Psalm 15 "The Indwelling" Scott Hoezee

In an ethics class I once took, the professor was at one point thinking aloud for a bit, musing about this and that moral dimension to life. At one point he muttered something about the commandment about not bearing false witness to our neighbors and he then said, "I wonder about that sometimes when we buy those electric timers to turn our living room lamps on and off automatically, making it look like we're home even when we're not. I wonder if that is bearing false witness." Many of us laughed, thinking he was making a little joke. He wasn't. At the same time, he wasn't saying he thought such timers were immoral, but it was clear that his ethical mind wandered over to such questions on a regular basis, pondering them with a certain amount of holy earnestness.

Yet we thought initially he was just kidding around! Unhappily, there are any number of people in society today (and maybe not a few in the church as well) who would be taken aback by the notion that just maybe we should parse matters morally and that, what's more, we should do it in every sector of our day-to-day living and routines. Instead, our culture has become far too segmented and compartmentalized even as a certain moral relativism fosters resistance to the notion that there even are any universally applicable standards to carry with you in all your living.

So we as a society motor on with a wink and a nod under the aegis of "Everybody's doing it." Even if we see something we would consider laudable in someone else's life, we don't necessarily adopt that for ourselves because, as we also like to say, "Different strokes for different folks." We are scandalized when a police officer has his computer confiscated only to discover hundreds of pornography pictures stored on the harddrive. Yet we maybe fail to see that this kind of private trafficking in the immoral may be on the same trajectory as something society does promote: namely, the idea that whatever consenting adults do in private is no one else's business.

Also, in this celebrity-driven society, it is amazing how apparently easy it is for actors and athletes to maintain huge levels of popularity even after getting caught in sometimes wretched scandals. Hugh Grant, Jack Nicholson, Rob Lowe, Kobe Bryant, Paris Hilton, Martha Stewart have all been involved in sordid activities, and a few of these celebrities have had their police mug shots broadcast for all the world to see. But it doesn't matter. The next time they make a movie or put on a uniform to play in a game, we line back up to see them. One of the reasons there is such a thriving business on the Internet peddling nude pictures of female celebrities is because many of these now-famous women made lots of dirty pictures as part of their climb to stardom. But it doesn't diminish their status now. Instead it gets written off as another example of the way the world works. Live and let live.

But then along comes Psalm 15 to re-orient our ethical thinking. Of course, it needs to be said up-front that we must not naively equate the society of ancient Israel with our own. For all the rhetoric you hear about America as some kind of chosen nation or God's shining city on a hill, we have never been a theocratic society the way ancient Israel was. So we as Christians witness to the truth of the gospel, we try to persuade unbelievers to see the beauty of Christ, but we cannot expect that our every belief will be codified into the law of the land. Jesus told us to proclaim the truth not legislate it to the point that people will break the law if they refuse to embrace the gospel.

That, naturally, makes our living all-the-more challenging. We should expect to be out-of-step with the surrounding culture, and so we should not be shocked that this is so. Jesus promised his orignal apostles to anticipate scorn and even persecution. "The world has hated me," Jesus basically said, "so don't expect it to swoon over you!"

So those are a few necessary provisos. But even having said that, Psalm 15 makes it clear that whatever the world around us does, if we are to be among the righteous, we need to lead lives that are consistently in line with the God we serve. If you take Psalm 15 head on, its message is downright daunting. It begins by asking a question that could be paraphrased as, "Who may come to church? Who may sit in the pew and bow before God's throne of grace?" The answer here is unstinting. Who is worthy to enter God's holy presence? Someone who is blameless, truthful, honest; someone who is careful about what passes his lips every day, who is faithful and loyal until it hurts, someone who is generous to a fault and who is not interested in lining his own pockets.

In short, it rather sounds as though the one who would presume to visit God in worship had better be pretty well close to perfect! But even in ancient Israel, had Psalm 15 been literally applied, you suspect the Temple would have emptied out! Conversely, if this set of stringent moral requirements really had been perfectly maintained by all the people in Israel, then you would have to wonder why God also required that sacrifices for sin be offered every single week as part of Israel's Temple liturgy. After all, the only reason to bring a sacrifice was if you knew you were not completely blameless! In our current church setting this would be like getting rid of the Confession and Assurance portion of our morning liturgy by saying that there would be no need to confess any sins seeing as the only people we were going to let in the door in the first place were those who were already so perfect as to have no sins to confess.

