Fasting from Guilt: Psalm 32
Fourth Sunday of Lent
How blessed are those whose offense is forgiven,
those whose sin is covered!
2 How blessed those to whom Adonai imputes no
guilt,
in whose spirit is no deceit!
3 When I kept silent, my
bones wasted away
because of my groaning all day long;
4 day and night your hand was heavy on me;
the sap in me dried up as in a summer drought. (Selah)
6 This is what everyone
faithful should pray
at a time when you can be found.
Then, when the floodwaters are raging,
they will not reach to him.
7 You are a hiding-place
for me,
you will keep me from distress;
you will surround me
with songs of deliverance. (Selah)
8 “I will instruct and
teach you
in this way that you are to go;
I will give you counsel;
my eyes will be watching you.”
9 Don’t be like a horse
or mule
that has no understanding,
that has to be curbed with bit and bridle,
or else it won’t come near you.
10 Many are the torments
of the wicked,
but grace surrounds those who trust in Adonai.
11 Be glad in Adonai; rejoice, you righteous!
Shout for joy, all you upright in heart! (CJB)
There once was
a woman who had grievously insulted her best friend, hurting her so badly with
her actions that they did not speak for two months. After much self-reflection and seeking
external advice, the woman went to her friend and apologized fully, confessing
that she knew she had been in the wrong and was heartbroken that it had so
destroyed their relationship. After a
lot of awkwardness and a little bit of tears, the friend forgave the woman and
they hugged and parted ways.
Two days
later, the woman went again to her friend and apologized profusely, weighed
down by her sorrow at how much pain she had caused her friend in the quarrel
and by how aware she was of the impact of her actions. The friend reassured her that the apology was
accepted and the relationship on its way to being mended, strong and deep as it
was. They left each other again,
promising to get together soon.
The next week,
the woman was overwhelmed by the intensity of the insult she had caused and invited
her friend out for a drink. She
apologized again, asking forgiveness, and the friend looked at her coolly. “We have been friends for a long time,” she
told the woman. “When you insulted me, I
was very hurt, and I was very glad when you recognized that you had been
cruel. Why are you continuing to insult
me by not believing me when I tell you that I have forgiven you?”
The woman stopped
apologizing, realizing that she had confessed enough, and the relationship
moved on to the next thing they would experience together.
We continue in
the season of Lent—I will not ask, a month in, how many have broken whatever
promises of giving up or beginning were made on Ash Wednesday. That is between you and God. I will, however, point out that some of you
may be internally squirming due to having failed at such a thing, and may be
taking that out on yourself, and I would ask that you not do that. This psalm would ask that you not do
that. To continue to berate yourself is
not helping.
“How blessed
are those whose offense is forgiven!” begins the psalmist. This is one of the seven so-called
“penitential psalms,” named such by the early Church because “they were seen as
particularly appropriate for the developing Christian emphasis on individual
sin and forgiveness”.[1] These psalms get linked to Lent rather
often—Psalm 51 is almost always to be found in Ash Wednesday or Good Friday or
both—because this is a penitential season, a season of reflection on the ways
we have drifted from God.
Too easily,
however, that penitence strays from a meditation on how we are reshaping
ourselves to the wholeness to which God invites us and instead becomes self-flagellation
at how we are continually failing, how we had chocolate last Tuesday and unthinkingly
ate sausage last Friday and definitely have fallen behind on the daily
devotional and are therefore, of course, wretched. We get caught in the regret of it, the grief
of it, the guilt of it, coming back again and again to I’m sorry, to forgive
me, just as the woman did with her friend.
We think less about “how blessed are those whose offense is forgiven”
and far more about how “day and night your hand was heavy on me”.
If this is not
something you struggle with—if you can confess a sin and move merrily along—feel
free to tune me out. However, especially
for those of us who grew up in the Midwest with the clash of Catholic expectation
and Protestant work ethic, I imagine many of us know the days when we are so
sure that this time, this mistake is the one that will be too much.
“How blessed
are those whose offense is forgiven!”
The psalmist constructs a problem and solution all in one here: he was
in pain because he had not confessed—his “bones wasted away”—and then he
confessed. Easy, right? “Don’t be like a horse or mule that has no
understanding,” go ahead and confess what you have done and then keep
going. It is enough; “When I
acknowledged my sin to you, / when I stopped concealing my guilt, / and said, ‘I
will confess my offenses to Adonai’; / then you, you forgave the guilt of
my sin”. Walter Brueggemann writes, “The
act of forgiveness follows the act of confession directly,
without condition or mediator…this psalmist understood the power of speech, the
need for spoken release and admission, the liberation that comes with actual
articulation to the one who listens and can respond…guilt fully embraced and
acknowledged permits movement, a new reception of life, and a new communion
with God. Only then can the guilt be
resolved and genuinely relinquished.”[2]
Except—except sometimes the
confession doesn’t feel like enough. That’s it?
