Transcript
A Clean Heart First Baptist Richmond, August 2, 2026
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 51
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
It was not really how I had planned to spend the day. It was May of 1984. Christy and I were on our way to Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, to celebrate her graduation from college. We had just caught sight of the ocean and started across the bridge that connects the island to the mainland. There were people everywhere, fishing in the inlet, strolling across the bridge…. I slowed almost to a stop, and then heard the screech of tires behind me, and felt the sickening crunch of someone else’s car smashing into mine, and then another crunch as another car smashed into that one.
It was a three-car pileup on the Pawley’s Island Bridge. Christy and I were both OK, but when I stepped out of the car I saw a skinny, red-haired woman walking toward me with her fist drawn back. She shouted a few choice expletives and offered to punch me in the face. “It was your fault!” she screamed. “This whole thing was your fault!” And, as coincidence would have it, the fellow who had smashed into her said the same thing.
He sat in the back seat of the police car and made his case in a perfect low country accent: “Officer Brunson, if this boy hadn’a stopped his car right in the middle of
the bridge I wouldn’a run into this other lady, and she wouldn’a run into him. In other words, if he hadn’a been there, none o’ this would’a happened in the first place.”
It kind of made sense, and I said so.
Officer Brunson turned toward me and asked, “Are you saying it was your fault?” “NO!” I said. “Of course not!” But as I left the car a few minutes later, holding a twenty-five dollar fine for “improper parking,” I realized what I should have said. I should have said, “If this fellow had run into the side of the bridge, would it have been the bridge’s fault?” I never think of those snappy comebacks when I need them.
This other man, however, had convinced the police officer that it was my fault, and it serves as an illustration that we human beings are masters of justification.
The word means, literally, to “make things right.” And when we make mistakes, do some damage, rear-end innocent tourists, we begin to employ this enormous capacity to absolve ourselves of any responsibility. We say, “It wasn’t my fault.”
“He should have been watching where he was going.” “It was an accident.”
By shifting the blame or manipulating the evidence, we make things right—we justify ourselves.
And we are really, really good at it.
We have been doing it from the very beginning. You may remember that when God confronted Adam about eating the forbidden fruit he pointed to Eve and said, “She gave it to me!” And when God turned toward Eve she pointed at the snake and said, “Well, he tempted me!”
When we get to the story of David and Bathsheba we know how easily people sin, and how quick they are to justify themselves. David’s story isn’t anything new, but other than that Original Sin in the Garden of Eden it may be the most notorious sin in the Bible.
“It was the spring of the year,” the author of 2 Samuel tells us, “the time when kings go forth to battle.” But King David stayed home in Jerusalem. And if I could use this as an opportunity to teach you some lessons about sin I would say this is how it begins for most of us. We don’t plan it. We don’t scheme. We don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “What a great day to do some sinning!” It just happens, and it usually happens (point number one) when the circumstances are favorable, as they were for David.
Surely, he didn’t send his troops off to battle just so he could stay home and succumb to temptation. If we are going to think the best of him, as the author of First and Second Samuel has taught us, we will assume that he had a very good reason to stay home.
Maybe he was nursing an injury from a previous battle: a pulled calf muscle, a torn rotator cuff. Perhaps his personal physician had told him, “David, I know how you love to mix it up on the battlefield, but this time you’d better stay home.”
And so, when all the other kings were going forth to battle, David stayed home in Jerusalem, pouting.
The circumstances were favorable for sin.
It was under those circumstances that David took a walk on the roof of the palace (no doubt a part of his physical therapy). And there it happened, we are told, that David “saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.”
Let me remind you of what I said the last time I preached on this passage. You’ve probably heard that Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah,” that says, “His faith was strong but he needed proof, he saw her bathing on the roof.” My friend Amy Butler is quick to point out that David was the one on the roof, not Bathsheba.
Amy has been to David’s palace in Jerusalem. She has walked on the roof of that palace. She has noticed how, from that vantage point, you can look down on all the other buildings in the city, and how David might have been able to see into every private courtyard. “Bathsheba wasn’t on the roof!” Amy says, but she might have been down there in her private courtyard, performing a ritual of purification after her monthly cycle just as the Law of Moses required.
Wherever she was, David was able to see her from his rooftop. But it’s not like he planned to see her. He didn’t get up from his couch that afternoon thinking, “Maybe I’ll see a beautiful woman bathing in her courtyard.” And again, this is how it is for us. Even when the circumstances are favorable for sin we don’t usually arrange it. But in that setting (and this is point number two) the opportunity may arise, and if it should we will find that we are already vulnerable.
David was bored and restless. He saw a beautiful woman bathing. He asked his attendant, innocently enough, “Who is that?”
Or maybe it wasn’t so innocent.
A recent article by Mary Beth McSwain in the Christian Century explores the full range of sexual exploitation in the Bible, including David’s exploitation of Bathsheba.i McSwain insists that rape is not too strong a word for what happened in the king’s private bedchambers that night. But that’s not the way the author of 2 Samuel tells the story.
As I said, he has taught us to think the best of David, and in his report what happens appears to be almost an accident, like the driver who glances up from his smart phone just in time to see himself collide with the car in front of him. David may have looked up later that evening to see the palace guard bringing Bathsheba to him—beautiful even in her resistance—like something out of a dream. And like a character in
a dream himself he may have reached for her, taken her, and in his lust-drunken stupor never heard the sickening sound of the collision. It was only when he woke up the next morning that he realized what a terrible accident had occurred.
