Reading from Psalm 51, verses one to 12.
It is Psalm of David when the prophet Nathan came to him
after David had committed adultery with Betzeba.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love,
according to your great compassion,
blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions and my sins
is always before me.
Against you, you only have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight.
So you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.
Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb.
You taught me wisdom in that secret place.
Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean.
Wash me and I will be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness.
Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.
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.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.
The word of the Lord.
Morning.
It is wonderful to be with you on this sunny summer morning.
And as I've been introduced, my name is Sandra
and I am a sinner.
I know, that's not how you usually start a sermon.
Perhaps a greeting more common in the 12-step group,
but our topic today is confession.
Now you see, when Rob asked me if I would cover
this summer for this service when he was away on holiday,
I said yes, without knowing the summer theme
or the topic of the day.
The summer theme of a playlist is lovely.
There are so many good psalms,
and in fact so many good settings of the psalms.
And if you like to support local musicians,
there's actually a Toronto artist that's now
on his third volume of putting some of our psalms to music.
I'm gonna shout out to Mike Jansen,
who's actually a member of another Anglican church
here in the city.
If you haven't heard his settings of the psalms to music,
I highly recommend them.
But confession?
Well that isn't a topic I had expected.
It's emotionally right up there with politics and money,
the things we tend to avoid at family gatherings
because we know it could lead to division.
And I kind of have a hard time
picturing a casual conversation about confession.
So my husband's name is Matt, so I just imagine this,
hey Matt, how was your day?
Anything to confess?
And his reply, well Sandra, my day was great.
I never did sin, clocking up those heavenly merit points.
How about you?
Well I had a tough day.
Let me tell you all the ways I messed up.
Like we don't typically have conversations like this.
So how do we talk when we need to apologize
or be sorry for something?
Well since this is a playlist theme,
I look to songs to see if there's sort of a sense
in the common culture of how we approach these things.
There's not too many songs actually about apologies.
Mostly they're based in relationships,
but I picked two out of fairly famous people
just for reflection.
One is a Justin Bieber song back from 2015
and it's called I'm Sorry.
3.8 billion views on YouTube
and it's a heartfelt ballad about a relational breakup.
Here are some of the words from that.
You gotta go and get angry at all my honesty?
You know I try, but I don't do well with apologies.
I know you know that I made those mistakes
maybe once or twice.
Oh, by once or twice I mean a couple of hundred times.
So let me, oh let me redeem myself tonight
because I just need one more shot at second chances.
Well, theologically there's quite a lot we could parse.
Our God is a God of second and third and more chances,
but that last bit about redeeming oneself,
that doesn't align with how the Bible talks
about forgiveness.
Love the tone of honesty,
but ultimately if you read on or listen to that song,
it's really about getting back together
with a previous lover
and trying to say the words so that that would happen.
The other artist who has sung a little bit more about this
is Adele.
She has a rich and deep voice
and there are two songs of hers
that have quite significant elements of confession to them,
Hello and Easy on Me.
There is in her music a truthful vulnerability
about her own life, about her emotions,
you get a sense of sadness and regret.
When you look at it,
there's also a lot of excuses and explanations.
So let me read you a few verses from Easy on Me
or phrases there.
There ain't no gold in this river
that I've been washing my hands in forever.
I know there is hope in these waters,
but I can't bring myself to swim.
I had good intentions and highest hopes.
But I know right now that probably doesn't even show.
Go easy on me, baby.
I was still a child.
Now, in this song, which has more views and downloads
even than Bieber's,
she poetically captures the complicated set
of experiences and emotions
that are connected to looking for forgiveness.
She recognizes that she can't change on her own,
that there is even a difficulty
in willingness to change, right?
That like I'm in the water, but I don't wanna swim.
The feeling at the same time
that she needs to justify her actions.
And then just also say that she wants to change,
but doesn't know she can.
So if in this kind of poetic language of song,
it's hard to have a conversation
even about relational forgiveness,
let alone a confession to God about how things are going,
then you can imagine that we're not so practiced at it,
even in the church.
