and troublesome moral worldview: sometimes the wicked do indeed seem to prosper, while righteousness seems unrewarded and even irrelevant (Psalms 10, 74 and 88 are a few bitter examples). The indignant Psalmist will rage to God, demanding that God to go back to the ground rules of Psalm 1: prosperity for the righteous, futility for the wicked. The Psalmist will give God an earful until the moral equation adds up again. In light of that later questioning and complaining, Psalm 1 may come off as a little too tidy—neat and clean, maybe even a little naive, uninformed by all that follows. Come on, we say, it’s not that simple. We have the rest of the Psalms to back us up. But it’s the word “planted,” and the image of the tree bearing fruit, that makes Psalm 1 more than just wishful, pious thinking. The righteous are rooted. They are grounded. They are connected to cycles of growth. The wicked aren’t, and they could blow away at any moment. And so it’s probably better to think of Psalm 1 as descriptive rather than prescriptive. The point of Psalm 1 is not to predict how life will always go for the righteous and for the wicked, but instead to make this observation: no matter how things look—how fair or unfair life seems, how well the world compensates wickedness, and punishes, even humiliates, righteousness—only righteousness is rooted. Only righteousness is lasting, reliable from season to season. Righteousness is perennial. Righteousness, then, is not just behavioral conformity to a set of do’s and don’t's; it is growth. (Psalm 92 revisits this metaphor, and adds a fascinating description in verse 14: the righteous “are always green and full of sap”!) And wickedness, then, is not just mischief and misdeeds; it is a lack of rootedness. It is short-term thinking. Psalm 1, in the end, proves to be anything but black-and-white. The key color of righteousness, it turns out, is green.
Related Resources for Psalm 1
Reflections on ‘counsel’ and ‘tree’ in Psalm 1
Psalm 1: Beginning a Lenten Journey
Meditation on Psalm 1 from Ryan Schreiber
Resources for the Psalms
Psalms for a Lenten Journey
The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship
Update: More Meditations on the Psalms