Psalm 32 Sermon

Alright, y’all can go ahead and have a seat, and I invite you to turn to Psalm 32 for our sermon this morning.

Essential to the Christian faith is the belief that everybody fails. Everybody fails. We fail. Specifically, we fail to follow Jesus. We fail to live the life our God created us to live. Growing up in Sunday schools at our local Baptist church, I was taught the ABCs of following Jesus, and step one was “admit that you’re a sinner.” Why? Because everybody fails.

And right now a lot of us in this community are dealing with feelings of failure. But we’re not alone, because it’s all over our diocese, and nation. Today we are being confronted with our failure to follow Jesus, to care for the oppressed, to seek justice, to pursue reconciliation, and ultimately to empathize and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This failure brings guilt and shame and a whole flurry of emotion that can be overwhelming. Is there a way to process this experience of failure in a way that doesn’t leave us crippled on the other side, lost in an ocean of guilt? Is there a way to confess our sin in a way that leads to real transformation and a newness of life? Even joy? That’s why we’re in Psalm 32 this morning.

But some of us are going through a different experience and struggling with a different emotional response. We’re unnerved by all the finger pointing, the accusations, and the shaming whether implicit or explicit that has come our way from friends and strangers alike. We’re also overwhelmed, and we feel that our only recourse is to take up a defensive posture and erect walls to guard our hearts from those who seek only to tear us down. But a tragic side effect of this has been that we’ve walled off our heart from ourselves as well, because to search my hearts and lives now is to invite the voices of the accuser to harm me. Is there a way to not fear digging deep into our hearts for traces of darkness and failure, but rather to see this as an avenue that leads to a richer and more abundant life? That’s why we’re in Psalm 32 this morning.

Psalm 32 gives both of us a way forward, because David shows us how experiences of failure that are processed through genuine confession can lead us towards confidence, courage, conviction, and real personal transformation. So this morning I want to talk about three things: First, Psalm 32 reminds us that we were created to confess our failures, and so to do otherwise is to go against our nature. Second, Psalm 32 shows us how genuine confession is wide and holistic. And third, David shows us that deep heart and soul searching is founded in our identity as children of God. So, let’s dive in. Psalm 32:1.

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

The first word David writes is the word, “blessed.” And this is very important. We don’t use this word much in everyday life, except to subtly backhand someone, right? “Oh bless your heart...” But otherwise, we don’t really use this word, but we all understand what this word means…even if we’re not aware of it. I remember when Melanie and I were in seminary, we had basically no money apart from student loans, which is not a good feeling. We were young and married, and we would see these pictures on Facebook of people our age, young and married, traveling all over the world, going on adventures, buying homes, having children. And here we were, spending long nights working at a coffee shop or studying in the library, and our hearts yearned for their life. They were blessed. They were living the good life, the life that brought fulfilment and satisfaction. We all have our version of what this life looks like.

Now look at what David says is the good life, the desirable life, the life that truly fulfills and satisfies. David says, how blessed, how fortunate, how enviable is the person who has this set up: that they know that they are deeply flawed and that they’ve royally messed up, failed in a big way, that they are not okay and they know that they need forgiveness, and they know that they have it. This is the person that David says is experiencing the best that life has to offer, and it’s a life that begins with knowing and owning that you’re not okay.

As a human being, one of our greatest fears is being exposed and uncovered. It’s the nightmare where you’re standing in front of the class and you realize that you’re naked. There are some things about me that I don’t want you to have total, unfiltered access to. And if I lose control of that, if I can’t control what you see and know about me, that’s humiliating, that’s dehumanizing, that’s terrifying. We all have this deep fear of being exposed and uncovered, because we all do and think and say things that we are ashamed of, so a lot of our energy is spent on hiding those things, and on covering them up. But to do that is actually to go against our very nature. We are made to confess, to air out our failures, to search our hearts for parts of ourselves that need to be cleaned out. Look at verse 3.

For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

This is what happens when we bottle it up, when either out of ignorance or fear we hide our failures away. David paints an image of someone who is harming themselves by avoiding their own sins. We need to be cleaned out. We need to be open about our failings, because to do otherwise is to go against our nature.

Some of you know exactly what this feels like. To know that you’ve failed in some way, you’ve done something you shouldn’t have or you knew you should have acted or responded in some way, but chose not to, and you’ve hidden it away, built your walls around it too keep others out, and it’s eating you alive. Your bones are wasting away, because you know that this hidden part of you is harming you. You need to confess, and you know it, but you’re terrified about what? About being uncovered.

But look again at verse 1: Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, and blessed is the one whose sin is covered. David is saying, How fortunate and envious is the one who knows what they’ve done, knows how terribly they’ve failed, but who lives in the freedom of not having to hide or avoid the truth about who they are and what they’ve done, because they are not naked and exposed, for their sins have been covered. How blessed is that person, David says. Imagine that life. Imagine the freedom and security that comes from knowing that your sins have been covered - and not in the way that you would want to cover them, which is simply to hide them - no your sins have been radically and wonderfully dealt with through forgiveness. You and I were not made to hide away our sins, but rather to confess them to the one who has committed to forgiving and covering all our failures.

