This Psalm begins, “Happy are those
whose transgression is forgiven.”
Doesn’t that assume that the transgressor feels guilt and shame because
of his misdeeds? If he didn’t, he would
not need the forgiveness to feel happy.
Maybe the sin itself gives him a thrill, a guilty pleasure, if you will.
Have you had that experience with
sin? You know a particular word is
offensive, an abhorrent word, but you giggle when you hear it or say it. Gossip; does it really even count sin? And systemic sins – sinful systems; who ever
heard of such a thing? Am guilty for
benefitting in a sinful system? Seriously,
who feels guilt over sin whether it’s individual or systemic? You know the phrase. I’m
only human. Why even make a big deal
about disobeying God?
But this singer, in Psalm 32:3,
says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day
long.” Kept silence; he, or she, the
singer, kept it inside. Whatever the sin
was, he buried it deep in his heart.
This Psalm is attributed to David and his most public of sins was to
have an adulterous affair, try to cover it up, and then have the wronged
husband, Uriah, murdered in a way that would protect him from guilt. David committed both individual and
systemic-power related sins in the Bathsheba episode. You can read about it in 2 Samuel 11-12. Psalm 32 is one of David’s confession
songs.
However, the Psalms are
portable. What David sang, you or me or
anyone could sing in reference to our own sins.
We could sing, if we feel guilty.
David had help feeling guilty. He
says in Psalm 32:4, “Day and night your hand, [O Lord], was heavy upon me; my
strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” The way God’s hand fell on heavy David was
through the confrontation provoked by the prophet Nathan.
God’s heavy hand sets upon us until
we have to face our sin, the damage it does, and the guilt it throws on
us. Two of history’s most acclaimed
authors have captured this guilt sin has wrought.
We’ve already mentioned that a
parable from the prophet Nathan provoked King David’s guilt. In 1843 Edgar Allen Poe published “the Tell
Tale Heart.” In the poem, the narrator is driven by his own madness to the kill
the old man. He thinks the murder and brilliant
cover-up has relieved his gnawing insanity, but it only drives it all the
more.
A couple of police officers come to
the door because a neighbor heard a midnight cry. The narrator has successfully hidden the body
and the police officers are about to leave the house when his screaming madness
awakens with a vengeance.
Why would
they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if
excited to fury by the observations of the men --but the noise steadily
increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore! I swung the
chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the
noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder --louder
--louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible
they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they
knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I
think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than
this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I
must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!
"Villains!"
I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks!
here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"
Day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us
in our sin.
Twenty years or so Poe published his
account of agonizing guilt in ‘The Telltale Heart,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s presents
a similar theme in his novel Crime and
Punishment where the gifted but starving writer and student Raskolnikov
bludgeons the old woman Alena Ivanova.
She is stingy with her money and has no pity on this able, but poor
young man. The police suspect someone
else in the crime, and that man commits suicide. Raskolnikov is in the clear. But, we are never in the clear.
Leaving Lieutenant Elia Petrovitch,
Raskolnikov knows he is free, but when he steps from the police station, there
she is waiting, his beloved Sonia. She
knows what he has done.
Her countenance
expressed the utmost despair. At the
sight, Raskolnikov smiled, but such a smile!
A moment afterwards he had gone back to the police-office. Elia Petrovitch was in the act of ransacking
some papers. “Ah! There you are again! Have you forgotten something? But what is the matter with you?” With pale lips and fixed gaze, Raskolnikov
slowly advanced toward Elia Petrovitch.
[He] allowed himself to sink into a chair that was offered, but could
not take his eyes off of Elia Petrovitch.
For a moment, both men looked at one another in silence. “It was I – “said Raskolnikov. “It was I who killed, with a hatchet, the old
moneylender and her sister, Elizabeth, and robbery was my motive.” Elia Petrovitch called for assistance. People rushed in from various directions
(p.421).