So that's why we're gonna look at one of the texts
that we would use and has been used in the church
for thousands of years, which is the Book of Psalms.
And what was chosen for us to hear today
is one of the classic ones that is focused on confession,
Psalm 51.
Now what's interesting is on the screen,
you saw it starting actually at verse two,
so I'm really grateful that we read starting at verse one,
because right embedded at the beginning of the Psalm
includes the context.
The songwriter was David, and he's a complicated figure.
If you grew up in Sunday school,
you might remember some stories about him.
The two that are often written in Sunday school
are how he was chosen.
He was the youngest of eight boys,
and a dignitary comes to his house, Samuel,
and he's not even there as part of the family to meet him.
His father didn't think he was significant enough.
He was left outside looking after the animals,
and yet he's the one that God chooses.
Or you might remember a story that came a little bit after
when he joins a couple of his older brothers
at the front line and with a slingshot takes down the enemy,
the biggest enemy, Goliath.
It's the showdown that's worthy of fireside tales,
motivational talks, and Sunday school.
But by the time what we heard this morning was penned,
he's no longer that young boy.
He is now the king of the land.
There's been a political transfer of power,
and he lives in a palace.
And it was when he was in the palace that he sees her,
bathing on a nearby roof, and he wants her.
And so because he's the king, he can get her,
and he rapes a neighbor.
Now that's all it says in the intro to the psalm,
but the sin doesn't stop there,
for after he finds out that she's pregnant,
he brings the husband home from war
and tries to get him to sleep with his wife.
When that doesn't work, two nights of that not working,
he gets him drunk, yeah, still doesn't work.
Anyway, then he orders the man to death.
Basically, he tells his military advisors
to put him at the forefront of the fighting
and pull back so that he will die.
All in all, David breaks at least four
of the Ten Commandments, coveting, adultery, murder,
false witness, and if you wanna read some of the other ones,
you might call stealing or some of the other things
in there too, but at least four.
But here's the thing, because he's the king,
even though lots of people are complicit, right,
somebody sent a message to get her from the roof,
someone else brought him home,
someone else did the celebrations,
someone else was identified to do the military part,
all these people are complicit,
he brings them into the sin, no one says anything, right?
He's the person in power, nobody says anything
until a prophet comes, and prophet Nathan comes
and he actually calls it out through a story.
And as a result of that public show of repentance,
this song, we believe, is penned either by him
or attributed to him that we heard this morning.
So there's a deep context there and a complicated one,
so we're gonna look at it, knowing that context,
we're gonna look at two aspects of this
to see what it can teach us today
about practices of confession and the power of confession.
So biblical confession, the practice of biblical confession
is at its root speaking truth to God about our lives.
I'll say that again, it's at its root speaking truth
to God about our lives.
It is an acknowledgement of the corruption of the cosmic,
the societal, the personal fabric.
Biblical confession does not hide in excuses or explanations,
it doesn't say I had the best intentions,
go easy on me, I was a child, no, it is a presentation
of the wrong we have done in thought or word or deed.
Biblical confession is the starting point
of the process of turning to God.
It is a foundational component of our relationship
with God because it's about trust and being truthful.
Perhaps you've heard the phrase God accepts us
as we are but doesn't leave us there.
Well, how do you know God accepts you as you are
if you don't talk to God about who you are, right?
He accepts us as we are, that's confession,
he doesn't leave us there, repentance is when we turn around
and receive God's grace and change our lives.
So let me use a digital example
to see how that might play out.
So I'm old enough to remember life before
and after smartphones and it's true,
the dopamine cycle of reinforcement impacts me
just like it impacts anybody else
and there is an addictive potential
that all advertisers are counting on
and it just starts in your body when you open that phone
and it works your brain.
So I don't know about your smartphone
but my smartphone gives me a weekly accounting
of how I've spent my time with my device.
It will tell me how many pickups I've had every day,
what's the first thing I open when I turn on my phone,
it will tell me the length of time
I've spent on various platforms.
So if I were to look at that,
confession would be speaking to God in prayer
about what I notice about how I relate to my device.
