Each week, I take some time to reflect on one of the lectionary passages for the upcoming Sunday. This week for the seventh Sunday of Easter, we're going to look at Psalm 1.
The opening track of an album sets the tone. There is the spiritual longing embedded in the organ hum of "Where the Streets Have No Name." There is the crashing gong, washing cymbals, and clarion call of the saxophone that rouses the listener when "Acknowledgement" begins A Love Supreme. There is the digitized anthemic gurgling of "Baba O'Riley" on Who's Next. The thesis statement of sorts when Mumford & Sons sing "Serve God, love me, and mend" on "Sigh No More." It sometimes jars you like the unexpected dance funk that heralds the beginning of Arcade Fire's Reflektor.
The opening track is supposed to grab you and pull you in. It's true in many cases that an album is just a collection of songs. But when an album is something more, when an artist has something to say (be it good or bad) then that opening track will give you a sense of what the entire work is to be about.
Psalm 1 is the opening track to the 150 song mega-compilation that we know as the Psalms. A book of worship, the psalms touch on praising God, dark nights of the soul, doubts, anguish, hope, religious education, and much more. The Psalms run the gamut. Perhaps it's appropriate that the collection begins simply: "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked..."
It then shifts away from what the happy are not to what they are. The blessed are people that delight in God's law: the centerpiece of the psalmist's faith. The psalmist switches to the image of a tree planted by a river. The rivers and trees evoke Eden. It is how things were created to be. How things should be. It is not the wandering chaos of sinners staggering around the earth. It is planted and grounded. It yields fruit. It lasts. The wicked, the text tells us, will not last. They will be blown away like the chaff. The righteous last. The wicked perish.
And so on this opening track, the psalmist simply establishes the tension that exists in this book of worship: the call to follow God versus destructive pull of sin. Sometimes that pull is on the psalmist (Psalm 51 is a prominent example). Sometimes the psalmist is pulled down into the swirling chaos of someone else's disobedience (Psalm 22, which Jesus quotes on the cross). It is a complicated collection of songs that speaks to a familiar problem: How and why do we follow and worship God in such a beautiful and yet messed up world?