Psalm 23
In the spring of one year during his reign as king, David does not join his soldiers and officers in battle but stays behind in Jerusalem. And one afternoon it happens. David rises from reclining on his couch. He prowls the roof of his royal house. He spies a beautiful woman bathing. Large and in-charge, the president— I mean, the king— does not think the law can touch him. Thinking himself accountable to no one, David takes her. David rapes her. And David walks away. But when the wife of Uriah later informs him that she is pregnant from his trespass, David makes Bathsheba a widow by sending her husband to the front lines.
“The thing that David had done displeased the LORD,” scripture reports.
In response to David’s sin, the LORD sends a preacher.
And like a lot of preachers, Nathan hands over God’s word by means of a story. Nathan preaches a parable about a rich man who, rather than sacrificing from his abundance in order to feed a hungry guest, steals a poor man’s only and precious lamb. The word works on David, who immediately responds to the sermon, “As the LORD lives, whoever has done this deserves to die.”
And the preacher takes a step back from his prey and lands the killing blow, “You are the man.” Like a dead man, David falls over, weeping, “I have sinned against the LORD.”
Not, I have sinned against Uriah.
Not, I have trespassed against Bathsheba.
But, “Against you, you only LORD, have I sinned.”
Having killed him with the law, Nathan raises him with a gracious promise from God, “The LORD has put away your sin. You will not die.”
Thus does King David pray in the twenty-third psalm, “My life, he gives back.”
But King David never would have been able to utter this praise of God’s grace had the preacher Nathan stopped his sermon at, “You are the man!”
Having recently returned from a cross-country flight, I recalled a story I heard the theologian Jim Nestingen once tell. Lecturing on the gospel at an event years ago, Nestingen shared a story about how he’d been traveling long hours and many miles from conference to conference.
“As the plane was taking off,” he said, “the guy sitting next to me asked what I did for a living. I said to him, “I’m a preacher of the gospel.” Almost as soon as I got the words out, he shouted back at me, “I’m not a believer!”
“But the man was curious,” Jim said in his presentation:
“Once we got to cruising altitude, he started asking me about being a preacher. After a bit, he started telling me stories about the Vietnam War. He’d been an infantryman in the war. And he’d fought at all the awful battles and done the terrible things his country required of him. This went on the whole flight, from coast to coast, him giving over to me all the awful things he’d done. As the flight was about finished, I asked him. I said to him, “Have you confessed all the sins now that have been troubling you?”
“What do you mean confessed?! I’ve never confessed” the man replied.
“You’ve been confessing your sins to me this whole flight long. And I’ve been commanded by Christ Jesus that when I hear a confession like that to hand over the goods I’ve received and speak a particular word to you. So, you have any more sins burdening you? If so, throw them in there.”
“I’m done now,” the man next to him said, “I’m finished.”
“So I unbuckled my seatbelt and I unsqueezed myself from my chair,” Nestingen said, “and I stood up. The stewardess then— she starts yelling and fussing at me, “Sir— SIR— you can’t do that. Sit down. You can’t do that.”"
“Can’t do it?” I said to the stewardess. “Ma’am Christ our Lord commands me to do it.”
Recalling the exchange, Nestingen said,
“And she looked back at me, scared, like she was afraid I was going to evangelize her or something. So I turned back to the man next to me and, standing up over him, I put my hand on his head and I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority, I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
“You— you can’t do that,” he whispered to me.
“I can do it. And I must. Christ compels me to do it, and I just did it and I’ll do it again.”
“So I gave him the goods again. I tipped his head back and I spoke faith into him, and I did it loud for everyone on that plane to hear it. And just like that, the man started sobbing… like somebody had stuck him. Soon his shirt was wet from all his weeping and I held him in my arms like I’d hold a child.”
After the guy stopped weeping, he laughed and wiped his eyes and he said to me, “Gosh, if that’s true, it’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”
When I thought the story was over, Jim started to cry all over again and he said, “After the plane had landed, I handed my business card to him. I told him, “If you get hungry for that word in the future, call me and I’ll hand it over all over again.”
And then Jim laughed a big, deep laugh and said:
“Wouldn’t you know it. He called me every day— every day— just for me to serve up the little word of the gospel to him. So I did, every day until he died— I wanted the last words he heard in this life to be the first words he would hear Jesus himself say to him in the next life. That way, in the future he will discover he’d already met Jesus in his past— he got him in his word.”
Now, I have told that story before— like the gospel, it’s too good a story not to tell over and again— but this time I want to attach a question to it. I want to consider an imaginative alternative.
What if that infantryman, broken by the world and burdened by his sins, had not been sitting in the middle seat on a 737 but had instead been sitting in a pew?
What if Jim Nestingen had not been sitting on top of him in his aisle seat as a fellow passenger but had instead been standing in the pulpit as his preacher?
And what if Jim Nestingen had not handed over the goods that morning but instead had opted to preach a word otherwise than the gospel?
