Psalm 51
Psalm 51 has often been
described as a psalm of lament--it's one of the seven Penitential Psalms, a
psalm used as a tool--as a prayer that helps us to bemoan our sins and to beg for
forgiveness. And it does those things;
it is a powerful psalm, but it does even more.
Psalm 51 offers us the chance to claim a new life, the chance to live a
life birthed from repentance. A life
that is set on restoring relationships and repairing the wrongness in our
lives, in the lives of our community, and in the lives of the world.
Barbara Brown Taylor is a brilliant, in my opinion, theologian and a
person I greatly admire--in fact I stalk her--ask me about that after service--well
she writes about the difference between remorse and repentance. She writes, "most of us prefer remorse
to repentance. We would rather learn to
live with guilt than face the hard work of new life." (64) Although I'm not eager to agree with her,
there is something inside me that wonders if she is onto something? Is it possible that this psalm is
sometimes used only as a means for us to
wallow in our sins, almost as a competition of who can seem the most broken;
who can seem the most pious? It seems
to me that the language of the psalm not only asks us to lament our sins, to
beg for God's forgiveness, but it also calls us to action. We pray the words, "Create in me a clean
heart O God, a put a new and right spirit within me." And I believe our
prayer is heard, and answered, but then
what do we do with that new heart?
I grew up in Georgia--in the Deep South full
of its traditions, it's "rules" of hospitality, it's very way of
being. One of these ways of being was to
always use your sterling silver--if you have it use it, but if you use it, well
you know what that means, you have to polish it. It would not be proper to set a table with
tarnished silver, to fix a drink in a tarnished mint julip cup--heavens, you
wouldn't be able to read the monogram.
So polishing silver was one of those jobs that happened on a regular
basis. And that job my friends often
fell to me. Truth be told, I loved it; (ya'll don't know me well enough yet,
but I have weird things I love to do like ironing). Anyway, I would stand at the kitchen sink for
hours polishing every piece--getting down in the groves, rinsing it, drying it
and then inspecting it to make sure that every surface was perfectly shiny, and
if it wasn't, I'd redo it. When I
finished, I would put the silver back in the cabinet, stand back and marvel and
it's pure beauty. Here's something I
know about silver--a little helpful Heloise hint; it sort of goes against what one would think,
but if you don't use it often, it actually tarnishes faster--the more you use
it the longer it stays shiny and polished.
Oh, it eventually needs to be polished again, but it has been used, it
has served a purpose. We used our silver
every night; we used it as we sat around the dinner table and shared our days;
we used it when we had friends over and we built relationships--friendships,
and we used it when we celebrated holidays, celebrated birthdays and weddings,
and even when we celebrated the life of someone who was no longer with us. We used our silver; we exposed our silver to
the world. And then periodically it
again needed to be taken out and polished, brought back to its luster and used
again, and so the cycle continued.
We ask God to create in us a new heart--a new
heart that believes there can be a better way, believes there is a better
way. A new created heart that strives to
stop doing the same things over and over and a heart that accepts that it is
forgiven. There is a cliche "he/she
wears his/her heart on her sleeve."
Most of the time it is used when we are talking about someone super
sensitive, someone who is prone to be hurt--but I wonder, what would this world
look like if we all wore our hearts on our sleeves? Hearts that had been forgiven and
transformed; hearts that forgave and worked for transformation. Wore on our sleeves hearts that lived to
restore right relationships with God and one another. Hearts that sometime were
broken but hearts that could continually be polished and mended and used again
and again as we participated in the renewal of the world.
Barbara
Brown Taylor has written an entire book on reclaiming the lost language of sin
and salvation. In it she answers the
question why we should speak of sin anyore--why speak of it when it is so much
better to speak about, preach about God's grace. And here is what she says, "The only
reason I can think of is because we believe that God means to redeem the world
through us. We have been chosen, in the
language of Genesis, not only to be blessed but also to be a blessing to all the
families of the earth. Our participation
in that high calling requires us to understand God's graces as something more
than the infinite remission of our sins.
If we want to take part in the divine work of redemption, then we will
also understand God's graces as the gift of regeneration--the very real
possibility of new life right here on earth--complete with new vision, new
values, and new behavior." (4)
Today a
cross will be placed upon your forehead.
A cross made from ashes--ashes that remind us that life is short and
fragile, but a cross that reminds us that we are marked for always as God's
beloved. As you return to your seat look
at the foreheads of all those around you; look at the foreheads of all those
you may encounter today who also have ashes on their forehead (shoot go ahead
and look at everyone's whether they have ashes or not), and remind yourself as you gaze upon them that
they too are God's beloved children.
Today as you live with that mark upon your forehead, as I live with that
mark, I pray that we also learn to live with our newly polished hearts worn on
our sleeves--for all the world to see, for all the world to feel.
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