So I've been doing my sermon series on the Psalms and today [well actually now it's yesterday] I preached on Psalm 51. I have a little history with the Psalm so I thought it would be a good one to tackle. About 8 years or so ago I was a youth counselor at South Meridian Church of God in Anderson, Indiana under Mark Krenz. And for our ski trip/winter retreat Mark preached out of Psalm 51. In addition, me and Chris Gwaltney, another youth counselor and our worship band leader, ended up writing a song based on the Psalm while we were maxing and relaxing at the ski lodge while other people were skiing, snow boarding, and generally falling down.
For my other sermons I have basically focused on the Psalm itself and what it had to say, but this time I decided to take a look at the story behind the Psalm. For the uninitiated Psalm 51 is supposedly written by King David following his being confronted by Nathan the Prophet about his adultery of Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah. If you don't know the story you can read about it in 2 Samuel, one of the books of the Hebrew Bible [Old Testament], or you can just keep reading at get the overview.
I started talking about David being at home when he should have been out with his men at war. About how he took a moonlit stroll and saw a beautiful naked woman taking a bath. He asked who she was and one of his servants informed him, and then he sent for her and bed her and sent her away in the morning. A while later he found out she was pregnant and then set about trying to 'fix it.' David sent for her husband Uriah and tried to get him to bed his wife, or at the very least lay with her so that he could be convinced he had bedded her and impregnated her. But Uriah was a man loyal to his men and so he refused, even after been made drunk with wine.
After this failed David sent a note with Uriah to the captain of the army. The gist of this letter was to put Uriah in the front of the deadliest fighting and then to step back. The captain followed the orders of his king and Uriah died, but so did a lot of other men in the fighting. The captain sent a page to tell King David the news of the great loss, but told him to tell David that Uriah died also if he got angry. David having been told of Uriah's death decided that it was all good, not caring how many other men had to die to cover David's sin.
Following [in chapter 12 of 2 Samuel] God send the prophet Nathan to tell David a story of a rich man and a poor man. The rich man was, well, rich and the poor man had but one ewe lamb that he treated like a daughter. A guest came to visit the rich man and instead of using one of his many cattle decided to use the poor man's one lamb. David was enraged about the injustice and called for the rich man's head, which caused Nathan to say that David 'was that man.' In the end David convicts himself because he sees what he has done. Out of his contrite heart he wrote the 51st Psalm.
This morning's sermon was a sermon about grace, about the ability for another chance [not a second, we all had that a long time ago, but another]. I talked about how if God is not willing for David's sins to be the end of the story, with how great they were, how much more is God not willing to let our sin be the end of our story. I spoke about how no matter what we have done, no matter where we have gone, no matter who we sometimes are, no matter what we may one day do that there is still a God who yearns for a relationship with us, who yearns for us to recognize our misstep and turn again toward his love. In the Psalm David speaks about God's generous love and great compassion, but I wonder how often we fail to understand those aspects of God.
I would imagine that it is not through God's fault, or even the Bible's, truth be told you don't have to read much of the New Testament to understand how much God has done for us and how much he loves us. Heck, even if you begin in the first half there are a multitude of stories of grace, the fact that God clothed Adam and Eve after there fall [be it a true story or not it still speaks to the character of God in the face of our sins].Which makes me think that the fault is probably the church's or more importantly the human beings who make up that church. I would imagine that t is people in the public eye like Fred Phelps or Pat Robinson or the late Jerry Falwell who convinced so many people that God is the great judge in the sky just waiting to condemn us sinners to hell. I don't know what Jesus they read about but that is not the gist I get at all.
Even in the times when Jesus confronted people who were living incorrectly I feel that he did it with a broken heart not a smile on his face. I know that Jesus would never have blamed Katrina on the sin of America. I know that Jesus wouldn't be picketing a funeral of a soldier or a homosexual. I know that Jesus would be standing beside the grieving, helping them to stand upright in their time of overwhelming pain. And I have to say that if that is what Jesus would be doing its probably what we should be doing also. And if in our actions and our in-actions we his "followers" have convinced even one lonely hurting child to stay away from a scary God I worry about our eternities, not theirs.
I don't know about you but even I, a pastor of a church, is in desperate need to be reminded that God accepts me the way I am, even in my screw-ups. I am desperate to be loved, not tolerated. I am desperate for a sense of hope, for a sense that tomorrow may not always be better, but it will at least be a start of being better. I am glad that David made his mistakes, because they remind me that mine aren't really that bad, at least not bad enough to keep me from God. It's strange that we think that it is possible to do too much wrong for God, to think that our deeds could be bigger than his love, to think that our mistakes could trump his power to forgive, to think that we could be beyond his reach.
I pray that both you and I would recognize that God's love is bigger than anything that we can do, that God is never further away then just around the corner, and that forgiveness is never more than a simple u-turn away.
Peace and Love,
Pastor K
[Sidenote: I have stated before that I do not think that God neither stands up nor sits down to pee, but unfortunately their is not a non-gendered pronoun to use when talking about God, so I hope that those who are against using male language for God will be forgiving in the times when I do, I appreciate that the concept of a Heavenly Father may not be meaningful to all people]
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