Psalm 15
In reading Psalm 15, the moral standards may at first seem insurmountable. It seems like the author is asking for perfection! If you grew up in a more conservative Reformed community, these texts may remind you of your total depravity, powerless but for a merciful God. We may be able to say that we have never taken a “bribe against the innocent,” but whom among us can say we “walk blamelessly”?
The good news is that this short psalm is not about trying to be perfect. It’s not even necessarily about God’s mercy available through confession of Christ as Lord. When the Israelite people worshiped God while traveling in the wilderness, no one actually abided in God’s tent, the Tabernacle. Similarly, while people lived in Jerusalem, “on your holy hill,” no one actually lived in the Temple.
But who could enter into the Tent of Meeting? Who could come to visit the Temple on God’s holy mountain? Precisely those who had failed the tests of Psalm 15: Those who had become ritually unclean, had harmed their neighbors, had broken oaths. People came to offer grain and sacrifice animals and share the food with everyone else gathered there. In order to even just briefly abide in that holy place, you had to have something in your life that needed repair.
Who can gather in our sacred places today? Precisely those of us in need of mending the harm we have caused. God calls us to come together, to tithe our resources to nourish our communities and repair the broken places in our shared life.
Psalm 15 is an abolitionist ecclesiology. It doesn’t ask for moral perfection. It asks instead for our imperfection, our failure, our dishonesty, our complicity in injustice. It asks for honesty about these things, and promises that it is precisely in being honest that we might be welcomed onto God’s holy mountain.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.