Psalm 32 "We're Surrounded!" Scott Hoezee

Most of his friends had been hanged. But despite his central role in helping to construct Adolf Hitler's Nazi nightmare Albert Speer somehow managed to receive from the Nuremberg trials only a 20-year sentence at the Spandau Prison in Berlin. Not long after arriving in Spandau, Speer met with the prison chaplain. To the chaplain's shock, Speer said, "I want to use my time in prison well. So what I want to ask you is: Would you help me become a different man?"

The chaplain was savvy enough to know that for Speer to have even a chance of becoming different, he would have to provide full disclosure of his past evils. Whether or not Speer succeeded in doing that is a matter of considerable debate among those who have studied Speer's writings. Speer's memoir Inside the Third Reich was praised for its candor when it was first published. But over time people began to see that in actuality Speer may have held back, failing to confess the full scope of his Nazi activities. In fact, Speer probably made use of that age-old trick whereby you acknowledge some truths as a way to distract people from noticing other things you'd rather not talk about.

He talked to avoid speaking. He laid just enough on the table to keep people from noticing what he was hiding under the table. Alas, it is possible Speer himself was not aware he was doing this. At very least, however, Speer and his spiritual counselors knew that the key ingredient in becoming a different person is forthright confession. Psalm 32 agrees.

As perhaps was evident in the way by which we just read this passage, Psalm 32 is a powerful poem for three voices as it teaches that the path to beatitude is confession. In a scarred world of sin, we are as often the perpetrators of wrong as we are victims of it. Fight though we may to combat sin, the unhappy fact is that whether you are nine-years-old or ninety, confessing sin is like taking out the garbage: once is not enough--in fact, you need to keep up with the task daily so the house doesn't start to stink!

True, some days we may have only the spiritual equivalent of a crumpled cereal box and a banana peel to carry out. But there are also those days when the trash has to go out because a chicken carcass and some bacon grease are deliquescing at the bottom of the kitchen trash can. But whether it's some small lapse or a stunning misdeed, the truly honest among us admit that the core truth of Psalm 32 touches us every day.

Again, the very structure of the psalm makes this clear. Psalm 32 appears to have been written for use in worship. The opening and closing pairs of verses are the "lines" spoken by the priest. The priest begins by claiming that the path to beatitude, the way to be really blessed in life, is to be a person who knows he or she is forgiven by God. Following verse 2 you can almost hear the priest say, "For instance . . ." and then he would point to the person who speaks verses 3-7. This second voice in the psalm then becomes like a living example to substantiate the claim of the opening beatitude. The priest claims in verse 1, "Blessed is the one who knows her sins are forgiven."

Then just such a person chimes in and says in verse 3, "That's true! Look at me! When I kept quiet about what I had done, I was miserable. Day and night I was tormented by the thought that there was something out of alignment between the Master of the universe and me. Finally I couldn't take it anymore and so I spilled the beans. And, Voila!, God took away my guilt by forgiving me in something quicker than the blink of an eye!"

Following these wonderful words, the voice of God then bursts onto the scene in verses 8 and 9, confirming what the penitent person had just said. Things are so correct now between this sinner and God that God can speak tenderly and directly. God is not aloof, sitting off in a corner with his arms crossed over his chest and a stern look in his eye. No, he's tenderly, personally present, offering further instruction so that from here on out maybe life will go a bit better for this person.

Finally, in the last two verses the voice of the priest returns. With a smile on his face, he proclaims that his opening beatitude has now been proven. "Yahweh's unfailing love, his chesed, his grace, surrounds us. We're hemmed in by God's good heart. God's got us surrounded! There's no escaping his mercy! And so rejoice! Sing! Be glad! We've got a God who makes forgiving us the #1 item on his list of things to do every day."

Psalm 32 reveals a biblical irony: as grim, dark, and awful as sin is, dealing with this same sin leads to joy! Sin may be the "bad news" of life, it may be every bit the "downer" and "guilt-inducer" that all those trendy preachers who avoid ever talking about sin claim it is. But Psalm 32 is one of a legion of biblical texts which reminds us that the path to lilting joy leads right through sin. Indeed, some of the most effusive passages in the Bible are the ones that talk the most about sin. Because when you've got a God who drips with grace like our God does, the bottom line is never just about sin but about how swiftly God forgives sin!