That’s all? Not even a hail Mary
for our trouble? Surely there’s a catch,
an action, a punishment for which we have to prepare.
Getting stuck
in the “I am terrible” part of sin isn’t doing anyone any favors, and in fact
leads to wasting bones and day-long groaning because it is separating us from
ourselves, from each other, and from God.
Getting stuck isolates us from others as we dig deeper into the barbed
cocoon that surely we are so terrible no one wants us around, not even
God. The German pastor Dietrich
Bonhoeffer wrote that, “Sin demands to have a man [sic] by himself. It
withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more
destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes
involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain
unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the
whole being of a person.”[3]
“You will keep me from distress”. Allowing God’s forgiveness to stand as true
not only stops the bones-wasting-away part of keeping our wrongdoings as
festering secrets, it also welcomes us back into the community that loves us
and reminds us that we are not doing this alone. Professor Fred Gaiser writes, “For the
psalmist, release finally came through finding or being given the courage to
speak up, more by speaking ‘to you.’ Screaming one’s pain, anger, terror, or
guilt in the solitary confines of a closed automobile has its own benefits, no
doubt, but the person-to-person acknowledgment of distress and remorse is
inestimably richer. The other might be a family member, trusted friend, pastor,
or counselor, or, as in the psalm, it might be God. That is not an either/or,
of course. God is present and active in any of those other open and healing
conversations.”[4]
Facing up to what we have done or not
done in honesty is hard work, but it is necessary to do it and let it
go. This is also hard work but it is
beautiful work, and freeing work, and connecting work that pulls us back into the
community that reminds us who and Whose we are.
Blessed is the one who has done that work, who has reached out to God in
the trust that God will reach back.
Blessed is the one who knows that perfection is a journey, not a
checkpoint.
“The psalm
does not trouble over the speculative question of a life free of transgression,”
writes Bruggemann. “It assumes
transgression. It has observed the
killing burden of sin unforgiven, and it knows that forgiveness is the power
for new life. Genuine forgiveness
permits freedom to get on with living…No continuing guilt is assigned by Yahweh
to those who are in fact forgiven.”[5]
“How blessed
are those whose offense is forgiven”—so blessed that God becomes a hiding place
for them keeping them safe from the floodwaters, that God teaches them and
gives them good counsel. So blessed that
the psalmist calls them to rejoice, shout for joy, be glad in the Lord. How blessed are those who are forgiven—but only
if they let themselves be.
“I have forgiven
you,” said the friend to the woman, but the woman had not allowed herself to be
forgiven. Forgiveness has two parts; it
can be offered, and it can be accepted. This
second half is so important in our relationships with ourselves, each other,
and God: to see being forgiven as a blessed state. It is a matter of trust: trust that the one
offering forgiveness is not lying, is not attempting to trick us in some
way. Trust that the forgiveness offered
is, in fact, equal to our sin, whatever that may have been. This becomes especially thorny when the other
one involved is God; for the woman to distrust her friend’s acceptance of her
confession is one thing, but to spurn God’s offer? Do we truly not believe, when God offers
forgiveness once we muster up the courage to name why we need it, that God is
willing to give it?
John Wesley,
an Anglican priest credited with helping to develop Methodism, preached a
sermon in 1767 called “The Repentance of Believers”. In it, he asks, “For what can be too hard for
him who hath ‘all power in heaven and on earth’? Indeed his bare power to do this is not a
sufficient foundation for our faith that he will do it, that he will
thus exert his power, unless he hath promised it. But this he has done: he has promised it over and over, in the strongest
terms. He has given us these ‘exceeding
great and precious promises’, both in the Old and the New Testament.”[6]
Is our sin
stronger than God? Is our guilt deeper
than the Holy? Once we confess—which is
a necessary step, whatever that looks like—are we not free to be blessed by the
God Who hears us and welcomes us back into the fold? Why would we ever doubt that?
A thousand
thousand reasons, none of them adequate to stand up to the reality that God’s
mercy is boundless. We humans who live
in the finite world can’t really think about terms like endless or boundless
without getting a bit of a headache, but God lives there. God lives in the hard-to-imagine, the beyond-strange,
the infinite. God lives in the place
where forgiveness is given to those who truly and contritely ask for it. God lives in grace, and grace upon grace, and
“this is what everyone faithful should pray”: that we not only trust God enough
to confess in the first place, but that we give up our guilt and allow God’s
forgiveness to be enough.
May we have
the courage to confess our sins once we recognize them, the strength to give
our uncertainty to God, and the hope to return again and again to the One Who pulls
us back to our feet every time we fall.
Amen.
[2]
Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg Publishing, 1984), 97.
[3]
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. by John W. Doberstein (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), 112.
[5]
Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 96.
[6]
Wesley, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, eds. Albert C. Outler and
Richard P. Heitzenrater (Abingdon Press, 1991), 413.
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