Introduction

Lets begin by looking at the introduction to Psalm 51

To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

The words of this Psalm fit King David following his sin of adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah.

Not too long ago there was an article by a psychologist who works in Britain's penal system which described the startlingly crazy ways by which criminals attempt to sneak out from under their own crimes.

He opened his article by reminding us that in his pseudo-suicide note some years ago, O.J. Simpson had the audacity to write, "Sometimes I feel like a battered husband."

Right. Whether or not O.J. killed his former wife, one fact that is nowhere in dispute is that while they were married, he beat the living daylights out of her on more than one occasion.

But, according to this British doctor, O.J.'s reversal of who was the battered one is typical.

He recounts a time when a man who had just been sentenced to life in prison for murder emerged from the courtroom red-faced with rage.

"That wasn't justice, it was a kangaroo court," he fumed. "They didn't even call no medical evidence!" "Oh," the psychologist replied, "what kind of evidence should they have mentioned?" "What she died of," the man snapped. "And what did she die of?" "Hemorrhage." "How did she get the hemorrhage?" the doctor asked. "They pulled the knife out," was the murderer's reply.

Denial becomes amnesia, amnesia transmutes into innocence. Yet another man, convicted of raping a woman, complained that a combination of whiskey and marijuana had reduced the night in question to a fog in his mind. "How can I defend myself when I can't remember nothing?" he complained. "But if you cannot remember anything, you can't deny the charges either, can you?" the doctor shot back. The rapist was wholly unmoved by that line of logic.

This psychologist concludes, "In amnesia's house there are many mansions, one of which is distortion of memory in the service of self-esteem."

The art of self-deception is one we each know well, though few would care to admit that. In fact, the better you are at self-deception, the less you are aware of it.

First we deceive ourselves and then we further deceive ourselves that we have not, after all, deceived ourselves.

Mind and memory can play such fanciful tricks on us, resulting in sometimes silly consequences and sometimes dire ones.

On the silly side is something that happened to Ronald Reagan. During a 1980 campaign stop Reagan, with trembling lips and obvious conviction, told a World War II story about a pilot and his bombardier. Their plane had been hit but while the pilot could have ejected, the bombardier was too wounded, and his ejection seat too damaged, to get out of the spiraling plane. So the pilot reached over, took the man's hand and said, "Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together." It was a very moving story, until one reporter realized that if both men had died in the crash, there would have been no one to report these final words. When this was pointed out to Reagan, he was serenely unmoved.

On the more dire side of the ledger is the defense which Nazi Adolf Eichmann offered at Nuremberg.

Eichmann had been in charge of the massive transportation system which efficiently moved Europe's Jews from one destination to another, ultimately winding most of them up at one of the Third Reich's many death camps.

But Eichmann claimed his innocence in it all, saying that he was only in charge of transport and had no knowledge of where the Jews were going or what might happen to them once they got there.

But these examples have to do with forgetfulness about specific incidents.

The larger self-deception in which we are involved has to do with issues of who we are.

Most people are loathe to admit that they are just generally bent toward the bad, inclined to do it wrong.

So when the Christian tradition declares to any and all, "You are a sinner," most people these days reply, "What did I do?"

If sin exists at all, it is merely episodic, an occasional (and inexplicable) "lapse" from our better nature, which is at bottom "pretty good."

How foreign is the notion articulated by theologian Emil Brunner.

Brunner once noted that we can, in principle, avoid any particular sin. And we often do.

Few if any people give in to every dark impulse.

The average person, whether or not he is particularly religious, resists many temptations that come his way on the average day.

He does not slip the Snickers bar into his coat instead of paying for it, does not exceed the speed limit, does not shove the person ahead of him in line for the subway, does not grab and grope at the co-worker whose sexy dress just flat out is turning him on that day.

In principle the sinner can, and often does, avoid any particular sin, Brunner noted.

But what we cannot do is avoid every sin.

We cannot not be sinners.

We cannot claim that we have never done it wrong.

We cannot promise that we will never do another wrong thing, speak another cross word, or think another angry thought in the future.

Even if the alcoholic promises never to take another drink or the adulterer vows never again to wake up in the wrong bed--and even if they keep those promises--what they cannot promise is that in addition to staying sober or chaste they will also remain just overall sinless.

Christians are often accused of being rather fanatic when it comes to sin.

We leap from one wrong deed to the catastrophic conclusion that we are just generally depraved.

Like the author of Psalm 51 we claim that we've been sinful from the moment of conception.

