Psalm 1 - Wesleyan Wisdom: Scripture

This past Tuesday I met with a group of college students at Mansfield for Bible Study. The topic of our time together - wisdom in decision making. Throughout out our time together two items kept coming up, we should keep God at the center of all our decisions, even the seemingly trivial ones that we make without thinking, and the thought of making decisions can be overwhelming when we try to discern the will of God. Why these young people are at a key time in their life for decision making, I think we can understand what they are feeling for many of us feel it today. We either make decisions without thinking or we become paralyzed by our indecision. Some of us even try to seek God’s wisdom when making decisions, but we just aren’t always sure how. 

John Wesley throughout his preaching taught about four different aspects to consider when making decisions based on theology, or decisions with God at the center. Many years after his death, a Wesley scholar named Albert Outler put the four components together and named them the Wesleyan Quadlaterial composed of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. This tool is still upheld today and the book of Discipline states, “Wesley believed that the living core of Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illuminated by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason. Scripture [however] is primary, revealing the Word of God.”  Because our theology informs our decision making, we are going to spend the next four weeks together exploring different aspects of the Quadulaterial.

This week we start with Scripture, which Wesley considered the first and primary authority by which truth is tested. In today’s Psalm the author writes that those who delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night are blessed. Scripture, or the law of the Lord, is not simply a set of laws meant to restrict people, rather is a description of living life with God. While there are many rules laid out in scripture, their are also stories about people, just like us, and how the responded to the law given by God. Because God is part of our whole life, the Bible presents a story of different aspects of our lives as well. 

However, The Bible might not tell us what to do in a specific situation. Psalm 1 presents life and the choices in it as something relatively simple, you are either righteous or wicked. Good or bad. Accepting wisdom or rejecting it. But life is rarely that simple and choices are not always clear. I once heard the Bible described as the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. And on one hand this may be true - the instructions the Bible gives us are pretty simple - love God and love your neighbor. But as the stories in the Bible illustrate, and our lives often confirm, living this out is not always as simple as the acronym would lead us to believe. 

When I read this Psalm the image that captures my imagination is the tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in due time. Life is full of hard choices, but when it comes time to make those choices what are you rooted in? Where are you drawing your life source from? Who is advising you? The college students were surprised when I told them for me rootedness was not so much about memorizing scripture, but having a well worn Bible. A Bible tattered from years of reading, so much so that the scripture has sunk into your heart. When I need to make a decision, I don’t often recall chapter and verse, but I can recall stories that I find meaningful at that particular moment - stories that I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t read them time and time again and that wouldn’t necessarily be helpful if I only memorized a few lines from it. 

Brothers and sisters, what are you rooted in? Are you rooted in the Word of God? Is your Bible well worn? While there are many tools out there for scripture reading today, everything from reading the Bible in a year, to reading a chapter a day, you need to find what works for you. For me, reading the Bible cover to cover doesn’t really work. Somewhere around the list of the tribes in the book of Numbers, I get distracted and by the time I get to Leviticus I’ve abandoned reading altogether. That’s not to say those parts of the Bible aren’t critical, they are and I’ve grown to love them and find wisdom in them just as much as my favorite parts of scripture over the years, but you need to find what works for you at this time in your life so you can start soaking up scripture. 

When you read are you meditating on the scripture, as the Psalmist instructs to do, both day and night? Meditating means that you reflect on it. You keep coming back to it in your mind. Once again there are many different ways to do this. Some people find a word or sentence that strikes their attention from what they read and keep thinking about it during the day. Others pray through a piece of scripture several times a day. Whatever you do, its not going to be helpful just to read scripture because you should, check it off the list of your things to do, and then forget about it. That doesn’t give you time to let the scripture sink into your heart and transform you. It doesn’t allow you to glean all the wisdom you can from it. 

As I reflect on the role that scripture has played in my life over the years, I realize that it has both changed and remained a constant. I always remember scripture stories being a part of my upbringing - from the felt boards in Sunday School and the silly songs (with movements) that often accompanied that time of teaching to the picture books my parents still have to this day that we were read over and over again. As I grew older I read the same stories for myself, and realized that I had new things to learn from them. The Bible is described as Living because it is the Word of God that continues to speak to us throughout our lives. We are never done reading. We are never done learning. We are never done being instructed. The Bible is not something to be read once and then forgotten or abandoned.

We need to be interacting with the Bible every chance we get - not just at worship on Sundays. We also need to study it alone and in community. Do you have a group of people in your life that you can study scripture with? Some of the most formative times around scripture in my life involved studying it in community. When I was in high school a large group of us met in a trailer connected to a church once a week just to inch our way through the book of Acts. When I was in college, I used to go up to the balcony of the chapel after class and chew over pieces of scripture with my friends. And as much as we have joked about “still studying James” for our Bible Study in the parish, I think those of us who attend would agree that it has brought new meaning to our lives as disciples to go through the book slowly and intently. Who are you studying scripture with? Who can you go to with your questions and insights and wrestle over texts with?

The original part of scripture, the Torah, was given to the ancient Israelites as they were wandering in the dessert. It was one of God’s way of providing care for them - instructing them and sustaining them during their time of need. Even after they reached the promise land, they were reminded to have the word of the Lord written on their hearts and instruct their children in it. God knew that life has mountain peaks and valleys, and scripture sustains us during all of those times, but we desperately need it during the times of darkness. If we do not have it written on our hearts, we often resort to wishful thinking or magical tactics to make the Bible speak to us. One of my favorites is to flip the Bible open to any page and see if it applies to my situation. And sometimes that works. But more often it doesn’t. Because scripture is not meant to be a quick fix during hard times, or when we face difficult decisions, rather it is to be written on our hearts, meditated on day and night, and guiding us through all of life’s moments. 

The Psalmist tells us that either we will be rooted or we will blow away like chaff. Either we bore fruit of groundness and security in the Lord, or destruction. Faithfulness to God and faithfulness in reading scriptures do not guarantee prosperity and it does not guarantee that we won’t face hard times. Rather it prepares us for whatever lies ahead, by keeping our attention focused on God, and the core of our faith centered in God’s teaching and wisdom for us. Amen.