Oh, how I love your law!
all the day long it is in my mind.
The psalms contain some of the most beautiful language in all of Scripture – some of the most human, some of the most honest, some of the most desolate and the most joyous words in our liturgy and prayer. The psalms are often what we turn to for comfort, for hope, and for reminders of our shared humanity. The psalms are prayer; they are poetry. Benedictine poet and contemplative Kathleen Norris writes that they “defeat our tendency to try to be holy without being human first.”
And yet, those opening words in today’s lectionary psalm are startling to our ears:
Oh, how I love your law!
While most to all of us appreciate law that helps create a stable society – laws, from speed limits to gun control to environmental protections that protect people, especially the most vulnerable (and creation), we would not necessarily say that we love the law, that we think about law “all the day long.” At least those of us who aren’t attorneys or judges or serving in law enforcement.
But the psalmist meant something different. The Hebrew reads mah a-huv-ti (Oh, how I love) your Law – in Hebrew, oh, how I love your Torah – which is understood and translated not only as law as decrees, statutes, commandments, ordinances. Torah is also translated as WORD –
Oh, how I love your Word.
Torah is not simply a list of rules set down for God’s people. It is the text we are to hold in our hearts, to live and breathe and meditate and act on through the hours of our days.
Today’s psalm reading is not the entire Psalm 119, which you’ll be glad of, because that is the longest psalm in the entire Book of Psalms – more than 100 verses. Today’s reading is just a small fraction of it – 1/22 of it to be exact. Like all the psalms, it is poetry, but it follows a particularly specific structure – Psalm 119 is an acrostic.
You may remember acrostics from school – each line begins with a particular letter, spelling out a word or phrase. I remember writing acrostics using our names, or our parents’ names, or a holiday. Psalm 119 is an acrostic that spells out the Hebrew alphabet, or aleph bet, which is made up of 22 letters. So each eight-verse stanza is dedicated to one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. So the psalm is not only long, but also structured in a way that could be considered restrictive and repetitive. What is the point in writing a psalm that way? It feels like it would stifle creativity, become monotonous to read or to write or to listen to.
This morning’s stanza is the stanza that begins with the Hebrew letter mem, and the psalmist was very specific in choosing that letter to introduce the psalm.
mah – mem – mah a-huv-ti Torah…
Oh, how I love your law
In Hebrew, the letters themselves, not just the words, but the letters, have symbolism, have meaning. In seminary I will say that Hebrew class was the one class I was most terrified of, but it ended up being amazing. For quite a few classes, our professor would bring this book – The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet, by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. It’s a series of meditations on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This is part of what he wrote on the Hebrew letter mem:
“Mem is the substance of Mother Earth. It is water – mayim – and it is the wilderness – midbar – through which we wander and are made ready. It is the food…and the work…which we must do for food. And it is the work we must not do in order to rest… and keep the [Sabbath].”
all the day long it is in my mind.
The beginning letter of this stanza – mah a-huv-ti (Oh, how I love your law) – represents water, earth, work and rest, reminding us that God’s law – the Torah, God’s word – contains all of those things – wisdom, the water of life, the inspiration and purpose of our work, the necessity and commandment of sabbath rest, the entirety of the earth. This psalm and this stanza contain all that is necessary to life and to faith.
This psalm reminds me of another poetic form called the ars poetica – the art of poetry, a poem whose purpose is to explain the purpose of poetry or to define the nature of poetry. Archibald MacLeish wrote one of my favorite ars poetica poems (the writing group that has been meeting has heard a fragment of this), really one of my favorite poems of any kind, and it ends this way:
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
If an ars poetica is a poem about what it means to be a poem, then Psalm 119 is a prayer about what it means to be a prayer. Words that seem restrictive and monotonous to write and to read and to sing and to study are actually freeing. The law that governs the psalm’s specific structure frees us, opens up space for us to welcome God in, just as the idea of law, which seems restrictive and monotonous, is freeing when it is God’s law. It opens up space for us to welcome God in. And the psalm’s words remind us that that welcoming of God should be all the time, not just on Sunday mornings in church:
I do not shrink from your judgments,
because you yourself have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste!
they are sweeter than honey to my mouth.
This sort of space of words, this sort of contemplative almost-monotony, is hard for us to practice in fast-moving days full of noise and distraction. But it is important. The words of this psalm remind us that God’s word is always with us, always teaching us, and is present in every part of our lives. Wisdom and grace and love will find us wherever we are, if we quiet ourselves to listen. This is part of why we refer to Christian education not just as class or Sunday School but as formation – because we are being formed all the time, by the words we hear and speak and sing, by the conversations we have in Sunday School or in small groups, by the books we read and the people we meet, and by the world’s griefs and joys that we witness and experience in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.
I remember some years ago in Memphis, coming early to an evening service, and a friend of mine who was on the altar guild was by herself in the nave, preparing the altar for worship. There was a calm and a peace that radiated from her as she worked with the fabric and the vestments, a sort of silent music to her work. She told me later that her work at the altar and with the materials of the altar is a meditation for her. That she prays every time she goes through those routine, repetitive, and beautiful movements that could become monotonous in their familiarity, but instead become a spiritual practice, a space for prayer.
And we can find that the same sort of contemplation arises out of other practices, including the repeated readings and silent meditation on the psalms each week, or the practice of lectio divina, walking the spirals of the labyrinth outside, opening ourselves to creativity on Sunday mornings, allowing ourselves to explore the parables as we have been in watercolor or clay or words. The things we do here in the church – cooking noonday meals in the kitchen, preparing our worship spaces, washing dishes, rehearsing choir anthems – and the things we do out in the world – driving to work, making coffee, visiting with neighbors – these are all opportunities for prayer as well as activity, for being as well as doing, reminding us that there is sacredness and holiness in the everyday, repetitive work that we do, and space for God’s grace and wisdom to speak to us through that. Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, October 16, 2022
Psalm 119:97-104
