At my worst moments, my lowest, saddest, most frightened moments - and there have been many, not just over the last two years, though there were several then, but over my lifetime - at my lowest moments, it is the Psalms that save me. Often not the saving Gospel or the soaring Epistles. The Gospels can be, if you get my drift, too hope-filled, too upbeat, too faithful and steady, and the Epistles can seem to promise so much that there are times when it is hard to really believe it will be so. But the Psalms, the Psalms seem to me the most realistic, the most varied, the most up and down and in and out and true to life and true to faith and true to doubt and true to hope and true to wonder and true to worry, of all the books of the Bible. They are, for many reasons, the most-beloved and best-known parts of the Scriptures. They bring me hope and sympathy when I look for it elsewhere, can not find it.

This one - this Psalm25 that we heard this morning - how this has helped! How many times have I returned to this, not in sweet devotion and priestly reverence, but out of human desperation and grinding worry and haunting fear. I am not sure the Psalm's theology is impeccable, or refined, or even right, but it is mine, and mine in way that the more classically correct parts of Scripture can never be - not my own, my very own, my own voice echoing back to me from the Word of God.

"Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love, for they are from everlasting. Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions, remember me according to your love, and for the sake of your goodness, oh Lord."

Remember not my sins - remember me according to your love.

Oh, that particular verse is bracketed by more glorious, more appropriate ones: "In you have I trusted all the day long, " on one side, and on the other side by: "He guides the humble in doing right."

But for one moment, one brief, vulnerable, naked moment, the Psalmist and I are real, and honest, and direct with God for once. It does not happen as often as it should.

I am, when all is said and done, worried about by my sins and my transgressions, very worried, those recent, and those not so recent, those of years just gone by but also the transgressions of my distant youth. I hope, I hope, he does not remember them. A vain and foolish hope - he is God, he forgets nothing. But after that one moment, when the Psalmist is closing in on our terror and worry and guilt - he points out the often-overlooked obvious: what God remembers above all, always and everywhere and forever and above all else - he remembers his compassion and love, and he remembers me - not according to my sins - he remembers me according to his love and for the sake of his goodness.

And I am saved. And now I know it, and in a way that I don't really know it when I hear: "You are washed, you are sanctified, you are saved my the blood of the lamb." "You are justified by Faith, sanctified by Grace, saved by Atonement and Adoption"

I know, I do know. But sometimes I need to hear, really need to hear, and can only hear, that I am saved because God remembers me according to his love and for the sake of his goodness, not my own, and not for my faith, not for my baptism, not for my ordination, or my works of mercy, or my prayers and worship, or my service and sacrifice - they are all so often well-intended, but wanting, and hardly, I am sure, up to the task demanded of them - saving me, and making me feel that, feel good about myself.

But his love, his goodness, is always up to the task. That is what I want and that alone, for him to remember, not my sins, not my transgressions - I remember them well enough for both of us. I want him to remember me, me, and according to his love. Which he does.

This, the Psalm, is not technically the Gospel - the Good News. But I can imagine I have heard no better News than this. The Psalmist speaks and he speaks to me and in a way almost no one else in Scripture every speaks, and I listen and I hear and I believe. And so am saved. And know it.