And much of our world sees that and cries out, "Good grief! Aren't you taking this guilt trip just a little bit far!?"

We prefer to trace the reason for any given sin not clear back to some defect with which we were born but to more immediate surroundings.

One of the world's first autobiographies was Saint Augustine's Confessions.

A hallmark of that work is Augustine's willingness to confess his own sins and the perversity of heart which inclined him to commit them in the first place.

Today the genre of spiritual autobiography is once again very popular, but with a difference: today people are more interested in confessing the sins of others.

The way a certain author turned out was Mom and Dad's fault, or because of a non-affectionate spouse, or because the company never really gave him his due and so squashed his sense of self-worth.

In a recent interview Hillary Clinton suggested that some of her husband's philandering could maybe get traced back to an alcoholic step-father.

But if your problems can get traced back to someone else, then not only have you rather nicely shifted the blame but you have also suggested a solution:

you simply have to get some therapy to make peace with father, to re-build the self-esteem a careless lover stole from you, to feel better about yourself by garnering the goodies which you never got from your boss.

Now I want to be very clear that I both know and value the power and worth of good counseling.

But if it becomes a substitute for confession or a way to get at the darker truths of others instead of the darker recesses of our own hearts, then we have crossed a theological line which ought properly to give us pause.

We are not forever and only victims.

It is in this sense that Psalm 51 can serve as a bracing tonic.

Here we find an excellent illustration of the elements that go into the doctrine of sin.

Two elements are evident:

One is the fact that it is the psalmist himself who is the problem

And the other is the notion that not only is God our judge, he's right when he renders a harsh verdict.

We properly stand before God, and God properly stands over against the shape of our lives.

Unlike the majority of the criminals in our world, the Psalmist is liberal in saying, "I am the one in need of repair!

It's my heart that needs fixing.

No, better yet, it needs replacing."

So the psalmist begs for a new creation, for a radical change on the inside.

There is in Psalm 51 virtually no hint of outward circumstances that contributed to this sin.

The psalmist claims that he has been sinful since conception but he does not blame his mother or father for that, it's just the way things are.

Nor does he say that since he came into the world already bent, he's just a victim of his nature.

Instead he says that because he came into the world already corrupt, that is all the more reason to beg for new creation.

Because he is willing to fess up in this psalm he feels the sting of God's judgment, the crushing of his bones.

He really feels bad.

In fact, he's downright miserable.

He is very much, to borrow a contemporary phrase, "down on himself."

It is unrelenting.

Nevertheless, Psalm 51 is not depressing.

Therein lies the mystery of faith.

Body

In the potency of grace words that are darker than dark lead to a brightness that cannot be silent.

Look at the first verse

To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving-kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

One preacher has said, the psalm begins drenched with grace.

The first line of the first verse could be translated literally as, "Grace me in your grace, O God!"

In the original Hebrew this line is just three words, two of which ooze with divine mercy.

A literal translation would be something like, "Grace, God, Grace!"

In the Hebrew it is chanan 'elohiym checed.

chanan is a primary root word which means to bend or stoop in kindness to an inferior; to favor, to be merciful, have pity upon

Elohiym is a plural word meaning God

The third word is checed and it means kindness; beauty, favor, good deed mercy, pity, reproach

In your King James Version after these three words is another word which is translated tender mercies.

In the New International it is translated great compassion

This is the Hebrew word racham, meaning compassion, in the plural, the womb, as in cherishing the unborn child, tender love, tender mercies, pity, womb

These words as attributed to God, characterize God as a. God of infinite grace, mercy and love.

One commentator has said that grace is the oxygen of heaven--there's always more of it than there is of sin.

David, in Psalm 51, banks on this super-abundant grace

God’s grace is super plentiful, but it is not cheap.

God is not some feeble figure who is too much of a wimp to generate any anger.

You know, sometimes we see God as a tottering old Grandfather that is just too tender-hearted, or maybe just too much of a moral wimp to ever get upset.

So a smart-aleck son may recklessly smash up the car only to have his father say, "That's OK. We'll get it fixed and forget about it."

To such a father the flippant son may reply, "Yeah, I figured you'd say that! That's why I wasn't terribly careful in the first place!"

Sometimes a person's easy forgiveness becomes something others bank on in self-serving ways.

But not here.

The fierce rightness of God's judgment, the utter dread with which the psalmist faces the possibility of being cast out of the light, make it clear that God's disposition for grace is not being invoked in a manipulative way.

But that is because a genuine awareness of God's grace emerges only from a knowledge of sin's seriousness.

