Sermon 14th June 2009
Today, Adrian Parkhouse, one our Lay Readers, preaches based on the reading from Psalm 32:
Conversations with God: forgiveness
.
Sunday 14 June 2009 – “Conversations with God – Forgiveness” – Psalm 32
“Happy are those whose sins are forgiven,/ whose wrongs are pardoned…”
“Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered…”
1. So we come to almost the last of our studies from the Psalms, a series we have called “Conversations with God”. We have already considered the Psalmist’s acknowledgement of God’s knowledge and His guidance of us and His help towards us; and our responses of praise and of awe towards God. And today we read Psalm 32 – a Psalm that is written as a real conversation between the author and God: the first 7 verses and the final acclamation are the Psalmist while 8 to 10 are God speaking.
What do they speak about? The person tells of the blessing, the happiness, of knowing forgiveness and compares it to the torture of unconfessed guilt. He tells of the decision to repent and of the receipt of forgiveness. And then he encourages others to pray to God and to experience the safety and security of knowing God. And in reply God promises to teach, to instruct and to counsel the repentant and forgiven man – so their relationship will be a natural one and not one which is forced, like a man controls an animal. And lastly the Psalmist responds with rejoicing. It is a happy psalm, a happy conversation. Man and God enjoying each other and looking forward to the future.
2. Psalm 32 is traditionally attributed to King David and as marking the close of one of the Bibles “tabloid moments”. David’s lust for the bathing beauty Bathsheba had led to a spiral of deceit and destruction: first her pregnancy, then increasingly desperate attempts by the King to lead her soldier husband to impregnate his wife and so cover up the affair; and finally an order to his army commander intended to lead, and leading, to the death in battle of Bathsheba’s ever-loyal husband and so disposing of a potentially troublesome situation.
This was sin writ large. But from the account in 2 Samuel it is not obvious that David felt any compunction about these actions – until God sent the prophet Nathan to challenge him with a parable of a rich man with cattle and flocks who chose to take a poor man’s only much-loved lamb to feed a visitor. David was enraged by the obvious iniquity: “The man who did this should die!” “You are that man,” said Nathan. “I have sinned against the Lord.” responds David.
So David repents and, while punished, finds forgiveness. And tradition has it that Psalm 32 reflects some of that experience: reflects it moreover from both sides of the conversation. We hear something of what is essential to both David and God in what might otherwise appear a simple transactional formula: “repent and be forgiven”. David wants to lose the pain and torment of guilt and knows that it will come with repentance: God wants to teach and instruct so that obedience becomes natural.
3. Put another way the Psalm gives us the view from both the main characters in the most famous parable Jesus told about forgiveness – that of the Prodigal Son or of the Forgiving Father. The son, facing hunger and poverty, realises the way out of his spiral of destruction is to face up to going home, saying sorry and offering to work for his father. In fact he finds more than he expects, sooner than he expects as his father runs out of the house, clasps him in his arms, dresses him in finery and shoes, puts rings on his finger and arranges a celebration feast. Why (asks his hurt brother)? Because he was lost and now is found, he was dead and now is alive. The chance to begin the relationship has started again.
The parable reflects the same drivers on both sides – the forgiving God and the forgiven son – as David wrote of in our Psalm.
4. Turning-up the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s gospel (ch. 15) had me leafing through the gospel spotting the place of God’s forgiveness in the ministry of Jesus. I was and still am slightly shocked by the importance that it does play: I can only think that my surprise is borne of an assumption that Jesus spoke of other things, while the theology around forgiveness was a later construct of Paul. Wrong!
At the outset of his ministry, what was the message of John the Baptist? Baptism as a mark of a complete change of heart and the forgiveness of sins. And flip to the end, what did he say on the cross? “Father forgive them”. And what was it that he said which seemed to cause greatest angst among the religious folk? “Your sins are forgiven” – to the paralytic let down through the roof and to the prostitute who bathed his feet in perfume, to name two. He was clear that he had the authority to do this. And what did he do which annoyed them most? Meet with publicans and sinners –people like the prostitute, like Zacheus, like Levi. He was clear, he came to seek the lost, “to invite sinners to change their ways” (5:32). And what did he teach his followers: to pray for forgiveness for their sins and to be able to forgive others; and also, in Luke’s version of what we sometimes call the Great Commission, just before his ascension to heaven, he tells them/us “in his name the message about repentance and the forgiveness of sins must be preached to all nations…” (24:47).
