About Me

My photo
My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Psalm 51: 1-17 “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return”

This evening we gather together to celebrate Ash Wednesday, a day when we hear the word “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return” as ashes are spread in our foreheads in the shape of a cross.
I don’t remember a lot about Ash Wednesday growing up. But I do have profound memories associated with this day starting in college. One Ash Wednesday we gathered for worship before dinner - a large group of students in a small auditorium and we read the words of this psalm together, saying in one accord “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love.” The words seemed to echo off of the walls and deep in our heats.
Psalm 51 is believed to have been written shortly after David had taken another man’s wife as his own. The story goes that David, King of Israel, stayed behind for some unknown reason when his men, his troops, were off preparing for battle. He caught the site of a married women, Bathsheba, bathing on a roof, and he had he brought to the palace where he lied with her. Then she became pregnant. In order to attempt to cover up his sin, David called for Bathsheba’s husband to come home from battle and tried to convince him to sleep with her - only he refused, for it was improper for him to sleep with his wife when other men were in battle.
Finally, David went Uriah back to the front lines of a battle with a letter for his commanding officer, essentially stating to make sure Uriah gets killed in battle. Which he did. And David took Bathsheba as his wife.
David’s priest Nathan came and spoke to him about what had taken place - telling the story of a small lamb that was taken by a man who had all the lambs in the world. David became enraged until Nathan pointed out that he was the man who stole the lambs - he had taken Bathsheba as his wife after having her husband killed. This Psalm is written after all of that had taken place - and David is guilt-ridden, calling out to God for forgiveness and mercy.
However, what was moving about all of the voices reading his psalm together echoing off of the walls was that, while it was certainly written in a particular time in David’s life, can we not find ourselves in it as well? When we hear the words of this Psalm does it not remind us of our own fallenness and entanglement in sin?
So David’s prayer also becomes our prayer. Blot our our transgressions in your mercy. Wash us throughly of our iniquity. Brothers and sisters, none of us are free from the hold of sin in our lives. Since the days of Adam and Eve, when they intentionally made the choice to rebel against the ways of God, we have been making the same choices. We have been choosing to not love God and not love our neighbor with our whole hearts. 
So we need this time, this season of Lent and this day - Ash Wednesday - marked with ashes to seek out repentance. We need a time of self-reflection and penitence. Because when left to our own devices, we like to pretend that our sin doesn’t exist, but the truth is pretending does not make it go away. It only makes it fester like an open wound. 
David didn’t feel guilt about what he had done until Nathan called him out and invited him into a time of repentance. He was perfectly happy not examining his actions or how they damaged his relationship with God and his relationship with others. So it is with us. We need these 40 days, friends. We need a time of confession and turning our hearts back to God. We ned a time to cry together that we need God’s mercy.
Even if we want to pretend that we don’t know our transgressions, want to pretend that there aren’t consequences, we know they exist. We need a time to let them come to the surface in order to be cleaned out.
When I was little one of the things I hated the most was having scraped knees. For with scrapped knees came the peroxide - that nasty feeling of the dirt and grime in the wound bubbling to the surface. But I also knew that the wound had to be cleaned so it didn’t become infected. Friends, today begins the season of letting the dirt and grime of our lives come to the surface, through confession, so that God can bring healing. Sin is not just on the surface of our life, it is deep within us and needs to be purged. Ignoring our sin only causes it to fester and bring more pain, more hurt. 
God wants to create in us a clean heart. A heart where we can proclaim that we are yes, sinners, but that we are saved by grace. Have you ever noticed that folks tend to focus too much on one side of this statement or the other? People either become focused on their depravity, forgetting God’s gift to us, or become so caught up in the gift of grace that they forget why we need it in the first place. Today we stand before God saying that we are sinners, in need of God’s grace, and then we accept that beautiful and powerful gift with open hearts - allowing God to clean and transform us from the inside out. God not only saves us from our sin, but gives us new lives!
As we come together this evening, what do you need to confess? What do you need to ask God to cleanse from you? What sin needs to come to the surface so God can blot it out? But as we come together, we don’t just confess - we repent - asking God to change us. And we don’t just repent but we also seek reconciliation in our relationship with God and with others. We seek to be renewed and made new in the love and mercy and grace of our Lord. 

Brothers and sisters, as we come forward this evening to receive ashes may we remember that during this season we are in need of God, we are wholly dependent upon God, and find our hope in God alone. Let us bring ourselves this evening, and during the entire season of Lent, as a sacrifice for our Lord, who gives us victory over the power of sin. Amen. 

No comments: