Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be—
you get a fresh start,
your slate’s wiped clean.
2 Count yourself lucky—
God holds nothing against you
and you’re holding nothing back from him.
3 When I kept it all inside,
my bones turned to powder,
my words became daylong groans.
4 The pressure never let up;
all the juices of my life dried up.
5 Then I let it all out;
I said, “I’ll make a clean breast of my failures to God.”
Suddenly the pressure was gone—
my guilt dissolved,
my sin disappeared.
Psalm 103:10-13
God doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve,
nor pay us back in full for our wrongs.
As high as heaven is over the earth,
so strong is God’s love to those who fear him.
And as far as sunrise is from sunset,
God has separated us from our sins.
As parents feel for their children,
God feels for those who fear him.
Sermon: “Accepting Forgiveness”
In his book Who Needs God, Harold Kushner has a chapter on Forgiveness. In it, he invites us to imagine the scenario of a woman named Beth, who has taken a large sum of money, several thousand dollars, out of the joint bank account she shares with her husband, but she doesn’t tell her husband that she’s taken it. She uses the money to invest in a stock that a friend had assured her was going to take off and make them a lot of money for them. But, of course, it doesn’t. Two weeks later, the stock was worth only half of what Beth paid for it, and now Beth needs to tell her husband what she’s done. She had been planning to surprise and impress him with a wonderful gift of extra cash, and now she’s got to tell him that their savings has diminished. It’s still a surprise, but not the kind you’d want to be presenting as a gift. So Beth can’t bring herself to tell her husband what she’s done. Kushner describes it like this:
“The longer she waits to tell her husband what she did, the more afraid she is of his reaction, and the more ashamed she is of what she did and of not telling him. She finds herself growing distant from her husband, avoiding conversations with him, even as she knows that this will only make things worse when the truth finally comes out.” (p. 124)
Beth is caught between a rock and a hard place, as it were. If she keeps her guilt a secret, holds it inside, she suffers some degree of pain and discomfort caused by the unresolved guilt and shame, which leads to a rift in her marriage. However, if she shares her guilt with her husband, she risks suffering pain and discomfort of a different kind--the potential judgement and wrath of her husband, which she worries might be even worse than the pain that comes from holding it all in.
We’ve all experienced this dilemma to one extent or another, haven’t we? Not that we’ve all sinned in the same way Beth has, but we’ve all sinned in some way--and felt guilty and ashamed about it, and perhaps we kept that guilt and shame to ourselves longer than we wish we had, and suffered the consequences.
Psalm 32, verse 3 describes the experience of feeling guilty like this:
3 When I kept it all inside,
my bones turned to powder,
my words became daylong groans.
4 The pressure never let up;
all the juices of my life dried up.
Clearly the psalmist understood what it was like to feel guilt and shame, to keep it inside far too long--and it is not a pleasant experience. So why do we resist letting it go? Why do we human beings have a hard time honestly confessing our sins and accepting forgiveness?
Rabbi Kushner has a theory. “Somewhere along the way [he says], we have picked up the idea that in order to be deserving of love and admiration, we have to be perfect…We are all afraid to admit our weaknesses, for fear that other people will use them against us.” (p. 122)
But here’s the thing. That fear is powerful because it’s based on our actual experience in the world. Who hasn’t witnessed many examples of this actually happening:
· spouses who hurt each other when they take the risk to admit vulnerabilities;
· bosses who have fired workers for owning up to something they’ve done wrong;
· patients who have “sued doctors for honestly admitting a mistake.” (p. 122)
No wonder it’s hard to shed the burden of guilt--because when we admit our imperfections, in our society, quite often we get punished for it!
Reflecting on Kushner’s theory, it occurs to me that what he is really saying is that the burden of guilt is hard to shed because, in our society, perfection is valued above honesty. And, it occurs to me that a consequence of this is a society full of people who are AFRAID to admit their mistakes--and, as in Beth’s case-- a society where people grow DISTANT from one another. That distance can take different forms, depending on how people deal with their guilt and shame. Whether they keep silent and HIDE their secrets OR cast BLAME on someone else when the secret can’t be hidden OR belligerently insist on their OWN righteousness regardless of the facts-- the effect is the same. People are divided from one another, not engaging in honest reflection or conversation.
I think we can all agree that a society where people are afraid to admit mistakes and grow ever distant from one another is not something any of us want. Right? But the more important question is: how do we remedy it?
Our Scripture for today gives us some clues. It invites us to look first at how God deals with our sin, our guilt, mistakes. Contrary to what may be our unconscious fear, God is not an ogre who relishes punishing people for their sins. In fact, the primary word for sin in the Hebrew Bible is “pesha” which is an archery term meaning, “to miss the mark,” to miss the target. [New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Vol. IV, p. 805] The wonderful thing about this definition is that sin is understood to be a behavior, not a character flaw. This is wonderful because behaviors can be changed. People can learn and grow and move past their failures, leave their unhealthy behavior behind and become agents of blessing and healing in the world.