But how do we enter into that kind of life that David is calling blessed? It takes a confession that is wide and encompassing. Look at verse 5.

I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.

In the Old Testament there are three words used for human failure, and all of them are present in this verse. Sin, iniquity, and transgression. David intentionally uses all of them here, and they are all a bit different in meaning. The word translated “sin” is the Hebrew word, hataah, and it comes from the image of an archer and they are aiming for a target, but miss. They hataah, which is to say..they fail. They failed to do what they were supposed to do, and so when we sin that’s exactly what’s going on. We were made for a purpose, but we have failed to live up to that purpose. We’ve sinned. And David says in confession we must name that. We acknowledge it, we name it, we speak it out loud.

We also see the Hebrew word, pesha, which is translated as transgression. Pesha is the one we are probably most familiar with, because it’s the willful crossing of a moral boundary. It’s knowing something is wrong, and doing it anyway. And David says he confesses that, he speaks the truth about it. That’s what to confess means. It means to speak the truth about something. To speak the truth about the ways we have willfully ignored our God and his desires.

But in between those is this very important phrase. David encourages us to stop covering our iniquity. Here, the Hebrew word is ahvon. Now ahvon has more to do with waywardness. The image is that we’re walking along life’s road, and we’ve chosen to go down the wrong path. We’ve gone astray, we’re off the map. And the Bible, particularly the book of Leviticus, talks about how sometimes this is intentional, we know what we should do, but we decide we’ll do something else, but often it’s unintentional. Often we can find ourselves astray and on the wrong path without even realizing it. Without knowing when we even began down this road.

And this is so important for us to hear right now. We cannot limit our brokenness or our failings to only those things that we can see, that we are aware of about ourselves. We can’t assume that we know the boundaries of sin in our lives, because it is often the case that we’ll be in the wrong without even realizing it. It’s like the piece of cilantro that gets stuck in your teeth. The true friend points it out, because otherwise you’ll just make a fool of yourself for the rest of the night, until you see your own reflection in a spoon or window. But even then, something else had to draw your attention to it.

This is what friends and family and spouses are for! We can’t see everything that’s wrong with us, so sometimes the only way we are going to become aware of those things is if someone or something brings it to our attention. Numerous times the New Testament writers like Paul and James encourage the church community to admonish one another, to instruct one another, to warn another. And this, they say, is the loving thing to do! We need their voices to show us what we ourselves cannot see.

And so the language of confession here includes the humility of saying, I do not even know all that’s wrong with me. I need someone or something to help me name it, because I do not want to to allow these things to remain hidden out of fear. I want to know them, so I can offer them up and be forgiven.

You can see that confession is deep and wide and encompassing. It’s about being willing to really expose yourself before God, laying it all out on the table, but even then searching your heart and soul for the mess that you can’t see, or maybe don’t want to see. It’s about lowering the walls that guard your heart so that even the sins that are hidden from view can be named, uncovered, and honestly offered up for forgiveness.

And here’s the best part. Here’s why you and I who call ourselves followers of Jesus can be known for our honest soul-searching. Verse 5 again: “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and what? And you will consider my case for a while? And you’ll give me a number to wait for the verdict? And you’ll weigh my sincerity, my pain, my good and my bad deeds before deciding? What does it say?

And you forgave. No hesitation. Why is there no hesitation? Why is there no question or uncertainty? Because the statement of God’s commitment to forgive you has been made once for all upon the cross. Our God is in the business of forgiving, and he’s made that known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Imagine a life where you have a real handle on what’s wrong with you, where you know that you’re deeply flawed, and in need of forgiveness, and there is someone in your life with the power to heal and transform you, and they have already made their statement that they are committed to you no matter who you are or what you’ve done. Imagine a life where you do not need to hide your failure because your sins are covered by the God of the Universe. Imagine a life where you can do the hard and uncomfortable work of searching your heart and soul while assured that you are totally and utterly forgiven of whatever you might find lurking in the shadows. What freedom you’d know. What security. What joy. What love.

This is the blessed life. And this is your life if you are in Jesus.

And in this life, and with this identity, and with this understanding of confession, our experiences of failure do not result in maring us or crippling us beyond repair, or overwhelms us with guilt and shame. Instead, these experiences of failure can now result in our being stronger than ever before, more confident in our Savior. We can step out in courageous ways, rather than shrink back in shame. We can even find an abiding joy as we listen to the Lord’s shouts of deliverance that surrounds us.

And in the same way, in this life, with this identity, and with this understanding of confession, we can lower the walls that guard our heart and step out of our defensive posture. We don’t have to lash out at the world nor wall it off, because there is no danger in finding darkness in our hearts when that darkness has already been forgiven. In fact, now we have the beautiful freedom to truly search our hearts in the security that is God’s grace, which he lavishes upon sinners like you and me.

In this moment, our way forward as the community of Christ is a wide and robust confession that acknowledges our sins, seen and unseen, that names it, that stops covering it or hiding it, and that speaks the truth: the truth that we are flawed and forgiven. Thanks be to God. Let’s pray.