I might say, oh God, you know,
you know already that I look at my phone
for more than two hours a day
and I spend most of that time on social media.
It's having an impact on my thoughts,
it's having an impact on my feelings about myself,
it's having an impact on my actions
because I'm looking at my phone.
I'm sorry, have mercy on me, forgive me.
So I'm not saying that confession
is throwing that phone out the window.
My mother even has a smartphone
but she actually uses it as a phone, right?
Like she doesn't do all the other stuff.
But confession is seeing the phone for what it is.
Now, compared to what it could or should be,
if I was relating to that phone in a way
that is relating to it rightly with myself,
with my neighbor and God.
So it's acknowledging what is now
while also realizing what could be.
So that process is a bit tricky to unpack
in all areas of our life.
And so David in this Psalm
actually uses three different words for sin
to help us figure out how we can be fully true
and fully truthful to God about who we are
and how we live in this world.
And those three words that he uses
are transgression, iniquity, and sin.
And they're similar but they do have
slight different nuances.
So I'm gonna go through those
because I think they're helpful for us
when we don't have a lot of language about confession,
it's easy just to be like,
well, I didn't break a commandment today, did I?
Do I have anything to confess?
Well, no, when you unpack this,
you're gonna see that there's a lot more richness
and it helps us to look at ourselves truthfully
in our relationship with God.
So transgression, in Hebrew that's the word pesha
and its meaning is to step over the line
in violating a relationship of trust.
Just violating a relationship of trust.
In verse one and three, David says,
he knows his transgressions
and he asks God to blot them out.
So how did David violate trust?
Well, on many levels, right?
Personally to Bathsheba, to her husband, Geriah,
but then also to all those people that he involved, right?
To the military, to the court, even to the country.
Another passage in the Old Testament
that uses this same word, pesha,
the choice to mistreat or ignore the poor and vulnerable,
that's called a pesha, that's called a transgression.
So what Amos is trying to tell us by doing that
is that this type of relationship violation,
it can be active like we saw in David's case,
but it also can be passive through mistreatment or ignoring.
Now in the work that we do at Young Street Mission,
we serve many people who have faced trauma
because they have experienced pesha
or transgression against them, right?
They have had multiple violations of trust,
both active and passive mistreatment,
but a lot of being ignored because they're poor.
So when we think about transgression,
to biblically confess that is to recognize
not just that we might be at the receiving end of it,
which is the easy part, it's actually to recognize
that we could be the ones stepping over the line too.
So really like daily example, I have two kids,
they're now 18 and 20, but my teenage daughter
said to me in a way that only a teenage daughter
can say to her mom, mom, did you remember
to ask Emily about the backpack?
You said you would, did you?
With that kind of accusatory tone,
because if I didn't keep my word in her world,
I would have not, I would have violated the relationship,
right, I would have stepped over the line,
I did not keep my promise, and that's how you build trust.
And that's how you build trust, right?
That's a very small daily example.
As the Anglican prayer goes, we say,
merciful God, we confess we have sinned
by what we have done and left undone.
And transgressions fit in both categories.
Now the second word that David used is iniquity.
The unpacking of that word is to bend or distort.
It's a Hebrew word called avon, might not be pronouncing it
exactly right, because I studied Greek,
we had to choose between Greek and Hebrew,
so I don't always get the pronunciations right.
In Lamentations, this same word, avon,
describes a twisted or crooked road.
In Psalm 38, it's translated as a malformed back
that's bent out of shape.
Its meaning is that it's distorting of something
that was otherwise beautiful and good.
So let's start with David again.
What did he do?
He distorted faithfulness into adultery.
He distorted celebration, because he invited
Geriah to these big celebrations, to deceitfulness,
because he was just trying to get him drunk
so he'd sleep with his wife.
He distorted his right use of authority
and relationship to domination.
Iniquity, that's the bending or distorting.
And like transgression, it can be done by us or to us.
So for example, if somebody were to use
a crooked set of weights or scales,
or have an algorithm that's biased in one direction
or another, we might be experiencing iniquity,
a distortion of justice.
And again, it's twice that David uses this
in this particular Psalm.
