When Christianity Begins to Speak

Text: Psalm 51:10-12
Theme: “When Christianity Begins to Speak”
Ash Wednesday
March 9, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

In the Name of Jesus

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

The word “Lent” comes from an old English term which means springtime. If all we had to rely on was Dopplar radar, we might not be sure if it, indeed, is Lent. I mean, if spring comes can winter be far behind? Perhaps it is global warming. Wait, it can’t be that. We’ve had nasty a winter with very low temperatures in Texas. Pipes have burst and flooding in our building was the result. So it must now be global climate change – as it has more recently been described. But we’ll let the scientists, meteorologists, and politicians quibble over that. More importantly, for our purposes, is this question: what is the “climate” of our souls? If you did Dopplar Radar on your soul, what’s the weather like? What’s the forecast?

To carry the analogy through, it was all nasty weather for King David’s soul. We just heard him speak in the 51st Psalm – a penitential psalm, the Bible scholars tell us. What does the great Old Testament King, the “apple of God’s eye”, have to repent about? Repentance does sound so – what’s the word? – religious! The psalm (p. 598 in your pew Bible) does have an editorial comment – which is part of the Biblical text – before the first verse. It reads like this: “For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.”

Oh, that explains a few things. If King David lived nowadays, the news of his adultery may have leaked out to the press and we would have had ourselves something of a scandal. His supporters would have rushed to his defense while his enemies would be smelling blood in the water. But what if you threw capital murder – of the premeditated variety – into the mix? It is exactly what happened with David. He commits adultery and then arranges for the murder of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite. Without David’s friend Nathan calling him to account, it stands to reason that David would have gone along his merry way as if nothing had transpired. Perhaps he thought of sitting back one day after it all happened and thinking to himself: “I got away with it.”

Although he may, at first, have denied it with the best of them, in the end none of this happened without consequence for David’s soul. David himself eventually said: “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” It sounds like a guilty conscience to me. What do you do with a guilty conscience? Do you suppress it? Do you deny it? Do you rationalize it away in an attempt to take the edge off? Do you medicate it? A friend of mine on Facebook recently shared a quote worth quoting: “It says something about our times that we rarely use the word, sinful, except to describe a really good dessert.”

C.S. Lewis nailed it when he wrote:

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind that Law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power – it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.

Dear friends in Christ, I really want Christianity to talk to me in this way this Lent. I want it to talk to us all. I want this Lent to be a season of renewal for each of us. There is a corporate way that this happens. In other words, we come to church and we receive the Word of God in its written, spoken, and sacramental forms. This is all good. But I’m talking about renewal on a level we tend to overlook and even forget. I speak of the personal and individual level. Together with corporate worship, this renewal starts – on a personal and individual level – with daily meditation and prayer.

We take care of our bodies – we clothe them, feed them, exercise them, give them rest. We take care of our minds – we engage them; we read; we expand our mental horizons; we even entertain them. We tend to our jobs – we go through our day and daily round of activities to support ourselves and those we love.

What about our souls? I ask. What about our spirits? I’m not just talking about one hour a week on Sunday mornings.

Lent, you see, is more than just a season where we mark the passage of time (in this case, forty days). Lent is also a discipline. And discipline breeds habits, and habits become a way of life.

I am not “Herr Pastor”! I am not a theological dictator! I am not the final arbiter of Presbyterian canon law! God forgive me if I come off sounding like an overbearing, autocratic religious sort who didn’t know when to shut up and was out of touch with reality. But let me, at the very least, earnestly suggest and plead with you to from the depths of my own soul to undertake daily meditation and prayer. Let Christianity have that conversation with you. If you need resources or suggestions on how to make that happen for you or to improve what you are already doing, that’s one of the reasons I am here. Prime times of the day for meditation and prayer, if I might further suggest, are shortly after you wake in the morning and shortly before you go to sleep at night.

And one last suggestion: it would be wonderful if you would commit to memory that prayer which is our text for tonight. It reads as follows:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

We begin this season and leave this sanctuary tonight with a very stark reminder of mortality on our foreheads. “Dust you are to to dust you shall return,” God said to our ancient parents. Later on, the Bible offered its own commentary of our mortality when it said: “The wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Lent is not meant to be morose. It is not meant to make a good showing of repentance – as if the quality of our repentance and sorrow is what earns God’s favor. Rather, it’s a chance for Christianity to speak to us again, for the crucified Christ to speak to us again, and we meditate upon what we hear and offer our prayers accordingly. God bless us all in this. God bless this season of Lent.

Amen.