Stronger Than Darkness

Psalm 51:1-17; Luke 18:9-14

February 17, 2021 (Ash Wednesday) • Mount Pleasant UMC

It was a normal Sunday morning, like so many Sunday mornings before, and two men went to church. They attended the same church, though they didn’t know each other, and they arrived within minutes of each other. Both took their seats—on opposite sides of the worship space, of course. One man was well-dressed. You could tell by looking at him he was well-to-do, and he was proud of his family’s long history with this particular church. In fact, it didn’t take much looking around to find something his family had donated, or built, or contributed toward. He was proud of this church, and in many ways, he considered it to be “his” church. The other man wasn’t so well-to-do. In fact, his shoes were shabby and his jeans had a couple of holes in them. And not the fashionable kind. He didn’t have a well-pressed dress shirt, so he wore his very best t-shirt. It wasn’t fancy, but it was clean. His job—well, it was the kind of job no one wanted to do, so when anyone asked him what he did for a living (and that didn’t happen very often), he always managed to change the subject.

So two men from different sides of town came to the same church. And when the service began, they worshipped in their own way. About halfway through the service, the pastor invited people to pray silently, to use their own words to talk to God. The rich man bowed, properly, and prayed, “God, I am so thankful that you have blessed me so much. And I am thankful that I have a better life than so many of these people here—most of them, actually. I try to do everything I can to make you proud of me.” At the same time, in the same silence, the t-shirt man had also bowed his head. Actually, to look at him, you’d have thought he bowed his whole body. All he could pray were these words: “I’m so sorry, God. I’m so sorry.”

Two men who could not be more different went to the same church. And Jesus asks: which one of them truly worshipped? (cf. Luke 18:9-14).

A king went to worship, but it wasn’t in a church or a synagogue. It was in his own palace, in the place where everyday life and kingdom business happened. He had become king quickly, and had, in recent days, abused his power. He had taken another man’s wife, gotten her pregnant, then had the man killed. He’d made the death look like an accident, arranged for it to happen during a battle, and he thought he had gotten away with it (2 Samuel 11). He forgot one thing: the God factor. So God sent a prophet named Nathan to King David to point out his sin. David didn’t really think much of it before that moment. What he had done is what kings did; you have power and you take what you want. David forgot that what was normal behavior for other kings would not be tolerated for Israel’s king. And when he was confronted with his sin, he prayed. Psalm 51, which we read together tonight, claims to be the prayer—or at least the essence of the prayer—that David prayed during that time. We know from 2 Samuel 12 that David prayed so intently he didn’t eat for seven days. He clothed himself in sackcloth—which is pretty scratchy and generally uncomfortable—and laid on the ground at night. There, on the ground, in the depths of despair and the realization of his sin, David worshipped.

David’s prayer is more in line with the second man who went to worship in the parable from Luke 18. You can’t help but notice that David does not do what we normally do. He does not offer excuses of justifications in his prayer (cf. Russell, The Psalms—Part II, pg. 28). He doesn't try to “spin” what happened like a good PR person would do. He’s not trying to protect his reputation. I mean, a guy worried about his reputation wouldn’t be laying on the floor wearing sackcloth anyway! No, David comes out of the gate begging God for mercy. And he knows he can do that because he knows the God to whom he is praying. Remember, as I’ve been saying for the last several weeks in our P.R.A.Y. series, everything about prayer is dependent upon the God to whom we pray. David can pray boldly and honestly because he knows what God is like. He knows God’s character, and that character is summarized in this very request: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love” (51:1).

David knows God’s character is that “unfailing love,” which in the original Hebrew text is the word I’ve shared with you several times before, but it’s a word we need to hear often: hesed. As I’ve told you before, there is no good English translation for this word; in fact, when Miles Cloverdale was working on a translation of the Bible in 1535, he made up a compound word for it (a word the translators of what we know as the King James Version later borrowed): lovingkindness. This single word, hesed, shows up nearly 250 times in the Old Testament, and over half of those times are in the psalms. One Bible dictionary calls it perhaps the single most important theological word in the Hebrew scriptures, and it certainly has the broadest range of meaning in almost any language. So it’s important we “get” this word, this characteristic of God that David was depending on. Here’s my definition that I stole from Michael Card because I can’t say it better. Hesed is when the person from whom I have right to expect nothing gives me everything. And it perfectly describes the God in whom David has placed all of his hope (cf. Card, Inexpressible; VanGemeren, “Psalms,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 5, pg. 379).

Some have objected to David’s prayer, especially the part where he says he has sinned only against God. I mean, he had taken advantage of Bathsheba and gotten her pregnant; we call that “adultery” and it’s a sin. And he arranged to have her husband Uriah killed while in battle; that’s murder and it’s also a sin. David has done some pretty despicable things against Bethsheba, against Uriah, and really against the whole people of Israel. How can he say to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (51:4)? I don’t think David is ignoring the implications of his sin; in fact, if you read David’s story, you will see that he has to deal with problems that stem from this sin for the rest of his life. No, he knows there are going to be consequences, but David is, you might say, throwing himself on the mercy of the court. In this prayer, he knows that the only hope he has is to restore his broken relationship with God first. If he does not have that, he cannot and will not go on. As one scholar puts it, “All you can do when you have committed serious sin is cast yourself on God’s grace as someone who is crushed and broken by the price you have paid for your wrongdoing” (Goldingay, Psalms for Everyone—Part 1, pg. 163). If he does not begin with God, if he cannot find God’s hesed again, then David truly has no hope. All his hope rests on repenting to the one who is over it all.

I wonder if the reason we seem to have so little experience with the hesed of God is because we have so little practice in the area of repentance. We have lots of apologies, but very little repentance. We have learned the art of “spin,” or recasting our sins into “minor indiscretions” or “small mistakes.” We even believe we can tell “little white lies” and it’s okay, as if one lie is somehow better than another. And then along comes Lent, and Ash Wednesday specifically, which reminds us of the centrality of repentance in order to fully enter the Gospel. In just a few minutes, I’m going to mark you with the sign of the cross in ashes and say to you, “Repent and believe the Gospel.” Ash Wednesday comes along as a reminder that all is not well in our world—in our larger world and in our personal world. Ash Wednesday gives us the chance, at least once a year, to throw ourselves onto the hesed of God: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your hesed; according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions” (51:1).

The most well-known part of this psalm (and the part most often put to music) is in verses 10-12, and it is David’s hope for what God’s hesed will do in him: “Create in me a pure heart, O God and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.” And then comes what has become my favorite part of this psalm: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” A year ago, we gathered here, oblivious to what was to come for the rest of 2020. Then, near the end of March, we were locked down, people began to lose jobs, and the days became very uncertain. Then, on top of a pandemic and a struggling economy, we added the struggles of racial injustice (which was always there but we had gotten good at ignoring it) and a violently contested election. I don’t know about you, but somewhere late summer to early fall, I found myself emotionally and spiritually exhausted, weighed down with the realization of all we, as a culture, as a church, needed to be repenting of. In some ways, it was easy to bury myself in the work that had to be done, but that didn’t make the heaviness go away. And in some ways, it still hasn’t, but it was in the middle of that time that God brought two things to my heart.

One was this verse. I was praying one day and I told God I didn’t know how to pray in these times. And almost immediately, Psalm 51:12 echoed in my spirit: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” I began praying just that first phrase over and over again: “Restore to me the joy…restore to me the joy…restore to me the joy.” I didn’t want to ignore all that was going on. I wasn’t even asking God to change the circumstances around me—at least not with that prayer! Rather, I wanted God to fill me with joy in the midst of the circumstances. You see, joy is different than happiness. Happiness depends on circumstances and it can disappear in an instant. Joy goes so much deeper. Joy is being contented in God. Joy is knowing without a doubt that God’s hesed is moving in your life. Joy is found in remembering God is still at work, even when all the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. Joy is knowing that you are resting in God and that your heart is his (cf. VanGemeren 382). What David prayed here is not, “Restore to me the joy of my salvation,” as we sometimes misquote it. That implies that salvation is something we have accomplished, something we are able to do for ourselves, something we can earn. No, David’s prayer is better: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” God is the one who owes us nothing and yet gives us everything. God is hesed.

The second thing God brought to me during that time is a song I had heard but hadn’t really heard, if you know what I mean. The song is written by a couple of modern hymn writers; they call their work “hipster hymns.” It’s called, “His Mercy is More,” and though we’re going to sing it in a few moments, I want you to hear the words first. Sometimes when we sing, especially a new song, we’re so concerned to get the notes right that we miss the words. So I want you to hear these words because they point to God’s unfailing love.

What love could remember no wrongs we have done

Omniscient, all-knowing, He counts not their sum

Thrown into a sea without bottom or shore

Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more

What patience would wait as we constantly roam

What Father, so tender, is calling us home

He welcomes the weakest, the vilest, the poor

Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more

What riches of kindness He lavished on us

His blood was the payment, His life was the cost

We stood 'neath a debt we could never afford

Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more

Praise the Lord! His mercy is more

Stronger than darkness, new every morn

Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more

That’s good stuff! No matter how dark the world gets, no matter how dark our sin gets, there is nothing we can do that will cause him to turn away from us. He will always welcome us home when we repent, when we turn toward him. His mercy, his hesed, is always greater than our sin and brighter than our darkness. I love that phrase in the song—“stronger than darkness.” It reminds me of how, on the darkest night, the tiniest light can still be seen. Or, more to the point, the way John puts it in the beginning of his Gospel as he describes Jesus: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

So, two men came to worship, and the question remains: which one went home filled with joy? The one who prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13) because his mercy is more. Let’s sing those words together now.