God's Commandments
/Almighty and merciful God, it is only by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
-This Sunday’s collect
Our readings this Sunday are focused on God’s commandments, and how important it is for us to follow them - particularly the one to love God with all our hearts, and souls and minds and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. While this commandment is pretty clear, I would hazard a guess that we’ve all discovered that it is often difficult to put into practice.
The annoying aunt. The loudly partying neighbor. The disrespectful teenager. The crooked politician. These neighbors are often downright hard to love - just how are you supposed to do that? And it’s even often challenging to love God when life is not going your way. How can you love a God that allows tragedy, evil and pain?
Let me digress from these questions to tell you a bit about Psalm 119. It is the longest psalm in the bible, having 176 verses, set into 22 stanzas of 8 verses each. It’s so long that not even monks in monasteries read the whole thing at one time. Each stanza is named for a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and if you were reading the psalm in Hebrew, you’d notice that in each stanza, every verse begins with that particular letter. It It is therefore known as an “alphabetic acrostic” poem.
Not only does each verse within each stanza start with the same letter, every single verse of the psalm contains a word that is synonymous with God’s teaching (God’s commandments, way, words, statutes, law, etc.) So this explains why Psalm 119 can seem rather repetitive and tedious. In English we don’t pick up on the alliteration of the psalm., so the psalm appears like an interminably long list of random statements about God’s law with little relationship from one verse to the next. It may have been a psalm people used for meditation. Or maybe it was a psalm for teaching children. Or maybe it was simply a clever poem that reinforced God’s teaching that was set to music for worship.
Here are the first three verses of the section we’ll read this Sunday, which are the first three verses of the whole psalm. (As an interesting aside, they are the only verses in the entire psalm that refer to God in the third person. The rest of it address God personally and directly in the second person, implying that Psalm 119 might have been a psalm meant for personal prayer)
Happy are they whose way is blameless, *
who walk in the law of the Lord!
Happy are they who observe his decrees *
and seek him with all their hearts!
Who never do any wrong, *
but always walk in his ways.
OK. I don’t know about you, being blameless and never doing anything wrong is a pretty high bar to start off this long psalm. This gets me back where I started - how following the commandments, even just adequately, is a lifetime practice and challenge. If there were a simple on-switch to make us completely blameless and good and right, my guess is that many people would have switched it on by now. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met anyone completely blameless and always right…
We are in a pickle. We live in a fallen world in which we live and move and have our being. We participate in the mess, even when we don’t want to or are aware we’re doing so. Yet, we want to follow God’s commands, and be part of the solution instead of magnifying the problem of the human condition. How can you rectify this tension?
This is why I am relieved that these very strict readings this Sunday are tempered by our opening collect:
It is only by your gift that your faithful people offer you true and laudable service.
We’ve had some other very similar opening collects this liturgical season:
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as
you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength,
so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy
O God, because without you we are not able to please you,
mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and
follow us, that we may continually be given to good works
Our prayers recognize our inadequacy and our need for God. It is only through God’s strength that we can be strong. Only through God’s faith that we can be faithful. Only through God’s love that we can love. It’s only through following in the way of Jesus that we’ll find the way to truly love that annoying aunt, the loudly partying neighbor, the disrespectful teenager or the crooked politician.
By verse 4 & 5, Psalm 119 acknowledges the same thing:
You laid down your commandments, *
that we should fully keep them.
Oh, that my ways were made so direct *
that I might keep your statutes!
Psalm 119 and the Season After Pentecost, or Ordinary Time, have a lot in common. They both call us to focus on what we are called to do as faithful people and to follow God’s commands with all our ability. And, at the same time, knowing that we will always fall short, we’re also called to stick very close to God. For only then will we have any hope to run without stumbling to obtain Christ’s heavenly promises.
