Sermon 5 was originally presented on Sunday, November 22, 2009, at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The title of this message is “The Deathbed Blues.” It’s based on the biblical story of King David and found in the book of 2nd Samuel, chapter 23, verses 1 through 7.

And so we come to the end of this series of sermons on the blues and the church, the blues and the Christian life, the blues and the gospel. Two things that we might have been forgiven for thinking had very little to do with one another have a lot to do with each other. And I end with some deathbed words because there is no more honest place than the place where you are just before you die. There is no avoiding in that moment; it is the place where we have to make peace, we sometimes say, with what we have done and said and how we’ve lived.

Well, the blues arise out of that kind of reality and sort of dwell there all the time. There is this great discrepancy between what we want to be and what we are. There is a split between what is and what should be, and if you don’t see that, you really don’t understand the Christian gospel very well, for it is all through our story. And there’s a good deal of what passes for spirituality today that wants to look away from that truth and only see positive things, and only see happy things, and only see joyful things. And those are good things; it’s good to be optimistic, it’s good to try to create the right image for things and to think differently—it’s very important. But we can say those things and still live in a world of betrayal, and blood diamonds, and ethnic cleansing, and Bernie Madoff. It’s hard to hold it up.

So, how are we going to have a song that we sing, a way that we live, a truth that we tell that keeps both of those things in view? There is no easy way to do it. But one way we can delude ourselves from it is by what we do with our memories. There is nothing more important before we die than to come to terms with the things we remember. We churn them over and we think back, and we’re trying to edit and sort of get ready. Whether we ever have a presidential library or not, all of us are going to leave some memories behind, and it’s very important in the last part of our life to work back through it.

But memory can be very treacherous. I took a course in psychology of learning when I was a doctoral student at Baylor University, and it was very interesting to study how the brain worked. And it’s very complicated. We have three memory systems in our bodies: one is within the nervous system itself, one is short-term, and one is long-term. When your mind starts forgetting things, it’s the short-term system that breaks down first. It’s not that the stuff isn’t there; it’s just that you can’t go get it. The retrieval mechanism in your brain doesn’t know where it is anymore; it’s just in there floating around, unconnected.

But it’s very important to understand that certain kinds of memory we always change. Every time we tell stories, we alter the memory a little bit. That is, we edit one more time. And so, as you tell it over time, it not only reflects what actually happened, but it increasingly reflects your interpretation of what happened, and what you think about what happened, or what happened in the light of what you’re doing right now in your life and the way you see things. Just remember that when I tell stories more than one time and they’re a little bit different.

Now, it’s rather interesting because, traumatized, we can remember and not really understand. But deceitful is to remember a sanitized past. We can remember what we want to remember and forget what we’d just as soon forget. And so, it is hard for us to come to truth we don’t want to remember.

You know, there are ten identified passages of last words of David in the Old Testament. There are ten sets of deathbed words of David. They are all over the place. And this is typical of a king. Kings and presidents are always wanting to sort of leave their legacy, and so all of our presidents in this country go and build a library and they put all their stuff in there. And the process goes on a long time because they want to be remembered for what they’ve done, knowing full well that that remembering will be done by historians in time and they have no control over how they are going to be remembered.

Well, David has ten of these, and at the end of his story, these words seem to lift him up as the ideal king. It’s strange because here are these idealized words, and at the same time, all over the Old Testament is the memory of all the rotten things David did. He put out contracts on people’s lives. He had one of his own soldiers murdered so that he could sleep with his wife and then marry her and have a son with him. He was, for a while, in league with the very enemies of Israel when he was surviving in the wilderness. He was a rascal. He was not a guy that you want to start a kingdom with.

In other words, he was just like us: a sinful, flawed human being. And the great thing is, in the Old Testament, they never worry about all this consistency. We worry that—and we have all these literary scholars who study and they say, “Well, this must have been edited in because it’s so different and it’s trying to sanitize.” Well, I think they just leave it all in. It’s sort of like going to the family reunion; it depends on who you talk to. You’re going to hear a different version of it, and it’s all right there. But if you go over here to Aunt So-and-So, she’s going to say, “Well, let me tell you about him. I knew him back then, and he’s not the boy you think he is.” Because when he was nine years old… and the story goes on.

David’s failings are remembered right along with these deathbed wonderful things. Many of our Sunday school classes, adult classes, have been following the story of Bathsheba. Y’all about had enough of Bathsheba for now? Yeah. But it’s very important for us to remember these real stories, this world that these people moved around in, and to know that God condescends to that world, meets us in this real place, in our real lives.

The Bible remembers both stories: that David is the ideal king—he is the man after God’s own heart, he is the one God chose—and he is David the flawed leader, who had a man killed to commit adultery. His confession of that in Psalm 51 is one of our best-loved psalms and true to life. He was also a man of courage, a man of poetry, zeal for God, prayer, music. He is saint and sinner, ideal king and lousy man. Somehow, the Bible can live with that, and so should we.

