Psalm 51: 1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.
5 Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
6 Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place.
7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you.
A king went on a tour of his royal prison one day. He asked the prisoners in each cell, “What crime did you commit that landed you here?” Again and again he heard prisoners say, “I’m innocent; Won’t you pardon me and let me out?” Or, “I have an excuse for what I did. And it wasn’t so bad that I deserved this!” Then the king came to a prisoner who told him, “I’m here for embezzlement, theft and perjury.”
The king then asked him, “Did you do it?”
“Yes,” the prisoner confessed.
“What’s your excuse?” the king asked.
“No excuse; I knew better,” the prisoner replied. “I did it just because I could do it, and thought I could get away with it.”
The king then turned to the guards and jailors and said, “Unlock this cell and let this man go. I want him out of my prison, immediately!”
“But Your Highness!” the warden said, “This man has served at best only half his sentence. And he admitted to his crime! Why let him go?”
The king replied, “I want this scoundrel out of my prison before he corrupts all the innocent people in here!”
The main point of this morning’s message is that what that prisoner did, by acknowledging and confessing and repenting of his sin is the one and only doorway to freedom, the kind of freedom for which Psalm 51 prays: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin,” in verses 1 and 2.
There are many kinds of freedom in this world and this life. But how can we really enjoy any of them if we have not the Psalm 51 kind of freedom, the freedom from the guilt and the treasured, unacknowledged, un-repented sin, that stands between us and knowing and experiencing the mercy and the unconditional love of God?
Whoever we are, whatever we have done, God’s love and mercy are always there for us, guaranteed by Jesus in life, death and resurrection, waiting simply for our acceptance. Confession and repentance, like what the prisoner did, are the door through which we pass to accept and receive the kind of freedom prayed for in verses 8-12: “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” For we must release our grip on all that is opposed to God, if we are to receive all the gifts and goodness of God. That release of our grasp we call “confession and repentance.”
Which brings us to this year’s Lenten Season theme: “Between You and Me.” It’s about a personal covenant relationship between us mortals and our covenanting God. I’m preaching from the Psalms this Lenten Season because they express and describe the personal experiences and qualities of a covenant relationship with God. Confession and Repentance of sin are necessary aspects of this covenant relationship. They start and they sustain this covenant relationship. Otherwise, our human bondage to sin is always getting in the way of that covenant relationship. And a sinful, selfish mindset, will always try to turn that covenant relationship into a merely contractual relationship on our favored terms.
But a true biblical confession and repentance are more about God’s goodness and holiness, than about human sin and bondage. Like when Isaiah the prophet had his vision of God’s majesty, power and holiness in the temple. Then he cried out, “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, in the midst of an unclean people!” It was Isaiah’s vision of the majesty and the mercy of God, the holiness of God and God’s care and compassion for us, that drew these words of confession and repentance from him. Yet that pride-shattering encounter with God’s greatness also gave Isaiah hope and faith, and launched him on his ministry as a prophet of God.
And when Job and his so-called comforters argued each other to a standstill, about whether or not his terrible sufferings were deserved by some secret sin of his, God showed up and sent them all into a humbled, awe-struck silence. God’s person and presence, not any persuasion, are what challenged and humbled all of them. God himself was the answer to their questions about God’s work and will. Faced with the majesty and mystery of God and of God’s creation, Job replied, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know… 5 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. 6 Therefore I retract my words and repent in dust and ashes.”
True confession and repentance are not then about feeling bad about ourselves, especially not in comparison with others. If we’re stuck in a negative cycle of shame, self-condemnation and self-loathing about ourselves, then we need to repent of that, too. Shame only strengthens the things we feel shame about. In which case, maybe we should even get checked out for depression, please. No shame in that.
But shame and self-loathing are not to be confused with repentance. True biblical repentance does not come from fixing our focus inward, upon ourselves, nor outward in comparison with anyone else. True repentance comes with fixing our focus upward, upon God. It is about seeing and being awed and amazed by God. Then in the light of God’s majesty, might and love for us, we see ourselves more truthfully. In the light of God’s goodness and glory, we see our true selves in all our promise as well as our peril, in our dignity as well as our dependency, in our wonderfulness, as well as our weakness.
The more we understand and experience the wisdom and wonder of God, “to whom all things are known and no secrets are hidden,” the more we can handle, with charity, any truth about ourselves, good or bad. There’s no need to hide. The more we trust God’s desire to justify us, the less we need to keep justifying ourselves. The more we understand the holiness and incorruptibility of God, the less love we have for evil, the less do we feel the need to rely on our own virtue. The more we perceive the majesty, might and sovereign power of God, the more we understand and appreciate, humbly, realistically and gratefully, the strengths and limits of our own human power and wisdom. And the less are we burdened with the need to rely only upon ourselves. The more we perceive and receive the mercy, compassion and patience of God toward ourselves, the more compassion, patience and love do we have for ourselves and others.
