C, The Third Sunday after Epiphany - Psalm 19:12-14 "Presumptuous Sins"

Psalm 19:12–14 (ESV) Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

These are the words of King David.  Why does he end this psalm in this way?  We’ve all heard variations of these words before.  Usually as a prayer… May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Often prayed at the beginning of a sermon, pastors pray that they preach God’s word acceptably in his sight, to the congregation.  Hopefully, this preaching comes about through the pastor allowing the Holy Spirit to guide his meditations in God’s word, so what is preached is what the Lord God needs his people to hear.  So therefore, pastors pray that the hearer’s meditations are also acceptable to the Lord, our Rock and Redeemer.

So why does David end the psalm this way?  He wants to be blameless and innocent of great transgression. Why does the pastor pray this way?  Pastors, faithful to the word of God, know they are accountable to God for what is taught and preached to God’s people. 

In the letter to the Hebrews we hear, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.”  (Hebrews 13:17a ESV)

And from the epistle of James, “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” (James 3:1 ESV)

Although David has many liberties as king, he knew as the leader of the liturgical congregation of Israel, David does not presume anything.  He does not gauge his blamelessness nor his innocence by his position or how he feels!  But rather, he is counselled by the warnings in God’s word, spoken by the likes of Samuel and Nathan, and those who came before.

Again, we should ask, “why does he the king, listen to God’s word of warning?”  David knows his true hidden self, in the face of God’s word!   He is a leader in constant learning in the face of death.  David does not have to think too hard to remember, both his failures, and the forgiveness of his failures.  He also knows his rise to power came at the Lord’s hand, in the wake of King Saul’s presumption, removal from leadership, and death.

King David knew he was a sinful man forgiven and sustained by God after his lustful adultery with Bathsheba and its coveting that led to the murder of her husband Uriah the Hittite.  Just as Nathan the prophet was sent to call David out for these sins, David knew of Saul’s fate sealed by the judge and prophet Samuel who revoked his life and leadership saying, “For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king.” (1 Samuel 15:23 ESV)

David knew that being presumptuous was deadly and he didn’t want what happened to Saul, to happen to him.   Like David, we cannot declare ourselves innocent nor blameless, nor do we want our death to be eternal.  The knowledge of death brings a baptised Christian back to the foot of the cross, where like David, we seek the mercy of he who created all things, and continues to sustain us and his creation, despite our corruption and creation’s corruption. 

This knowledge of death comes as a shock to humanity who’ve made the presumption that their goodness will save them from death.  Especially those who no longer believe God exists, nor created life, justice, and love.  Without God, life is shallow and hopeless.  Without God, justice is every man for himself.  And without God, love is nothing more than human yearnings, boiling in the bowels of desire.

In fact, this is the definition of presumption.  The Hebrew word for presumption is the same word for cooking or boiling stew.  This reminds us of the presumption of both Esau and Jacob when Esau despised and sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of boiling stew. Like Esau, we all know how the smell of boiling food can entice presumptuous desires within us.  Similarly, like Jacob, we know how to act with hidden deceit, cooking up presumptuous plans to get what we want, to get our own way!

But these are not God’s way.  Presumption is meditation without Godly wisdom.  Presumption takes the will and ways of the heart and leads a person to death.  Presumption works in the realm of unwise jealousy and selfish ambition.  As we hear, “This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.” (James 3:15 ESV)

How often does your frustrations lead you to presume you’re better than your neighbour, to force your way as the way!  This is playing God.   Our presumption works contrary to God’s word, especially the wisdom and meekness of God’s word implanted within.  Presumption opposes the way of Jesus.  Presumption uses the truth of Jesus’ word to serve one’s own imperfect truth.  And presumption foolishly leads one to believe the human spirit over against the Holy Spirit for life.

This is why like King David we call out to God and pray, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.” (Psalm 51:10–12 ESV)

Three times David says,  renew a right spirit within me, take not your Holy Spirit from me, and uphold me with a willing spirit.  Like David, every believer’s spirit needs to be sustained by the Holy Spirit.  Presumption makes us forget we are human, or at least what being human is, and tricks us into putting God aside in favour of everything else.  Presumption makes fools of us!

Being recreated, not cast away through repentance and forgiveness, restored and upheld by the Holy Spirit, David says, “Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.” (Psalm 51: 13 ESV)

And he does just that here in Psalm nineteen.  Don’t be fazed by the numbering of the Psalms.  They were liturgically ordered and numbered years later.  Nevertheless, David reigned thirty-three years in Israel, and constantly struggled with the sins of his humanity, especially within, when threatened from others, tempting him to look to himself instead of God.

And so, David not only teaches the congregation of Israel. But he himself is taught by the words of this psalm and others he authored and authorised for use as he leads the congregation in Jerusalem.

