Over the weekend, I heard about another beautiful person who passed away. I saw a notice on Facebook on Friday about Rachel Held Evans. I know she had the flu and I knew that there were complications from a medication she took to treat a routine UTI. I had watched and read as a prayer community had developed online in response to a coma she had been in. I don't know why I wasn't prepared for that news.

This is the third death from this year. The first was a wonderful teacher who had been central to the KOTESOL community here in Korea. She committed suicide, leaving many people mystified and confused, but it has brought up a discussion on how people living overseas deal with depression. The second was the father of a Sunday School teacher. He died well. That funeral was a beautiful celebration of a life devoted to God and family. 

In the midst of news about Rachel Held Evans, I am thinking deeply about salvation, sanctification, reflection, and how everything revolves around story. Our lives and our legacies revolve around story. We want to live in such a way that the story of Christ's saving grace is told through us. 

I think Rachel did that. A big part of her writings, her story, is her critique on modern day evangelicalism. She was reflective, opinionated, and critical. She was a faithful doubter and became a leader as a result.

The Atlantic wrote an article about her death. These next two paragraphs appear there as well as here in my thoughts.

“Death is a thing empires worry about, not a thing resurrection people worry about,” she told me in 2015. “As long as there’s somebody baptizing sinners, breaking the bread, drinking the wine; as long as there’s people confessing their sins, healing, walking with one another through suffering, then the Church is alive, and it’s well.” The lasting legacy of Evans’s writing, and of her public life, is her unwillingness to cede ownership of Christianity to its traditional conservative-male stewards—her unwillingness to give up on Christianity, period. 

Evans did not lead a denomination or a movement or even a church, but she did invite people to come along as she worked through her relationship with Jesus. Her very public, vulnerable exploration of a faith forged in doubt empowered a ragtag band of writers, pastors, and teachers to claim their rightful place as Christians. Evans spent her life trying to follow an itinerant preacher and carpenter, who also hung out with rejects and oddballs. In death, as that preacher once promised, she will be known by her fruits.

She has a legacy. She leaves behind family and community with her early death. Her story matters to us. Christ's death and resurrection is told in her story. She refused to give up on it.

Your story matters. My story matters. All of these stories matter. Stories open up paths of vision that weren't there before. Mitzi Kaufman opened up a discussion on how to deal with depression. The father of the Sunday School teacher, 'Teacher Yang', had me reflecting on legacy and vision for this mother, wife, teacher, writer, and pastor on what I need to focus on. Rachel Held Evans' death continues this this reflection on what is important. Her death and all these stores are about legacy. Her's reflected the fruit of the Spirit and not giving up on Christianity.  

It's all beautiful, and the stories need to be told. Why don't we start with the big one?

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 
John 3:16 ESV

Let's tell our stories to each other in every way possible. Our words reflect back to the living Word of God. Let's story in person, on the page, over email and through social media. Let's tell our stories. 

I remember discussing the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken” in high school and wondering what was down the path that was not as worn down.  It reminds me of real life in trying to follow a path few have chosen and even fewer seem to understand.  Psalm 1 describes two paths.  It sets the stage for the rest of the Psalms, our ultimate prayer book and evidence of every emotion imaginable. It is interesting to note that it was likely written last. It is the finishing touch, defining the contents and fixing the atmosphere on which all of the Scripture is prayed and lived.

But first a story about the Scottish Pastor Alexander Whyte.  When he was addressing a group of theological students, he said, "Ah! I envy you young men with your ministry before you., and especially that you ahead a lifetime of explaining the Psalms to your people!" His delight and and satisfaction in providing a exposition on the Psalms began at the very outset.

"Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,                                                  nor stands in the way of sinners,           
not sits in the seats of scoffers. (verse 1)

Blessed.  It's a beautiful word that announces a sense of well-being, wholeness, happiness.

Jesus used this word eight times in the Sermon on the Mount.  He laid out eight ways to be blessed that the listeners hadn't thought of before.  Here is one of many instances that Christ captured the Psalms.

The psalmist says we are blessed when we do not walk in the counsel of the wicked. As we travel in faith, we are surrounded by others who counsel, advise, urge us in ways that guarantee our happiness. Their advice is supported with statistics and documents. Have you (and I) learned to not be impressed. We are learning to listen to a different drummer.

