What must we do to be saved?  Pure religion is visiting orphans and widows….  Blessed are the peacemakers….  On and on it goes.  The Bible pervasively talks about faith coming to life in action.  Hands and hearts move together toward God.

It has taken me quite a long time to figure out how human activities and divine grace connect to each other.  (In the interests of truth-telling, let me say that I still don’t have it figured out and don’t expect to, since only God knows these things.  But still, trying to understand pays off immensely.)   Like many others, I have had to move from a works-righteousness orientation to one that acknowledges the mercy of God (prevenient, sustaining, eschatological, all at once).  In this way of seeing things, human activity becomes an expression of God’s mercy in two senses: we are sustained by God’s grace and mercy, and our actions come to imitate that mercy as we extend grace to others.

The author of Psalm 18 (equals 2 Samuel 22, more or less) see things this way, too.  The psalm itself consists of several parts (vv. 1-3 an address to God; vv. 4-5 a statement of prior distress and impending death; vv. 6-19 a description of God’s dramatic actions of salvation, phrased to sound much like the deliverance in Exodus; vv. 20-24 an oath of innocence (to which I’ll return); vv. 25-45 a meditatation on the surpassing nature of God; and vv. 46-50 a final praise of God — at least that’s one way to organize it, and there are others).  Each part contributes to an overall image of a God who acts decisively to bring about righteousness in the world. The God who acts must take sides in the human situation because, while all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, some of us have fallen a lot more than others, and our behaviors are more destructive.

This realistic appraisal of the human condition leads to the first of two big ideas, each underpinning this psalm, to consider.  That is this: in the Bible, the justice of God is not seen as something to balance against God’s mercy, but as essentially tantamount to mercy and grace.  God does the right and brings about a world in which the right is done, and this fact is very good news.  At least, it’s good news for everyone who seeks the right.  Gone is the popular idea among evangelical Protestants that somehow justice is a diminution of love or even its opposite. All those sermons promoting cheap grace in the name of ending legalism can just go out the window.

The second idea appears in vv. 20-24.  Here the psalmist talks about works.  Someone trained in the pop-Calvinism of contemporary American religion might find such statements as “Yhwh rewarded me according to my righteousness, compensated me because of my clean hands” a little too self-important or even highly dishonest.  But the psalmist does not see it that way.  He or she is not claiming moral perfection in every little thought or attitude, but rather a basic disposition toward life.  This disposition is characterized by a desire to “keep the ways of Yhwh,” which is equivalent to both “avoiding evil before God” and carefully assessing one’s life in terms of God’s judgments (acts of justice, v. 22) and placing one’s life before God for evaluation (v. 23, “I was blameless before him”).  The psalmist thinks that human behavior can form a pattern that is commendable, not that we are irremediably sinners who must always hope that God can ignore reality and pretend we are not what we are.

The trouble with the opposing view, the one very popular in church, is that we run the risk of saying that God doesn’t care about righteous behavior.  And we run the risk of turning God into a sloppily sentimental rich uncle of the human race who ignores our faults even when they hurt us.  The psalmist wants to take us another way.

I thought about all these things this week when reading a charming little book by Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist at Harvard.  His book, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger (Oxford University Press, 2006), chronicles several lives as men and women experience mental health issues that ultimately derive from moral failures of one sort or another.

Here are some of his conclusions, which relate to the narrative that the psalmist tells.  “… moral mentoring can intensify danger unless it enables individuals (and collectivities) to break out of local dialects of moral experience that underwrite violence by mobilizing inhuman responses to threats to what we mistakenly hold to be most at stake.  Moral responsibility is not itself enough; it must be balanced with critical imagination” (p. 192)

How do we break out of our own limited language for moral experience and enter into a broader one (which for Christians means, the language of Scripture and the church)?  Let’s take that up next time.