What if the preacher had instead selected to preach that Sunday a sermon on stewardship or, God forbid it, relationships?
Imagine he had chosen to use the sermon time not to proclaim a promise on the basis of the scripture but to summarize highlights from the church’s recent service project.
Or consider the stakes if the preacher had elected to preach a word about politics.
If that Sunday he had not preached what my friend calls “the Big Relief at the heart of Christianity,” then that man in the middle seat on the 737 would have returned home yet dead in his sins.
And who knows to what ends his despair would lure him.
My friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones is the director of a Lily-funded grant project, for which I serve as the Preach-in-Residence. Our inaugural cohort closed out their second gathering this week in California by receiving the preached word from Ken.
During his sermon to preachers, Ken made himself vulnerable and shared the desperation he endured during his last parish call. Two yoked congregations comprised the church, and Ken immediately found himself at odds with them, for they refused to pay him what they had originally offered him. Ken and his wife exhausted their savings in his first year in the parish and they went into debt during the following eighteen months. The church convened secret meetings about him. They even refused to allow him to use the cemetery riding mower to tackle the hour-and-a-half lawn mowing duties at the church parsonage.
Ken quickly spiraled down into a dark depression.
“In those days, I frequently found myself in the garage,” Ken confessed to us, “contemplating whether or not the rafters were strong enough to bear the weight of my body at the end of a rope. And in the kitchen, I often stared at a drawer of knives wondering if they were sharp enough to open a wrist.”
Ken worked himself into despair.
He confessed to us:
“If a friend and fellow pastor, Steve Jacobson, had not recognized the death spiral in me and changed its course by proclaiming the gospel of grace to me, then I have no doubt that today I would be planted in a cemetery, lying horizontal beside a church with which I had nothing but disgust, having forsaken my own life.”
Here’s my question:
What if Ken Jones had not been the pastor of a toxic church a lay person in a pew? And what if Steve Jacobson had not been a friend and clergy colleague but a preacher at a church into which Ken Jones had wandered into one Sunday morning in his despair?
Imagine if Steve Jacobson had elected that Sunday morning not to point to our bipartisan need— the love and mercy of God on account of the shed blood of Jesus Christ— but instead had elected to preach a prophetic sermon about the new administration’s policies?
Finally at the end of his rope, maybe Ken would’ve left church that morning and put himself at the end of one.
My friend Ken, the man in the middle on the 737— they are not alone.
Seth Stevens-Davidowtiz is a data scientist whose PhD is in economics. In his book Everybody Lies, he documents his years-long research into the big data that Google made available eight years ago. Illustrating the illuminating uses of such data, Stevens-Davidowtiz admits to a reporter for The Guardian, “If you examined the Google search record of me, you could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health.” Explaining the ability of Google’s search history to unveil our true selves— our actual fears and desires, he says, “I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.”
For example—
Based on the anonymous search history of users across the country, Stevens-Davidowtiz concluded that the concerns, anxieties, and priorities people volunteered to pollsters did not align with their actual concerns, anxieties, and priorities. For instance, he notes how the Google search data shows that when Donald Trump first became president in 2016 a majority of Americans told pollsters and friends how anxious they were, losing sleep because they were so concerned about immigrants and the so-called Muslim ban. “But,” he counters, “from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there was not a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. What’s more, when people were waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, their Google searches were not about the Muslim ban or the southern border or global warming. People were actually anxious and afraid about concerns much closer to home: their jobs, their health, their relationships, or their loneliness, depression and despair.”
My friend Dave serves an Episcopal church in Charlottesville. He told me recently that in the last three months there have been four suicides in his congregation. Each of their families responded with the same words, “We had no idea.”
What they presented to the word was not what they were googling at the three o’clock in the morning.
From the second century theologian Origen to the fourth century church father Augustine to the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, the interpretive consensus of the church is that the “green pastures” and “quiet waters” in King David’s prayer are in fact allegorical references to God’s two words, law and gospel. The former nourishes us in God’s moral intent but it cannot create the righteousness it commands. Only the latter, the quiet waters that are the gospel, can— like David before Nathan— make us alive.
According to Martin Luther, not only are the green pastures and quiet waters allegories to the LORD’s two words, the ordering of verses two and three is essential to a proper distinction between those two words, law and the gospel.
That is—
In between the law’s nourishing pastures and the Good Shepherd giving your life back stands the gospel’s gracious promise for you, applied to you in the quiet waters of baptism. And only after the gospel has raised you from being dead in your sins can the LORD set before you pathways of justice. Or, as the apostle Paul explains to the churches in Galatia, good works are the effects of the gospel, its fruit; they are not the gospel. And notice too, in Psalm 23 it is the Shepherd who sets before his flock works of righteousness; the sheep do not set out in search of them— that’s how sheep get lost.
The essential link in David’s prayer chain are the quiet waters, the gospel.
The only word that can make alive.
