Saturday after Ash Wednesday with @johnschaplain #bigread12

http://12baskets.co.uk/view/images/the-spirits-fire-purifies

Well, we are launched into the season of Lent, and the reading for today, Mark 1.9-15, ends with a call to repentance. Tomorrow I am preaching in Yorkshire in a Lenten sermon series. My title is ‘I acknowledge my sins’ and the passage is Psalm 32 and Mark 1.9-15.  If you have ever known the weight of guilt, that inner heaviness akin perhaps to digesting large breeze blocks, then Psalm 32 offers a dose of Alka-Seltzer to the soul. This is a Psalm of David. When it comes to sin, contrition and forgiveness, David is a good teacher.  Check out 2 Samuel 11 for the full story on David’s sin and his scrabbling attempts to hide it. David and Bathsheba -  it’s a story of lust, weakness, adultery, deception and murder. When he comes to his senses, as a result of the intervention of Nathan the prophet, David is broken and contrite, he sees his sin clearly, and cries out to God in the words of Psalm 51, which expresses his deep longing for a clean heart. On the basis of his experience of sin, shame, contrition and forgiveness, David writes Psalm 32.  David is a forgiven sinner who knows what he is talking about, and he has a message for all of us who struggle with the ‘devices and desires of our hearts.’

First the experience of God’s forgiveness:

The Joy of Forgiveness

¹ Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
² Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

These opening verses are reminiscent of Psalm 1 with its statement ‘happy are those who do not take the path that sinners tread.’ But David has taken this path, and so have we. However, Psalm 32 says even after we have taken that road to a far off land there is hope, there is forgiveness. Happy is the person who discovers this. Happy is the person who can hold their head up and know they are declared innocent. That person is blessed.

But this is hard for us to grasp. Alone we are enmeshed in sin. It’s easy to sing ‘I’m forgiven’, whist wearing the ‘all’s right with me and God face’, when in truth we feel wretched, caught on the hamster wheel of failure. Sin, it’s like a virus running through creation. Alistair McFadyn in his book Bound to Sin, talks about sin as a distorted framework. Sin is like a force field, a kink in creation that trips us up. Sin infects all creation, it runs through society, it damages international relations; it creates walls – sometimes quite literally – in communities; it wreaks havoc in our relationship to nature. Worse still, often we are numb to the reality of sin. So what hope for any of us? Is there really a way back from the far off land of broken relationships, addiction, lust, jealousy, pride, envy, hatred, bitterness, et al? Alone we cannot escape sin, not even by doing our best to be very good. Aren’t David’s opening verses just an empty promise?

‘I’ve got it covered’ – a common enough expression: ‘I’ve dealt with it, I’ve sorted it, I’m dealing with it, I’ve paid for it. I’ve got it covered.’ God has a habit of covering people. Remember back in Genesis, Adam and Eve have monumentally stuffed up, they sin, their innocence is lost, they are naked and ashamed and must bear the consequence by leaving Eden. And what does God do? He makes clothes for them.  (Gen 3.21) Covers them. It’s a beautiful and striking action. Human sin has consequences, but note that God does not abandon Adam and Eve. He clothes these sinners. In Exodus, the people are told to paint the blood of the Passover Lamb on the doorposts and lintels, so that, they will be covered – safe, protected from God’s judgement. Later in the Book of Exodus, again we see God covering a sinner – this time Moses, the one time murderer, is put into a cleft of rock and covered by the hand of God as the glory of the Lord passes by. He is protected.

Christians today read this Psalm through the lenses of our understanding of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus has our sins covered. He experiences the weight of Creation’s virus within himself, he bears it within himself. He knows the anguish it causes. I love the way C.S .Lewis explains this in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Aslan dies in Edmund’s place, takes the punishment for Edmund the traitor and overcomes it with what Aslan calls a ‘deeper magic’; a powerful wisdom which embraces the power of sin and meets it with love. It’s easy to trot out neat little formulas to explain how Jesus’ death deals with sin… Somehow language makes it seem so trite and formulaic – this wonderful, powerful mystery. And yet… in Christ our sin is covered, finally, in a way David could not have conceived. In Christ all Creation is reconciled to God. In Christ we can approach God; our sin is covered by him.

But this raises some questions. If sin is dealt with – why do we still wrestle with it? We know that sin lurks near-by ready to rugby tackle us into wrong patterns of thought and behaviour. God has dealt with sin decisively in Christ, but we still need to address it as we journey on in that process of having the corners chipped off as God shapes us in His likeness.

David writes as a man who knew God and deliberately sinned anyway. That might be familiar to many of us. The decision to turn away from God cost David dear. In verses 3 and 4, David describes the effect of genuine guilt: that deep awareness that we have done wrong, the sheer exhaustion of carting around a sackful of remorse:

³ While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
⁴ For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up^* as by the heat of summer.

It leaves us feeling as if (please note the ‘as if’) we were far, far from God. In truth, as Paul observes, ‘nothing can separate us from the love of God’. It is guilt, our friend, which brings us back to God. This is true for David who recognises it’s time to ‘fess up, be honest and open and face the truth.

⁵ Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

David encounters the Lord who forgives; who takes away that sickening sense of separation, and silences the drum beat of guilt.  When God forgives he does so out of understanding of who we are and what led us to sin. This is not to condone the sin, but to show compassion for the sinner. Forgiveness – it a gateway to freedom.

⁶ Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress,^* the rush of mighty waters
   shall not reach them.
⁷ You are a hiding-place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

David has experienced the relief of forgiveness and he’s keen to share it. We are offered that beautiful image of God as hiding place – the place of security where we can go with our struggle and sin and know deliverance from the failures and flaws of our humanity. To know God as a hiding place is to acknowledge deep intimacy with God and trust in God. Perhaps we hear this and wonder. ‘If only you knew what I had done, said, thought; you’d know there is no place of safety in God for me’. There is hiddeness in the faith community, guilt and shame that don’t know relief because we think some things are unsayable to God. People can get locked into terrible guilt and shame, trapped into believing that the acknowledgment of sin means the end of everything. In truth the admission of sin is the doorway to hope. How many in our churches are trapped into secret addictions and destructive patterns: gambling, sexual compulsions, food addictions, alcoholism, pornography, ingrained bitterness, abusive behaviours… God knows us. All of us.  The truth is all have fallen short of the glory of God. But if we acknowledge our sins, God promises to guide and help:

⁸ I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
⁹ Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding,
whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
else it will not stay near you.

God counsels with his eye upon us. How do we understand this? Is Big Brother watching us, always on our backs? How easily we fall into the heresy that God is some loveless, killjoy watching and waiting for us to trip up and fail. Have a look at this picture of St Menas, an Egyptian saint of the 3^rd century. This is one of the oldest icons and shows Menas with Christ.

To those who understand what it means to say ‘my sin is ever before me’ the Menas icon comes as medicine against a counsel of despair. God understands. God forgives. God instructs. He is by your side, not on your back.

The psalm ends with these words:

¹⁰ Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.
¹¹ Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous,
and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

Wickedness is that deliberate, free, uncritical engagement with sin – and it has a cost, sooner or later, as David discovered: the struggle to maintain a hold on things, shame, fear, stress, misery – plenty of torment there. But the experience of trusting God and discovering forgiveness – that is a cause for deep joy – receiving the loving embrace of Christ – who has it covered.