Psalm 51
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
This biblical prayer of confession from Psalm 51, today’s psalm, has found its way into regular use in the Book of Common Prayer. If your devotional life includes Morning Prayer, you quote parts of this psalm every day. “Create in us clean hearts O God.” The Collect for Purity at the beginning of the Eucharist echoes Psalm 51 as we pray for God to “cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit.” A portion of this psalm is included in the prayerbook service for Reconciliation of a Penitent, private confession. That service isn’t commonly used and that’s a loss. There’s something renewing about saying out loud the sins that are bothering you, the honesty that requires, and hearing a word of God’s forgiveness spoken directly to you—past mistakes and failures absolved. And each year Lent begins with Psalm 51 prayed as part of the confession of sin on Ash Wednesday. Daily, weekly, and at various times and seasons, this psalm opens a thesaurus of words to confess our sin: offenses, wickedness, transgression, and iniquities. But more important than that, Psalm 51 trusts that the treasury of God’s loving-kindness, mercy, and compassion will cleanse us from our sin, renew us, and give us joy.
In many editions of the Bible, there is an inscription at the beginning of Psalm 51 attributing it to David, from the time that the prophet Nathan confronted David after his sin with Bathsheba. You remember? It’s in 2nd Samuel. One afternoon, King David was relaxing in the garden on the rooftop of his palace. “From the roof,” we read, “David [looked down and] saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful.” That’s when things collapse into a story of lust, adultery, cruelty, and cover-up that would’ve kept a 24/7 news cycle going for days, especially since it involved a politician who was also a man of faith.
David took Bathsheba as his own. (She was married at the time to a man named Uriah, a solider in one of David’s armies who was off fighting a battle for David.) Bathsheba conceived. David then scrambled to avoid scandal and, in a ‘what was he possibly thinking’ moment, ordered the death of Uriah—successfully—then tried to disguise it as a battlefield casualty. Even today this theme still gets played out: powerful CEO uses junior colleague for personal advantage then scrambles to cover things up. At this point in the biblical story, Nathan confronts David. David’s response? In a moment of utter repentance, David neither defends his actions nor offers excuses. David gives no strange yet familiar half-apology where he sounds like he’s apologizing for Nathan. There’s no, ‘I’m sorry you feel bad for what I’ve done.’ No. David says only one thing. “I have sinned against the Lord.”
“I have sinned against the Lord.” This is not to say that David’s actions against Bathsheba and Uriah are beside the point; they are precisely the point. David’s sins were against flesh-and-blood persons, as the prophet Nathan makes clear. But David has become aware of the cosmic implications of his sin. In the psalm he says, “Against you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” All our sins, the ways we have “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” are against God. And it is our sin, belongs to each of us as individuals. That’s what makes this psalm so powerful in private confession. There’s no attempt to deny fault or escape personal responsibility. Some psalms blame others for troubles in the world. “They have rebelled against you,” says Psalm 5. Other psalms call God to account. “You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths,” Psalm 88. And there are times when those words are right for our prayer. But not today. Psalm 51 acknowledges personal sin and guilt without excuse. “I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you only have I sinned.”
And the psalm doesn’t stop there. It goes deeper still in its honest search. It also knows that the sin belonging to each of us isn’t just a fault here or there, tripping over a commandment or two on our walk of faith, missing the mark when we aim for God’s desires. Sin is more than a list of failings. Sin is deep within our heart. So the psalm prays, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” This disease of our heart can only be remedied by the steadfast love and mercy of God renewing us from the depths of our lives.
Sin isn’t a crack or two in a building to be patched over and repaired; the fault is in the foundation. I believe that’s what the psalm is getting at when it says, “I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” I don’t believe this means each and every act of conception is sinful or that our mothers are morally implicated in our problems. (Remember, Psalm 51 doesn’t offer excuses or shift blame.) Rather, there’s a sense that the source and cause of the matter can’t be traced back to any one moment at any one point in our lives—we were fine until one day we weren’t. No, sin permeates us through and through in a mysterious, puzzling way; is part of our fallen human condition from our very beginning.
This is what the church means by the doctrine of Original Sin. GK Chesterton said that Original Sin is the one church doctrine with clear evidence on its side. How often do we know the right thing to do yet end up doing the opposite? How often do we resolve to make a change but fail in our good resolution? Even writers who have renounced religion—Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins—note the human propensity to be violent, cruel, and selfish. None of us needs to be taught to seek our own desires instead of God’s. And we see the effects everywhere. Watch the news to see the effects in the world. Do an honest inventory of your soul to see it in your life, the enormous human capacity to mess things up permeating us through and through. Sin is deep within our heart. So the psalm prays, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
Yet if the diagnosis is grim, and it is, today’s psalm does not have a hopeless obsession with failure and guilt. John Baycroft, in The Anglican Way, says that “dealing with our sins in prayer is like putting out the garbage; it is necessary but incidental to the main activity, which is spiritual union with God.” Psalm 51 does indeed have a thesaurus of words to confess our sin: offenses, wickedness, transgression, and iniquities. But most important, this psalm opens up the greater treasury of God’s loving-kindness, mercy, and compassion to cleanse us from our sin, renew us, and give us joy, looking beyond sin to God, trusting that God’s mercy and grace can and will renew us and give us new life.
The confession in Psalm 51 begins where all confession begins: with God; with the goodness of God; with the loving-kindness and great compassion of God. The psalm doesn’t start by saying, ‘I’ve done so many bad things I hope you will forgive me.’ Confession begins with a deep and abiding trust in God’s enduring and loyal love, the assurance of God’s gracious and steadfast love toward us, that God does forgive. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses. This is always where confession starts: not with remorse squeezed out from us over our failings and faults but a life drawn to God by the love of God. There is no finger-wagging, there’s no ‘It’s about time you came to your senses after all these years,’ there’s no ‘You can work off your debt to show you’re serious and then we can talk.’ There is only this: “A broken and contrite heart you will not despise.” A broken and contrite heart you will not despise. And that is enough.
When we pray with the psalm, “Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me,” we turn to the God who does that very thing. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, God is at work to create in us clean hearts. “You are clean because of the words I have spoken to you,” Jesus says in the gospels. Peter, in the book of Acts, talks about God “cleansing our hearts through faith.” And in 1st John, we hear how “the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.” All these promises of forgiveness, cleansing, and renewing are given for you in Jesus today, heard in words of absolution and tasted in Holy Communion: “This is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you, and for many, for the remission of sins.” If it is against God only that we sin, then it is from God in Jesus that we receive the treasury of forgiveness, transgressions blotted out, iniquities washed away—the gift of God’s mercy and loving-kindness in answer to the prayer of Psalm 51, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
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