5th Sunday in Lent
Psalm 51
March 25, 2012
When It's My Fault
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
There are times.
We gather on Sundays, what in the early days of our movement was called the “Lord's Day” because Sunday is the day of resurrection. Sunday was the “eighth day” of the week, the first day of the new creation. The tone of Sunday is always triumphant, simply because it's Sunday. It's a little Easter. Sundays aren't even counted in the forty days of Lent.
Surely there are times of resurrection, times of Easter in our lives. When we come to church in those times, the worship, the hymns, the lessons and the whole of service align with our hearts. We can hear the goodness of the lives that we are living in the stories that are read. We can sing the joy in our hearts in our hymns.
But there are other times. Sometimes we don't feel like Easter, sometimes we can't feel like Easter. There are times when there is no triumph in our lives. When we've lost our job, when our lives have been derailed by decisions made a thousand miles away by people who don't know us or care, when we find ourselves estranged from the people we love and the more we try to fix it the worse it gets, when we are victimized by secret violence, when the doctor won't meet our eyes and we don't dare to ask the question that matters most.
When we come to church in those times, we don't fit. The world is not right. It is not Easter, even a little.
There are times.
The psalmist knew this. The psalmist knew that the covenant that binds God and God's people has its seasons, its times. There are times when all is well with the covenant community: the harvest comes in and it is good, the borders are free from enemies who threaten invasion. There are times when men and women live out the end of their lives supported by their children and surrounded by grandchildren. There are times when the nation is prosperous, the pastures are filled with sweet green grass, the flowers bloom in abundance, and so the land flows with milk and honey.
There are times in the life of the covenant community when pure praise is the order of the day, when Psalm 150 makes perfect sense:
Alleluia! Praise God in the holy temple;
praise God in the firmament of power.
Praise God for every mighty act;
praise God’s excellent greatness.
Praise God with the blast of the ram’s horn;
praise God with lyre and harp.
Praise God with timbrel and dance;
praise God with strings and pipe.
Praise God with resounding cymbals;
praise God with loud clanging cymbals.
Let everything that has breath
praise God. Alleluia!
There are psalms like this that celebrate the knowledge that, as Browning said, “God is in his heaven—all's right with the world.”1
But there are other times, times when life makes no sense at all. There are times when Israel plants its crops, scattering the seed, plowing the soil, and watching over the crops so carefully. But the rains do not come in time and so there is no harvest. There are times when the land is threatened by enemies and the armies of Israel show up to defend the land, but, somehow the heavenly host does not and so the cause is lost. There are times when the king fails to use his power to protect the widows, the orphans, and the foreign workers, when the country looks wealthy but feels poor indeed. There are times of crisis when despite the longing for God's guidance the voice of the prophet is not heard and the people are left not knowing which way to turn.
The psalmist knew that there were times like these. There were times when the people needed psalms that could carry their grief and disappointment and even their despair, so they wrote laments. These weren't simply complaints about how tough life is and how unfair. They were petitions made within a covenant relationship. They had made promises. God had made promises. When God's promises were not kept, when God seemed not to be listening or ignored their pleas, they were not shy about letting God know in no uncertain terms. Yes, Yahweh was God and therefore powerful and potentially dangerous. But Yahweh was their God and they were Yahweh's people and that gave them audacity.
Even when death seemed imminent, even when they despaired of ever being heard the psalmist fashioned a prayer of pain and laid it before God's throne:
God, why have you rejected me?
why have you hidden your face from me?
Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death;
I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.
Your blazing anger has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me;
They surround me all day long like a flood;
they encompass me on every side.
My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me,
and darkness is my only companion.
When Israel had reason to believe that it had kept covenant and still it suffered calamity and abandonment, or at least when the disaster was out of proportion to Israel's failure, the psalmist had no qualms at all about laying the responsibility for covenant failure at God's feet.
And there are times like those.
But then there are other times. Times when we know very well that the fault lies with us, times when we know with stunning and terrible clarity that we have sinned. Oh, I know we're not comfortable with that word. We might prefer “messed up” or “behaved inappropriately” or “made a mistake.” But the psalmist knows that the old word is the right one:
Against you only have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight.
And so you are justified when you speak
and upright in your judgment.
Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth,
a sinner from my mother’s womb.
No, this time the psalmist makes no excuses and takes full responsibility for failure to live out the covenant. That’s kind of refreshing, I think, to us today who know all sorts of ways of apologizing without taking responsibility. “I apologize to anyone who may have been hurt by my actions.” Nothing specific there, nothing actionable in court, nothing that renders us liable. “I am sorry that some people took offense at what I said.” What I said wasn't offensive in itself; it's the way people heard it, so it's really their fault, not mine. No, this psalm does not evade or pretend: “It's my fault. I sinned. I've been doing it from day one.”