He asks God to wash it away, to blot it out.
And iniquity is something that has consequences
in the real world.
That even in the story of David,
the child that he has born through iniquity
bears the burden of it.
David is pardoned, but the child dies.
See, the weight of wrongdoing that distorts
has implications in the real world.
Unless we think that that's just something
in the past, we have to think about it
at the societal level of how many ways
truth maintains this distortion,
and then what happens in the world.
So we go back 30 years, what happened?
The Rwandan Civil War, a whole ethnic group,
a whole ethnic group were called cockroaches,
distorting the truth of their humanness
with a genocidal result.
They were seen as animals, not people.
January 6th, truth was distorted.
What happened?
Violence and anger.
Or just last week, misinformation,
the distortion of truth, stoked unbelievable rioting
in British streets.
See, to confess iniquity, we recognize that we too
might be complicit in personal or societal iniquity,
which is the bending and distortion of truth
that can lead to violence.
That's word number two.
Word number three for sin or wrongdoing in Psalm 51
is the word kata.
It's the most common term, and it addresses
the moral failure of missing the mark or missing a goal.
In Genesis 4, 7, Cain is warned that when he does not
choose good, sin is crouching at the door.
It's the word that speaks of our human condition
where we make choices that separate us from God.
In medical terms, it would be a failure to thrive.
So David's world view, he would have understood
that he was made in God's image, the likeness of God,
but fell short on a daily basis of living into that likeness.
And so while it was clear to David that he had wronged people,
we notice in Psalm 51 in the confession that he actually
acknowledges this wrongdoing as ultimately
against God's very self.
Verse four, against you and you only have I sinned.
He has raised the scope and heightens the impact
because he recognizes that there is a cosmic implication
of his human actions.
And then in verse five, he turns and he looks at this thing
that he's done, but then he looks backwards at his life
and he sees a pattern and he's like, wow, that's not just
a singular one-off look over the balcony to my neighbor,
but he actually sees that his whole posture in the world
is a self-centered one.
And our self-centered posture is always in contrast
to God's self-giving love and he says, I've been sinful
from when I was born.
And the only thing that he can say in response to that
is that I need a new heart because the very posture
of the world, the very core of my being is leading me away
from God and so he says, a broken and contrite heart
you would not despise.
The very core of his being, he needs realigning
and he asks for that in confession.
So these three words are just different ways
that we can both wrongly be and wrongly do in the world
and it is all part of what it means to do biblical confession
which is about talking truthfully to God.
But biblical confession would be incomplete
if all we did was talk about ourselves.
That's another way of keeping ourselves
at the center of things, right?
Did you notice in the first verse that was up
on the screen today that before David gets into
all the details, right, before he talks even
of the transgression or sin or iniquity,
this is how he starts, he says, have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love,
according to your great compassion.
See, biblical confession also needs to speak of who God is,
of who God is, the one of unfailing love,
the one who demonstrates compassion,
the one who can create a new heart.
We do not redeem ourselves, no matter what Bieber thinks,
it is God who redeems us.
The one who can heal a broken heart,
who can do something about those crushed bones,
give us new ones and can then renew a right spirit,
a steadfast spirit, ongoing strength.
All of that is in Psalm 51.
See, David lived with a covenantal understanding
of God's promises to God's people.
He knew he was flawed, but he knew God was flawless,
and he knew he was unfaithful, but he knew God was faithful.
And it's the characteristics of God,
it is God's very self that gives David confidence
to speak truth to his maker and not to his enemies.
And not to be afraid.
Not to be afraid that he's gonna reach judgment.
The practice of biblical confession then,
as modeled in this Psalm, is speaking both the truth
and the trust at the same time.
It's speaking the fault and the faith together.
Because together, these two sides,
these practices of confession allow
for the process of repentance and redemption
to begin to flow.
It releases, if you will, the power of confession.
Now, I'm not gonna get into Jesus' role right at the end,
because in Psalm 51, even centuries before the time of Jesus,
David can already see four ways that the process
of confession brings impact and power into his life.
And he talks about how confession and this act
of coming before God truthfully brings cleaning,
it brings covering, it brings recreation,
and it even brings celebration.