Here is a central wonder of the faith:

The more soberly serious we are about sin and the reality of God's judgment, the more joyfully exuberant we are about the awsome splendor of grace and the way it saturates our lives with a super supply of forgiveness.

We stand constantly under Jesus' cross as the most stunning reminder of just how fierce God's judgment on sin really is.

And yet we find joy emerging from the darkness, even because of the darkness!

We forget this sometimes

But, those around us in society who dislike irritating talk of sin and who think that being called a sinner is merely crazy fenaticism are not the only ones who would just as soon skip topics

Such as sin

Death

And judgment.

When it comes right down to it, we Christians are not too crazy about these subject, either.

Some years ago Tony Campolo was asked to join several other preachers at a Good Friday service.

In the course of that long service each preacher was asked to deliver a short sermon.

Campolo preached what he thought was a desperately powerful sermon.

But when he finished, he was immediately put into his place by a Baptist preacher who delivered a much more powerful sermon.

The title was also the sermon's oft-repeated refrain, "It's Friday, but Sunday's comin'!"

We don't like messages about sin and death.

We want to hurry past them so as to arrive at a happier moment.

Too many Good Friday services, I have listened to, end up as mini-Easter services which refuse to let Jesus' dying gasp be the last thing we hear and so ponder.

We don't like the one part of Romans 6:23

For the wages of sin is death

We want to hurry on to the second part

but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We want also to put some distance between ourselves and the rest of all those "sinners" who are "out there."

Earlier I mentioned how some recent spiritual autobiographies end up more interested in other people's sins than in the author's own.

One recent book which does not do that is Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies.

Lamott is liberal in detailing her sins past and present, and they are the very sins that often make us the most uncomfortable: drugs, booze, bad language, and sex.

She blames no one other than herself but gives unabashed thanks to Jesus for accepting and forgiving her the way she was and is, which, as she says, is mostly a mess.

Yet, here is someone with the refreshing honesty of Psalm 51.

But some in the Christian community have rejected her because of it.

Those who invited her to speak at Calvin College one weekend got letters of protest, complaining that such a "bad Christian" ought not be embraced by those of us who, it is apparently presumed, are all "good Christians."

Oh, how easily self-deception slides into also our devout hearts.

'God, I thank You that I am not like other men; extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector.

The dominating fact of our all being sinners is what leads us to join the psalmist in throwing ourselves on the abiding grace of God.

We're born bent.

We've got a problem that goes well beyond this or that isolated instance of sinful behavior.

We need to face these facts.

We need to quake at the prospect of being cast out of God's holy light.

And if you think that sounds like a dark, morose way to live, if that all sounds like a "bummer" and a "downer" and just flat out no fun at all, that's because you are forgetting the power and the magic of grace.

Then you're forgetting that this kind of honesty, this kind of straightforward acknowledgment of the way things are, leads to nothing short of a new creation through Jesus--the same Jesus who brought resurrection by facing death and hell for us.

The processes of confession and forgiveness is the heartbeat of our lives.

But so is an ever-deepening joy in grace--one which will put us on track to fullness of life with God in the New Creation.

Theologian Miroslav Volf has approached the shape and nature of life with God in what we often call "heaven."

Volf speculates that even in our renewed state, the memory of what was bad in this world may still be there.

Perhaps our conscious awareness of the good will require our being able to contrast good with evil. In other words, we will know what evil is, but we will never choose to do it because, as Volf writes, the love of God will so continually flood into our hearts that we will never have time or desire for anything else.

Another thing is that we will see our Lord Jesus and the scars on His body

The nail prints in His hands and feet and scars of the whip onb His back

To continually remind us of the cost of sin

Our consideration of God's New Creation, our sheer, unadulterated delight in one another, will provide rich patterns of joy.

This will be a life so interesting, so filled with abiding curiosity to see what is around the next corner of God's universe, that the thought of spoiling this will not occur to us.

Such a vision, such a hope, is possible because the grace of God abides forever.

It's what allows us to take the risk of honesty and confession.

It is what lets us take a few sparkles of light from the New Creation and pierce the darkness of our hearts right now.

Attempting to skirt our own sin, ducking this way and that to avoid the truth about ourselves is a never-ending process that brings no peace.

The 8^th verse of Psalm 51 says

Make me hear joy and gladness, That the bones You have broken may rejoice.

"Let me hear joy"

In the end he does hear this joy.

Through the mystery and riddle of grace that joy somehow comes out of contemplation of death and sin and judgment.

From that joy comes something else:

The peace of God that surpasses all understanding; the peace of God that leads the way home.