In the Psalm, David sings, day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us in
our sin. We are not murders like
Raskolnikov or Poe’s narrator, or David for that matter, but sin rests just as
heavy on us. Our sense of guilt is
enough to crush us and when it does not, God’s Holy Spirit convicts our soul. When our conscience is dull and we seem
content in spite of our words and deeds that hurt others, not bothered that we
are agents of pain and deception, then God steps in and pricks the conscience
and convicts the soul. As long as we
deny our need for forgiveness, we waste away, groaning all day.
However, there is hope –
the best of hopes. That’s the point of
Psalm 32 and the simple message of this day. There is a way out of this fog of sin, a fog
so thick it is only cleared after God the son is murdered by us all when he’s
nailed to the cross. There’s a light
that shows the path from crippling guilt and shame to unfettered freedom, a
freedom that enables us to soar to the heavens.
Again, the Psalm: “Happy
are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those whose record the Lord has
cleared of guilt, in whose spirit there is no deceit” (32:1-2). David knew that happiness because he
confessed, received forgiveness, and rose to stand as a new man. He says as much in the Psalm. “I acknowledged my sin to you … and you
forgave” (32:5). It is a basic, central
Christian belief. When we confess our
sins by name, repent of those sins by turning away from them, and turn to
Jesus, we are forgiven and we are made new.
In this Psalm, God is not
an angry judge waiting to crush us in our guilt. It is our guilt itself that crushes us. In the Psalm, God’s heavy hand is meant to
lead us to confession that we might be forgiven and rescued from the weight of
our sins. Verse 6 says, “Let all who are
faithful offer prayer to you.” And in
the next verse, the singer sings to God, “You are a hiding place for me; you
preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance”
(32:7).
Confession is freeing. We fear it because walking through our guilt
is painful, but God walks with us. And
the church must walk with people so they don’t have to face their own shame
alone. We cannot be a judging community
that compounds the pain and shame of the guilty by rejecting them. We have to imitate our Lord by forgiving as
God forgives. We have to be a community of grace, a community in which grace is
extended to all.
In this way, and only in
this way, does confession bring freedom.
And, O, what freedom it is!
Dostoevsky captures it well at the end of Crime and Punishment. Sonia
goes with Raskolnikov to Siberia. She
will wait for him to serve out his 7-year prison sentence. She has been his conscience, by her purity
forcing him to confess, and staying with him when he did. She did not preach at him, but she lived her
faith. She gave him a New Testament, but
never forced him to read it.
On the last page, he sits
in his sell, holding the closed Bible, contemplating all that has happened: his
crime, his confession, Sonia’s love for him.
He notes that as hard as things have been for her, “nothing could take
her joy!” And thinks to himself, “Her
faith, her feelings, may not mine become like them” (p.434). The books ends, “Now a new history begins: a
story of the gradual renewing of a man, of his slow, progressive regeneration,
and change from one world to another – an introduction to the previously
unknown realities of life.” Those are
the realities of the happiness and freedom we have when we turn to God in
Christ and receive forgiveness.
A final note from the Psalm
reiterates the necessity of grace from God to us and from us to one
another. Verse 10 says, “Many are the
torments of the wicked.” And we might
expect the next stanza to say, “But great are the delights of the
righteous.” However, it does not say
that. It says, “Steadfast love surrounds
those who trust in the Lord.”
The contrast is not between
the wicked and the obedient, the sinful and the righteous. David, the singer of this Psalm, knows we all
sin. The contrast is between those who
are miserable because they are stuck in sin and don’t see the way and just
suffer the pain of it all, and those who, in the midst of the messes of their
own making, turn to God and trusted God.
God can be trusted with our junk, with our messes. “Steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the
Lord.”
Enter that freedom
today. Fully confess your sin today and
look to the cross and know that you are forgiven. One of the ways God makes things right in the
world is the gift of freedom. God frees
us from our own sins by forgiving and making us clean and new. Confess today, and receive the new life God
offers.
When we do that, then the
final verse, Psalm 32:11 is ours.
“Be glad in the Lord and
rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart”
(32:11).
AMEN
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