Psalm 51: Recognize the brokenness, but don't stop there!

Psalm 51: 1-17

Have mercy on me, O God,

   according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

   blot out my transgressions. 

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

   and cleanse me from my sin. 

For I know my transgressions,

   and my sin is ever before me. 

Against you, you alone, have I sinned,

   and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your sentence

   and blameless when you pass judgement. 

Indeed, I was born guilty,

   a sinner when my mother conceived me. 

You desire truth in the inward being;

   therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;

   wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 

Let me hear joy and gladness;

   let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. 

Hide your face from my sins,

   and blot out all my iniquities. 

Create in me a clean heart, O God,

   and put a new and right spirit within 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. 

Then I will teach transgressors your ways,

   and sinners will return to you. 

Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,

   O God of my salvation,

   and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance. 

O Lord, open my lips,

   and my mouth will declare your praise. 

For you have no delight in sacrifice;

   if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased. 

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

   a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

~~~~~~~~~~

Grace and peace be with you in the name of the one who has cleansed us from our sin. Amen


Well, we have made it to the fifth week in Lent. The journey that began with ashes and thoughts of our mortality has brought us again to texts that speak of dying. Next week we will read the account of Christ’s passion and we will enter Holy Week mindful of those events that led to the glory of the resurrection. But today we are called to look at both Jesus and ourselves. It’s like a final call to take up the Lenten journey of reflection and repentance in this last week. Not to look back and see how we’ve fallen short in what we thought we might do for 40 days, but to look inward and forward and say, “what do I do between now and next week?”  Our readings set us up for Holy Week in a number of ways. What I found notable is that they give us a pretty clear picture of who we are before God. Particularly, we are not our own. And that may be a good place to sit these five days before we take our donkey walk and enter deeply into the darkness and solemnity of Holy Week.

If you were here for worship on Ash Wednesday, we opened the service by speaking these words from Psalm 51 together. So here at the other end of Lent, I’d like to go back to them a bit, to see how the psalmist might help us understand where we are right now on our own faith and Lenten journeys.

Psalm 51 is a penitential Psalm. There are 7 of them in the Psalter, but this is probably the one we recognize most quickly. This is partly due to the story associated with it, one of the sadder stories in Scripture. The superscript at the beginning reads, “A psalm of David. Upon the prophet Nathan coming to him when he had gone into Bathsheba.” It’s a story of sin. Sin that snowballs out of control. King David sends his men off to war and stays home. He sees the beautiful woman next door bathing on the roof, .Things escalate and ultimately David winds up with the blood of an innocent man on his hands.

He is taken about as low as he can go, and then this prophet add to the sting and says “Hey David, you may be king, but God saw what you did. I suggest you deal with it.” Ever been there?

So David reaches for what he knows – a prayerful song that expresses the darkness in his spirit. This was the king God had said was made after God’s own heart. But David’s heart had strayed and he knew it. I read this week that this is not a psalm meant to be read, it is meant to be wailed! Psalm 51 calls us to recognize our brokenness. As we read them, the lines of this psalm are really not about one specific sin. This is about all out sinfulness, that tendency that follows us around even when we try and ignore it. And we can try our hardest to ignore it in ourselves, or we can pray with the psalmist who says, “My sin is there right in the open, and Lord, you see it. You, who created my inward being, see where I am so very unrighteous.” And what is striking, especially when we think of King David and the other people hurt by David’s sin – Bathsheba, Uriah, the baby born - the psalmist asserts that sin is against God alone. This is brokenness that recognizes the character of God as holy and righteous. God is the only one to whom we can and should hold ourselves accountable. Sin hurts others, but the evil in it is against the one Holy God.