Obviously we would no more gut our liturgy of confession than the high priest in Israel would have been allowed to break the Temple's altar and so suspend sacrifices for sin. Even the person who wrote Psalm 15 knew that sin does continue. But if Psalm 15 was not literally applied even in Israel, then what purpose did it serve? How can it serve us even now? Perhaps in this way: by reminding us of what shalom looks like and so giving us a goal to shoot for--a goal that is as lofty as it is lovely; as challenging as it is edifying.

You see, the problem in our lives is that we are too easily satisfied, as C.S. Lewis often said. We mostly are content to live with shrunken horizons, with short-term goals, and with aspirations that barely rise above the level what could be called ethical Kindergarten. Psalm 15, by contrast, forces us to shoot for the moon. But it does so not because God is some moral drill sergeant who insists that things get done his way sheerly because he likes being in control. Morality, ethics, the keeping of God's law is never about our being trained circus dogs who artificially jump through various hoops. A lot of people think that way. God's rules for living are too often viewed as artificial, as arbitrary, and so as optional.

But all through the Bible we pick up a different message. Psalm 15 has this message, too, and it comes in the very last line of the psalm. "The one who does these things will never be shaken." It doesn't say that the person who does this will make God smile. It doesn't say the person who lives well will get to go to heaven instead of hell. It doesn't say that the moral one will escape getting swatted with the rolled-up newspaper that some people envision God as always wielding. No, it says that the person who lives this way will not be shaken, which means he or she will have a life of shalom.

Recently I reminded you that Psalms 1 and 2 were placed at the head of this book to establish the themes that would come in the rest of the psalms. Psalm 1, we noted, points to a major theme of this book when it describes the need for individual integrity before God. And Psalm 1 famously uses the image of a well-planted, deeply rooted tree flourishing and growing on the banks of a most delightful river. Psalm 1 uses that arboreal image to paint a portrait of settledness, of security, of repose. A healthy tree that has a steady source of nourishment is a wonder to behold. It is the epitome of strength and stateliness. By contrast, Psalm 1 says that the wicked of the earth are like dust in the wind, chaff blown here, there, and everywhere before finally being just blown away completely by the wind.

Psalm 15 stands in line with that opening poem. God wants us to live in the ways sketched in this psalm not because these constitute some artificial set of optional hoops but precisely because God knows that these are the ingredients in the recipe for shalom. Who wants to live a life of dishonesty in which you are forever worried that your lies will be uncovered. Don't the truthful sleep more soundly than those who spend their days covering their dirty tracks? Who wants to live a life of stinginess, refusing to be generous givers and so making people angry because of your perceived selfishness? Generous people have an easier time going out in public because they don't need to worry about bumping into old so-and-so whom we know is ticked off at us for not lending a hand when we had the chance.

God knows that not doing the moral activities mentioned in Psalm 15 only serves to unsettle our peace of mind, our peace of heart, our very shalom. Living selfishly, dishonestly, and brutally unglues us. We fall apart at the seams. God doesn't want that. So if Psalm 15 seems to set the ethical bar dauntingly high, it's because if you manage to clear that bar, you will experience nothing less than the lovely webbing together of all life into that integrated reality known as shalom.

It is precisely that all-encompassing webbing-together that Psalm 15 helps us to see. If you look closely at these verses, you can detect a series of concentric circles. This "map" of life was consistent with Israelite society generally. As you may recall from books like Leviticus, the entire Israelite camp (and then later the holy city of Jerusalem as well) was like a series of concentric circles. At the very center of all the circles was the Holy of Holies at the center of the Tabernacle and, later, the Temple. God lived smack in the middle of Israelite society. The people's entire identity stemmed from the theological belief that they were the center of the spiritual universe. But if this holy God was going to be able to stick with a people that tended to be unholy, certain safeguards needed to be in place. And so the innermost circle of Israelite life was that Holy of Holies--a place so sacred, only the high priest could enter it once a year on the great Day of Atonement.

