Repentance [Lent 5B - Psalm 51]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Psalm 51
Repentance
When this season
opened – Lent, we call it – I remember there was unexpected snow.
We came to this place,
to this lawn, to be marked with the dust of death; we walked to our cars
drenched in the water of life. The snow was
another symbol, washing us as we were cleansed – white flakes mixed into our
black ashes. Something about how In the
midst of life we are in death.
And as we received our
mixed messages from the heavens, we committed ourselves, once again, to a holy
Lent. We said words about repentance. And mourned the 40-day loss of
chocolate.
In the snow and ashes,
our souls once again tried to digest the heaviness of the Lenten Exhortation,
with its complex invitation and its intimidating expectations. And the choir was singing, from the inside
out, Psalm 51.
Today is the fifth
Sunday of this season, the fifth since that day, and again Psalm 51. Purge
me from my sin, and I shall be pure. Purge me.
And other pretty words we say but are not really sure we mean.
Lent is almost
over. This season, staining our souls
with dirty ashes and assaulting our egos with a piercing gaze, always wants to
change things, to change us. And in this
world, this world in which there are just so many changes all the time and all
around. And everything about how change
is hard, maybe even implicative. And
still God with this desperate desire to break our bodies and purge our insides
and other painful poetic phrases. And
give the whole process a sanctified name like repentance.
I think it is possible
that maybe repentance is now one of those relics that collect dust in the old
buildings of archaic institutions. Because
honestly I’ve been reading the news lately and I’m not sure we’re doing
repentance anymore.
You might have heard about
this. Earlier this month a high school sports
announcer in Oklahoma was caught on video calling a high school girls’
basketball team the N-word. The news
reports tell us that he was a former youth pastor, so a church guy. In his public statement he explained that he
thought the microphone was off. And
further explained, "I suffer Type 1
Diabetes and during the game my sugar was spiking. While not excusing my remarks
it is not unusual when my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and often say
things that are not appropriate as well as hurtful. I do not believe that I would have made such
horrible statements absent my sugar spiking."[1]
Who
knew the cure for racism was insulin? But
it’s not surprising. A quick fix is far
preferable to repentance, which requires of us the deep vulnerability of personal
accountability and the hard, protracted work of amendment of life.
Then I read this story
about this other Christian, a young white guy.
One of his friends calls him a "deeply
religious person – he would often go on tangents about his interpretation of
the Bible.” Earlier this
week this “deeply religious person” shot and killed eight people in the
Atlanta-area, mostly Asian-American women.
When asked about his crimes, he blamed
a sex addiction, said the spas were a “temptation he wanted to eliminate.”[2] Eight people lost their lives, countless
others lost loved ones in the massacre. Worlds
of trauma from a smoking barrel. The
sheriff explained the next day, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him
and this is what he did.”[3]
This is what he did. The world is cursed with examples of what
happens when we replace repentance with reasons and excuses. Those reasons and excuses grow into fortresses,
surrounding and protecting the worst human hatreds from the confessional purge.
These stories make me
think about the stories we tell about ourselves on Ash Wednesday. About why repentance defines this season and
seasons our liturgies. What I appreciate
about the Book Common Prayer is it makes us say things we do not wish to say –
and to keep saying them until they start to become true – in us and for us.
Things like Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs
we have done: for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference
to injustice and cruelty. The Prayer
Book made us say that on Ash Wednesday.
Things like Accept our repentance, Lord, for all false
judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our
prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us. The Prayer Book made us say that
too.
And it made us confess
our pride, our hypocrisy, our self-indulgent appetites, our exploitation of
other people, our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves, our pollution of
our planet, our daily dishonesty. It
made us admit to every little wicked thing we harbor in our hearts, the things
we carefully carry through this broken world, the reasons we are so relieved
there is no microphone amplifying our silent thoughts. It made us tell the truth. It made us spill our guts in front of
God. Purge
me from my sin, and I shall be pure. Who
knew beautiful poetry could cut so deep?
We live in a world in
which there is far too little repentance.
And that is tragic. Because without
repentance there can be no amendment of life, no spiritual growth. And also no opportunity to receive the gift of
forgiveness. And without forgiveness
there can be no salvation, no life.
Barbara Brown Taylor
says, “Repentance begins with the decision to
return to relationship: to accept our God-given place in community, and to
choose a way of life that increases life for all members of that community.
Needless to say, this often involves painful changes, which is why most of us
prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I
feel really, really awful about what I have done’ than actually start doing
things differently. As a wise counselor once pointed out to me, our chronic
guilt is the price we are willing to pay in order to avoid change.”[4]
And
that is what God means to do for us, not to us, but for us: change us. To create in us clean hearts. To invite us into a relationship of
repentance, one that is always and forever transforming us in beautiful, painful,
life-giving ways.
The call of this
season, the invitation we received under snowy skies, is to open our hearts before
the devastating mercy of our God, to allow God to purge from our lives those
things that threaten to crush our souls and destroy our world. God is calling us to repentance: an old idea
that blesses us with new life.
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