A Tree That Does Not Hurry: For the Week You Did Not Choose

A Tree That Does Not Hurry: For the Week You Did Not Choose Preview · Opening of the manuscript Nobody voted for this week. The scan came back while the bulletin was already at the printer. A resignation sat in an inbox next to a youth calendar that still thinks Wednesday is ordinary. A grave is going to occupy Saturday. The foyer will try to make the week smaller with a sentence that sounds like faith. Psalm 1 will not help you do that.

A tree does not hurry. It drinks. It stands in weather it did not schedule. Fruit comes in a season the tree does not vote on. If you preach this psalm as a map of anyone's private drought, you will lie. If you preach it as wisdom about a life planted in Yahweh's instruction, you give this church a God who feeds people beneath the surface while the week they did not choose is still the week they have.

This is a sermon for a charge that already knows how to survive a hard announcement and does not know how to stay planted when the leaf looks less like April. Formation is not a personality. Endurance is not a mood. The psalm is talking about a person whose life is located in Yahweh's law. The tree is how the poem says what that life is like.

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Hear the first psalm, from the World English Bible: "Blessed is the man who doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand on the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in Yahweh’s law. On his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, that produces its fruit in its season, whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper. The wicked are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For Yahweh knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish." (Psalm