Even if you don’t preach on Jeremiah, you
hold that thought in the back of your mind… I believe I will preach on Psalm
51:1-12, as somehow I don’t think I’ve ever done so. {And I even co-authored a book, with Clint McCann, called Preaching the Psalms!} What a great, famous,
heavily-used and oft-quoted Psalm – and what could be more fitting for the
season of Lent? The seven “Penitential Psalms” in general could draw more attention
during Lent. I love this: when St. Augustine was confined to his deathbed, his
eyesight failing, he asked that the 7 Penitential Psalms be printed in
oversized hand on huge pieces of paper and hung on the walls around his bed.
In seminary you learn that the headings
attached to Psalms aren’t original. It
is interesting that whoever pieced the Psalter together to find its way into
our canon saw a fit between Psalm 51 and the sordid, telling tale of David and
Bathsheba – and the temptation is then to launch into a digression and wind up
preaching on 2 Samuel 11-12. A worthy text! On that text, though, I’d urge you
to read Robert Barron’s brilliant, probing insights in his fabulous Brazos
commentary, which I reviewed in Christian
Century; after assessing David’s balcony view as “a parody of God’s
providential presidency over creation,” and the way David “seizes the
prerogatives of divinity, like Adam did,” he pairs the story to Psalm 51 and
shrewdly points out that “David does not need a program of ethical renewal; he
needs to be re-created.”
Wow. And we also have Robert Alter’s clever translation of the Psalm 51 heading, noting the Hebrew wordplay which he dubs “a barbed pun”: “Upon Nathan the prophet’s coming to him when he had come to bed with Bathsheba.”
Wow. And we also have Robert Alter’s clever translation of the Psalm 51 heading, noting the Hebrew wordplay which he dubs “a barbed pun”: “Upon Nathan the prophet’s coming to him when he had come to bed with Bathsheba.”
Humble, eloquent, heart-rending
contrition: Psalm 51 hardly needs explication. As a preacher, it would be too
easy and simplistic just to default to an old-timey sermon plot: yes, you sin,
and yes, God forgives if you ask. But the Psalm happily complicates things –
and we do too. The Psalm is after, as Barron mentioned, not a plan of ethical
renewal, or a determination to do better, but a radically new heart, like the
one Jeremiah 31 dreamed of – and maybe this is the sort of thing Jesus had in
mind when he said we must be born again.
This text isn’t after the mere absolution of guilt. It’s about reconciliation, a healed, renewed relationship with God that only God can achieve. Randy Maddox helped us see how for John Wesley, grace isn’t just God letting bygones be bygones; grace has a medicinal, healing power.
This text isn’t after the mere absolution of guilt. It’s about reconciliation, a healed, renewed relationship with God that only God can achieve. Randy Maddox helped us see how for John Wesley, grace isn’t just God letting bygones be bygones; grace has a medicinal, healing power.
The Psalm also highlights the image of
being wiped clean – very different from the accounting of sin being erased. I
love this thought: in his Letters to
Malcolm, C.S. Lewis ponders something John Henry Newman wrote in his “Dream
of Gerontius.” A saved soul, at the very foot of God’s throne, begs to be taken
away and cleansed before continuing in heaven.
“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so sir.’”
“Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so sir.’”
Relevant preaching will touch on why sin
is an elusive topic nowadays. Yes, the Psalm implies “original sin.” Unsure how
much the preacher should delve into that.
I love Mark Twain’s quip, that when we sin, there’s nothing very original about it! We fall in line – and then his other thought: “I don’t know why Adam and Eve get so much credit; I could have done just as well as they did.” Or Whitney Brown’s Saturday Night Live humor: “Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It’s very embarrassing.”
I love Mark Twain’s quip, that when we sin, there’s nothing very original about it! We fall in line – and then his other thought: “I don’t know why Adam and Eve get so much credit; I could have done just as well as they did.” Or Whitney Brown’s Saturday Night Live humor: “Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It’s very embarrassing.”
Our bigger challenge isn’t persuading
anybody of the doctrine of original sin. It’s getting anyone but the most
conservatively-reared, guilt-riddled Christians to understand sin is a real
thing.
A generation ago the psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote Whatever Became of Sin? – and it’s a better question now than then. But it’s no use hammering on people (as I’ve tried a few times), saying You don’t think much about sin, but you really are a sinner! People can’t conceive of sin as an impudent violation of God’s commands – with which we only have a passing, thin acquaintance anyhow. And if sin is breaking a rule, then we fail to understand what revolutionized Martin Luther’s ministry 500 years ago – that sin isn’t this or that action but our entire nature.
A generation ago the psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote Whatever Became of Sin? – and it’s a better question now than then. But it’s no use hammering on people (as I’ve tried a few times), saying You don’t think much about sin, but you really are a sinner! People can’t conceive of sin as an impudent violation of God’s commands – with which we only have a passing, thin acquaintance anyhow. And if sin is breaking a rule, then we fail to understand what revolutionized Martin Luther’s ministry 500 years ago – that sin isn’t this or that action but our entire nature.
How do we explore the human condition and
then help people realize the trouble they are in?
