St. John’s University, Collegivelle, MN, 56231 2006
Monday, June 1st
By Conrad Navarro
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David committed adultery with Bathsheba.
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 sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts, you teach me wisdom in the inmost 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. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. Save me from bloodguilt, O God, the God who saves me, and my tongue will sing of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem. Then there will be righteous sacrifices, whole burnt offerings to delight you; then bulls will be offered on your altar. –Psalm 51
I like the Psalms. They are religious poetry and as such speak truths from the deepest feelings, both joy and sorrow, of human emotion. As poetry, songs, and hymns, I would caution us to make deep theological propositions from them. What they do best is take the deep theological and scriptural tenets and paint them in beautiful poetic form. Psalm 51 is attributed to David after committing adultery with Bathsheba and the subsequent murder of her husband Uriah. However, nowhere in the psalm does David mention these events. The closest allusion to it is when he mentions “bloodguilt” as one of the many transgressions he confesses.
For simplicity’s sake, we will proceed from the assumption and understanding that David wrote the psalm after his sins attributed to the Bathsheba affair. David became well aware of his sin. Nonetheless, he did not start out with that self-awareness. As you know, it took the prophet Nathan to tell him a parable about injustice. Throughout the encounter with Nathan, it never occurs to David that, “You are the man!” Yet, once made aware of his sin, David became spiritually and emotionally conscious of it and pens this beautiful psalm of God’s grace.
In the 1950s psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham developed what is known in counseling as the Johari Window (named after their two first names, “Jo” and “Hari”). The theory claims that we all have a window to our inner selves which we can peek into. This window can either be very open and we can see a panoramic view of ourselves and become self-aware, or it can be barely open and we cannot see much of who and why we are. In other words, we can be blind to our own flaws and not know it. The more our window is open the more we can see into our inner selves and make necessary changes.
The Air Force sent me to do a year of Clinical Pastoral Education residency at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base. A year of CPE residency is spiritual, emotional, and psychological surgery. We arrive with our “windows” barely open (in my case, completely shut and padlocked). Through a year of intense grappling with a group of residents and a supervisor who guides us through the process, our windows start to ever so slowly open and we see why we do the things we do and say the things we say. If a resident allows CPE to go through her or him, the resident changes. CPE is similar to a “born again” experience where a person is never the same after a significant event in his or her life. After a year of CPE and intensely staring inside your window, something happens, something changes in you. From then on, when a conflict arises with another person, the self-aware person always starts with himself or herself. “What did I do to contribute to this conflict?” Perhaps nothing, but that is the starting point of a self-aware person.
David, went through a year’s worth of CPE in one brief encounter with the prophet Nathan. Unaware of his sin, he became remorsefully aware of what he had done. So much so, that when he starts his prayer he does not address God by God’s most holy name, Yahweh. David addresses God as “Elohim.” He does not even feel worthy to mention God’s most holy name. (This reminded me of the sinner in the Temple praying to God and not even being able to look up to heaven.) David did not make excuses. He did not blame others. He did not say the devil made him do it. “He was the man,” and he knew it. He immediately looked inside his “window” and saw his sin. Consequently, what David discovered is that as horrific as his sin was, God’s grace was greater.
The entire psalm is a wonderful example of contrition, confession, and the amazing grace of God. In verse twelve David says, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” What sin does, and to some extent our faults, is break the fellowship with God and others. As David says, his sin was against God, but it also did not go well for Bathsheba or Uriah. Whether intentionally or not, sometimes the things we do hurts God and others. It damages the relationship. What it does not do is sever the relationship. David wants the joy of his salvation to be restored, the joy not the salvation. David never lost his salvation, his relationship with God as God’s son, but the fellowship of the relationship had suffered. Paul tells us in Romans that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. Nothing!
David’s now wide open Johari Window led him to do the only thing he could do, ask God for forgiveness. Just as David felt that he was a sinner before being born and as such could do nothing about his sin as an embryo inside his mother’s womb, he knows that he also cannot do anything about it now. David could not pay nor offer any sacrifice to atone for his sin. All he could do is ask God for forgiveness. That is the first step of any reconciliation, asking for forgiveness.
That is also all we can do. Sometimes having a memory is a good thing if it helps us to remember what we did wrong in order not to repeat the same mistake. The other side of the memory coin is that sometimes it is not a good thing if all we do is dwell on our sin and mistakes in life. It will not allow us to move on, to restore the joy of our salvation, our forgiveness, our life. We are safe and secure in our relationship with God. Nothing can ever separate us from it. Not even our unaware selves. That sounds like a lot of happy thoughts and a lot of joy. I like that! I need that!
A Time of Reflection and Prayer
We have all been hurt and hurt others. Do you remember those times? Was the relationship restored through forgiveness? If so, live in the joy of the Lord.
A Musical Guide for Prayer: Mercy Me’s “Dear Younger Me”
Dear younger me
Where do I start
If I could tell you everything that I have learned so far
Then you could be
One step ahead
Of all the painful memories still running thru my head
I wonder how much different things would be
Dear younger me, dear younger me
Dear younger me
I cannot decide
Do I give some speech about how to get the most out of your life
Or do I go deep
And try to change
The choices that you’ll make cuz they’re choices that made me
Even though I love this crazy life
Sometimes I wish it was a smoother ride
Dear younger me, dear younger me
If I knew then what I know now
Condemnation would’ve had no power
My joy my pain would’ve never been my worth
If I knew then what I know now
Would’ve not been hard to figure out
What I would’ve changed if I had heard
Dear younger me
It’s not your fault
You were never meant to carry this beyond the cross
Dear younger me
You are holy
You are righteous
You are one of the redeemed
Set apart a brand new heart
You are free indeed
Every mountain every valley
Thru each heartache you will see
Every moment brings you closer
To who you were meant to be
Dear younger me, dear younger me