So who are you? You’re the wonderful person I see here on Sunday morning, and you’re the person God knows the rest of the time. And so am I. Good and the bad, and the ugly if it’s there. I’ve got things about me I’d rather you not know, thank you. There are few people that are worthy of my confession, but I don’t trust everybody to hear everything about me. So I can edit on Sunday morning and tell you the stories that generally look pretty good. But the truth is there are some parts of me that I haven’t been all that happy with throughout my life, and on judgment day, unfortunately, it’s going to be a bad day for all of us. I’m going to be pressed up against the wall, trying not to look at any of you, and standing before God Almighty, thankful that Jesus Christ is enough to get us in. Aren’t you?

Now, that’s real. And your story is that, too. And there’s nobody out there whose story is not that. Well, in the history of blues, this ambivalence is everywhere, and because of the sordidness and the sadness and the defeat that is often the blues, many blues players felt that they had to choose between church and singing the blues. They either turned to gospel music and preaching careers and that sort of thing, or they abandoned that part of their life for the blues, which is a tragic choice.

Dr. Beth McGinnis said to us not long ago that what the church can learn from the blues is, for one thing, honesty. And I agree with that, but it’s more than just honesty about the fact that we’re sinners and that we fail and that we make compromises. If it were only that, we could become depressed and hopeless and in despair. The blues can also teach us that it’s possible for us to have a sense of moral seriousness and a steely ethical and spiritual backbone that continues to hope without collapsing in the face of this knowledge that we are complicated sinners. That is, the blues can teach us that what is going on in this is not that we have to come to some selective memory that makes us into these people that we’re not, that makes us somehow into perfect beings who have really gotten there and arrived in the spiritual life. And you can find worlds of churches across this land that will help you rev up and feel that way once a week, but it still isn’t the truth.

The opposite temptation is that in knowing this about ourselves, we can sink into despair. But the blues singers take a little different tack. Reverend Rubin Lacy said, “If anything, Christians are more prone to the blues because,” he said, “you see, if you are a Christian, you are obligated to certain things. And the disparity between those things and you yourself can cause you to have the blues.” But he said, “What you do then is you work with it.”

Mississippi Fred McDowell—there are a lot of blues players either named Mississippi Something or Blind Something, I’ve discovered this—but Mississippi Fred McDowell said, “What you do is you start with something way down deep inside and you just keep working with it. And you work with it and you work with it and you get a little deeper until you get it out there, and then you can walk away from it.” He said what you’ve done is you’ve moved a little deeper into yourself and into that. You keep working with it until you move deeper.

That is the conclusion, I think, of what it means. We need to remember all of it: how we got here, how close we came to losing it all, and how surprising it is that God loves us. And that’s why I think Jesus gave us two memories that all Christian churches have: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. And they’re both unpleasant memories. One is of a man dying and being buried and raised again to new life, who didn’t deserve it. And the other is of a table on a night before he was betrayed.

And generally speaking, if you and I are the disciples in that story, it’s a pretty sordid story. One goes out and sells him off for greed. The rest all think that they’re guilty when he brings it up. One betrays him and denies him, that he even knows him, and lets him go to his death alone. This is our memory as the church. And when we turn and look at the cross to sing the doxology on Sunday morning, that’s one of our memories. We messed up big. We failed. We let him down when he needed us. We didn’t live up to the commitment we made. And every time we let him down, that’s exactly what it says.

The Lord’s Supper is a memory that reminds us: only God can do what God did. And that’s the story. So don’t try to forget it, and don’t push your blues away. Just work with them and move them to another place, and pray over them and let God change them. And eventually you’ll find yourself, along with “Lord have mercy,” singing “Amazing Grace.” Both songs belong to the church; both are the same story.

One of my favorite stories—I’ll close with this—was in my second church when there was a man who wouldn’t come to church. His name was Buck. And one day I found him outside the church and I said, “Buck, why don’t you come to church with your wife? She’d just be so happy if you’d come to church.”

He said, “It’s because of that table up there at the front of the church.”

I said, “What? What are you talking about?”

He said, “That table up there.”

I said, “The communion table?”

He said, “Yeah. Myrtle gave that to the church after her husband Johnny died. And do you see what that woman had the gall to have carved on the front of that table? ‘Do this in remembrance of me.'”

I said, “Buck, Jesus said that.”

He said, “I don’t believe so.”

So he was still a little self-righteous about that. He was going to have to understand what that table meant before he could get there. What we do remembers something that could be so painful for us, except it was the only way to get where we needed to go. Work with your blues. Go deeper until they take you to the place where only God can reach down and take your hand.