"Create In Me a Clean Heart, O God" A Sermon After a Fire In Our Parsonage

Text:  1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 51:10-14

Date:  October 20, 2013

Green Strett UMC, Augusta, ME 

© Thomas L. Blackstone, Ph.D., Preacher

1 Samuel 16:1-13

 ¹³Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. 

Psalm 51:10-14

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
   and put a new and right spirit within me. 
¹¹ Do not cast me away from your presence,
   and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
   and sustain in me a willing spirit. 

Create in me a clean heart, O God.  And put a new and right spirit within me. 

They are the words of David, the same David who was anointed as a young child by the crusty old Prophet Samuel:  David, who received on his forehead the drops of oil that marked him as chosen by God, chosen to lead his people.  Like Samuel himself, David says yes to God as a young man, little knowing what that might mean or where that willingness to serve might take him.  Like Samuel himself, David utters those words “Here Am I”, and is lifted up from a simple and humble life as a shepherd to the royal courts of King Saul, who has proved a disappointment both to God and his people. 

I find it interesting that the Narrative Lectionary brings together the anointing of David with words from David’s Psalm 51, written by an older and wiser King, a King who has committed both adultery and murder.  His lust, combined with his unlimited power, has resulted in the rape of the wife of a military commander, and then the soldier’s murder when he refuses to return to his home to provide cover for a pregnancy which will soon be obvious to everyone. 

These things are not only crimes; they are sins, and David is confronted with the loss of his innocence through the seduction of power.  And when confronted with his sin, David’s heart breaks, and like so many sinners, before and since, David pours out a plea for God’s mercy from the depths of a broken heart. 

Create in me a clean heart, O God.  And put a new and right spirit within me.  It is a plea from the creature to the creator to be fixed, to be stripped down to the core and be built up again.  It is a plea that that which is soiled and ruined be made fresh, and new, and sweet.  I expect that most of us have been there, when it becomes painfully obvious that by our actions, or our failure to act, we have caused harm to our neighbors, our loved ones, or our world.  Having done so, our first reaction might be to make excuses, or to blame someone else, or to hide the evidence.  But Psalm 51 isn’t for those days, it’s for the day when those strategies stop working.  It is for the day when we realize how we have injured others, and how much in need of grace and forgiveness we truly are.  Psalm 51 is prayer we pray when we hit the bottom, when we are ensnared in our own filth, when we cannot help but own the wrong that we have done.  Then, and only then, can we know the true misery of David, who cries out from his own personal hell, Create in me a clean heart, O God.  And put a new and right spirit within me. 

And the heartbreak is that even as David prays his prayer, he fears that it is prayed in vain.  Sitting where he sits, knowing what he knows, he cannot imagine that his life can ever be fixed.  David’s language is that of basic sanitation and cleanliness:  create in me a clean heart, because the heart that I have is polluted, corrupted, filled with the worst kind of stuff, stuff that can never be returned to the way that it was before, to the way that you want it to be, God.

David’s contrast between dirty and clean is particularly poignant to me this week, as I have dealt with the aftermath of the fire in our home Tuesday night.  As I shared over the prayer chain, a dishwasher that had worked flawlessly for 10 years suddenly burst into flames on Tuesday after supper while my wife just happened to be standing in the kitchen, talking to her mom on the phone.  Though she stopped the dishwasher and used the fire extinguisher, the melted plastic spread to the floor, ignited the vinyl flooring, and the house began to fill with smoke.  Within minutes, my mom and wife and our pets were in the driveway, thank God, and the filth and corruption of smoke and soot had begun to spread throughout our home. 

We are so grateful for the Augusta Fire Department who arrived in time to save the home, and for the compassion of our neighbors who kept watch with us as our lives changed in front of our eyes.  Arriving home from the Finance Committee meeting, I was greeted by the sight of fire trucks surrounding the parsonage, and men with hoses walking in our front door.  It’s a kind of sick feeling in the stomach that I can still feel, even today while talking about it.