From Isaiah sixty-two Jesus proclaims, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4:18–19 ESV)

After saying this he says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4: 21 ESV)

David sought not to be presumptuous and trusted the Holy Spirit to lead him with the Word of God.  In meekness, Jesus came to implant the fulfilment of his word within us.  The Holy Spirit was upon Jesus to do this, and the Holy Spirit continues to work faith within us and remove presumption from within.

We hear in James, “Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” (James 1:21 ESV)

Jesus is the Word made flesh implanted in us by the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit counsels us to remain in what we’ve received through being baptised into Jesus’ wisdom and meekness.  This is the wisdom and meekness that overcomes your humanity, your presumption.

The words of Psalm nineteen are fulfilled in Jesus, as are all of the Psalms. 

Jesus perfects the law of the Lord, reviving the soul; Jesus’ testimony is sure, making wise the simple. The precepts or teachings of Jesus are right, rejoicing the heart.  Jesus has kept the commandments of the Lord pure, enlightening our eyes, to allow the Holy Spirit’s enduring cleansing with Christlike meekness and wisdom.  The rules of the Lord’s law of liberty are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired is Jesus than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.  Moreover, by Jesus’ words is your servant warned; in keeping them there is great eternal reward.  Let us pray.

Dear Lord Jesus Christ, by ourselves we cannot discern the errors of our human spirit from the new person you have recreated each of us to be!  Thank you for daily sending the Holy Spirit with your implanted word, to expose and set each of us free from the desires and deeds that frustrate and cause us to seek our own way.  You declare me, and other repentant sinners, innocent from hidden faults.  Help us to believe this equally of ourselves and of others. Keep back your servants, from presumptuous sins seething within; let them not boil up and have dominion over us!  In feeling the bubbling dread of our guilt, lead us to innocence through the confession of our transgressions.

Lord Jesus, let the words of your mouth and the meditations of your heart be sweet desirable honey and gold in my life, and in the lives of this congregation, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. 

A, Easter 5 - Acts 7:55-60 "Homothumadon"

Acts 7:55–60 (ESV) But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.  And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”  But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together at him.  Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.  And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”  And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

Extraordinary things occurred in the early days after Jesus’ resurrection.  The believers acted with one accord.  The title of this sermon bears the Greek word Homothumadon, translated “in one accord, in one mind, or with one voice”, and it literally means with “one passion”, or “one hot breath.

This acting in one accord is recorded only eleven times in the New Testament, ten in the book of Acts, and once in Romans. [1]

Eight out of the eleven occurrences homothumadon refers to the worshipping of God in one accord by the believers of Jesus’ resurrection.  Three times homothumadon, is the oneness of passion with which mobs of unbelieving Jews roared and breathed against the believers.  At Stephen’s death, men from the synagogue of Freedmen, cried out, shut their ears to God’s call through Stephen, and rushed at him with homothumadon, dragging him out of Jerusalem and stoning him.

Stephen with the witnesses and believers of the resurrection sought to proclaim the actions of man in the death of Jesus Christ, and the actions of God in sending him in the incarnation of human flesh.  He was sent to serve as the Son of Man, and submit as the sacrificial Lamb of God, for the Jews first, and then the Gentiles.  The actions of Jesus Christ glorified our Father, when together with the Holy Spirit the Trinity acted in homothumadon.

In these days after the resurrection, we hear homothumadon occurring amongst the believers as the Holy Spirit moved in them and spoke through them to save others. 

First, Peter was reinstated by Jesus with a three-fold call to “feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep”.  Jesus spoke into Peter the homothumadon, the one accord, to love others as he loved him, loved the disciples, and loved all sinners, in his death and resurrection.

Then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, Peter begins by continuing Jesus’ love at Pentecost, standing up with the eleven, in the peace of God, with homothumadon he calls all people to repentance.

One could say this had a positive outcome as the crowd was cut to their hearts because of their sin, and three thousand were baptised for the forgiveness of their sins and received the Holy Spirit.  Peter promises resurrection for them and their children and calls them to, “save themselves from the current generation”.

So, from one man going to the cross for humanity and then being raised from the dead, Peter is resurrected, the other ten Apostles are resurrected, then three thousand.  The Holy Spirit continues the work of Jesus, the Son of God, the Son or Servant of Man, proceeding from both the Son and the Father, to do the will of God, and bring humanity into the oneness of Jesus Christ.

Those gathered, by the power of the Holy Spirit, sought to gather others.  With strength and courage, they waited on the Risen Lord, despite the very real threat to their lives.  But it was to those who threatened their lives that they testified the love of God because only through the power of God can anyone be re-erected in a way that pleases God our Father.

God had become displeased with Israel, his chosen people.  But in his displeasure with humanity and the Jews, he sent his Son, to be human, a man, a Jew, to save the Jews and humanity.

God the Holy Spirit was calling people into a new temple, a gathering of living stones, built on the Corner Stone, Jesus Christ.  This homothumadon was the gathering breath of the Holy Spirit, calling one holy apostolic church to be gathered in and around the resurrected Jesus Christ, the Corner Stone.