Probably not a few of us could tell a similar story from our own experience. But it is equally probable that many of us could tell an opposite story, either about ourselves or about someone else. If Psalm 32 were a description of how things always go, our world and our lives in it could be significantly better. If it were true that every time we sinned we not only knew it but were plagued by it until we came clean and confessed it, if that's how things always were, then we might very well find ourselves leading happier lives.

If everyone always confessed their sins to God and to each other, then we maybe would be done with bearing grudges. We would maybe be done with seeing people "get away" with something. It always drives us a little crazy to watch someone hurt another person only to trot away without even the slightest twinge of regret. But if Psalm 32's description were always accurate, that wouldn't happen. The person who hurt you would admit it and ask you to forgive him. Also, when it is you who did the wounding, you also would be led to beg for forgiveness. As a result, our mutual life together might go along much better.

Alas, however, Psalm 32 is not a description of how things always go. All of us routinely commit sins that as a matter of fact do not burn our innards like hot wax, that do not cause us to toss and turn on our beds all night long, that do not sap our strength the way last week's hot and humid weather stifled us. No, instead we often go on with our lives just fine. Sometimes we even flourish.

And if that's true even within the community of the church, we know full well that it happens with abandon in the wider world. Lots of people have whole aircraft carrier's worth of sins which they never acknowledge to God or anyone else. But far from being weighed down, these folks proceed forward in life with a spring in their step, smiling all the way to the bank as shady business deals pay off, tax evasions succeed, extramarital affairs go undiscovered. They not only fail to confess their sins, they fail even to notice them!

Again, that's not just the case with mafia dons, corrupt corporate CEOs, or playboys. Something similar can happen even to us. More days than not our confessions of sin get no more specific than the generic, "Forgive me for all my many sins, Amen." Granted, saying even that is better than never confessing at all, but how probing or finally helpful is such anonymous acknowledgment of sin? Do such generic confessions help us feel and so celebrate the wonder of grace? Do empty confessions help us clean up those parts of our acts that are less-than-lovely many days?

Psychologists tell us that there is such a thing as "doubling." On a grand scale this is sometimes accomplished by those who have committed truly heinous crimes. Some of the soldiers responsible for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam thirty years ago viciously put bullets through the brains of women and children and bayoneted suckling infants. How could they live with themselves following such horrors? Well, they doubled themselves. "It wasn't I who did that but someone else, some nameless "other" person inside my skin. That didn't come from the core of who I am--it couldn't have!" Ask some of those soldiers who pulled all those triggers, and they will reply, "I don't know."

That is but a dramatic example of something we all do to one degree or another. We keep trying to daylight between ourselves and ourselves. In some of the Godfather movies mobsters who had assassinated one another's sons nevertheless find it possible to be in the same room together, backhanding away those other events as being "just business." "Sure I had your son killed, but it was just business, right?"

Sometimes we put a similar move on ourselves. Decisions we make at the office on Thursday don't follow us into the sanctuary come Sunday morning. Or, we manage to slip out of the noose of our own actions by claiming afterwards, "I was misunderstood. My intentions were good! I'm not really an angry person, I just lose my temper sometimes . . . a lot of times . . . OK every day, but I don't have an anger problem! I love people!"

In all these ways and dozens of others, we manage to evade the Psalm 32-like experience of having a bone-rotting, sleep-disturbing, energy-zapping guilt. So we don't confess. Or maybe, like Albert Speer, we confess some things in order to avoid others. We talk to avoid speaking. But if Psalm 32 is a true portrait of reality, then all we succeed in doing is cutting ourselves off from joy!

You see, if you are a believer in Jesus but die with some unconfessed sin on your spiritual balance sheet, God is not going to send you to hell because of that. The waters of baptism wash away our sins--all of them. And so if you die in a car accident when you were just over the legal limit for alcohol in your bloodstream, you're not going to blink open your eyes and see a God with smoke coming out of his nostrils as he cocks his finger to flick you into hellfire. The gospel says we're forgiven for everything! Past, present, and future. It's a radical and dangerous message, but it is the gospel message. If you are a baptized believer, then nothing can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Period. No, exclamation point: Nothing!