True repentance then is characterized more by release than by resentment, by gratitude more than by grudges. How freeing it is then, when the eyes of our hearts are upon Christ, to have our gaze lifted from ourselves. Apart from that, there is no real repentance.
Each human self is a wonderful creation of God. We can each say with David in Psalm 139: “I am awesomely and wonderfully created.” Each of us bears the image of God. But we can also say with David, in this Psalm, “sin infected me before I was old enough to name it.” Each self has a point of vulnerability: self-will, self-delusion, self-justification, self-pity, and self-worship.
Just how subtle, stubborn and deceptive are these self-focused traits we see in the story about asmall congregation of mostly upper class professional people. During a prayer meeting in the sanctuary, a sudden, startling, stunning sense of God’s glory and greatness struck someone. Kneeling at the altar he began weeping and saying, “I am nothing, compared to you, who are my Everything!”
This same sensation swept the rest of the congregation, until nearly all were kneeling by their pews, in the aisles or at the altar, weeping and confessing, “I am nothing, compared to your everything!”
This congregation had a janitor who was poor, with little formal education. He wasn’t a member; he didn’t even share their faith. It just so happened that he was there during this prayer meeting, doing some cleaning and maintenance. The same sensation of holy fear, gratitude, awe and wonder overwhelmed him, and he joined the people kneeling and weeping, saying also, “I am nothing, compared to you, in your majesty and mercy.”
Two men looked up from their prayers and tears, saw the poor janitor among them, weeping and praying. One of them nudged the other and said, “Why, the nerve of that guy, thinking he’s just as much a nothing as we are!”
That is not true repentance. At best, maybe the men who clucked their tongues at the janitor regretted the exposure of their littleness, their dependence, their frailty and fallibility. And then to have to share that with people below their station, supposedly! But as long as the eyes of our hearts are upon ourselves in self-condemnation, or upon others, in condemnation or comparison, that is not the repentance that liberates. Only when our vision of God and of God’s greatness and goodness leads us to equal charity for self and for others, to practical compassion, empathy and identification with others, is it true repentance. True biblical repentance means that we always understand and resist that subtly and stubborn tendency of the self to idolize itself, and how that idolatry of the self is always seeking to insert itself into the best of our actions and intentions.
The first few steps of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, or Narcotics Anonymous, describe many features of True repentance: Step one: We came to realize that we were powerless over our addiction. Christians Substitute the word “sin” for “addiction.” Step two: We came to believe that only a power greater than ourselves could deliver us. The Christian knows that that power greater than ourselves is God. Step three says, “We Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. That’s what happens in AA meetings. It can also happen in church, in small groups, with a trusted friend, or a pastor.
Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Those steps lead, according to one AA slogan, to an “attitude of gratitude,” and not to a morbid self-loathing. Their addiction did enough of that.
But those are only the start of what AA calls “sobriety,” or what we call “discipleship.” The 10th step says, we “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” That makes confession and repentance not just a “one-and-done” but a way of life. And so, for example, our friends in the Benedictine Christian communities reserve Friday of every week for concentrated self-examination, prayer and confession, with the guidance of Psalm 51 in their morning readings.
Those ten of The Twelve Steps I mentioned make a good model for us of the practical work of confession and repentance that is our part of our covenant relationship with our covenanting God. If we keep a journal, this would be a good season to consider steps 4 and 5: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” and “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” Then write down whatever comes to mind. Or simply reflect on them during your prayer time.
But only if we’re willing, if necessary, to follow up with steps 8 and 9: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. That’s humbling. But also freeing.
For it could lead to the kind of freedom for which Psalm 51 prays. But only if we keep this also in mind, which Step number two also remind us: “Only a Power greater than ourselves…”
As for this power greater than ourselves, a Jewish man once told his rabbi, “I can’t think of anything I have to confess, nor to ask forgiveness for today. As far as I know, I have no regrets, no remorse, nothing for which to repent or apologize, no vice left to unlearn, no virtue left to learn.” So the rabbi told him, “I think God would tell you that, “There is no room in this whole universe for both of us.”
“In your light we see light,” says Psalm 36. In the light of God’s mercy, might and majesty, in the light of God’s glory and goodness, God’s holiness and tenderness, we see our true selves, in our dignity and our dependency, how little we are and yet how greatly beloved we are, just like everyone else. When our gaze goes from inward toward self, from outward toward others, to upward toward God, then arises both the grief and the gratitude, the love and the longing, the holy fear and the true freedom of biblical confession and repentance. Far from being a recipe for self-loathing and rejection of self and others, confession and repentance are the doorway to freedom: freedom to let God be God, and to let ourselves be human. Being human is quite wonderful enough, don’t you think?