MUMC Sermon-08/06/06

The theme of both the Psalm and the lesson from 2^nd Samuel is confession. And the most comfortable place to begin a confession is with someone else’s sin. So let’s begin there: It has been a bad week for Mel Gibson. Actually, a little more than a week has passed since it all began. Most of you know the outline of the story: in the early morning hours of Friday, July 28, a police officer stopped Gibson’s Lexus after clocking it doing 78 in a 35 mph zone. Not a good moment. The officer, James Mee, found Gibson behind the wheel and the distinct odor of alcohol on his breath. For the actor, a bad moment began to get even worse. Gibson asked if the officer was a Jew, and then, according to Officer Mee’s report, the actor launched into an obscenity-laced tirade. Officer Mee noted that Gibson said, among other things, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

Since then, Mel Gibson has publicly repented. He has apologized several times for his remarks, and asked to meet with representatives of the Jewish community, so that they might help him find, in his words, “the appropriate path to healing.” One hopes that Gibson will find the resources, the guidance, and the fortitude to continue on his path of healing, and that, in doing so, the coming weeks will be better for him than the past nine days.

Actually, in his quest for forgiveness and reconciliation, Mr. Gibson seems wisely to have consulted his – and our – own Christian tradition. And, in his very public spiritual journey, Gibson seems to be learning this fundamental lesson of faith. In one of his statements this week, Gibson, our brother in the faith, was not only conciliatory, but also confessional. “There is no excuse,” he said, “nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark.” Perhaps he will be able to follow this path toward a fuller reconciliation with the people whose ancestors include both the penitent David in today’s lesson from the Hebrew Bible, and the author of Psalm 51.

A note at the beginning of today’s Psalm actually identifies David as the author of Psalm 51. This note also identifies the occasion of the writing: the moment of the prophet Nathan’s confronting him for his dalliance with Bathsheba, and, by implication at least, his further sin in his instruction to have Uriah killed in battle. Whether David authored Psalm 51 or not, and there is scholarly debate about that, clearly this confrontation between Nathan and David is a moment of spiritual truth, not unlike Mel Gibson’s confrontation with both Officer Mee and his own personal demons in the early hours of last Friday on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. When the fog of tequila lifted from Gibson’s brain, he had the courage to confess. And, to David’s similar credit, he listens to Nathan’s story of a rich man’s abuse of power, and has the courage to see himself in the parable. In the end, instead of Nathan executed for his insubordination, David confesses. “I have sinned,” he says. “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Those words on the lips of a king surprise us, I think. Not merely that David, his treachery exposed, would react with a confession, but that David would identify his sin as an affront against God. Not a sin against Bathsheba, though clearly she is wronged. And not against Uriah, though his bones cry silently in the background of this whole sordid story. And not even against the nation, though it’s clear to any of us who have lived through the last few decades of our own country’s history that the sins of our leaders impact our country as a whole. But the Bible’s concern, and the concern of the lesson for today, is that the breach of sin injures the relationship with God. Confession is important, because it begins the restoration of a divine connection.

And yet confession doesn’t have much of a place in our world. In our time we seem to prefer other responses to our sin: denial, cover-up, obfuscation, explanation, rationalization, or psychobabble. We will go to great lengths to avoid confession.

I recall a conversation with a woman about the early morning communion worship at Christ Church. Like our own early worship, that service always included communion. Partly for that reason, the order included a prayer of confession prior to the sacrament. “I like the service, she said. “But there is something that bothers me. I don’t like always starting with a confession. Worship should be uplifting, and the confession is such a ‘downer’. Couldn’t we start some other way? I’d be more comfortable if we just left out the confession.”

As a pastor, I pointed out the scriptural warrant for beginning with confession, even though it is public and ritualized. It reminds us of who we are, and of our need. It reminds us that there is something broken between God, and us, and we are the ones who have broken our relationship. Confession is a beginning of honesty. I reminded her that even the 12 steps of AA begin with something like a confession of need. Step one is an admission of powerlessness. It is, quite bluntly, a confession of need.

But, for all of that, I got her point. In truth, something in me agrees with the woman in her reluctance to begin worship by confessing. Our conversation made me recall as well that as a young student at seminary, I found myself startled a bit when the Episcopal students led chapel one morning, and they opened with their own prayer of confession, using words I found spiritually unsettling: “Almighty and most merciful God,” we prayed aloud together, “we have erred and strayed from thy ways, like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” I think I staggered out of chapel the first time I heard those words. In my own mind, I argued with them for years. “No health in us?” None? How could we pray, “There is no health in us”? For the first time, I peered into my own heart to see the shadows of its own innate darkness. I was being taught something by the worship within a larger family of faith.