So Jesus seems clear that he was here to help more people come to the point of the Psalmist. And so are we.
5. There is a super Transport for London video on YouTube: 8 basketball players, 4 dressed in white and 4 in black: and you are asked to count the number of passes made by the team in black. The camera is static and the teams mill around the playground for a minute or so when the film stops. “How many passes?” You guess and then the question: “Did you see the moonwalking bear?” What bear? But the film replays and, lo and behold, in the midst of these players, dashing around, passing here, passing there, on walked a large man in a bear suit who proceeds to perform a Michael Jackson moonwalk before disappearing stage right. How did I not see it? How could I have missed something so big, someone so central to the action? Something so obvious? But I had done.
A little like I had missed or forgotten with time the fact that repentance, forgiveness and restored relationships is dead central to Jesus ministry – I know that there are also times when the need to be forgiven, to join the Psalmist in the acclamation of joy, to commit myself to being counselled and instructed by God in the way so obedience to Him, slips out of view. I carry the guilt. I know others do too. And it can be for lots of reasons: it can be because, like the son before he came to his sense, we have something to prove about our independence – perhaps about whether what we have been like or done or said was really wrong or was our fault; or it can because we find it hard to believe that forgiveness is possible: I am struck how things can’t be undone – from trying to undo gossip to trying to breathe live back into an innocent child hurt by our negligence, some things can no more be undone than David could have turned the world back to the day before he saw Bathsheba bathing on the roof of her house. How then can repentance and forgiveness help? And while we are about it what about “deathbed repentance” by an obvious sinner – what’s that all about; and anyway, why do we start from the assumption that man is bad and needs to repent? All fair questions: all of them questions I have asked; perhaps all of them questions that need to be asked on a journey of faith – on a journey to the one who wants us to see the moonwalking bear – which is, in the midst of all the confusion and all the excuses and all the demands of life, the call of our Father to repent to be forgiven and to grow closer to him.
6. It’s a quiet service this morning: it’s not been a long sermon. We have a chance to reflect.
Conversations with God: forgiveness
.
Sunday 14 June 2009 – “Conversations with God – Forgiveness” – Psalm 32
“Happy are those whose sins are forgiven,/ whose wrongs are pardoned…”
“Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered…”
1. So we come to almost the last of our studies from the Psalms, a series we have called “Conversations with God”. We have already considered the Psalmist’s acknowledgement of God’s knowledge and His guidance of us and His help towards us; and our responses of praise and of awe towards God. And today we read Psalm 32 – a Psalm that is written as a real conversation between the author and God: the first 7 verses and the final acclamation are the Psalmist while 8 to 10 are God speaking.
What do they speak about? The person tells of the blessing, the happiness, of knowing forgiveness and compares it to the torture of unconfessed guilt. He tells of the decision to repent and of the receipt of forgiveness. And then he encourages others to pray to God and to experience the safety and security of knowing God. And in reply God promises to teach, to instruct and to counsel the repentant and forgiven man – so their relationship will be a natural one and not one which is forced, like a man controls an animal. And lastly the Psalmist responds with rejoicing. It is a happy psalm, a happy conversation. Man and God enjoying each other and looking forward to the future.
2. Psalm 32 is traditionally attributed to King David and as marking the close of one of the Bibles “tabloid moments”. David’s lust for the bathing beauty Bathsheba had led to a spiral of deceit and destruction: first her pregnancy, then increasingly desperate attempts by the King to lead her soldier husband to impregnate his wife and so cover up the affair; and finally an order to his army commander intended to lead, and leading, to the death in battle of Bathsheba’s ever-loyal husband and so disposing of a potentially troublesome situation.
This was sin writ large. But from the account in 2 Samuel it is not obvious that David felt any compunction about these actions – until God sent the prophet Nathan to challenge him with a parable of a rich man with cattle and flocks who chose to take a poor man’s only much-loved lamb to feed a visitor. David was enraged by the obvious iniquity: “The man who did this should die!” “You are that man,” said Nathan. “I have sinned against the Lord.” responds David.
