This Is A Saint?                         First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. Patricia Ramsden         8/2/09

         He sat in his pastor’s office, hopeless and helpless.  “I don’t know what to do.  We’re so far in debt I don’t see a way out.  We might even lose the house.  I didn’t realize it had gotten so bad.  She hid the bills from me and I just assumed they were being paid.  Now I find out she’s at Four Winds almost every day.  She’s lost a fortune so far but she keeps saying she’s bound to hit the jackpot.  Please you’ve got to help me.  I’m at the end of my rope.” 

         On the outside, she looked like the perfect wife and mother.  She was active in the PTA and in her church.  She was even a deacon, taking care of others.  No one knew, no one suspected, and she didn’t think what she was doing was wrong.  “I’ve just had a string of bad luck,” she said.  “It’s bound to turn around and I’ll win a lot more than I’ve lost.” 

         How could this have happened to a child of God?  Surely she should have known better.  Surely her faith should have kept her on the straight and narrow way.  Church members shouldn’t have such problems.  We’re supposed to be better than that.  We’re supposed to do what God wants.  Yet we are just as susceptible as anyone else.  Even the heroes of the faith can be guilty of the greatest sin.  David is a case in point. 

         There he was, a man of God, chosen by God to be a king, a man we consider to be a saint, a beacon of faith.  We know him as the writer of some of our greatest prayers and songs to God, and, as a young boy, the strength of his faith led him to be a giant killer.  Yet here he is in this story --- a man who had given into lust and taken another man’s wife.  And even worse, a man who had the unsuspecting husband deliberately killed in battle as he fought to defend David from his enemies.  It doesn’t get much worse than that. 

         So Nathan shows up to confront his king with the truth.  David had sinned and sinned greatly.  It was time for him to repent, to acknowledge what he had done, to turn back to God and rely upon the Lord’s strength to change his ways.  Nathan did what we find to be so difficult to do.  He called a sin a sin and intervened to save David’s soul. 

         Too often as a pastor, I’m reluctant to do that – to call a sin a sin for fear of hurting someone’s feelings, for fear of being called judgmental.  Too often as pastors we do not preach on what is happening in people’s lives.  We skirt around issues like addictions to gambling, addictions to porn, even addictions to texting, face book and surfing the web.  Instead we concentrate on sins that are far away from us.  We preach about Bernie Maloff and Wall Street bankers.  That’s safe.  That’s them – not us. 

Yet God’s Word is never about someone else.  It’s about me.  It’s about you.  It’s about our sin, our wrongs.  It’s never abstract.  It’s very concrete and it is uncomfortably true.  It confronts us with that truth and calls us to change. 

But there’s the rub.  How can the people we love change and turn away from their sin, without some kind of intervention?  And how should we go about confronting someone with the cold, hard truth? With the reality of what they are doing, with the reality that they are destroying their lives and the lives of all those they care for?  We know we need to do it.  We need to have what seems like a brutal conversation in order to save the one we love whose life is spinning out of control.  But how?   

Some things we can learn from Nathan’s approach. 

First, we must be certain that the confrontation is based on righteousness and not self-righteousness.  Nathan concentrated on David’s sin and why it was sin.  He did not set himself up as better than David.  He did not say”why can’t you be more like me?  Why can’t you be more like your brother? your sister?  You are such a loser.  You’ve always been a loser and always will be.”  He did not say “You are the scum of the earth and there is no redemption for what you have done.”  He was not the judge and jury.  In fact, he set up his intervention in such a way that David condemned himself. 

How did he do that?  He told a story.  Nathan’s story was set up so David would see the wrong, would condemn his own action.  That must be the result of any successful intervention.  The person themselves must acknowledge their sin. 

Now Nathan’s story, Nathan’s example, was a fable, but most successful interventions rely on true stories, on how the person’s sin affects someone else, on how they impact us in very specific very personal ways.  They are clear and hard hitting.  They come from the heart and are something the person being confronted cannot deny.   They tell the story of heartache and heartbreak. 

They talk about bills that go unpaid, paychecks that disappear into slots and lotteries.  They describe relationships that are ruined by time spent on line in virtual relationships instead of building family relationships of the closest kind.  They discuss the degradation of porn on their own lives.  They talk about angry words and angry fists lashing out at them instead of the cause of the sin. 

They end with the conviction that what seems impossible is, in fact, possible --- that the addiction can be broken --- that the person can be set free of the chains that bind them --- that change can take place.  They end with the clear message that hope is possible and help is available.  They are clear that the addict is not in this alone, but that their family and their God are on their side and will walk with them through recovery, but they are also clear that things cannot stay the way they are.  They – and God – love them too much to sit by while the person destroys themselves. 

The intervention, then, ends in hope and a belief in a God willing to forgive, to forgive even the darkest sin, a God we are celebrating today as we are reminded that Christ Himself was willing to take on our sin even to the point of death. 

We have a God who comes to us in bread and wine, saying I love you. I will always love you come what may.  Nothing will turn me away.  No sin is so great that you will no longer be my child.  No sin is so great that you and I together cannot overcome it. 

We have a God who declares that we will be victors over whatever sin threatens to destroy us if only we commit ourselves to change.  We have a God who promises us life --- a new life.  That’s what we celebrate today.