In fact, this is exactly what God wants for us. The primary word used in the Bible to describe God’s character is the Hebrew word, “hesed,” which is most often translated as “steadfast love.” Psalm 103 gives us two images that help us understand what God’s steadfast love feels like. Verse 11 describes it as “as high as heaven is above the earth”--in other words, God’s love is infinitely strong, beyond imagining. Further, verse 12 compares God to a loving parent. So, putting both verses together, the Psalmist implies that God deals with our sin, guilt, and mistakes in the same way that a loving parent would deal with them--being infinitely more interested in the child learning and growing-- than in punishing the child for their failures.
Psalm 32 backs this up by saying
Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be—
you get a fresh start,
your slate’s wiped clean.
2 Count yourself lucky—
God holds nothing against you
and you’re holding nothing back from him.
I was meditating on verse 2 when I was out walking the dog the other day. That is, I was repeating it over and over in my head, praying to be open to God’s Spirit speaking through these words. And one of the things I started to think about was the body language around the phrases in this verse that contain the word “hold.” The first phrase is “God holds nothing against you.” I thought about how someone might act out this phrase, pantomime it, and I thought to get the meaning across, one would first have to act out its opposite. To hold something against someone else, I pictured holding both arms out in front of me, scowling slightly, maybe almost sneering, literally keeping someone at arms length, not letting them close. BUT, holding NOTHING against someone would be just the opposite: stretching arms out wide, smiling, inviting an embrace. That’s what God does for us! God drops whatever it is that we’ve done that could cause a rift between us and opens arms wide in an extravagant welcome.
The second phrase in this verse is “and you’re holding nothing back from him.” Again, I thought to get the meaning across through pantomime, I might need to start with its opposite: Holding something back from someone I pictured fists clenched and arms wrapped tightly around my body, shoulders hunched, head partially turned away and down, eyes mostly averted. Clinging onto something--and not in a good way. Protecting oneself out of fear and shame. But the phrase used here is you’re holding NOTHING back from God, which involves a beautiful release. Shoulders going back, standing up straighter, fists unclenching, eyes looking up, arms unfurling until they are open to accept an embrace.
I know that right now we are in the midst of a pandemic, and embracing people beyond our immediately family or small group is not something we are doing right now. And rightly so. But how wonderful those first hugs will be when we finally can give and receive them safely!! Something to look forward to!!
This body language is a metaphor of how God calls us to be in community: holding nothing against one another, holding nothing back. Or as the Apostle Paul phrases it in Ephesians 4, “speaking the truth in love,” so that we can mature in Christ.
One of the gifts that the church can give to the world is to model a community where we are not afraid to admit our mistakes to one another, where we see ourselves and each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow human beings loved and forgiven by God. And, when someone takes that scary step of admitting a mistake, then we can model how to accept that honest admission with grace instead of judgment, figuring out a way to move into the future together in ways that build each other up. Living into the “fresh start” that the Scripture talks about.
Let me give you an example of how that could work, from Kushner’s book. Back to Beth, the woman I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, who took money from the joint bank account she shared with her husband without telling him and gambled with it on the stock market and lost. And then compounded her sin and shame by continuing to keep what she did a secret. Beth was afraid that her husband “might lose his temper, throw things, yell at her” say something like, ‘You’re a thief and a liar! How can I ever trust you again?’” But Kusher suggests: what if Beth’s husband responds with grace, and says something like:
“You should have told me about it… I know you meant well, you wanted to surprise and impress me, but you really went about it the wrong way. Let’s sit down and figure out what we can cut out of our budget to replace what we’ve lost.”
What I noticed most about that response was how the pronouns moved from “you” to “we.” From, “you should have told me about it,” to “let us figure out what we” can do.
I dare say that is God’s response when we confess our sins. The response of steadfast love. The response that invites engagement and connection and offers to work with the person who has sinned so that together they--we-- can create a solution that helps everyone to grow and thrive.
Let me close with a prayer by Rev. Arianne Braithwaite Lehn entitled, When I need forgiveness and to forgive p. 34
Compassionate Creator,
You hold me with faithfulness each day,
And i’m asking for your
Forgiveness to flood my life.
I recognize in myself persistent struggles…
The same old failures…
The things I get too tired to confess again…
The things I’ve hidden for so long
I’ve convinced myself they’re
Not so wrong after all.
Thank you for your patience, God.
Pleae forgive and free me.
Heal my heart and liberate my mind.
Reveal to me, Lord, those I need to forgive.
From your reservoir of grace,
May new springs of healing and forgiveness
Flow into my relationship.
Carve in me a deeper kindness.
May the pain others caused--
Even pain they don’t know about--
Teach me a compassion
I would not have learned otherwise.
Loosen the hard, rigid bars
I’ve put around my heart,
And relax my expectations
With your humility and love.
Nurture a supportive space in me,
That I might give others a soft place
To land with sore hearts--
Just as you’ve done, God, for me.
I pray that all I speak,
All I do,
All I dream,
And all I confess today
Declare my love for you,
Need for you,
And commitment to follow
your way, Lord.
Amen.
Rev. Dr. Marlayna Schmidt
Franklin Federated Church
Franklin, MA
July 19, 2020