This was a calling of people out of death into life, calling them to daily die to self and live in Jesus Christ, allowing the Holy Spirit to bring them out of darkness and into a royal, holy nation and priesthood.  This is the homothumadon into which people were being baptised to the glory and pleasure of God.

But the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit, the oneness into which the Spirit was seeking to work through the Apostolic Servants and the newly re-created and resurrected Priesthood of confessing sinners living under forgiveness, was not appreciated by some.

For four hundred years God had withdrawn from the people of Israel and left them to their own devices.  Kingship and the Levitical Priesthood was rife with corruption.  Murder, chaos, and buying of power was common as warring factions in Jerusalem jockeyed for supremacy.  The Sanhedrin looked more like question time in parliament, rather than leading of the Jewish public in a God pleasing way.  Men like Herod the Great and his adulterous Son Herod Antipas were the legacy of this time.

Outside of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee the world was in a state of flux.  Years before, Alexander the Great had conquered the world, and having been tutored by Aristotle, he encouraged diversity of thought and ideologies.  This helped the spread of Judaism through the Greek world, but monotheistic Judaism struggled to come to terms with the polytheistic nature of Greek Hellenisation that traversed lands from the Himalayas in the east, to Greece and Egypt in the west.

Between Alexander’s reign and the rise of the Roman empire, the lands of Israel found themselves in a great tug-o-war and Judaism became a part of this political struggle.  By the time God sent his Son Jesus Christ, Jerusalem, a place which bore the name meaning flowing peace, was more use to the flow of human blood, at the hands of those who should have been spilling the blood of animals, for the atonement of their sins and for those whom they were meant to serve.

So, with one accord, with the homothumadon, with the unified fierce breath, in which Jesus was crucified was not new to Jerusalem and the Jews.   Paradoxically, the oneness in which these political assassinations occurred in the lead up to Jesus’ death, further splintered and disintegrated God’s chosen people of Israel.  The spirit of the age was every man for himself, not all that different from today!

However, the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit is different because people were being brought into the oneness of Jesus’ resurrection.  He who proclaimed himself as the Son of God, now had a faithful following growing mysteriously, a strange phenomenon of believers repenting and confessing, calling others into the same homothumadon of forgiveness by the Holy Spirit. 

Two homothumadon are revealed at this time.  One was that of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ, the other was that of the human spirit.  One tasted and saw that the Lord was good, the other didn’t see that the Lord was good.  Christ’s call to repentance and his resurrection did not please their taste, rather it was a puzzling enigma and another suspicious power needing destruction. 

With those gathered by the Holy Spirit into Jesus Christ, they were one in him with a peace that surpassed all understanding, allowing them to freely confess sin and live in forgiveness in the face of death and tribulation.  They looked to Jesus knowing the threat of death and separation was a blessing of eternal life in Jesus.  They tasted and knew that the Lord was good.

Stephen tasted the Lord too!  He wanted others to be freed from the confusion, chaos, and the corruption of the age.  His wish was for those who lived under the bondage of death to be made free in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Stephen proclaimed with the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit, the one accord of the Holy Spirit and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Those who debated against Stephen, were from the synagogue of the Freedmen.   Literally in the Greek, the synagogue of the Libertine.  They may have been freed in the sense of freethinking and free to indulge in their pleasures, but they were bound by their thoughts and pleasures that were leading them to death.  When Stephen sought to free them from death and the spirit of the age, they cried out and shut their ears to the Holy Spirit speaking through Stephen and murdered him.

Each Sunday we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the face of death.  Today might be the last day I have, to proclaim with the homothumadon of God to you, calling you from the spirit of this world into trusting the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It might be the last time you hear with the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit, the one rushing breath of the Holy Spirit.  Today may be your last breath to confess your sin, to confess the forgiveness of your sin to others, to proclaim Jesus’ death and resurrection, bringing another into the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit.

It was Stephen’s last opportunity.  It cost him his life, but it also blessed the church, as it pleased God to bring a young man called Saul from the homothumadon of Jewish human desire into the homothumadon of God’s resurrected Kingdom, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Finally, the name Stephen needs to be looked at.  Stephen comes from the Greek word stepho which means wreathe, a badge or symbol of honour, or even a crown.

As your  pastor, it is my duty to call you to taste and see that the Lord is good.  To lay your sin at the foot of the cross, to forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.  To receive the homothumadon of the Holy Spirit, so you leave here in the peace of God, and pass on the peace of forgiveness to others in your royal and holy calling, in the priesthood of all believers, baptised into the forgiveness of sins and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Like Stephen, let your homothumadon be a Holy Spirited one accord with Jesus Christ, bearing the  homothumadon badge of honour, and crown of eternal life.  Amen. 

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[1] Acts 1:14, 2:46, 4:24, 5:12, 7:57, 8:6, 12:20, 15:25, 18:12, 19:29, Romans 15:6