But having taken responsibility the psalmist makes an amazing turn. For someone who has admitted their fault, the psalmist certainly makes a lot of demands. Count them. “Have mercy” and “blot out” in the first verse. “Wash me” and “cleanse me” in the second. “Teach me” in verse six, “purge me” and “wash me” in seven, “let me hear”and “let my bones rejoice” in eight; and, “hide” and “blot out” (again) in nine. Then there is “create” and “put” in ten, “do not cast” and “do not take” in eleven; and, “restore” and “sustain” in twelve. We skip a verse and then there is “deliver me” in fourteen, and in fifteen there is “open my lips.” Finally, there are two more in verse eighteen: “do good” and “rebuild.” Twenty-one demands all together.
For someone who is apologizing our writer certainly has a long of list of expectations! She has a lot of nerve, doesn't she? This nerve got into the DNA of the Jewish tradition and in Yiddish it’s call chutzpah. Elie Wiesel tells the story of a rabbi who stepped into the pulpit on Yom Kippur and observed that in Yiddish the day is called Yom Kippurim, the day of atonements—plural—and that it was a good thing, too, because, while the people certainly had their sins that needed to be atoned, so had God committed sins that needed atoning. I think that's more than I would dare. In another story a rabbi stood in the pulpit to pray but instead of the prayers appointed, he said something like, “God, until you start answering some of the prayers we've already prayed, we're not going to pray any more of them!”
The psalmist knows something that I too easily forget: this relationship with God is a covenant. When one of us fails to keep covenant, it will take both of us to restore it. When I fail to keep covenant, I can recognize my failure. I can speak my failure to God. I can do what I can to undo the damage I have done. But that's as much as I can do. Offering a sacrifice won't help. Giving a burnt offering won't help. I cannot restore the covenant by myself. Only God can do that. And God simply must or I am done for. The boldness of this prayer is born of equal parts trust in God's mercy and the conviction that there is no other life-giving alternative available.
You may have noticed that this is described as a “psalm of David.” The superscription even goes so far as to say “when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” Someone at least thought it was appropriate to connect this psalm with David and with his confrontation by Nathan after the sordid episode with Bathsheba. You remember the highlights, I'm sure, how David saw Bathsheba bathing and, since he was the king, saw no reason why he shouldn't have her and did, and how she became pregnant which was awkward since Bathsheba's husband was in the army and away fighting so he would know the child could not be his, and how David had her husband summoned home and tried to convince him to spend some time with his wife but he wouldn't because his comrades couldn't and why should he have a privilege they did not, and how David sent Uriah back to war with a message to his general to request that arrangements be made so that Uriah would be killed in battle, and how he was, and how David then married Bathsheba and figured no one was the wiser, but God knew and sent the prophet Nathan. You knew all that. Remember that Nathan's accusation was not that David had committed a sexual offense, but that David was guilty of abuse of his power and theft.
It doesn't matter who we think we are, or how important, or how special, when we sin—and we've been doing it from day one, haven't we?—come on, be honest!—when we sin, yes, we have to take full responsibility, but that doesn't mean that we can fix it. There is a part that only God can do, and God must or we are done for. So we may be audacious:
Have mercy on me, O Lord,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
God has something to gain from this as well. We cannot praise God, we can take no delight in God when the covenant is strained. If God does the things that we ask to restore the covenant, then our praise will be what it should be:
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
At New Melleray Abbey, the Trappist monastery not too far from Dubuque, the monks live according to a strict interpretation of an ancient way of life found in the Rule of Benedict. They live a life of prayer and work, solitude and community. They are not an order that takes a vow of silence, but they do observe a daily period during which they do not speak. That period begins after the last prayers of the day, the service of Compline, the ancient bedtime prayers of the Church, which begins at 8:00 p.m. They gather and sing an evening hymn. They pray the fourth and the ninety-first psalms. They pray the Song of Simeon and receive a blessing from the abbot, their leader. Then they sing Salve, Regina, a hymn in honor of Mary and the only part of the service in Latin.
Then they depart the abbey church and return to their rooms. They keep what is called the greater silence and speak no word. At 3:15 a.m., the bells ring, calling the community to its first prayers of the day, the office of Vigils that starts fifteen minutes later. The first words that they hear will be from the worship leader: “O Lord, open my lips” and they will answer with their first words of the day: “and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.”
It's not a bad way to start a day—the words, I mean, not the time. Better, I think, than “stupid alarm!” or “morning already?” The first words of their day, every day, point them toward this psalm and remind them of why we have voices. That, and that we are living, all of us who are a part of God's covenant people, within the mercy of the God who listens to our desperate pleas, our insistent demands, our cries that we may always live in God's covenant. Only God can restore the covenant when it's our fault that it is strained. And God must. God simply must.
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1Robert Browning, “Pippa Passes”.
