Happy Are the Righteous

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

May 24, 2009

Flannery O'Connor tells the story of a wicked man in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”  A family consisting of a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their three young children are driving to Florida for a vacation just after the grandmother reads about a dangerous criminal named the Misfit who has escaped from the Federal Pen and is heading toward Florida.  They stop at a barbacue joint and the owner, Red Sammy, laments the passing of better days:

"You can't win," he said. "You can't win," and he wiped his sweating red face off with a gray handkerchief. "These days you don't know who to trust," he said. "Ain't that the truth?"

"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother.

"Two fellers come in here last week," Red Sammy said, "driving a Chrysler. It was a old beat-up car but it was a good one and these boys looked all right to me. Said they worked at the mill and you know I let them fellers charge the gas they bought? Now why did I do that?"

"Because you're a good man!" the grandmother said at once.

"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer.

His wife brought the orders, carrying the five plates all at once without a tray, two in each hand and one balanced on her arm. "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust," she said. "And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody," she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.

"Did you read about that criminal, The Misfit, that's escaped?" asked the grandmother.... [The owner's wife speculates that he might come to their barbecue joint.]

"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."

[The family resumes its journey but has an accident; the first on the scene is the Misfit and his two henchmen.]

"You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.

The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and then covered it up again. "I would hate to have to," he said.

"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!"

"Yes mam," he said, "finest people in the world." ….

The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulder blades were just behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. "Do you ever pray?" she asked.

He shook his head....  [She asked how he ended up in the penitentiary the first time, but he can't bring himself to remember.]

 

 

"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."

"That's right," The Misfit said.

"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.

"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself...."

[The Misfit's has casually instructed his two companions to take the rest of the grandmother's family off into the woods, where they have all been killed.]

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.... [Finally he kills the grandmother as well.]

"Some fun!" [one of the Misfit's companions said.]

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."[1]

“The wicked are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.”  As religious liberals, we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the reality of wickness in this world.  We like to ask ourselves why people do bad things and how they could be raised differently so they wouldn't do wicked things.  There is, of course, some truth to the belief that desperate social conditions breed crime and criminals; that children raised in dysfunctional families of all sorts are less likely to be able to raise healthy families of their own, and that crime rates go up when economic conditions become more difficult.  But there is crime in the suites as well as crime in the suites, and the wickedness of a man like Bernie Madoff in ruining the lives of thousands can hardly be laid at the feet of economic hardship.

Stephen Mitchells lovely adaptation of this Psalm is an illustration of a liberal tendency to prefer to ignore the wicked:

Blessed are the man and the woman
Who have grown beyond their greed
and have put an end to their hatred
and no longer nourish illusions.

But they delight in the way things are
and keep their hearts open, day and night.

They are like trees planted near flowing rivers,
which bear fruit when they are ready.

Their leaves will not fall or wither,
Everything they do will succeed.[2]

But what has become of the wicked?  Perhaps that's Mitchell's point:  They have become like the grass, or like the chaff which the wind blows away, and they have blown right out of his adaptation!  The Psalm is very clear, and I believe our own experience confirms, that wickedness is its own punishment or, as Flannery O'Connor's anti-hero puts it, "It's no real pleasure in life."  There is wickedness in this world, and there is righteousness, and our task in our living is to study that way day and night as the Psalm has it, or, as Emerson puts it:

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full centre of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.[3]

The Psalm spells out for us what to avoid, how to be righteous, and what the consequences of our choices are.