David acknowledges that one power of confession
is to be cleaned, right?
To be cleansed, white as snow.
He's not gonna have to wash his hands forever,
like in the Shakespeare plays, right?
Wrongdoing, wrong being, it feels like a sin
and it feels like a stain and a dirt.
The emotional word here would be guilt, right?
God releases us and cleanses us from our guilt.
God specifically in this Psalm is asked
to clean David using hyssop.
And that was a practice of that time
that the religious leaders would use
for the ceremonial cleansing.
So when you look at it, there's like cleaning
and washing up, and then there's like the religious side.
So in a sense, he's recognizing that this power
of confession can clean him physically,
it can clean him emotionally,
it can clean him religiously.
Like all parts of him can be cleaned by God's hands.
So that that dirt under the fingernails,
the guilt that is sort of weighing heavy,
and even the flashbacks, they can all be gone.
So the one power of confession
is that it can lead to feeling clean.
But not only are we clean, David says
the power of confession is that we get covered.
We get covered.
It's verse nine, and sometimes it's read
that the sin is hidden by God, but the word is covered.
And it's like a hyperlink back to Genesis 321.
So back in the Garden of Eden,
when the first act of sin happened,
what does God do for God's people,
Adam and Eve at that time?
What's the first thing he does?
He covers them.
It says God made the garments for Adam and Eve.
He closed them after he sinned.
So we get cleaned and we get protected.
And then after that, we get recreated.
Verse 10 in Psalm 51, creating me a clean heart, O God,
renew a right spirit within me.
God could, God, sorry, David could already see
that God was doing something about that self-centered sin.
And so he says, God changed my heart.
Now this vision of God's intention for recreation
and renewal from the inside out,
we can look back now knowing Jesus
and kind of put a Christological focus on it.
But even without that, we see the hints of what's to come.
David had this vision of what was to come
because not only does he ask for that recreation,
but then he talks about God's Holy Spirit presence
staying with him, which is all language
that we still use to this day.
Now last but not least, David draws our attention
to the power of confession in one more way.
So we're cleaned, we're covered, we're recreated,
but then there's celebration.
So confession itself, yes, is somber and sober.
But confession is also part of a process.
It's part of being in relationship with God.
And if confession leads to repentance, right,
God accepts us where we are but doesn't leave us there.
So if you actually go to the doesn't leave us there part,
then there is so much to be joyful about.
And in verse 10 he says,
this leads to the joy of salvation.
Restore in me the joy of salvation.
We are healed from our iniquity, the deliverance of guilt.
It brings a freedom that returns joy.
It returns the capacity for praise to be proclaimed.
Now if David, David who was well before the time of Jesus,
sees all these things as the power of confession,
how much more confidence can we have who know of Jesus?
Who know of Jesus, how much more confidence can we have
to know that we will eventually come to joy
and not judgment if we step into confession?
Jesus fulfilled the words of a prophet, many of them,
but specifically Isaiah 53,
which speaks to what we're talking about today.
Surely, in Isaiah it says,
he took up our pain and bore our suffering.
He was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities, right?
His bones were crushed instead of our bones.
The punishment that was brought on him,
it brings peace to us.
And it's by his wounds that we are healed.
See, Jesus carries the burden of our transgressions.
Jesus carries the burden of our iniquity.
Jesus carries the burden of our sins
so that you and I can truly and freely live
and experience even joy.
Joy in the days when the days are hard
and joys when the days are easy.
Joy in the sunshine and joy in the rain.
Now, I don't know how your last week was
or what you've got planned for next week.
I really hope it wasn't as bad as David's.
But whatever events you experienced,
whatever things you did or didn't do,
we receive forgiveness when we ask through confession
because of Jesus.
That's one of the core foundations of our faith.
And so spending time looking at this psalm
just helps us to build our relationship with God
because it helps us to grow in trust with God.
We tell God all the things of our lives
and he receives us and loves us.
Confession is the start of that process.
So if that's what you're interested in,
then it's a good thing to add to your summer playlist too.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.