Saturday, January 27, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Following your path from failure to forgiveness
The Lord sent Nathan to David. Nathan said to David, “Judge this case for me!” David heard and spoke, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves death!” And Nathan looked at David and said, “You are the man.”
Our lectionary begins with a terrible moment in the life of David, and in the life of Israel, and in our own lives. Our hero (best that we have) has betrayed himself, his people, and us. He has betrayed God, most of all.
The Lord on his part has forgiven the sin, and you shall not die.
But the betrayal is not the end of anything. It’s in the middle, where every betrayal belongs, between innocence and forgiveness. And after the forgiveness comes the shadow, when I forget the forgiveness and maybe even do the awful thing again.
Since you have utterly spurned the Lord by what you’ve done, the child born to you must surely die. Then Nathan returned to his house.
But over the years of my life, the forgiveness wins out. God’s plan does not change, the plan to redeem his children once and for all, and bring them back to Eden.
Is that God’s plan, after all? To redeem his children, and bring them back to the Tree of Life, where they will fill themselves up and live forever?
Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me.
If it’s not, then we are more on our own in the endless starspace of time than I could ever imagine. Archimedes told us this: “Give me a lever and a rock on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” But without the rock of God’s endless love, without the lever of his forgiveness, I have nothing.
Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Living in Texas and Illinois all at once at the same time confuses me, but my foundation is in neither of these lands. When I drive a thousand miles from one to another and then a thousand miles back, watching out for potholes, scanning the road for big retread pieces, appreciating the thousands of defensive drivers that take to the roads alongside me day after day after day, when I drive like this I settle my feet upon the rock and know who close God is to all of us on that road. We have nothing to fear.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit.
I’m in the middle of trip #27. In a few days I’ll assist in performing a couple of weddings at Danville Correctional Center. Those folks have stories to tell, oh yes, stories to tell. Nobody much wants to listen to them, and they have mostly forgotten how to tell them anyway. They get buried deep, the best ones, because they spring out of shame or violence or fear, all the parts and pieces that are mostly kept in the closet, in the shadows, hidden away even from the owners.
Jesus woke up, rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” Why are you terrified, he asked his friends. Do you not yet have faith?
If we are at all self-aware, most of us know that we don’t own stuff. We don’t own land, or houses, or stocks and bonds. What I do own is my story, with all its layers and limbs and shades of gray. I am glad to hear yours, too, when your story begins to sneak a peek at what’s outside, and at me, and up at your face to see if you’re going to spill the beans.
Oh, how those beans so want to be spilled!
God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.
(2 Samuel 12, Psalm 51, John 3, Mark 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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