Jeremiah 31:31-34 seems preachable to me,
although I’ve never done it. I try to imagine the small scroll scholars believe
chapters 30-31 once were – a small roll indeed, yet full of promise and hope,
and for the very people Jeremiah had been castigating for years! That’s
something – like a long pamphlet of hope. I am fond of Elizabeth Achtemeier’s
wisdom on the need for the law to be written on the heart, for a radically new
and different covenant: “It is obvious from this passage why moralistic
preaching does no good. It does not and it cannot produce any change in
people’s lives, for they have no power in themselves to change. They are like
prisoners – slaves of sin – and exhorting prisoners to be good is like telling
them to fix up their prison cages a little – maybe to hang a picture on the
wall or to put a rug on the floor. But what is needed is someone to come and
open the door!” Whichever text you choose, hold that in the back of your mind!
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.”
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.
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.’”
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.”
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.
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.
We do know guilt, shame, worrying about
being found out, hoping to be good enough – and by “we” I mean not just
churchgoing believers but garden variety American people!
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.
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 who 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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