By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

Sometimes the easiest person to fool is yourself.

That’s what I think whenever I hear this story about King David and the prophet Nathan. David has done so many terrible things, but apparently he’s the last one to know. It’s heartbreaking to anyone who has been following along with his story, because he started out with so much promise. He was a golden boy, a shepherd who was chosen by God to be king. He stood up to a giant and won, he found his way out of a trap set for him by a jealous King Saul, he brought the ark of the Covenant into the city and danced in ecstasy before the Lord. It all seemed to be going so well.

But honestly the cracks in this rosy portrait began pretty early on. By the time we come to this encounter between Nathan and the king, David has broken nearly all of the ten commandments, from coveting his neighbor’s wife to adultery to lying and even murder. One misdeed leads to another, and soon the coverup is almost worse than the crime.

And yet, when the prophet tells him a parable about a powerful person mistreating a less powerful person, taking what isn’t his and using it for his own selfish purposes, David never once thinks that what Nathan is talking about could be relevant to him. He has to have it spelled out for him, has to have Nathan actually say the words, “You are the man!” He has been doing one bad thing after another and yet he still doesn’t see himself as a bad guy. No doubt he has gotten better and better at justifying his actions, at least to himself. Not only has he lied to others, but it seems he has begun to believe his own lies. It’s a sad but all-too-familiar situation.

In his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman delves deeply into the power of our thoughts to control our reality. He writes, “Some things are true whether you believe in them or not. … Other things have the potential to be true, if we believe in them.” Examples of the first kind of truth would be the boiling point of water, or the location of the Eiffel Tower. Simple, provable facts.

Explaining the other kind of truth, sometimes called self-fulfilling prophecies, Bregman writes, “If you believe something enough, it can become real. We are what we believe. We find what we go looking for. And what we predict comes to pass. […] Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people, because ultimately you get what you expect to get.”

The thesis of his book is not only that people are generally much better as a species than we believe them to be—kinder, braver, and more cooperative—but that our false belief about humanity’s tendency to be bad has terrible consequences in real life. He uses the example of Hurricane Katrina and the awful news reports about uncontrolled violence and chaos that came out of New Orleans in the first few days after the levees broke. Because so many of us believed those reports, certain agencies and officials were slow to go in and help, and several unarmed black people were killed by police officers who assumed they were part of a marauding, violent gang.

We see what we want to see. We find what we go looking for. We become what we believe.

The power of beliefs to shape reality, even when those beliefs fly in the face of facts, is on full display in our world today. For the first several months of the pandemic everyone was focused on the need for a vaccine. Now we have a vaccine but we also have a terrible new variant and, most of all, we have people who are seeing what they want to see, turning their version of reality into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We weren’t wrong to hope for a vaccine, or to be astonished and grateful that such a tremendously effective and safe vaccine was developed so swiftly. The problem is that too many people, because they don’t trust the scientists or they don’t trust the government or what have you, are clinging to an idea that they’re better off without the vaccine. And that idea is endangering the rest of us.

It is very, very hard to change people’s minds. It is very, very hard to introduce a new reality. And yet that is what the Church, and the Bible, and the Holy Spirit, are all in the business of doing. We are all about new life and new hope, and perhaps most of all about a new way of seeing things.

David did not want to see the reality of what he was doing, but the reality was there nonetheless. People were hurt, even killed, because of his abuse of power and still his eyes remained blind to his sins. It took the word of God, carried to him by the prophet Nathan, for David to recognize what he had done.

The church traditionally reads Psalm 51 as a cry of repentance, written by David after his encounter with Nathan. It illustrates the depths of his contrition and sorrow, and contains one of the most repeated verses in all of Scripture: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

That is the great promise of God to us. We are forever being offered new life, a more abundant and joyful life. What else could it mean to have a new heart and a new spirit if not that we would have a new way of seeing the world, of understanding ourselves, and others, and God? And yet so often we choose old ways of doing and seeing things instead—because they are safer, and more comfortable, and they don’t require us to change.

If you feel up to a challenge, consider those last three verses of the Psalm we heard today. Repeat them throughout the week. You will find that they are a prayer for re-creation, for renewal, and for the sustaining power of the Spirit. They can be a gentle guide into the places in our hearts and minds we don’t always want to look at too closely. They might help you see some old belief that you are holding onto, some way of seeing another person or situation that is no longer serving you.

It would be great to write them down somewhere where you will see them often. You can say them in the singular or the plural, with a specific situation in mind or with no guiding intentions at all. You can look up different translations of them or create your own paraphrase. Try praying them at the beginning of the day and notice whether or not they influence decisions you make or interactions you have. If nothing else, you might end up memorizing some beautiful poetry! And you might even find yourself renewed, comforted, and encouraged.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people. Hear what the Spirit is saying to you and to me and to all of us:

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.

Give me the joy of your saving help again
and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

AMEN.