So David repents and, while punished, finds forgiveness. And tradition has it that Psalm 32 reflects some of that experience: reflects it moreover from both sides of the conversation. We hear something of what is essential to both David and God in what might otherwise appear a simple transactional formula: “repent and be forgiven”. David wants to lose the pain and torment of guilt and knows that it will come with repentance: God wants to teach and instruct so that obedience becomes natural.
3. Put another way the Psalm gives us the view from both the main characters in the most famous parable Jesus told about forgiveness – that of the Prodigal Son or of the Forgiving Father. The son, facing hunger and poverty, realises the way out of his spiral of destruction is to face up to going home, saying sorry and offering to work for his father. In fact he finds more than he expects, sooner than he expects as his father runs out of the house, clasps him in his arms, dresses him in finery and shoes, puts rings on his finger and arranges a celebration feast. Why (asks his hurt brother)? Because he was lost and now is found, he was dead and now is alive. The chance to begin the relationship has started again.
The parable reflects the same drivers on both sides – the forgiving God and the forgiven son – as David wrote of in our Psalm.
4. Turning-up the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke’s gospel (ch. 15) had me leafing through the gospel spotting the place of God’s forgiveness in the ministry of Jesus. I was and still am slightly shocked by the importance that it does play: I can only think that my surprise is borne of an assumption that Jesus spoke of other things, while the theology around forgiveness was a later construct of Paul. Wrong!
At the outset of his ministry, what was the message of John the Baptist? Baptism as a mark of a complete change of heart and the forgiveness of sins. And flip to the end, what did he say on the cross? “Father forgive them”. And what was it that he said which seemed to cause greatest angst among the religious folk? “Your sins are forgiven” – to the paralytic let down through the roof and to the prostitute who bathed his feet in perfume, to name two. He was clear that he had the authority to do this. And what did he do which annoyed them most? Meet with publicans and sinners –people like the prostitute, like Zacheus, like Levi. He was clear, he came to seek the lost, “to invite sinners to change their ways” (5:32). And what did he teach his followers: to pray for forgiveness for their sins and to be able to forgive others; and also, in Luke’s version of what we sometimes call the Great Commission, just before his ascension to heaven, he tells them/us “in his name the message about repentance and the forgiveness of sins must be preached to all nations…” (24:47).
So Jesus seems clear that he was here to help more people come to the point of the Psalmist. And so are we.
5. There is a super Transport for London video on YouTube: 8 basketball players, 4 dressed in white and 4 in black: and you are asked to count the number of passes made by the team in black. The camera is static and the teams mill around the playground for a minute or so when the film stops. “How many passes?” You guess and then the question: “Did you see the moonwalking bear?” What bear? But the film replays and, lo and behold, in the midst of these players, dashing around, passing here, passing there, on walked a large man in a bear suit who proceeds to perform a Michael Jackson moonwalk before disappearing stage right. How did I not see it? How could I have missed something so big, someone so central to the action? Something so obvious? But I had done.
A little like I had missed or forgotten with time the fact that repentance, forgiveness and restored relationships is dead central to Jesus ministry – I know that there are also times when the need to be forgiven, to join the Psalmist in the acclamation of joy, to commit myself to being counselled and instructed by God in the way so obedience to Him, slips out of view. I carry the guilt. I know others do too. And it can be for lots of reasons: it can be because, like the son before he came to his sense, we have something to prove about our independence – perhaps about whether what we have been like or done or said was really wrong or was our fault; or it can because we find it hard to believe that forgiveness is possible: I am struck how things can’t be undone – from trying to undo gossip to trying to breathe live back into an innocent child hurt by our negligence, some things can no more be undone than David could have turned the world back to the day before he saw Bathsheba bathing on the roof of her house. How then can repentance and forgiveness help? And while we are about it what about “deathbed repentance” by an obvious sinner – what’s that all about; and anyway, why do we start from the assumption that man is bad and needs to repent? All fair questions: all of them questions I have asked; perhaps all of them questions that need to be asked on a journey of faith – on a journey to the one who wants us to see the moonwalking bear – which is, in the midst of all the confusion and all the excuses and all the demands of life, the call of our Father to repent to be forgiven and to grow closer to him.
6. It’s a quiet service this morning: it’s not been a long sermon. We have a chance to reflect.
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:28 pm
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