Douglas John Hall (in his wonderful Professing the Faith) rather wonderfully suggested that we don’t feel so much like Prometheus, defiantly scaling the heights to steal fire from the gods, but rather we feel like Sisyphus, valiantly pushing that stone uphill, only to have it roll down again; we are weary, hollow, frustrated people. We are dogged (and you needn’t persuade anyone) by all kinds of brokenness. Such as these:
Douglas John Hall (in his wonderful Professing the Faith) rather wonderfully suggested that we don’t feel so much like Prometheus, defiantly scaling the heights to steal fire from the gods, but rather we feel like Sisyphus, valiantly pushing that stone uphill, only to have it roll down again; we are weary, hollow, frustrated people. We are dogged (and you needn’t persuade anyone) by all kinds of brokenness. Such as these:
Sin, today, is being enmeshed in a culture
that is not of God; the “seven deadly sins” (pride, sloth, greed, lust, gluttony,
envy and wrath) are the very definition of the good life in America we
mindlessly pursue and accept!
Sin, today, is our irrational attachment
to and ultimate trust in our political ideology, which is today’s idolatry. If
your god is what you rely on, what can make your day (or ruin it), what you
believe can deliver the fullness of life, what unites you with some other angry
people, then political ideology (and perhaps especially for those who
vehemently insist politics not be spoken of in church!) is sin.
Sin, today, may well be our bland
niceness, and believe it passes muster as a Christian life. All of these, and
even old-timey garden variety rebellion against God, mean-spirited sins,
indulging in the more sinister aspects of our culture: all are manifestations
of fear, fear of isolation, fear of pointlessness, fear even of God, fear there
may be no God, fear I’m insufficient somehow, fear of missing out, fear of
death.
The Psalm urges us toward what Luther
figured out. My witty and brilliant professor of Church History, David
Steinmetz, explained things this way (in Luther in Context). As a young priest, Luther encountered the
common medieval understanding, which sounds hauntingly like the common modern
church understanding of religious reality: “Although Christ died for the sins
of the world, it is still the responsibility of the sinner to act on behalf of
his own soul by rigorous self-examination, by good works and self-denial, by
prayer and pious exercises. God is
willing to forgive the sinner, but there are conditions which must be met – and
which lie within the power of the sinner to perform.”
But then, after a deep reading of Paul, and thrashing through his own personal struggles and guided well by his mentor John Staupitz, Luther arrived at a very different, more mature, and theologically on target view of things: “The problem with human righteousness is not merely that it is flawed or insufficient (though it is both). The problem with human righteousness is that it is irrelevant. God does not ask for human virtue as a precondition for justification. God asks for human sin.” I love that. God asks for sin. And we’ve got it.
But then, after a deep reading of Paul, and thrashing through his own personal struggles and guided well by his mentor John Staupitz, Luther arrived at a very different, more mature, and theologically on target view of things: “The problem with human righteousness is not merely that it is flawed or insufficient (though it is both). The problem with human righteousness is that it is irrelevant. God does not ask for human virtue as a precondition for justification. God asks for human sin.” I love that. God asks for sin. And we’ve got it.
A few other details in the Psalm might
merit attention. “Cast me not away from your presence”: the very is more like “Hurl”
or “Fling me not away…” And this: the craving is to be “whiter than snow,”
which got erased from “Have thine own way, Lord,” in the hymnal; but if you
rail against this as political correctness, you are exposed as the very sinner
in need of being washed. And the opening verb, “Create,” renders the Hebrew
bara’, which is used rarely in Scripture, and only with God as its subject – as
in Genesis 1!
Our other texts? Hebrews 5:5-10 has always
left me puzzled. This “order of Melchizedek” business meant so much to early
Christians, but then for most of us it’s just plain mystifying. How fascinating
is Hebrews 5’s narrative – that Jesus prayed “with loud cries and tears.” In
Gethsemane? On the cross? And “to him who was able to save him from death, and
he was heard for his godly fear.” Really? The Gospels imagine Jesus’ prayer not
being heard, or being heard but resolved quite differently. Or is Hebrews
envisioning the resurrection? I think not, but who knows?
And then John 12:20-33 is a rich text. In
the wake of being anointed, and of Palm Sunday, and then just before the
footwashing, we find this public scene where some Greeks approach Philip (the
one disciple with a Greek name!) and ask “We wish to see Jesus.” I heard a
sermon years ago that used this as a cadence throughout, the whole homily
playing on what it means to wish to see Jesus, how to find him, what we see
when we find him, or are found by him. This is our request, and I suspect this
is even the request of a cynical, unbelieving world – in our Christ-haunted
landscape.
I love the way Philip told Andrew, then and
Andrew told Jesus. There’s something hidden in there about the nature of
community, but I’m not sure what. Jesus’ “hour to be glorified” is near – and for
John, that glorification isn’t on Easter morning but as he breathes his last on
the cross. How startling is the way this Johannine text picks up on Paul (“unless
a grain falls into the earth”) and the Synoptics (“he would would save his life
will lose it,” and the voice from heaven!): it’s as if this text is an
overture, a big musical climax, a “greatest hits” explicating Jesus. And then
(and I recognize it’s past our reading), what is that in verse 36? “And he hid
from them.”
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My new book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available now!
My new book, Weak Enough to Lead, is available now!
I always remember Steinmetz's rendering of "original sin": We sin "inevitably and freely".
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ReplyDelete"God does not ask for human virtue as a precondition for justification. God asks for human sin.” Again, Steinmetz: "When your car runs out of gas, all that is important is gas."
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