I saw many of you at the Ash Wednesday service this week, but let me just say it’s wonderful to be back after a couple of weekends away on vacation! Some of you know that my in-laws live on Maui seven months out of the year, so often in February we feel a deep family obligation to pay them a visit! I did spend time this week listening to the two services I missed, and our special guest Mark Labberton two weeks ago…I missed being here!

We’ve been learning how to pray by reading the Psalms. (if you’re following along on our little schedule, you are at Psalm 91, which means you are 60% of the way through completing the book of Psalms- you’re doing great!

We’ve noticed along the way that this “prayer book” is full of many, many different kinds of prayers. We’re learning to pray by praying. Psalm 1 & 2 helped prepare us to pray by reminding us of our context for prayer- that we converse with a God who is both intimate and powerful, nearby and God of the whole world. Psalm 13 invited us to pray our personal laments and complaints, to have honest conversation. Psalm 46 invited us to turn to God for help and security in time of trouble. Psalm 74 helped us to pray not just as individuals, but as a community. And last week, Psalm 98 invited us to praise.

Reading: Psalm 51:1-12

Walker Percy was an American author from the South who died in 1990. He was first trained as a medical doctor. Early on in his practice Percy contacted tuberculosis from one of his patients, and was forced to go into an extended convalescence.During that time, he began to question the ability of science to deal with the human dilemma, and dug further into his faith and began to write books, both fiction and non-fiction.

As it turned out he had a real gift, and won many awards for his writing. One of his later books was called Lost in the Cosmos. It’s sort of a strange book, chopped into lots of small pieces, but it is essentially a satire on the futility of the self-help movement that is so powerful and popular in America.

In the last sections of the book, Percy imagines a spaceship that has gone out from the earth, investigating radio transmissions which turn out to be from intelligent life near a planet six light-years from the earth. Eventually the American spaceship gets close and a radio conversation takes place. The Americans want to land their spaceship on the foreign planet. The extraterrestrial voice won’t allow it, but keeps asking for information about the astronauts.

The humans eventually must tell them about the world wars on earth, the confusion over fidelity in relationships, the quarrels and murders that have taken place on their own ship, and the third world war they believe has utterly destroyed life back on their earth. The extraterrestrial voice says “You are in trouble. Have you requested help? Has help arrived? Did you accept help?” To which the astronaut replies “Help? What help? We don’t ask for help. We help ourselves.” Permission to land is denied.

Have you requested help?

Have mercy on me, O God…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.

Have you requested help?

The small title of Psalm 51 says the context for this prayer is David’s story with Bathsheba. We know these titles were added later to the Psalms, but this one seems to be particularly appropriate to the occasion it mentions.

You remember the story. David stays home while the army goes off to war. From the balcony, he spots a gorgeous woman, Bathsheba, sends for her and takes her to bed. When she becomes pregnant, David sends for her soldier husband Uriah and tries to trick him into spending the night with his wife to cover over responsibility for the pregnancy. When Uriah won’t do it, David arranges to have him killed in battle, and takes Bathsheba as his own wife. God then uses the prophet Nathan to confront David over his sin.

The story doesn’t even shock us anymore, sadly enough. Maybe because we’ve heard or read about David and Bathsheba many times. Or maybe because these same things are in the news so often it just seems routine. It doesn’t matter who the leader is- politicans, teachers, pastors, coaches, men, women. But here’s David, for heaven’s sake, the leader of God’s people, first lusting in his heart, then using his power as king to entice adultery. Ruining a marriage. Practicing deception and trickery. Convincing others to help him cover it up. Arranging a murder. Trying to proceed with life as though nothing has gone on. “We don’t ask for help. We help ourselves.”

Have you asked for help?

The easy thing when we read this story is to say- what a terrible person David is. The easy thing when we hear this story is to say (note Jesus’ parable from Luke 18- told to “some who trusted in themselves”) “God, I thank you that I am not like that.” The easy thing is to say “I’ve never done things like that. I never committed adultery, I never killed anybody, I never covered up a major crime.”