Without elaboration the author of the story tells us that Bathsheba returned home. What happened after that was what happens after any accident. David worked hard to justify his actions, to make them right. If anyone could do it, he could. He was a master of so many things. But we need to remember that this was no small sin: David had broken one, possibly two, of the Ten Commandments. He had broken number ten, certainly, the one about not coveting your neighbor’s wife. But he had also broken number seven, the one about not committing adultery, if that’s what you want to call it. But in his mind the defense must have sounded something like this: “Well, if it hadn’t been for this injury this never would have happened. If the doctor hadn’t told me to stay home from the battle this could have been avoided. If that woman hadn’t been bathing in a place where I could see her, and if she hadn’t been so gosh-darned beautiful, this whole thing might never have occurred. It wasn’t my fault, really. It was an accident.”
But when Bathsheba sends word that one accident has led to another, that their one-night stand has resulted in her pregnancy, David has no choice but to try to cover his tracks. If you know this story at all you know that David’s attempts to hide his sin only make things worse.
He sends for Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, who is where David should have been—across the Jordan River fighting the Ammonites. He brings Uriah home from the battle so he can spend some time with his wife (nudge-nudge, wink-wink), so that when she turns up pregnant he will assume the child is his.
When Uriah refuses on the grounds of solidarity with his fellow soldiers, David tries to break down his resolve with liquor, to loosen him up in order to send him home to his wife, but again, Uriah stands his ground.
In desperation David sends him back to the battle with orders that he be placed on the front line (ignoring the commandment about “Thou shalt not kill”), and shortly afterward a messenger comes to David with the news that, “Your servant, Uriah, is dead.” David breathes a sigh of relief, gives Bathsheba some time to grieve, and then takes her into the palace as his wife.
It is sometime later that Nathan the prophet comes calling, telling David the story of two men—one who was rich, with very many flocks and herds, and the other who was equally poor. The rich man took the poor man’s only lamb—the one he loved like a daughter—slaughtered it, and served it to an overnight guest. “Now,” said Nathan, “what do you think a man like that deserves?”
David was livid. He said to Nathan, “The man who has done this thing deserves to die!” Nathan, almost apologetic, answered, “You are the man.” And in that moment the full force of David’s sin struck him in the face, shocked him into silence. When he was able to speak again he said,
“I have sinned against the Lord.”
And let’s pause to appreciate the fact that when his sin was finally exposed he didn’t deny it, he didn’t try to justify it. He owned up to it. In the psalm that he wrote afterward he begged, “Have mercy on me, O God. Blot out my transgressions.” “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” (although Bathsheba may have disagreed). “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.”
We’ve heard that David was a man after God’s own heart. Maybe what this psalm proves is that David knew God’s heart well enough to know that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Ps. 103:8). Maybe he trusted that love enough to crawl through the rubble of the commandments he had broken asking for forgiveness. Maybe he realized that the right thing to do when we have sinned against God and others is not to say, “It wasn’t my fault,” but to say, “I’m sorry.”
Like David, we don’t usually sin on purpose. More often sin sneaks up on us when the conditions are favorable, and when the opportunity arises. Before we know it an accident has occurred, which we try to conceal from God and others. “It wasn’t my fault. She started it. I was just minding my own business.” We shift the blame and manipulate the evidence in order to absolve ourselves of sin when the truth is that no one can absolve us but God alone. Once we have done everything in our power to make things right with the person (or persons) we have wronged, we turn to the One who has the power to make us right. And if we can trust David’s experience, that One will not turn us away. Near the end of Psalm 51 David writes “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
On a sunny afternoon in October, 1988, Christy and I were rear-ended again, this time by a sixteen-year-old boy in a dark green Chevy Super Sport. But this time was different. This time ten-month-old Ellie was in her car seat behind us. We were sitting at a stoplight in my old Volkswagen Rabbit, waiting for the light to change, when I heard the screech of tires, looked into the rear-view mirror, and saw a car coming much too fast.
My first thought was for Ellie. I turned to face her, and at the moment of impact I watched the rear window shatter onto her sweet head. She screamed. I jumped from
the car, raced around to her side, pulled her from her car seat and saw this frightened boy coming toward me. “Is he all right?” he asked.
“It’s a she!” I corrected, brushing pieces of safety glass gently from her hair.
Finally I looked up and said, “It looks like she’s going to be all right.”
I handed Ellie to Christy and then turned back to this boy, whose eyes were brimming with tears, perhaps realizing how close he had come to doing something that couldn’t have been undone. But in that moment he said something that demonstrated remarkable maturity.
He said, “I’m sorry. It was my fault.”
And I said, “It’s OK.”
Of course, in many ways it wasn’t. There was all that broken glass to be swept up, all that damage to be repaired. But what I meant was that between the two of us things were OK, and that made all the difference.
This is what David was talking about. He was saying that when the accidents of sin occur (and after we have done everything in our power to make things right with the ones we have wronged) we can make things right between us and God, not by offering excuses, not by shifting the blame, but by standing before him like a sixteen-year-old boy and saying, with tears in our eyes,
“I’m sorry.
“It was my fault.”
—Jim Somerville © 2026