We recognize the brokenness. It’s really not too hard to see, is it? We can just look at ourselves, look around the room. Turn on the news and this week has been full of violence, from innocents gunned down in our own state, to others in Afghanistan, to a blockbuster movie that centers on children killing children. We are violent. We are sinful. We are broken. But the psalm doesn’t leave us there. The rest of its verses I see as an invitation- an invitation to repentance, to restoration, and to response. It’s a perfect Lenten psalm to get us thinking and ready for Easter.

We begin with repentance. Repentance is never easy. Ask my mother and she will tell you that getting me to say “I’m sorry” was impossible from the time I could talk. We do not like to admit we are wrong. But Psalm 51 invites us to recognize the sin and the wrong we commit and repent of it. It can take us even lower than recognizing the sin does. Because repentance means giving up all control and ownership of the situation. It’s saying, “I know what the Lord wants of me, but just as I couldn’t stay away from the sin, I can’t do the right or the forgiving on my own either. If God wants truth on the inside of me, God’s going to have to put it there.”

The invitation to repentance is necessarily difficult. But the prayer of Psalm 51 also invites us into the joys of restoration. We’re taken low. We die to ourselves and our desires. And then we call upon the Lord to do what only the Lord can. “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” That word “create” is the same one we read in the first verse of the Bible. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This word for creating is only used for divine action. We’re not talking about any sort of psychological self-help here. We are talking about the Creator of the heavens and the mountains and the seas reaching in and creating a heart in us poor miserable sinners a heart that is purer than snow, full of joy and gladness. Like a broken bone in all its pain pulled back together new, not fixed, but made totally new.

Restoration is not a process and that is always easy, either. If you’ve tackled some sort of restoring project in your home, you know that getting woodwork back to its original beauty is going to involve a huge amount of stripping, scraping, and sanding and polishing until that glorious grain shines through again. The paint layers we pile on old hutches to hide the marks and cover up the imperfections, eventually they just have to come off. Carefully, but the original piece is there somewhere. It’s just waiting to take its rightful place in the living room instead of hiding in the office.

“Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”  Not only is God the creator, but God is the restorer. God lovingly strips away the paint and varnish- of pride, career, personality, you name it- that we pile on ourselves to hide our failures, our sin, our hurt to reveal the original creation. God then brings us out into the open and say, “Here! Stay in my presence. You are my treasure!”  Are you starting to see why Jesus could not take this lightly? Purging with hyssop involved the priest dipping hyssop leaves into the blood of the sacrifice and sprinkling it over the penitent for forgiveness.  It’s a long term relationship, sprinkled in Christ’s own blood that gets to the very heart of who we are and who God wants us to be.

Psalm 51 invites us to repentance, to restoration, and to response. Our psalmist isn’t going to keep this quiet. “Give me your joy again Lord, and sustain it in me because I know I can’t do it on my own, and I’m going to teach others.”  I love this because the writer says “I’m going to teach this to sinners, and they’ll come to God.” He’s not just going to hang around with the redeemed and talk about how peachy things are now. No, he’s going to others who are broken, who have blood on their hands too, and point them to the deliverer.

Philip and Andrew had to tell Jesus about the Greeks wanting to see him, because Philip and Andrew had been there too. They knew what it was like to be waiting for the Messiah, to find him and experience life in his presence. How could they not share it?

On a final note, our psalmist knows he’s not doing this on his own. He asks for help from God and offers a second response of worship. Out of this new heart and broken spirit comes the praise that God desires. “Open my lips, Lord, and I will declare your praise!” Psalm 51 invites us to repentance, restoration, and sweet response in the presence of our Lord.

What a gift! In a way, it can all seems so simple: recognize the brokenness in sin and God will take care of it. But we hold on to ourselves so tightly it often seems nearly impossible.

But hear the words of Jesus. “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it’s just a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  We might rephrase that as unless a sinner falls into the arms of God and dies, he remains a sinner. But if he dies to sin, he bears the fruit of an eternal life centered in Christ.

Where do we need to die this week? What are you holding on to that needs to be laid aside, laid aside so that you can enter into the last days of lent and holy week ready to proclaim Christ glorified for the world’s salvation?

Where do you need to be cleansed, renewed, and made whiter than snow?