So this morning I'm not wagging a bony finger in your faces to say that if you don't do a better job at targeting very specific sins in your lives, then watch out!--you're going to be punished. No, I was ordained to preach the gospel. If I preach anything that undermines that gospel--like scaring you into thinking your eternal destiny hangs on a thread--then I'm violating my ordination vows. I'm not here to scare you but to bring you joy! So along with Psalm 32 I want to say this morning that by not confessing your sins, you are hurting yourself by cutting yourself off from the joy of grace. And by cutting yourself off from the joy of grace, you are diminishing your proper adoration of God. There is much about God for which to be enthused and excited, not the least of which is how quickly he forgives you! Seeing that reduces fear, wipes out guilt, enhances happiness, puts a spring in your step, and in the long run just flat out makes you a better person!

Because Psalm 32 does not aim at giving you some increased psychological well-being--it aims for the glory of God. I'm about to make some closing suggestions on how to sharpen our prayers of confession. But what lies behind these suggestions is a desire for all of us to make Psalm 32's final song of joy our own. We want to know our God in Christ better. Oddly enough, honest confession helps us to accomplish that goal.

So here are three suggestions on how we can imitate the movement of Psalm 32 in our own lives. First, simply remember every day that God is love. Recognize the truth of Psalm 32's opening beatitude: it's a great blessing to have sin forgiven and what's more, it's a great comfort to know that our God is so full of never-ending grace he will forgive us--every time. If your primary image of God is of a stern old man with a rolled-up newspaper ready to swat you every chance he gets, please dispense with that image and embrace the loving God whom Jesus told us to call "Daddy."

Second, resist the modern trend of compartmentalizing life. For a Christian it can never be true that "business is business" or that what happens over in that far corner of my weekly existence need not touch what happens in this sanctuary Sunday mornings. Instead see life the way God sees it: as an inter-connected whole.

Too often we pivot from one part of life to the next, neatly severing their connections. The "weekend" is different than the weekday, the cutesy human interest story with which Tom Brokaw closes the newscast is supposed to make you forget about the Kosovo carnage that opened the newscast. The amount of money you make and what you do with it is no one else's business, certainly not the Deacons at church! And so forth. Modern life fragments the world. Resist that by perhaps daily or nightly in your prayers surveying the larger landscape of your whole life and bringing all of it to speech before God.

Third, follow C.S. Lewis's advice when he urged that we find ways to talk about our own lives in the same way and with the same vocabulary by which we describe other people. We need to use simple, plain, old-fashioned words like theft, lust, anger, envy, pride, and selfishness when describing not just Harold and Josephine but ourselves. Weaving such blunt descriptions into our own prayers of confession may be uncomfortable, even painful, but they lead to the joy and wholeness with which Psalm 32 ends.

Psalm 32 was designed for a worship service like this one. It begins with the promise of a great blessing and it concludes with the conferring of a very blessed joy indeed. I suppose that's what people then and now expect out of worship. I suppose that we all come to church looking for some hope, some joy, some promise that will make life more bearable in an often unbearable world. Psalm 32 accomplishes that for us but it does so by reminding us of a very basic truth: real joy in God's presence comes when we bring the whole of our lives, and not just the good-looking bits and pieces, before him.

We can't change the past, we often say. That's a painful truth. How much don't at least some of us yearn that we could go back and turn left instead of right. We can't. If, as science fiction movies like to show, if we could travel through time, I suspect the world would end. If time travel were possible, I suspect that most every person in the world would take advantage of it by zipping back to one past moment after the next to change something, to prevent something, to make something better. Eventually there would be so many changes going on in the past that there would be no stable present moment in which to live.

No, we can't change the past. But God can. Through the alchemy of grace God can take what hurts us and make it better, take what weighs us down and blow it away like a feather. And when he does that--and when does he not?!--the present moment is transformed. Our happiness increases, our love for God mounts higher, our wonder at his grace brings an irrepressible smile, and the future looks effervescent with joy. Amen.