Laws Unsung
Your statutes have been my songs wherever I make my home. – Psalm 119:54 (NRSV)
Can. You. Even. Imagine?
Can you picture a set of laws so beautiful, so worthy of praise that you’d want to sing them? What legislation is so fair, in both senses of the word, that it would raise a song in your heart?
The psalmist sang God’s statutes. Jews today sing Torah like a love song. Not me. I know songs about a million useful, or beautiful, or silly things. I don’t think I’ve ever sung one about laws. How often have you?
Not rising to my feet for the singing of my town’s zoning ordinances, say—that, I understand. But it does seem strange that we don’t sing the Ten Commandments. Or the Golden Rule, even. At least not outside VBS.
Probably there are no laws I’d be super excited to sing; freedom is easier to set to music. Then again, freedom is really only freedom if it exists within boundaries—between me and you, the individual and the group, my behavior and your personhood. Laws that are fair, in either sense the word, sit right along those boundaries. I don’t love being curbed, but I like being run over even less.
I doubt I’ll ever belt anybody’s laws, even God’s. But since I’m grateful that God values my freedom enough to put some limits on it, I guess I’m willing to hum along.
Prayer
Teach me to so love your law that it puts a song in my heart. And grant that some hymn-writer out there will take this devotion as a challenge and prove me wrong. Amen.
About the AuthorQuinn G. Caldwell is Chaplain of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell University. His most recent book is a series of daily reflections for Advent and Christmas called All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. Learn more about it and find him on Facebook at Quinn G. Caldwell.