“Mosaic: Regret” Psalm 51: 1-15 Luke 19: 1-8

When I was in my first year of college I was blessed to have several church families. I had my home church family in Clearfield. I had a student ministry family, that I was mentored in. And on Sundays I attended two different churches that met in the same building. The first was a traditional service held in a beautiful church right across from my dorm. But in the evening, a church plant met in their basement. My year at that church plant fundamentally changed me.

The church plant was called The Open Door and it combined deep scriptural truths with experiencing God in community. So, for example, instead of sitting in pews, we would sit around tables and would have intentional time during worship to discuss what was being taught. We often also left Sunday worship with items for us to carry throughout our weeks in order to remember the sermon message. Some of those items I still have in my office to this day, because some of those messages so deeply touched me, including this piece of glass.

This glass was part of a sermon series on brokenness. Often when we talk about brokenness as a church we only equate it to our own sin - which isn’t always representative of how other people’s sin and selfishness sometimes causes the brokenness in our lives. And as a result, we can try to hide our brokenness, thinking that God does not want to see our cracks and bruises and scars, which can lead to a deep sense of shame.

But the truth is, God can take the jagged edges of our lives - those places where we have experienced broken hearts, broken trust, and broken circumstances, and truly bring healing. The type of healing that God can bring us, true and complete healing, can also redeem those places of brokenness for Kingdom purposes. To be clear, God does not cause our brokenness, but God can create beauty out of the ashes. 

Which is what our Lenten sermon series in about this year. How God can take that which we wish would could hide, that which has brought us hurt and shame, and make something beautiful out of it - a mosaic that can only exist because God has reclaimed our brokenness.

I was listening to a pod cast recently, similar to a radio show, where the guest talked about how she made money for her family. She went around to antique shops and auctions and reclaimed the dishes that no one else wanted - those with chips and cracks in them, and came home and smashed them up, and created new mosaics out of them. The host was truly shocked that she didn’t try to fix them, but instead she insisted that something new could come out of something old.

Friends, where are the areas in our lives where we are in need of such newness? In need of having our broken pieces used for God’s purposes? Pastor Shane Standford, said one of the pieces of brokenness that can hinder us and hold us back from fully living from God is regret. Regret is when we feel sorrow or remorse for something - which can lead us to dissatisfaction.

Throughout scripture we find folks with regrets. The Psalm today, Psalm 51, has an important piece to it that comes even before the first word of the first verse. Above the first verse we find the words: “To the leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

David was known as a man after God’s own heart, but he was still human. He still sinned. He still had regrets. One of those regrets came when he failed to be where he was supposed to be one year, as a King leading his people into battle. Instead, he found himself on the roof of the palace, looking at a woman who was not his wife, bathing next door. He summoned for the woman, slept with her, and she became pregnant. 

Next thing you know, David is trying to cover up his mistakes by making more mistakes. How many of us have been there before and done something like that, though probably not as extreme as David. For David summoned for Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, who was where he was supposed to be, in battle, and tried to trick him into sleeping with his wife, so that it could be claimed that the child was his. Only he didn’t fall for the bait. So David sent him back into battle to be killed.

Time passed and David was called out by the priest Nathan for his sinful behavior. This Psalm is David’s response for what Nathan told him. It is a psalm where he is on his knees, asking God for forgiveness. He wants to be forgiven. 

I would say that David probably regretted his behavior before Nathan spoke to him, but Nathan made it accessible to him - made it clear and understandable that David was in the wrong. 

Sometimes the things that we regret happen really fast - a decision made in the flash of a moment. But other times, like David, it is a series of poor decisions that lead to much larger issues as they build upon one another. And often the things we regret happen because we ignore the signs that we should have known. 

It can be hard to shake our regret. But as Christians, we are offered in Christ, the ability to set aside our regrets, turn away from sin, and start anew. Think of Zacheasus’s story in the Gospel of Luke. He was not making good decisions. He was deeply hurting the people in his community, who quite frankly saw him as a traitor. But Jesus stopped and told him that he was coming to his house that day. Friends, there is a different between Zacheasus hoping to catch a glimpse of Jesus passing by and being invited to be in relationship with him around the table. Jesus’s words so changed him, that he renounced his old behavior and sought to start a new. 

The real question about regret is are we going to dwell on it, or are we going to hand it over to God and be asked to be made a new - in the words of the Psalmist to be washed clean. Because if we dwell on regret often several things take place - regret comes in and tells us that what we have done is absolutely unforgivable, but brothers and sisters that is a lie. There is no sin so large that it cannot be covered by the grace and blood of Jesus on the cross. If we believe the lie that we are unforgivable, our joy starts to get stolen from us. We live into the “what if’s” that quite frankly don’t help for they cannot change the past. When we become people who cannot see past our mistakes, we become stuck.

When we become stuck, we also find that regret steals our potential and purpose. We think that God could never use someone like us, with all of our brokenness for the sake of the Kingdom. We think that our sin is bigger than God’s love and redemption. And that brothers and sisters leads to the lie that we can never share our faith with others because we are not worthy, when it could be exactly your story of how Jesus changed you that could draw someone into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. 

The truth is brothers and sisters that Zacheasus and David remind us that past regret do not have to have the last word in our lives. There is hope in the cross of Jesus Christ. For in the words of the song bearing the same title, our God alone can “give beauty for ashes.” Amen.