Psalm 51:1-12
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Sermon
It is about this time of year when we start getting a lot of questions (some with a more pleading or desperate tone than others) about Faith Statements and their purpose and why I am so so mean as to make innocent 8th graders write them. Mostly these questions come from the Confirmands, I suspect a number of their mentors are secretly hoping we’ve forgotten that we asked them to write a faith statement as well this year. But whether you’re an adult or an 8th grader, there is something daunting about having to write down what you believe. And I think there are three primary reasons for this:
- We don’t see many examples in our day to day lives of faith statements, so they have an air of mystery about them and generally feel unknown entities.
- Our beliefs tend to operate below the surface and so it can be difficult to dredge them up and bring them into the light of day.
- Even once we’re able to identify our beliefs, it’s incredibly difficult to put words around them or to point to an experience that prompted or evoked them.
So why, then, you might ask, as many Confirmands throughout the years have, do we insist upon them? And while I enjoy telling the 8th graders that it’s because I like making their lives difficult, that is not actually the reason. I believe we do it for two reasons.
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First, it is often in finding words for what we believe, or in struggling to do so, that we figure out what it is that we believe. Putting our faith into words is part of how we discover what it is that we believe.
In my own life, this is one of the primary reasons why I continue to engage in spiritual direction and therapy every month. For me, being able to step outside of my life and talk it through with someone else helps me identify my emotional responses to life versus my beliefs about what is going on and how I should respond. In struggling to describe something to someone else and in struggling to put words around my own response or reaction, I am then able to have my initial impressions reflected back to me. And while there are many times when my initial reaction is the one I ultimately believe to have value, there are equally as many times when I catch myself reacting out of a bias or in response to something perceived but not actual.
Putting words around our beliefs, whether it our religious beliefs or our beliefs about a set of events, helps us to clarify and, ultimately, to solidify those beliefs. As one theologian memorably put it, “unless you can say it, you don’t really believe it … When we talk about our faith, we are not merely expressing our beliefs; we are coming more fully and clearly to believe. In short, we are always talking ourselves into being Christian” (Tom Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian).
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The second reason we so cruelly make youth (and this year their adult mentors) write a faith statement is because words have a creative power. In Genesis, we hear God speak the world into existence. In the Gospel of John, we read that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … all things came into being through the Word.”
Looking outside of the biblical text, one needs look no further than our own Declaration of Independence—words that effectively created a country and a war. More recently, we can point to the words of President Obama (yes we can!) or Martin Luther King, Jr. (I have a dream), both of whom used words to cast a vision and inspire a nation.
One of Adam’s classmates at seminary has since gone on to write a book titled, Saying is Believing: The Necessity of Testimony in Adolescent Spiritual Development, in which she writes, “for better or for worse, the [words we speak] maintain and modify how we perceive the world. Through articulation, we find firmer contours to what we believe (and do not believe) and how we perceive reality” (Amanda Hontz Drury). Words have a creative power, and when we do the (often) hard work of putting them around our beliefs, we not only clarify and help solidify those beliefs, we shape how we perceive the world and thus how we experience the world. In essence, our words help to create our world.
Much as it is here, the church I grew up in did not offer Sunday school during worship for youth once you were in middle school. And in my family, church was not really an option. We went to church. All of us. With rare exception. And I can remember sitting in worship with my parents and wondering if this whole religion thing (as much as I enjoyed it) wasn’t just really a well-socialized cult.
In particular, there are two parts of worship in the Presbyterian Church with which I had trouble.
The first was the Affirmation of Faith. Now, if you’re not familiar with what an Affirmation of Faith looks like in the context of worship, allow me to describe it. When the sermon is done, and after the “middle hymn” is sung, the congregation remains standing and recites one of the Creeds of the faith out loud, in unison. So, basically everyone stands up and reads the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed or one of the more recent Confessions of Faith, which was always conveniently printed in the bulletin in case you hadn’t yet found your way to memorizing it. And this is done every Sunday. And the expectation is that you do this regardless of whether or not you actually believe in what is being said.
It wasn’t until I went through confirmation as a freshman in high school that I began to understand (and grow more comfortable with) this part of the service. As it turns out, and this is a lesson I have had to learn far more times than I’d like to admit, the Affirmation of Faith was not about me.
My mistake, I learned, was believing that when I recited the creed it was meant to be a reflection or articulation of my own faith. And thus if I didn’t fully understand it or agree with it than I was basically committing perjury. Not so, apparently. As it turns out, the Creeds represent the faith of the Church, not of individuals.
In her book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris shares this exchange between a seminary student and an orthodox priest: “What should one do,” the student asked “if they find it impossible to affirm certain parts of the Creed?” To which the priest responded, “well you just say it, it’s not that hard to master. With a little effort, most people can even learn it by heart.”
The student, fearing he had been misunderstood, clarified the question, “but what are we to do if we have difficulty believing parts of the creed, like the virgin birth?” And the response was, again, “you just say it.”
