United Methodist Church Hyde Park, NY

LIKE A GREEN OLIVE TREE
Psalm 52

It was an unplanned vacation. My Mom wanted to go with my sister when she returned to her home in Bigfork, Montana. And someone needed to escort Mom back here to NY, so I went. I spent 6 peaceful days in my sister and brother-in-law’s house on Flathead Lake. I had my morning coffee looking out on the water and the tree-lined distant shore. Several times my sister and I did the 4-mile Flathead River walk, walking alongside towering trees and breathing in the heavily pine-scented air. Once we hiked the narrow trail through the dense trees and foliage of a nearby forest. When we went out to a restaurant for supper, we sat under the lovely green spreading branches of lilac trees. Montana is rightly called Big Sky Country, but my eyes always gravitated toward something else that state has a abundance of: trees.

Maybe that’s why a certain line about a tree in today’s scripture reading caught my attention. In all my years of preaching from the Lectionary, I never really noticed it, and was never inspired to write a sermon on Psalm 52 – until now. Psalm 52 is unusual. Unlike most psalms, which are either prayers or praise to God, in this one, one human being is addressing another. And to the modern ear, the author/speaker of the psalm sounds blatantly self-righteous.

In the first half, the psalmist indicts someone called a “mighty one,” a person of power and position, who has used that power and position to hurt others. This mighty one has done mischief against the godly, has plotted the destruction of the righteous, has used the tongue like a sharp razor, and has worked treachery. This one loves evil more than good and lying more than speaking the truth. In fact, this mighty one loves all words that devour. Given that the psalm opens by asking this mighty one why he boasts of wickedness, it would appear that he actually takes pride in wrongdoing. The psalmist is saying that this one isn’t among the righteous, yes, but he is also charging that the man is ridiculing and taking advantage of people who are. Thus the psalmist’s harsh words are not name-calling but warranted condemnations.

The second half of the psalm is about righteous people, those accounted holy by God, and the psalmist clearly sees himself among that group. In fact, he says, “But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God,” which seems to indicate that he thinks pretty highly of his spiritual condition. Yet it’s unlikely that his contemporaries heard his words as bragging or self-righteous. In the Psalms, as in Proverbs and the other biblical passages that belong to what scholars call “wisdom literature,” people could fit into only two categories: either they were godly or they weren’t. There was no middle ground. You couldn’t be just a little bit righteous. Either you were, as Psalm 1 puts it, “like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season,” or you were “like the chaff that the wind drives away.” Those were the only two options.

That isn’t to say that people in that day didn’t recognize that some folks did a better job of obeying God than others. But when it came to how they counted where people stood in relationship to God, either you were with God or you were against God.

So when the author says that he is “like a green olive tree in the house of God,” he’s simply using a simile to declare his trust in and allegiance to God. He’s saying that he has planted himself on God’s side of the either-or line and that he’s rooted in God.

I don’t know why I never took notice of this image before. I love trees, believe there is much to learn from them, and always want to live where there are many. I’ve been to the Holy Land twice
and seen many wonderful sights, sacred buildings, holy places, and beautiful landscapes, but what I remember most fondly are the olive trees. Knowing how remarkable these trees are explains why the psalmist likened himself to one.

The olive tree is the most significant and valuable plant mentioned in the Bible. Olive trees so typify the lands of the Bible that the trees and their oil-rich fruits are frequently mentioned in their own right, as well as symbolically in verbal images. The branch of the olive tree symbolized peace and, brought to the ark by a dove, revealed God’s withdrawal of the great flood.

The olive tree is a medium-sized orchard tree with a life span of hundreds of years, perhaps even more than a thousand. Its knobby trunk may become massive and hollow with age while it still has leafy branches. The cultivated olive tree spreads a thick, beautiful canopy of narrow evergreen leaves that are gray-green on the upper surface and silvery beneath. When olive trees are felled, they sprout again, and the shoots may be seen around the base like children around a table. Some of the ancient trees found today in the Garden of Gethsemane could be shoots descended from trees known to Jesus.

The olive tree’s rich, yellow wood is very hard and well suited for fine carpentry and carving. Its’ fruit and oil were used daily by all the people of the Middle East. Both the fruit and its oil were dietary staples. Olive oil was used for cooking food and for lighting. It was also used for healing, soothing the skin in a dry climate. The purest olive oil was used in the Temple for light and to anoint sacred objects, priests, and kings.

The psalmist has examined his life, searched his soul, and can affirm that, like a long-lived olive tree growing on the temple grounds, his life is firmly rooted in God’s love. He is like a luxuriant green olive tree in the house of God, connected to source of life and experiencing abundant life. Who among us wouldn’t like to be able to say the same about ourselves? Psalm 52 challenges us to consider the state of our souls, the quality of our lives, and to see if we come to the same conclusion as the psalmist.

The central issue of the psalm is a perennial one: the nature of enduring security, wealth, and power. The temptation to live for ourselves at the expense of others is both as ancient as humanity itself and as contemporary as today’s date. One biblical scholar describes the depiction of the “mighty one” this way: “The portrait is that of a person who turns human capacities and possession into the basis of his existence.” This is precisely what most of contemporary society
presses us to do – to ground our lives in nothing but ourselves and our possessions.

In other words, contemporary culture confronts us with the same alternatives that we find in Psalm 52. We can choose to live for ourselves, or we can choose to live for God. We can trust our selves and our own resources, or we can entrust our lives and futures to God.

We are called to be like green olive trees in the house of God. We are invited to beautify our surroundings with acts of generosity and kindness, to provide light for the dark places of our world, to fuel our communities with care and support, to anoint others with grace and love. We are called to consecrate ourselves to serving God with all our being and to depend on God’s steadfast love, forever and ever.