Collier Street United Church, Barrie Ontario

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Sunday's Sermon
Jan 21, 2006
1056
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
A Message About Forgiveness And Beginning Again
The Rev. Dennis Posno

A few minutes before the church service started
the townspeople were sitting in their pews, talking.
Suddenly, the Devil appeared at the front of the church.

Everyone started screaming and running for the front entrance,
trampling over each other in a frantic effort to get away from him.
Soon everyone had exited the church except for one elderly man
who sat calmly in his pew without moving,
seeming oblivious to the fact
that God's ultimate enemy was in his presence.

So the Devil walked up to the old man and said,
"Don't you know who I am?"
The man replied, "Yep, sure do."

“Aren't you afraid of me?" the Devil asked;
"Nope, sure ain't," said the man.

"Don't you realize I can kill you with a word?" said the Devil.
"Don't doubt it for a minute," returned the old man, in an even tone.

"Did you know that I could cause you profound, horrifying, AGONY
for all eternity?" persisted the Devil.
"Yep," was the calm reply.

"And you're still not afraid?" asked the Devil.
"Nope," said the old man.

More than a little perturbed, the Devil asked,
"Well, why aren't you afraid of me?"
The man calmly replied, "Been married to your sister for 48 years."

Well, we can often recognize the face of the devil … and his family.
Question is: What do we do when we meet him?

Now I should tell you that
I am disinclined to believe in the Devil, or Satan,
in that classical or literal sense.
And saying that
is not to say that I am disinclined to believe in evil and its power over us.

For we all have within us that conflict,
like back in the days when we watched cartoons
and the character in a dilemma
of what to do … or what to say … or what to be …
had a little devil on one shoulder
and a little angel on the other,
each trying to persuade him to do what is wrong, or right.

We all experience that struggle.
And often, more often than we wish sometimes,
it is the devil on our shoulder that wins out,
and the good we would do we don’t do …
and the good word we would say we don’t end up saying …
and the good person we would be we fail to be …
and we often find ourselves caught,
caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,
in a place of regret
or guilt
or dis-ease.

I was with an old friend before Christmas.
He had come to visit me in my office.
He was not in a good place personally.
He was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Without telling you the nature of the wrong he had done,
he carried the weight of it heavily in his heart.
The goodness of who he thought he was
was outweighed by the badness of the deed.
And he felt like he had never felt before
in his relationship with God:
unclean
undeserving
unacceptable
unforgivable.

He had stayed away from our Sunday services
because he felt that he was unworthy to be here.

And his questions were real ones. They cut like a knife.
I cannot forgive myself, he said.
How can God ever forgive me?

I feel so badly, he said.
How can God ever use me for something good again?
What I have done is crushing me, he said.
How can God’s love ever be mine again?

What an awful place to be;
worse still, what an awful place to have to stay.

So we talked ~
my friend and I.
Heart to heart.
My heart ached for him
as his heart ached, not only with his guilt,
but with his sense that God would have no use for him anymore.
What do you say to someone at a time and place like that?

I told him about David.
You know, the “David-the-giant-killer” David …
the “Lord-is-my-shepherd” David who wrote most of the psalms …
the “King-of-Israel” David who built the temple in Jerusalem
and placed the ark of the covenant there.

David, for all of his greatness, also had great sin in his life.
He had fallen head over heals in love
with a real looker of a woman named Bathsheba.
Problem was, Bathsheba was a married woman.
Still, he fell head over heals,
and fell into her bed, and got her pregnant.
Quite a predicament, I’d say.
But being the king, David arranged for her husband,
a decent man named Uriah, and one of his soldiers,
to go into battle and fight on the front lines.
Conveniently, he was killed.
And the blissful nuptials followed.

But you know what they say: “Your sin will find you out.”
Well, after he was confronted with his sin, and confessed it, he wrote:

“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.

“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.

“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.”

It was from this brokenness
that God continued to use David in mighty ways.
In spite of his sin, David was used by God for great purposes
and was a man after God’s own heart.

Albert Camus was right when he wrote:
“Every saint has a past; and every sinner has a future.”
Even the greatest saint.
Even the greatest sinner.

If God could forgive David, I said to my friend, God can forgive you.
If God could use David for a great purpose, God can use you for His purposes.

And I reminded him of Peter, Jesus’ first disciple,
the fisherman who was called by Jesus
to cast his nets for something more than fish:
to cast them for the hearts and souls of people.