At this point, unsurprisingly, the exchange became a little more heated as the student raised his voice saying, “How can I with integrity affirm a creed in which I do not believe.” And the priest responded, “it’s not your creed. It’s our creed. Eventually it may come to you, for some it takes longer than others …”
We talk ourselves into belief.
And, as my Confirmation teacher pointed out, when we affirm our collective faith each week, we not only take a literal stand on what we believe (or perhaps aspire to believe), we also visually and audibly remind ourselves that we do not believe alone. That when our belief falters (because our Confirmation teacher was very clear that it would at some point falter), we would know, no matter where we were, that there was an entire congregation willing to stand up each week and hold the faith for us.
The second part of the worship service that caused me consternation growing up was the unison Prayer of Confession. In the Presbyterian Church, after the Call to Worship and the Opening Hymn, there is a Call to Confession, in which the pastor says something to the effect of, “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us, therefore let us confess our sins before God and one another,” and then there is a unison prayer of confession that has been written in advanced and is printed in the bulletin, which everyone says together.
This part of worship, I must admit, took me a fair bit longer to understand and appreciate. I struggled with the whole idea of confessing things I wasn’t sure I had done. It felt too much like being punished when all you had done was stand next to the person who behaved poorly.
Plus, like many Americans, I suspect, I found the whole concept of talking about sin to be off-putting. Sin felt like it belonged to the Conservative Evangelicals (not that they were the sinners, but it was their language). Sin was the word they threw against people who were gay or divorced. If they were nicer, they might soften the blow by saying that they loved the sinner, it was just the sin they hated. But as someone who grew up in a church that was open and affirming of all people in the 1980s, and especially as a middle schooler who still saw the world in the stark colors of right and wrong, I had little patience for those conversations.
I still think ‘Sin’ is a hard word that carries a lot of baggage. But in the season of Lent, and especially when the lectionary hands us a Psalm like the one for this morning, in which the psalmist speaks of little else, it is hard to get around it.
For me, the temptation when I read this Psalm is to skip over the first nine verses, read verse ten, which says “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,” and then move on. And, if we’re being honest, I really only like the first half of verse 10: “Create in me a clean heart.”
But as I was reading this Psalm in light of the questions the Confirmands have been asking about Faith Statements, and why oh why must we, I started to think about the power of words and what it is we create or confirm when we speak this Psalm aloud or when we say together a unison prayer of confession, which is often how this Psalm is used.
And the first thing I realized is that there is an element of truth in this Psalm. There is a reason that even one half of one verse stands out to me in a Psalm that is almost entirely about sin and our utter depravity. There is something in this Psalm, something about Confession in general, that names a truth about our world and our lives that runs deeper than the antiquated or abused language it employs.
There is something about me that is fundamentally disjointed. Whether I like to admit it or not, I know what the Apostle Paul means when he laments that he can will what is right, but cannot do it. That he does not do the good that he wants to do but instead does the evil that he has no desire to do.
I know that feeling. I know that sense that even when I am trying my best (and let’s be honest that is not 100% of the time), I still sometimes end up doing what is wrong. I still sometimes do harm. I still sometimes walk past the person on the street who is in need or brush off the person who needs to talk. I get caught up in the living of life and too frequently allow my own deep-seated, God-given sense of what is right and good to be overshadowed by what society says I should be doing or wanting.
The second thing I realized in spending time with this Psalm is that there is something profoundly counter-cultural about repeatedly acknowledging that we fall short. Whether it’s because we’ve done something terrible or because we’ve underestimated or underutilized our own gifts, there is something profoundly different about admitting out loud in front of other people, that we are not perfect. And while I am generally in favor of being counter-cultural simply for the sake of being counter-cultural, I do think there is a theological reason to do this.
Namely, who we are and how we understand ourselves and our place in the world is inextricably tied to who we believe God to be and what we believe God’s role is meant to be in our life. As one theologian puts it, “the practice of confession in the worship service is a means by which we constantly get reoriented to the way things are. This reorienting is not to the way we think or feel things are, but to the way they actually are. While the world around us may try to convince us that we are really OK, in confession we acknowledge that we constantly go astray, that even our good works are marked by sin, and that apart from God’s grace we are lost” (William A. Dyrness, “Confession and Assurance = Sin and Grace” in A More Profound Alleluia: Theology and Worship in Harmony.
If we are perfect, if we can do everything that needs to be done, then there is little room for God in our lives or in the world, except perhaps as Divine Cheerleader.
But when we are able to acknowledge that we are not perfect, that we do, on occasion, put our interests above the greater good, or that we are, despite our best efforts, complicit in systems of injustice, when we can put words around these deeper truths, we create space for God to enter in.
Our words have creative power. When we use them to confess our faith or confess our own shortcomings, we help to create a space for God both in our lives and in the world.
Amen.