Those are pretty spectacular sins, I agree.

But sin is actually not very spectacular. It’s pretty dull. It mostly all sounds the same, at its core. We say “I will be God.” We say “I will control my own life.” We say “I am more important than other people.” Most sin in our lives would fit neatly into those statements.

David said all of those things. David functioned with a heart that invited all of those things. David decided who had a right to live and who didn’t. David decided he could make his own decisions, control his own life. David apparently didn’t need the counsel of friends. David didn’t need prayer. David didn’t need light to shine, didn’t need scripture. David decided that he was more important than everyone else- Bathseba, Uriah, General Joab who had to carry out the deed, other soldiers forced to be complicit in murder, the baby son he fathered, his wife, his other children, the people of Israel. God.

David decided he was more important than any of them. What David really was deciding was that he would decide his own identity, which meant that who God made him to be really didn’t matter.

David, you see, didn’t need God. He had it all. Money, palace, power, reputation, health. When you think you have it all, you don’t need God. Thomas Merton once said “We cannot find God unless we know we need him.”

Have you asked for help?

This one Psalm, the 51 st, may be the single most-utilized-in-worship piece of scripture in the whole Bible. We sing it. We read it. We pray it. We use if for confession. Why has it remained so popular? What is going on in this Psalm? What kind of prayer is confession? I have five words to describe it. This is a very simple sermon, actually. I tried to make it more complicated. I listened to Mark Labberton’s sermon this week, I’ve always admired Mark- he’s so articulate, so sharp and I said “I’m going to preach a sermon like that.” And God said, “No you’re not!” So here are five simple words on the prayer of confession:

1) HONEST.

We’ve called our sermon series “honest conversations.” Psalm 51 is painfully honest. This isn’t bartering. There’s not a word about negotiation. Not a word about blaming someone else, or the author’s sin relative to anyone else’s. It is not the author saying, as some of the Psalms do, “Lord, change my situation so that I can praise you!” No. It’s simply “Lord, change ME.” It’s giving up trying to hide. When the prophet Nathan confronted David, David said only “I have sinned against the Lord,” the same thing that is here in verse four of Psalm 51, “Against you (Lord) have I sinned.”

We start confession by being honest.

Scott Cairns is a poet who teaches at the University of Missouri. He recently wrote what he calls four “Idiot Psalms” which appeared in January's Poetry Magazine. One of the “psalms” ends like this (it’s a prayer):

“…I find my face against the floor, and yet again
my plea escapes from unclean lips, and from a heart
caked in and constricted by its own soiled residue.
You are forever, and forever blessed, and I aspire
one day to slip my knot and change things up,
to manage at least one late season sinlessly,
to bow before you yet one time without chagrin.”

Painfully honest. The desire to be different, to live better, but also the honesty of acknowledging a heart “caked in and constricted by its own soiled residue.”

2) PERSONAL.

This Psalm is a painfully honest conversation because it is one person and God. There are big things all over the place in our world that need the light of honesty to be dealt with. There is national sin, there is our participation in institutional sin, there are abuses of power that keep people trapped across the world, there are all sorts of things in which we participate and clearly need confession and repentance, but not in this Psalm. In this one Psalm, Psalm 51, it is one person and God. It is personal. Me and God. You and God. Listen to the pronouns:

“Have mercy on ME, blot out MY transgressions, wash ME from MY iniquity, cleanse ME from MY sin. I have sinned, I have done evil.” And on and on. Personal.

3) SIN.

The prayer of confession deals with sin. No getting around it. It’s really interesting to see what the Psalmist asks for, several times, in several ways. There are at least three distinctly different Hebrew words used here for sin, that cover a broad spectrum of meanings- rebelliousness, defiance, disobedience, do wrong, go astray, twist, missing the mark/failure due to choice.

The Psalmist asks for these to be met totally and completely, also using three distinct words:

Lord, blot out my transgression. Wipe it out. Take the tablet that it is written on, and whitewash that part. Erase it. Blot it so it can no longer be read.

