Psalm 51:1-6

William F. Schnell

February 6, 2008 - Ash Wednesday

Most of us spend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources to conceal certain truths about ourselves.  We buy clothing that accentuates the positive, or at least conceals the not-so-positive insofar as our physical attributes are concerned.  I guarantee every man here that when his wife or girlfriend tries on a new pair of pants and asks whether or not they make a certain part of her anatomy look fat, telling the truth can get you into a lot of trouble.

We buy tons of make-up to make us look younger.  We color our hair.  We endure cosmetic surgery on virtually every part of our bodies.  We are suckers for pills that claim to melt away fat or enlarge that certain part of the male body.  We buy cars and houses we can ill-afford to make an impression that may not be consistent with reality.  We send letters with our Christmas cards that speak glowingly of our family, so that we resemble a mythical Lake Wobegon clan where all the men are handsome, all the women are strong and all the children are above average.  It is what we do not report—what we omit—that is telling.

And we do not just conceal the truth about ourselves from others; we also conceal the truth about ourselves from ourselves.  As one who will turn 55 one week from today, I am still inclined to think of myself in terms of being 40—sometimes less.  Say I want an outbuilding on my property.  I don’t know how to build one, but I know how to put in a foundation.  Why pay someone else to do work I can do myself?  So I get my pick and shovel and start removing sod in the heat of the day.  I heave and ho, and huff and puff, and sweat profusely.  Then the sunlight gets unnaturally bright and my head starts to spin and I have to sit down.  And I say to myself, "What was I thinking?"

It can be downright dangerous to conceal the truth from ourselves.  At the very least it can be costly in terms of making ill-informed choices we might otherwise have avoided.  According to the Bible, our Creator loves us with a perfect love.  He wants the very best for us.  That is why he wants us to know, as our title puts it, "The Truth About Ourselves."  You cannot want the best for someone and want them to be self-deluded at the same time—the two are not compatible.

As the Psalmist concludes our text for this evening, Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place (Verse 6).  Since we are starting with the end of our text, why don’t we work our way back to the beginning?  The verse immediately preceding the one just read explains the truth that God desires on the inside of each of us.  Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Verse5).

Wow, what an unflattering truth about ourselves.  No wonder we try to conceal it from ourselves and others.  It is a truth that is easy to conceal.  I would prefer not to tell parents this about their little babies when they bring them to be baptized.  Besides, how can a little baby be sinful?  What can a little baby do, except grow into a child and, later, an adolescent and then an adult?  So what I tell parents when they bring their babies to be baptized is this: "You will have to teach this child a lot of things—how to tie shoes and how to do math homework.  But the one thing you will not have to teach this child is how to misbehave.  We learn that all on our own.  It is built into the equation from the time of our conception in the womb.

And there are no exceptions.  Some children may be above average, but no child is perfect.  Every child willfully misbehaves from time to time.  Sometimes we misbehave toward our parents, sometimes we misbehave toward our teachers, sometimes we misbehave toward our spouses and in many ways we misbehave toward one another.  But in all these ways we misbehave toward the God and Father of us all.  Maybe you are a father or mother of children.  How do you feel when your children fuss and fight with one another?  It drives us nuts, no?  It drives our heavenly Father nuts too.  So when we sin against his children, we sin against him.

Continuing to read backwards, the Psalmist confesses to God: 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 (Verse 4).  God is justified when he judges us for our sins.  Our sins may harm others, but they also harm us.  They bring us under the righteous judgment of a wrathful God, and we have it coming—we have brought it upon ourselves.

One of the redeeming aspects of God’s judgment is that it enables us to accept the truth about ourselves.  We may delude ourselves into thinking that our sins are virtues, or that they are harmless, or that we are getting away with murder.  But when judgment day arrives the truth of who and what we are arrives with it.  We rue the day that sin brought upon us the wrath we are now suffering.  As the Psalmist puts it, For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me (Verse 3).  At last we know the truth about ourselves—that we are sinners and that we pay a terrible price for our sins.

You may be wondering why I have worked backwards from the conclusion of our text to its beginning.  That is because I wanted to get the bad news out of the way so that we could get to the good news of the Gospel that the Psalmist anticipates in the opening words of our text.  For the Psalmist not only addresses the truth about us, even more important, he addresses the truth about God.  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 (Verses 1 & 2).

Cleanse, wash away, blot out—this is what God is willing and able to do with our sins because of his great compassion and unfailing love.  The water of baptism reminds us of God’s promise to wash away all of our sins if we confess the truth about ourselves and repent of our sins as the Psalmist is doing in our text.  That is the hard work God requires of us before he can do his saving work.  And that is the hard work of the season of Lent.

Lent is a preparatory season.  It prepares us for the resurrecting power of Easter that raises us up to new and better lives.  But before we make it to Easter morning we have to get through the preparatory season of Lent.  We have to confess our sinfulness by taking an inventory of them.  We have to be truly sorry for our sins, asking forgiveness from God and, often, others.  Finally, we have to make an amendment of life with the grace God promises to provide—turning from our sinful ways to God’s righteous way of living.  In short, we have to repent of our sins before God can forgive them and restore us.

Today is the first day in the season of Lent which runs just over 6 weeks.  Traditionally this day has been referred to as "The Day of Ashes" or "Ash Wednesday."  On this day believers receive a mark on their foreheads in the shape of a cross made from ashes.  This sign reminds us of two truths: the truth about ourselves and the truth about God.  It also reminds us of the hard work of Lent that prepares us for the saving work of Easter.

Ashes are dirty.  Nancy and I make a lot of ashes in our wood stove that we burn 24/7 this time of year.  Sometimes it is a challenge to keep those ashes from escaping that stove and settling on our furnishings around the house, which then require a good dusting.  Sin is also dirty.  It defiles us and, in biblical terms, makes us unclean.  The ashes on our forehead remind us of our need for cleansing from sin.  And as the ancients used to express grief by placing ashes on their heads, we place ashes on our heads as a sign of sorrow for our sins.  That is the truth about us.

But the sign of the cross made with those ashes reminds us of the truth about God.  As God raised Jesus from the dead, so will he raise us up to newness of life if we repent of our sins, cast ourselves upon his mercy and claim his unfailing love and compassion.  That is why the ashes used on Ash Wednesday are traditionally made by burning the palms from Palm Sunday.  As those palms were used to celebrate Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, so their ashes are now used to signify our triumph with him.