Luther says of the LORD’s second word:
“Little can there any comfort and peace of conscience be found without the gospel, for it requires nothing of us, but brings us tidings of all good, namely, that God has given us poor sinners his only Son, to be our shepherd, to seek again us famished and dispersed sheep, and to give his life for us, that he might deliver us from sin, from everlasting death, and from the power of the devil. This is the fresh water, wherewith the LORD gives our lives. And thus were are set loose from our troubled consciences and heavy thoughts.”
In other words—
No matter how many times Nathan exhorts David with “You are the man!” it will not make David a new man.
How could it?
David is dead.
To be a new man, David requires a resurrection.
Which means, Nathan needs another word, the Big Relief, “The LORD has put away your sin.”
At the end of his story, as Jim Nestingen recalled his coast-to-coast flight, he started to weep. He remembered the reaction of the passengers and crew as he handed over the goods.
He said to us:
“The stewardess and all the rest who’d been freaking out and fussing at me for standing up on the plane— when I handed over the goods to the guy, they all stopped and became as silent as dead men. They knew something more important was happening right in front of them— something more important. This man’s life was breaking open. The Future was intruding upon his past. The old world was being unmade. Jesus Christ was raising this man from the dead right in front of them, and even if they didn’t know it to put it that way, they knew that they were seeing God in front of their eyes. I don’t care what else was going on in the world that very moment. This was more important.”
Donald Trump is the fifth president to be inaugurated during my ordained ministry; therefore, I’m not surprised that about half of the congregation hopes I will speak a word about politics while the other half has their fingers crossed I’ll keep my head down and ignore such matters. Karl Barth purportedly instructed public proclaimers of the gospel “to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other." I often think this is the only bit of Barth most pastors know.
While there is wisdom in Barth’s counsel, the little time I spend on social media these days the more convinced I’ve become that far too many proclaimers (as well as believers) are preaching instead with the newspaper in both hands— or the newspaper in one hand and their smart phone in the other.
If you are certain that your faith convictions can be exercised politically in only one direction, well, the church has a word for that certainty.
Sin.
Or perhaps two words: self-righteousness.
It’s true, of course, that the commandments stipulate the parameters for joyful obedience to the LORD. And Alexa Johnson just today pledged at her baptism to resist the forces of sin, death, and the devil. It is also the case that Jesus alone is fully human and so sets forth an example for us. Yes, the United Methodist Church has Social Principles and John Wesley stressed social holiness. And of course the larger Christian tradition has the saints who exemplify faithfulness for us.
You see, Bishop Mariann Budde on the left and Franklin Graham on the right are both correct in their way— in the scriptures, Israel and the Church are not simply people, they are a polity.
All of this is true.
But imagine—
Imagine that Christianity is a house on fire with flames erupting from the rooftop and chimney.
If Christianity is a house on fire, the one family heirloom worth running into the blaze to fetch is the gospel, the Quiet Waters, the Big Relief of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
Grace is the one item of the faith worth risking life and limb to retrieve because— the survey says— the LORD’s love and mercy for sinners is our abiding bipartisan need.
Like I said, I have been a pastor for twenty-five years, and in that time I have accompanied hundreds of people to their deaths. Many of them left this life expressing regret over relationships they’d ruined or reconciliation they never sought. Like a tongue over a hole where a tooth once was, even more revisited their guilt over a person they had wronged or a sin they had committed. Not a single person has ever died on my watch wanting to talk politics or litigate the outcome of an election.
Something more important was going on.
Laura Kallal and her two small children began worshipping with us a few years ago. David and Ruthie were in the Christmas Pageant. Laura taught Sunday School and Children’s Church. She dressed up in a Lord of the Rings theme for the Trunk-or-Treat event.
Laura was only thirty-seven years old. And you would never have known from looking at her that Laura was battling a lethal disease. She had a PhD and, though we never discussed politics or current events or public issues, I’m certain Laura had convictions about matters that matter. Just as I do. But knowing the burden she was bearing, I’m willing to bet those were not the issues Laura was googling after she put her children to bed at night.
On Epiphany, Laura died suddenly, unexpectedly, and far too quickly.
I am so relieved that the last word Laura heard in this place was the promise that God in Jesus’ shed blood had put away her sin, that at her baptism God had clothed her in Christ’s own righteousness, and that therefore, on account of Christ, God will give her life back.
All of it by grace.
I am so relieved.
May God forgive me for the Sundays where that might not have been true.
There is a lot going on in the world. There always is. But every Sunday, here, there is something more important going on. It’s an insistent bestowal of a promise that, even in the midst of change or sickness or oppressive darkness, the LORD remains count-on-able; that is, God remains for you.
And in all the world, it only happens here, not in newspapers headlines or CNN chyrons, but with words that are his word, with wine that is his blood, and with bread that is his body. Here God continues to assert sovereignty over kingdoms, dominion over powers, and supremacy over political pieties in order to create spouse for his Son. Only here does God himself promise a sinner, “This is my body, given for you.”
Share this post