The next circle was a bit wider but was still a restricted area of the Temple where only the ordained priests could be. The farther out from the Holy of Holies you went, the wider each circle became. The Temple area itself was a very sacred space. Then moving out a bit more, you came to the area of normal Israelite life where the people who were in good standing with God could live and do their daily routines. Farther out yet was the circle where aliens and non-Israelites lived. Ultimately you would get to the area outside of the camp or the city, and that was where people had to go in case they became ritually unclean.

Psalm 15 doesn't get quite that elaborate, but if you look closely, you can detect words here that encompass various areas of life. Certainly we begin in the center with the Temple where the most high God, Yahweh, dwells. Then you move out to the immediate neighborhood of where someone lived. Next comes the religious community, and finally you get out to the wider world where commerce takes place and where temptations for illicit bribes and other ill-gotten-gain could become possible.

But the point of Psalm 15 is that no matter where a person is at any given moment, you can still trace the ethical lines that go right straight back to the center of all things: namely, the dwelling place of God among his people. No matter how far out from the Temple you go, you remain tied to the God at the center of it all. No matter how far out you go, God's fierce desire for your shalom must still dictate how you live, how you conduct yourself before others, how you make decisions when you come to a moral crossroad.

So are you in court swearing an oath? God hears that oath and knows that it's in your best interest to keep it. Is someone pulling you aside after a meeting at work, suggesting that you cut corners here and there to pad the company's bottom line even if it could put innocent people at risk? God is there with you and he knows that even as protecting the innocent is very near the top of his own divine agenda, so it must be for you.

By the way, that verse about taking a bribe against the innocent does indeed mean far more than someone's literally flashing a wad of hundred-dollar bills to lure you to betray someone. These days there are so many ways by which the lust for lucre can harm the innocent. Every time some executive in a food manufacturing firm fudges a little on testing whether or not a certain new cereal is really safe, the innocent are put at risk. Every time somebody saves the company a little money by dumping a little extra mercury into the river behind the factory, the innocent are put at risk. Every time someone becomes aware that a certain car, or a certain kind of tire, or a certain child's safety seat is not safe but then let's it slide because it would cost too much to fix, the innocent are put at risk.

No matter what we do in life, we all regularly face decisions on what to say and what not to say, on whether to try to lend a hand or to keep our hands buried deep in our own pockets, on whether to spread around that little juicy piece of gossip we heard or let it die with us. Psalm 15 is here to remind us that if in the Holy of Holies that is the inner sanctum of each one of our hearts, if we want the Spirit of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, to dwell in that innermost part of our very selves, then we need to see all the tethers that connect every single part of our lives with that Spirit at our core.

Do we live just such consistent lives that contribute to shalom? As we said earlier, if that were the case, we could have long ago dispensed with our weekly time of confession in the morning liturgy. Psalm 15 insists that we be honest, and so the first thing we need to be honest about is precisely our dishonesty! We must try to live for God's glory, but at the end of the day we know that the message of the New Testament remains utterly true: namely, the bottom line of our righteousness before God comes not from ourselves but ever and only from Jesus, who alone is our Righteousness. We live by his grace alone.

But grace, as we must always remind ourselves, not only forgives, it transforms. You don't hear it much anymore, but once upon a time a standard way to say "Thank you" to someone who did something nice for you was to say, "Much obliged." Contained in that form of gratitude is the notion that obligation stems from our having received something. Certainly that is true of God's grace in Jesus. We are "much obliged" for what Jesus gives us. Jesus may be our very Righteousness, but that hardly frees us up to live however we please seeing as we're all set by grace anyway. Common sense tells us better.

So, with Psalm 15, we do aim high. We aim at nothing less than blamelessness, honesty, integrity, and generosity. We aim to love all the right things, reserving whatever disgust we feel in life for that which is genuinely disgusting to also God. We aim high ethically not out of fear that God will swat us down if we don't. We aim high because we know the heart of God: he loves us enough to want the best for us. He wants shalom for us. So we're only too glad to let God call the shots for us.

I'm still not sure what to make of that automatic light timer thing. But I am pretty sure my teacher was right: people who believe themselves to be the dwelling place of the Spirit of the Most High God do think about such things. They really do. Amen.