Peter was probably not the first to see it
but he was the first to say it.
When Jesus asked the question,
“But what about you? Who do you say that I am?”
it was Peter who answered with divine insight:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

When Jesus said that everyone, including every one of them,
would fall away, would scatter like sheep without a shepherd,
it was Peter who said, “Even if all fall away, I will not.”

When Jesus said to Peter, even with all of Peter’s professed loyalty,
that Peter would disown Him, deny Him,
Peter insisted emphatically:
“Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

But Peter, for all of his greatness, also had great sin in his life:
for he did, as Jesus predicted, deny that he ever knew Him.
He did, as Jesus predicted, scatter like a sheep without a shepherd.
He did, despite all of his protestations to the opposite,
fail the One whom he had seen as the Son of God.

But it was God, the God of second chances and new beginnings,
who loved Peter the most when he deserved it the least,
who took Peter in his brokenness
and weakness
and sinfulness
and forgave him.

It was Peter who, at Pentecost,
by the power of the Holy Spirit,
preached Christ crucified and risen,
and won, on a single day, more than 5,000 souls for the kingdom.
He came to be known as The Big Fisherman.
He cast his net, as Jesus said He would, and became a fisher of men .

If God could forgive Peter, I said to my friend, God can forgive you.
If God could use Peter for a great purpose, God can use you for His purposes.

And I gave him one more example.
I spoke about the Apostle Paul.

You know Paul, the church’s greatest evangelist …
the one who wrote, because he believed,
and believed, because he experienced it,
that “He could do all things through Christ who strengthened him” …
that “Nothing, nothing at all, could separate him from the love of God
in Christ Jesus his Lord” …
that “the life he lived, he lived by faith in the Son of God
who loved him, and gave himself for him.”
That Paul.

Paul, for all of his greatness, also had great sin in his life.
Before he was given the name Paul,
he was known as Saul ~ Saul of Tarsus.
He was Jewish, as Jesus was Jewish.
He was a Pharisee. ~ a keeper of the Law of Moses.
A keeper in the sense that he not only kept it himself
but kept it from any impurities.
Who made sure that the letter of the Law
was followed in every way.

Paul was a persecutor of the followers of Jesus.
He didn’t buy into all of this Jesus stuff.
Paul was a persecutor and prosecutor of any and all
who did not adhere to the strictness of the Law.

And although he himself did not throw any stones,
it was Paul who held the cloaks of those who stoned to death
our faith’s first martyr, Stephen.
Paul was complicit in his silence.But it was God who knew that Paul had a great need for Christ
and who had a great Christ for his need …
it was God who knew that
“forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds
on the heal that has crushed it” …
it was God who loved Paul the most when we deserve it the least.
And Paul, by the grace of God,
became not the persecutor but the preacher …
became the one who would write most of our Christian scriptures …
became the one whom God would use to win the world for Christ.
It was a reversal of fortunes ~
and how fortunate we are because of it.

If God could forgive Paul, I said to my friend, God can forgive you.
If God could use Paul for a great purpose, God can use you for His purposes.

Sin and forgiveness.
Our brokenness and God’s ability to make us whole again.
Our tendency, when caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,
to see only the worst that is in us
and God’s tendency, when we are caught in that place,
to see beyond it, to see the best that is in us.

Two little girls were comparing their progress in Sunday School.
“I’ve come to original sin,” said one of the girls proudly.
“How far are you?”
“Me?” said the other.
“Oh, I’m already way beyond redemption!”

Let me tell you something.
Something I told my friend that day.
Something that can, if it is accepted,
give hope to the hopeless …
and peace to the troubled …
and a way where there seemed to be no way …
and a chance.

Our God, as revealed in Jesus,
is the God of second chances and new beginnings …
is the God of every saint and every sinner …
is the God who loves us the most when we deserve it the least.
And none of us, none of us, is beyond redemption.
If we were, all of us would be without hope.

It is God’s love that calls us to a finer way of living.
It is God’s forgiving love that can empower us to live it.

If you are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, bring it to God.
If there is something terribly wrong in your life, bring it to God.
If you want to change your ways and turn yourself around, bring it to God.

Bring to God, as David in his writings reminds us,
“The sacrifices of … a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart … God will not despise.”

It has been said that
“God’s love is the great sea that fits every bend in the shore of human need.”
Let that great sea of God’s love wash up against the shore of your need.
Let it bring you to that life-changing place of forgiveness and beginning again.

SOLI DEO GLORIA

SCRIPTURE
Psalm 51:1-3, 10-12, 16-17

Footnotes