Lord, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. It’s a laundry word! Take me like a dirty rag and pummel me in water, use soap and wash out all the marks and stains.

Lord, cleanse me from my sin. Take the unclean thing and make it clean.

The prayer of confession deals with sin.

4) BIG.

Sin is big. This confession of sin is not just over “a slip up.” It’s not us pausing during our confession time here at Bethany and trying to drum up some little thing we need forgiveness for. It’s not a minor mistake, it’s not “Lord forgive me for this thought or that thought.” It’s not even just David saying forgive me for the act of adultery. It’s actually far more even than that.

It’s “forgive me for what is inside of me, forgive me for my heart.” This is a foundational difference in how a Christian looks at human beings and how most of the world does. Our culture says “Enough already on sin. You Christians…such a downer. Quit bringing up sin. People are good. We need to affirm that, recognize it and cultivate it, be positive and quit being so negative all the time. Sure people make mistakes, but that’s okay, we’re making progress (I think).”

That’s how the world talks about it, but it is not how scripture talks about it. Sin is big, it is a condition of our existence. We turn not towards the God who made us, but away. We don’t need improvement, we need delivering. We need saving. In scripture, sin is not just doing something bad. It is being bad. I need to confess not just my sins, but my sinfulness. Who I am. “Indeed, I was born guilty,” the Psalmist says.

This grates on us. Maybe you say “Oh, but Dan, that is so hard on my self-image. I’ve worked so hard at thinking I’m good, at not beating myself up about things, and increasing my self-confidence, at having my children feel good about themselves, at self-affirmation.” That is self-help. What we need is God-help.

Have you requested help?

Sin is big. Last Sunday night Anne and I went up to St. Mark’s Cathedral for the compline service at 9:30 pm. We sat in that darkened cathedral and listened to the choir chant, speak and sing the service. They’ve been doing it since 1956! It’s a wonderfully reflective time, in fact a GREAT Lenten practice. But at one point in every service, the reader says “We confess…” and then the reader and the choir continue “…to God Almighty, the Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost, that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed, through our own grievous fault.

Comprehensive. Thought, word, deed, and it’s my fault.

What the Psalm says is- sin is big. It’s the heart. We don’t need minor surgery, we don’t need a bypass, we need a transplant. “Create in me a clean heart…put a new and right spirit in me.” What we need only comes from one place. Not from us trying harder, but recognizing how God deals with someone who needs help. A clean heart, a new spirit comes from God. The God who made me, knows me, loves me. The God who longs for us to live into our primary identity as someone created, loved, saved by Him, and who is able to make of us new creations…and paid a great price to do so.

5) ASK.

David asks for mercy. “Act according to your abundant mercy, Lord. Teach me, purge me, let me hear joy, don’t cast me away, don’t take your holy spirit from me.” The Compline litany continues with “Wherefore we pray God to have mercy upon us.”

Lord, deal with us in grace. No deserving, no I have a right to, but asking for mercy. Someone noticed that the progression as you read through the Psalms seems to go from claiming a right to God’s mercy to asking for it.

Confession only makes sense if we are knocking on the right door to ask for grace. So much of sin is about power, and the abuse of power. Our guest two weeks ago, Mark Labberton, wrote, “We only have the power to confess because we worship a God with the power to forgive.” That power is manifest in Christ Jesus. A strange power. The power of weakness. The power of the cross. The power of forgiveness, which has much more power than sin. The power of death, and then resurrection. The power of Jesus. The power that wants us to ask for help.

At the end of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, one final communication comes across the radio waves from outer space. They are good words for us to close with. They’re questions, and I invite you to listen carefully. Remember the context is a voice from outer space to troubled human beings:

Repeat: Do you read? Do you read? Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble?...do you know who you are? do you know what you are doing? do you love? do you know how to love? are you loved? do you hate? do you read me? come back. repeat. come back. come back. come back..

Let us pray.