We are also blessed if we do not stand in the way of sinners. An easier way of understanding this is to not stand around or hangout with those who aren't going anywhere.  They are "in the way" but each one stands making small talk.  They have plans, dream up projects, are great conversationalists, but if we listen long enough, we realize it is mostly hot air.

We do not in the seat of scoffers either. A seat is a place to deliberate, to make judgments, to render decisions. Scoffers look down on others who have't the sense to take a position. They sit together with the know-it-alls. It's a place of cynicism, gossip, and superficial witticisms.  No judge sits over them and no counsel informs them.  They hold nothing in authority but their own so-called cleverness.  Spurgeon, the famous British preacher, called them the "Doctors of Damnation" (The Treasury of David).  

It's important to note that there are three rejected ways of living.  They descend from "walk", "stand" and finally "sit".  It can go from activity to passivity, from the dynamic to to sedentary, sluggish immobility, internal imprisonment. 

__________

The blessed way of life is then elaborated in two phrases:

But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night. (verse 2)

We are brought into the world of the Word made flesh.  The world of revelation, the Scriptures, and Jesus.  It is not superstition or guesswork.  It's a world where there is a personal relationship between a God who is involved in our salvation.  Our salvation that is revealed in the Sinai Law of Moses, the preaching of the prophets and apostles, and the good news revealed in Jesus.

We take delight in this through meditation. This does not mean to just read it or just memorize it. Meditate gives the connotation that it is something monks and nuns do in their monasteries or what you might do in contemplating a beautiful sunset.  It's something you do when you are serious about God.

In the original language, the word meditate has to do with slow thinking or slow eating.  We are to literally or slowly chew or masticate or suck on a lollipop.

The best illustration I can think of is what a dog does with a bone. I am sure you have seen it. The dog takes the bone to a private place and goes to work.  He gnaws, turns it over, licks it. He is enjoying himself and is no hurry. Often for a few hours, the dog enjoys the bone, buries, it, and returns the next day to take it up again. An average bone can last about a week.

The dog meditated his bone. You and I are to meditate the revelation in Scripture and Jesus.

___________________

The meditating person is

" ... like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither,
In all that he does, he prospers." (verse 3)

Why is there a tree here? Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jesus use the same image.  An example of robust, long life with strength and beauty.

"...planted by streams of water" is such a lovely detail. It is a planted tree, not something wild growing by chance.  These streams were Babylonians canals that were put into the desert to provide moisture and make agriculture possible in a land of dust of sand. 

The Hebrews were in Babylonian exile when this Psalm was written. They were the tree that had been the object of special care and cultivation, the knowledge and skill of the horticulturist God. Brains and purpose had brought to bear on this tree.

The planning and planting had been successful.  The tree bears fruit and is perpetually green. Creation and redemption are effective and not an illusion.

________________

"The wicked are not so
but are like chaff which the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgement,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." (verses 4-5)

The chaff here is written to contrasted with the tree.  The wicked, the sinners, the scoffers have persisted in their lack of seriousness and have maintained their course on the road to nowhere.

Chaff is the closest description to nothing that was available. It has no weight, no meaning, no use. Without meaning and responsibility, the wicked have no existence to speak of at all.  It is the dried up husk of something that once bloomed, bore fruit, and brightened the landscape. The wicked are far from what they had been created to be. They are at the mercy of breezes and winds. No roots and no life. There is nothing to them, defined now only by what they are not.

The rather terrifying conclusion is that the life of the wicked/sinner/scoffer is the complete inability to be anything.

________________

"For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish." (verse 6)

These last two lines show the end result of the two ways of life, the life of the tree and the life of the chaff.  The verb here knows is alive with gospel.  It's the same verb we see in Genesis 4:1 where Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.

This verb is deeper than our modern day notion of dealing with information.  In the Christian sense, it is firsthand relationship, personal knowledge, historical, and existential. In Christ, God knows us, and then, because the initiative has been Spirit-given to us, we know God. It is personal and experienced.

None of us are finished with finding ourselves personally in Psalm 1 until we pay meditative attention to Christ's comprehensive definition of himself in his his last conversation with his disciples.  He says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6 KJV). 

Christ gives his life as an exposition, an incarnation, a presence of how this way works itself out in our lives. This psalm gets our feet wet on the way to Jesus, reading and meditating on the Scriptures in a companionship in which we acquire a feel for the Jesus way of blessing.

Amen for the way!