Three-fold Blessing
Psalm 32
Over breakfast one morning, a woman smiled across the table to her husband, “I'll bet you don’t know what day this is.”
“Of course I do,” he answered as if he were offended, and left for work.
At 10:00 a.m., the doorbell rang and when the wife opened the door, she was handed a box of a dozen long stemmed red roses.
At 1:00 p.m., a beautiful two-pound box of her favorite chocolates was delivered. Later, a boutique delivered a designer outfit.
The wife couldn’t wait for her husband to come home.
“First the flowers, then the chocolates and then the clothes!” she exclaimed.
“This was the best Groundhog Day of my life!”
If you are considering doing something special for someone you love this week our text this morning actually offers us a pretty good Valentine to give. The gift is confession. Now, when someone’s sweetie comes to them and says, “Honey, I’ve got a confession to make,” they don’t usually consider what they are about to hear as good news. That is usually not a pill they want to take! So if you need to make that kind of confession, you might want to just stick with chocolates for Valentine’s Day and use another time to clear the air.
Our scripture is actually talking about a kind of confession that is about making you a more open and authentic person. This kind of confession is not about getting off the hook for some stupid mistake. It is about becoming more authentic. I call it a “Three-fold” confession. We actually find the parts of this confession in verse 5 of our psalm.
Then I acknowledged my brokenness to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh” – and you forgave the guilt of my brokenness.
The three parts are this: acknowledge our brokenness (step 1 is admitting there is a problem), stop trying to hide our wrong (remove the disguises which allow the problem to persist), and offer our brokenness to God (allowing grace to heal and restore).
The best prescription for spiritual health and the best way to most fully access grace is through honesty. When we are pretending to be someone we are not; when we are pretending not to have responsibility for something we caused; when we are pretending not to see something that is clearly before us, we limit grace’s ability to heal our brokenness.
Because our understanding has been so tainted with the angry hateful images of God that so many of us inherited from our fundamentalist past, we often mistake confession as being a demeaning experience of groveling under the shaming stare of vengeance. What we learn from this psalm is that confession is the path wholeness. Pretense, dishonesty, lies, cleverness, spite or ignoring reality will never bring healing. It is with the key of honesty that the doorway of grace is opened.
Just as the confession described in our text is three-fold so also we discover that the result is a three-fold blessing (vs. 7):
You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.
Notice the meaning built into this promise. What happens when we dig deeply down into ourselves and pull up broken memories, faulty judgment, poor choices or lack of character? We feel exposed, vulnerable, naked. Our first instinct is to cover all of that up and pretend that it doesn’t exist. After all, there are times when those tactics have worked well for us as a coping strategy to get through a crisis. Lent is our practice time for learning how to live outside the crisis and allow God’s grace to do the everyday kind of healing and restoration that all of us need in order to grow and develop as healthy and whole spiritual people.
So, rather than resort back to old patterns that get you through a crisis but are not good for on-going living and loving, the psalmist found a new way to be honest and vulnerable without fear. God is our hiding place, our protection from trouble and surround us with songs of deliverance.
We don’t have to be so eager to cover up our vulnerability so quickly, even though it is painful to have parts of ourselves exposed that have been hidden in darkness. “My grace is sufficient for you.” In my former church tradition people would talk about the blood of Jesus covering our sins. I’ve been washed in the blood. Sometimes all of that blood talk gets pretty gruesome to those of us not used to such graphic descriptions of bodily fluids. Jesus blood is a metaphor for grace. Jesus gave his life to demonstrate absolute trust in God’s grace. He laid himself bare with honesty before Pilate and his world, exposed and vulnerable, not because God needed to punish him for the world’s sin, but to demonstrate that ultimately only love can overwhelm hate. Only honesty can heal brokenness. Only faith makes it all make sense to try to live like this.
This three-fold confession leads to three-fold blessing. As we begin our Lenten journey this year I hope you will risk testing God’s grace with your life. It is the path to being a more open and authentic person.
Sources:
www.homileticsonline.com The Will to Pill, February 2008.
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