Over the next 24 hours, I began to be educated in lessons about fire and its aftermath.  The first is that even a small flame can do great damage.  The fire in our case never left the kitchen, thank God, but the petrochemicals which are the basis of so many of our household furnishings like flooring and fabrics are released by fire and take on a life of their own in a small space.  When we entered the home after 45 minutes or so, the entire ceiling of the downstairs was covered with a fine network of what looked like cob webs to me, but were in fact strings of charged particles of plastic which had floated in the smoke and joined up with one another to form long strings of oily residue.  The good news is that we don't need to decorate for Halloween this year.  We're already there!  The smoke and the soot went everywhere:  into cupboards, electronics, the coils of fluorescent light bulbs, the backs of closets, and the insides of our shoes.  Removing that soot will require days of effort by a team of people that—thankfully—have been down this path before, who have reassured us that they can deal with the worst of it.  In the meantime our home is toxic, from the moment one approaches the front door, one can smell the awful refuse that awaits one inside.  When I asked what we could do until the cleaners arrive, I was told, “nothing.”  “Everything you touch, everything you vacuum or sweep, everything you wipe with a cloth makes the problem worse.”  The best thing you can do is leave, and be patient, and let us do what we need to do. 

It’s the lesson of such a time that some dirt, and filth, and ash, and soot is so pervasive and overwhelming that it is beyond our ability to clean it up ourselves.  It takes an expert with the right tools and knowledge to make a difference, and our own efforts can indeed only make things worse.  It is similar to the hopeless situation that David found himself in before taking up his pen to write Psalm 51.  In the words of Dr Suess, “This mess is so big, and so deep, and so tall, we cannot clean it up; there is no way at all.”  All David can do is sit in the ashes of his own destruction and call for help, to plead with God, to beg with God for a clean heart, and a new soul.  He can no longer help himself.  It is beyond that now. 

Have you been there?  Are you there this morning?  Is the sin-sickness of your soul such that all you can do is call out to your maker to put things back together?  If so, then this is the place you want to be.  Ironically, it is only when we have lost the illusion of our own righteousness that we can accept with humility the righteousness that God has for us, a righteousness, based not on our worth, but upon our need; a grace that we don’t deserve, but that God offers anyway:  a grace that is worthy of Jesus, Jesus who came and preached the inclusive love of God so powerfully that he was murdered by a power structure that didn’t want to hear it, who couldn't stand to hear what he had to say, that God does indeed love all of us, even though are hearts be soiled, and our souls be mired in sin.  It is only such a God who can give us a clean heart, only such a God who can put a right spirit within us.

In the meantime, we need to be patient.  My family and I are trying hard to stay out of the house and let the insurance folks and cleaning experts do their thing.  Tuesday, a big truck will come and carry away all of our clothing and curtains to be cleaned.  At some point, when the investigators are done their work, the remnants of the dishwasher will be pulled out and disassembled on the lawn, deprived of its power to do more harm.  At some point the soot, and the grime, and the oily cobwebs will be dissolved into cleaning fluids, and sucked out of crevices, at some point the flooring, and wallpaper, and ceilings will be renewed, rehung, and painted.  And at some point, we will once again be able to call this amazing house you have provided for us, “home.” 

Is it possible that we could also be as patient when it comes to letting God do God’s work in our lives?  A clean heart, and a right spirit will mean changes in our lives that may be unwelcome.  We can’t accept the forgiveness of God, and then persist in the pathways that brought us to destruction in the first place.  Salvation, as Methodists understand it, is the beginning of a process, a lifelong process, by which we become less and less who we have been, and more and more who God wants us to be.  I wish I could say that it was a straight line from here to there, but it’s not.  There will be good days and bad days, times when we’re sweeping the filth out the door, and times when it’s blowing back in.  But with patience and persistence in being open to the remaking power of God, it is the witness of our scriptures and our elders that a clean heart, a new spirit is easily within God’s power to grant. 

Leonard Cohen’s dark song Hallelujah is at least in part about the struggles of David and the loss of his innocence before God.  Recalling the episode with Bathsheba, Cohen writes,

Your faith was strong but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

I’ve always found it interesting however, how the song ends, with a kind of restoration of David’s relationship with God.  It’s the verse that most versions of the song eliminate, but to my mind it’s the redemption of the brokenness.  The lyrics conclude,

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

          In the end, all that we bring to God is our broken Hallelujahs, our praises from mortal and corrupted hearts.  But in the end, that’s all that God needs, to clean out the crap, and fix us, body and soul.  You see, even though we’ve never been here before, God has, with countless generations of those who prayed with desperate hearts for a new beginning.  God knows how to get this done, and to help us be different, better, cleaner, and new.  Will we not open the doors this week, and allow the God of mercy to fix us, make us whole, and find the shine beneath the grime?  Will we not call for help, and invite in the expert who can give us the second chance that we long for, and restore our broken Hallelujahs?  Amen.