The first verse lays out what to avoid, here in Robert Alter's translation:  “Happy the man who has not walked in the wicked's counsel, nor in the way of offenders has stood, nor in the session of scoffers has sat.”  Each translation has its own particular way of expressing the particulars of what to avoid:  the King James version speaks of the “counsel of the ungodly,” Alter expresses that as “the wicked's counsel,” Mitchell of “greed.” Continuing, we find “the seat of sinners,” or “the way of offenders,” or “hatred.”  And finally the expressions “seat of the scornful,” “session of scoffers,” and “illusions.”  Each of these relationships is described in physical terms as well: Do not walk, stand, sit.  These express increasing degrees of intimacy with wrongdoing:  first a casual interest, just walking by; then standing around, making an interest manifest, and finally sitting down and joining up.  These increasing degrees of intimacy might well be an expression of the way habits are formed:  curiousity, getting interested, getting hooked.  I express it in the negative, of course, but good habits are the same way, and require the same sort of approach before they become natural and habitual to us.

The good habits are those we are urged to follow in order to be righteous.  The authorized version speaks of “delight in the law of the Lord” and the newer Alter translation says that “the Lord's teaching is his desire;” both translate the term “Torah,” which means teaching and in Judaism refer specifically to the first first books of the Bible, the Books of Moses or the Books of the Law.  It would be easy for us to dismiss this instruction as a demand for legalistic obedience to outdated law codes, but that would shortchange the real depth spiritual depth of the Torah, as suggested in this commentary by John C. Holbert:

Torah is "law," but it is much more than laws. Indeed, to translate Torah as "law" is to do something very unfortunate and finally misleading. Torah comes from the verb "to teach," and hence  means "instruction." But even that does not quite capture the full sense. More comprehensively, Torah means the sum total of all of the gifts God offered to Israel in what became the Bible: laws, poems, stories, wisdom, covenants, and rituals. To delight in Torah, to ponder Torah, is to swim in the vast ocean of God's love of and commands for God's people. To meditate on Torah leads one to the prophets and their call for justice for all people, their demand for righteousness in all things. To muse on Torah leads one to the stories of Genesis, to God's choice of the flawed Abraham and Sarah, to the wily Jacob and Rebekah, to the arrogant Joseph. To ponder Torah is to read of the reluctant Moses, the charismatic and murderous David, and the heroic Job who discovered a God he thought he knew but did not. Those who delight in Torah, who love it, who revel in it, have no time for or interest in wickedness or inning or scoffing.

Torah lovers are like stately perennial trees that can be trusted to bear fruit when they are expected to do so, and whose leaves are ever green. They prosper in their work, because they are happy and blessed.[4]

Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, was challenged by a skeptical pagan to summarize the whole teaching of the Torah – and enormously complicated body of scripture and commentary – while standing on one foot, and he replied "What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole Torah; the rest is just commentary. Go and study it."[5]  Jesus was challenged in a similar way:

^NRS Matthew 22:35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶ "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" ³⁷ He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

In either case, and in the Psalm, we are called upon to study.  The Psalm speaks of meditating day and night or, in Robert Alter's more literal translation, “he murmurs day and night,” suggesting continuous attention, steadfast effort, daily practice. 

Finally, what are the consequences of the choices we make for righteousness or wickedness?  We are not promised that everything we touch will turn to gold, or that good living will shield us from bad consequences, or that no one we love will ever die.  We all know that bad things happen to good people on a regular basis.  But the Psalm and our Unitarian and Universalist heritage have always held that righteousness and wickedness sow their own rewards.  We don't always know why or how, and there may be times in our lives when we doubt that there's any point in doing what is right instead of what is wrong, or in teaching our children to follow in the right path, or in doing what is good instead of what is easy, but our faith teaches us that, no matter how long the darkness may last, the high road is still always better than the low road.  We are not promised particular rewards, or wealth, or power; what we are promised is that our way will stand, that we can be proud of what we have done in our lives, that our way will not be lost.

This Psalm serves as an introduction and gateway to the rest of the Psalms, so it is fitting that it should open to us the way of right living and remind us that there are perils – there is wickedness – around us.  But we can stand firm if our roots are deep and if we love what is good, and right, and true.

 

Amen.

 

          As we leave this place, may we be reminded to choose righteousness,

         

          to teach it and pass it on, that our lives may be long and fruitful on this earth that is given us.

 

May we leave this place in safety and return again in joy when next we meet again.       Amen

 

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