Last month I was at our denomination’s General Synod in Chicago, which faced several issues that people are deeply divided on. One of the comments I kept hearing was, “Trust the process.” “Trust the process.” Embedded in that comment is the assurance that Jesus has given us the church as his body; that, as members of that body, we need each other, not just in spite of, but also because of our differences; and that Christ himself is at work in and alongside and through our process of engaging each other. The process may be painful and slow, and we may think the results are wrong—but Jesus is Lord of the Church, and we can trust him.
Psalm 32 is what Walter Bruggemann calls a psalm of disorientation. It talks about our alienation from God, and it isn’t entirely polite. It doesn’t put on a smiley face and pretend life is going smoothly, just to keep from rocking the boat. This psalm’s insistence on dealing with the messiness of life is what makes it useful.
The psalm has more interesting content than one can cover in a single sermon, so today we will focus on the three places the word “Selah” appears, which are at the end of verses 4, 5, and 7. The word “Selah” is a bit obscure, but it means something like “pause for meditation,” so that is what we will do.
The psalmist begins by proclaiming,
How blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered!
How blessed is the person to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.
Yes, a good position to be in. “Blessed” here means “in an enviable state; to be congratulated.” We want to get there. We want the fellowship with God and with each other that results from being in this state. Conveniently, the psalmist describes how he got there.
He begins by describing the results of not facing sin.
When I kept silent, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. Selah
God’s hand was so heavy on him that he physically lost weight. He was tormented day and night by his isolation from God, and his vitality was drained away.
1. God lets us feel the weight of our wrongness to bring us to himself. If we try to ignore what God brings to our attention, he doesn’t give up.
The three words used here for our alienation from God are “transgression,” which has overtones of revolt and rebellion, “sin,” which means missing the mark, and a word translated sometimes as “iniquity” and sometimes as “guilt,” and contains the idea of being twisted or perverted and deserving punishment.
The combination of these words paints a picture of someone who tries to live by his own wisdom instead of by God’s, to be the judge of right and wrong, to have his own vision of what life can and should be, to seek out truth the best he can, and to surround himself with good and loveable people. He may be very gifted at this. And that just makes it worse. It is worse because he can delude himself into thinking that he can be in control of his world, and that such control is a good thing. It isn’t. Inevitably, he comes to the end of himself, and the longer he is able to keep up the illusion of control, the bigger will be the crash of that world he has tried to maintain. Much better for him if God confronts him before such a crash, much better if God’s hand is “heavy upon him,” making him miserable away from God so that he will seek his home in God.
And what does God use? The very things that the psalmist saw as his strength, his “vitality,” God dries up. They are no longer a source of strength or reassurance.
What are the things that constitute our vitality? These would be the elements that enable us to enjoy life or the goals we have for life. Physical health is fundamental for life, but so are financial freedom, legal freedom, and social connections. Denver, for example, also has a practically endless list of opportunities for living interesting lives. It offers music, art, sports, commerce, a pretty good economy, interesting and likeable people, and a great deal of physical beauty.
But that same abundant opportunity makes us frustrated when lack of time or lack of money or other circumstance keeps us from taking advantage of those good things. Life can take such turns that deny us access to the good things we thought were just normal. Not being able to get to them is just—wrong, it seems. But here we are, cut off from the things that gave life meaning and strength.
And that turn of life, sudden or not, faces us with a new set of circumstances that we don’t know or like. Loss of financial flexibility, loss of a friendship, poor performance at work, advancing age, poor health, or just not having the time any more—any of these is a door into a dark room containing – what? – we don’t know, and we don’t like it.
This is quite a let-down. All the momentum you once had seeps away. You once felt like the rapids of the Colorado River, and now you feel like a swamp. With mosquitoes. And mud that won’t come off.
What happened?
One possibility is that we have lived as if the good things of life are ultimate things. Our jobs, our money, our sports, our wine, our books; looking good, being smart, friends and family, having a good church that proclaims the gospel and ministers to the poor—all these are good things. Every one of them can be an idol, even the church. God may step in to separate us from one of these if it comes between us and him.
Another possibility is that God is at work to change something deep within us, where the darkness has taken hold and God is saying, “It’s time for that to come out.”
In the middle of his pain, the psalmist turns to God.
I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I did not hide; I said, “ I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”; And You forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah.
2. I confessed and you forgave
a) God faces us with reality. The first reality, of course, is himself.
God & his character, God as creator, we in his image & therefore both relational and necessarily dependent.
So what is our twistedness/rebellion/failure? It is the twisted, rebellious, doomed-to-failure attempt to be god ourselves.
Confession: I stop hiding my sin, but then God hides it!
b) God forgives us. We use that word, “forgive,” a lot, but what does it actually mean? What is the picture of that in your head? Is it where someone just doesn’t think about the offence any more, or pretends that it didn’t happen? The Hebrew is different. The picture there is that of lifting the twistedness away. God does something positive about the rebellion/perversion/failure. These are a burden on our back, and God lifts them off.
How does he do that? By taking these burdens on himself. He bears what we could not, so that we no longer have to. Our rebellion/perversion/failure is not chiefly our problem any more, because God has made it his problem. And we see him work out the solution of that problem in the incarnation, when God becomes a man for our sakes.
In Jesus of Nazareth we see God, the Son of God, living a human life as we have not and cannot, as a son always dedicated to his Father, and then dying as a result of our alienation from the Father. It is not quite true to say that he died so that we don’t have to. Rather, he died so that in his death we died with him, so that in his resurrection we have a new creation, and it is no longer we who live, but Christ lives in us. He took upon himself the burden of our rebellion/perversion/failure, and in his death he annihilated it and us. In his resurrection we have new life.
Our life is derivative. We have it in his connection to us and our lives are hidden with Christ in God. The psalmist puts it this way:
You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance. Selah.
3. God is our hiding place, our preserver, and he surrounds us with songs of deliverance.
St. Paul, in Colossians 3, says,
Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
God is waking us up from our self-imposed illusions to face reality. Do you want to know the truth about who you are, about why you are here and where you are going, about what you mean? These things are hidden from the world where they are safe. That doesn’t mean we can’t see them, because God reveals them to us in Christ. In Christ God reveals himself to us, and there he also reveals ourselves to us. In Colossians he says, “Keep seeking the things above.” The psalmist says the same thing somewhat differently:
I will instruct you and teach you in the way which you should go; I will counsel you with My eye upon you. Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, Whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, Otherwise they will not come near to you.
Un-learning our old, false views about ourselves and learning the correct view from Christ is a life-long pursuit. It isn’t easy, and, as the psalmist describes, it comes with pain—and the more we resist God’s instruction and guidance, the more pain it will involve.
One of the hardest parts of this is to trust God. We have acquired reflexes and habits of self-defense to protect ourselves from the things that hurt us early on. We have learned not to hope too much, or trust too much, or love too much, because we have been hurt. We are curved in upon ourselves, with our backs turned to the threats that endanger us. We have to unlearn these reactions and stop protecting ourselves, trusting instead for God to protect us.
We also have to un-learn the old, false images of God that we have acquired. He is joyful about us, and sings songs of deliverance around us, songs of celebration.
In a way, Psalm 32 gives us a process for dealing with our alienation from God, for dealing with our disorientation in a very confusing world. We need to spend time here. We need to trust the process—not because it relieves us of all pain, not because it is a mechanism for self-improvement, and definitely not because it is a way to manipulate God. We need to trust the process because we trust God who is at work in it, in us, singing songs of deliverance.
Amen. ✠
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