It is good that the faith instructs us here, I think, because on our own we never want to face the truth about ourselves. Listen again to these three verses from the opening section of Psalm 51, a powerful and historic prayer of confession in its own right:

“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, [Lord], 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 judgment. Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

(Psalm 51:3-5)

This confessional Psalm is relentless in naming our situation before God, because nothing else will do as we seek a true relationship with God. Every relationship is built on the foundation of the truth. Nothing else works. Even our relationship with God. As every Hebrew knew, from David the King down to the youngest servant in the kitchen of the palace, to know God’s goodness is to acknowledge our own failing. Our own brokenness. Our own sin. We are the community of Christians and Jews who still pray this prayer as our very own, and doing so means coming face to face with our own sin. Face to face with God, our lives compel us to begin the conversation with confession.

In truth, to know our selves at all is to acknowledge our own tragic, inevitable, chronic imperfection. Knowing oneself begins with acknowledging one’s sin. The Psalm reminds us that our relationship with God, and therefore every prayer, begins with a stripping away of any denial of an especially difficult truth: “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” That’s not a confession of the evil of sex, but worse, an acknowledgment of our inability to live any other way but the way of sin. To the degree that we know ourselves, we know this truth about ourselves. Theologian and noted Union Seminary professor, Reinhold Niebuhr once dryly put it something like this: “The only Christian doctrine that is absolutely verifiable in human existence is the doctrine of original sin.” Or, in the words of the comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Perhaps we’ve been fascinated with Mel Gibson’s story this week because, at some secret place in each of our hearts, we are relieved that something similar has not yet happened to us. It might have. And maybe one day it will. But, for now, the spotlight of the world’s judgment is elsewhere. Thank God.

Maybe the drama that began in Malibu, California, nine days ago is merely a reminder that we, too, are called to face the darkness in our own hearts. Especially those of us in the family of faith that, we believe, begins with our cousins the Jews and continues with each of us who are brothers and sisters of Christ, our Lord.

The grace of the gospel is that acknowledging our sin opens the door for us to acknowledge the truth of Christ’s great love for us. Indeed, we affirm every time we gather at this holy table, that this table is open to all, open even to us sinners, for in his life in ancient Galilee Jesus ate with sinners. In truth, since we are all sinners, he could have sat at table with no one else.

That Christ comes to us as sinners reminds us that, we, too, are to accept other sinners – even foolish public figures like Mel Gibson – because we are all in need of the grace of Christ. We humans are equal in at least two ways: we all fall short of the goodness that God envisions for us, and we all stand under the shadow of death’s inevitable call. At the very least, our common frailty and mortality make with each other a bond of humanity.

So as co-conspirators, equally indicted sinners before the infinite goodness of a loving God, let us be bold to begin to consider our own need for confession. True, we hesitate. But just as true, we stand in need.

How much we might confess, if we put our minds to it: We could confess that in our own families, we are most neglecting and most hurtful with those we most love. Christ, have mercy.

Or, we might confess that in our own churches, we put ourselves at odds with others, even deliciously repeating stories about each other, thereby tearing the very fibers of the body of Christ. Lord, have mercy.

Or, should we confess that in our own communities, we neglect the needs of those around us, especially those who are not like us, whose language is different, or whose skin is a different shade, or whose economic situation is different from our own. Christ, have mercy.

I might confess that in my own experience, I have stood on the bank of the Missouri and Little Big Horn rivers, and thought of the native peoples that we European immigrants have displaced. And I have stood on the ramparts of a 16^th century stone fort on Ghana’s Gold Coast, stunned at the thought of the millions of slaves assembled there and bound for hard labor in the Americas, and I sense the need for my own confession of my casual assumption of a place of privilege in my world. Lord, have mercy.

We who call ourselves “American”, and we are, might confess that our language ignores millions of brothers and sisters in Central and South America, while we assume our own place of pre-eminence, expecting to use the best of the world’s resources for our own comfort, often ignoring the basic needs of those around us. Christ, have mercy.

Or, might we confess that, as a nation, we casually forget the violence on which we depend, and its impact on the whole world. As just one example, we commonly forget the sheer number of souls lost on that fateful day, 61 years ago today, August 6, 1945, when over 200,000 Japanese, many of them women and children, suddenly or slowly lost their lives in the world’s first nuclear attack. I understand the decision, but as a citizen of a violent culture, I see some need of confession for all that is lost whenever we resort to such power. Lord, have mercy.

As we come to this table, then, we remember the One whose love for us bridges a gap created by our sin. But as we come, we come humbly, having begun with the confession, a prayer that teaches the truth of our own hunger. We come; opening our hands to receive the One we worship as “the bread of life”. We come, remembering who we truly are, and therefore aware of the Bounty of God’s graceful love for us in spite of our broken lives or broken hearts.

So I invite you to come, brothers and sisters, to the table prepared for us by God’s abundant mercy and goodness. And as you come, may your hearts join the Psalmist to give thanks for the abundant mercies of God’s unfolding grace. We begin with a confession, trusting in the amazing grace of God’s steadfast love to give our hearts a song of praise and hope, in the overflowing cup of God’s forgiveness offered to all who repent.

Amen.