We Farm Faithfulness

Psalm 37:1-9; Lamentations 1:1-6; Luke 17:5-10


Two long-time church members were discussing the present state of the church. The woman lamented that for more than sixty years she had been going to church and she couldn’t remember one sermon from any one of a dozen ministers who had preached during that time. The church was in a sorry state she said. She wasn’t even sure why she still attended.

The other parishioner, a man of similar age, commented. “You know,” he said, “Charlotte and I have been married for nearly sixty years. I haven’t done the math, but that should amount to a huge number of meals she has fixed for me over the years. I confess that I don’t remember any one of them in particular. But here I am, still healthy. Every meal has fed me and kept me alive all that time. For that I am truly thankful. Maybe all those sermons over the years have done the same for you.”

I don’t think anyone has ever satisfactorily explained the human tendency to see the negative more quickly than the positive. Optimists see the glass half full. Pessimists see the glass half empty. Engineers and theologians say that what we need is a different glass, a smaller glass to be fuller, a bigger glass to be emptier, or a larger glass so that half is more.

The Book of Psalms is just such a glass. It is a remarkable ancient collection of songs of praise, lament, petition, wisdom, intercession, and thanksgiving. That should cover just about any kind of glass in a bartender’s collection. Yet, so often we only think of a few psalms that are familiar enough to be ingrained in our memories (23, 84, 98, 121, 150 to name a few). The rest are vague. We don’t know them by heart, like our ancestors did generations ago. The medieval monks knew them in Latin by their opening words. Our Scots ancestors knew them by the tunes associated with them. The Psalms were music, they were liturgical resources, they were prayers. They are not scripture like the Books of Moses, the writings of the major prophets, the gospels, or the epistles. Yet the Psalms are the largest book in the Bible, and they make up the most diverse collection of writings to and about God. They reflect every human emotion.

Psalm 37 wrestles with a very basic question, “Is God in charge or not?” It is not directly addressed to God. It is more of a meditation to the author’s self as he or she tries to sort out what is going on in the world around the psalmist and where is God in it all. By itself it psalm would be hard to identify it as a liturgical text. The poem consists of kindly advice to a fellow traveler on the way. For all its ancientness, the psalm has a surprising contemporary ring to it. The psalmist climbs a steep hill with the opening nine verses of imperatives imploring the righteous to remain righteous while faced with injustice and surrounded by the seductive lures of ill-gained prosperity. I would encourage you to go home and reread these nine verses and then continue for the remaining thirty-one verses to get the whole drift of the psalmist’s theological wrestling.

Throughout the psalm, the psalmist argues for what is true over what is apparent. If seeing is believing, then it is obvious that the world is a screwed up place where the guilty get away scot-free, where violence succeeds, where greed is the reigning core value, where untruth said often enough becomes truth, where good is to be stamped out like a campfire lest it ignites a whole forest.

The psalmist repeatedly insists that the eternal truth is that God is sovereign and just. What is temporarily apparent is that the wicked succeed and the unjust prosper. Just as we can only see so far until the curvature of the earth makes seeing impossible, so our vision over the curvature of God’s time limits our ability to see all that God sees.

The psalm’s readers are challenged to “enjoy the Lord” (v. 4), even when life is neither enjoyable nor fair. That’s the same message that the prophet Isaiah wrote to beleaguered exiles, “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength; they will fly on wings like eagles, they will run and not be tired, they will walk and not be weary” (Isaiah 40:31).

In a world where things are not as clear cut as we would like, in a world where people do get weary and where they plod rather than run, the psalmist provides a picture which sharply contrasts those who do life well with those who do well in life. To do well in this life nearly always requires a compromise of values. Doing well by earthly standards is always short-lived. The grass and leafy green vegetables only grow for a season until they die off or the frost does them in.

The psalmist believes that the wicked someday will rot away atop their polluted lifestyle. “Evildoers will be eliminated” the psalmist asserts in verse 9. All their gains will evaporate. A more terrifying warning is the psalmist’s insistence that they will be cut off from God. For an Israelite, such banishment was a fate worse than death. In Jewish theology, heaven is not a location but a condition in which one enjoys the full presence of God. Hell is to be cut off from God. That will be the fate of all who seek to thrive by relying on worldly, wicked routes to power.(1)

Three times in these first nine verses the psalmist counsels us, “don’t be upset.” That is perhaps a weak rendering of the underlying Hebrew. Other translations counsel, “Don’t worry,” “Don’t bother your head,” “Don’t fret.” None of those translations reaches the depth of the anguish and violence which the Hebrew suggests.

The Hebrew charah refers to anger or jealousy that is so strong one goes up in flames because of it. This is not your garden variety of being upset, like a parent fretting about a child’s messy room. It refers to an older notion of fretting as a torment that slowly devours one’s heart and soul.

The Hebrew charah does not refer to an action that occurs subtly, but comes on in a way that is fiery, violent, and all-consuming. In other words, it is hell. It is a life cut off from God. When we fret because evil people succeed through nefarious ways, we suffer the same fate that they do. Our road to hell may be less immediately obvious, but it will happen all the same. We end up no better off than they are, in a burned-out existence estranged from God.(2)

Instead of winding up like that, the psalmist invites listeners – believers – to “trust the Lord and do good; live in the land and farm faithfulness” (v. 3). Our psalmist is not a purveyor of doom and judgment. Rather the poet seeks to grow hope. Hope is always a fragile commodity. That reality makes this psalm especially powerful in our community and society today. We are quick to see the evil all around us. We jump on every conspiracy bandwagon that comes along. (Who doesn’t love a parade?) We have drawn up sides in the political machinations of the current electoral furor and earnestly believe that the other candidate is the devil incarnate.

The psalmist would say, “Not so fast.” Yes, each candidate is a sinner. Then again, so are each of us, and as Jesus so vividly demonstrated in John 8 when he asked for the one without sin to cast the first stone, the crowd dissolved one by one until there was no one left to condemn the victim.

Evil is in each of us, a on-going battle as strenuous as trying to overcome an addiction of any kind.

Thankfully, Jesus was aware of the agony of suffering helplessly in the midst of what seemed like irreversible evil. He gathered his closest associates around a table spread with the good gifts of life done well. “Be encouraged! I have conquered the world” (John 16:33).

So we should be encouraged as well. When we abandon our fretting, envy, jealousy, anger, and wrath, we not only enjoy a better life personally, but we glorify God. Our life and the way we live it from Monday to Saturday are a fundamental part of our worship of God on Sunday. Life, done well, is worship.

As the psalmist admonished, “Farm faithfulness.” On the land, we farm in order to eat. In our homes, we eat in order to live. In our daily activities, we live in order to be faithful. In the midst of a world where political, economic, and religious systems seem to be falling apart, where personal sureties fade from sight, this psalm calls for a spirituality of confident trust in God, who seeks justice for all people. “Those who hope in the Lord — they will possess the land.” We will trust in the Lord. We will farm faithfulness.


General Resource:
Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, Volume 4, “Theological, Pastoral, Exegetical, and Homiletical Perspectives.”:

(1) Rebecca Blair Young, “Psalm 37:1-9 - Theological Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year C, vol. 4 (WORDsearch edition).
(2) Ibid.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.

Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.