Do you remember
our Advent Series, "Singing the Songs" in which we recalled some of the great
songs of faith that proclaim Christ the Son of God, word made flesh for the
salvation of all the earth.
Today we
begin the counterpart, our Lenten Series, "Whispering the Lyrics."
While our sacred
songs are sometimes songs of praise, proclaiming the glory of God through
Jesus Christ, they are also often songs that become hand-holds providing us
strength and courage in the living of our days.
We will
be looking each week at the ancient songs of the people of God, assembled in
our Bibles as the Psalms, as well as the songs of our faith that we have come
to know and love which carry us through, give us hope, encourage and
strengthen us.
We begin
with a Psalm of confession. For that is what Lent is: a time of confessing
our sins before God, a time of remorse and repentance. One leads to the
other, they are not the same.
Remorse
is the heavy heart we experience when we know we have sinned before God.
Remorse is that deep sorrow that convicts us and convinces us that we have
been in the wrong. Repentance is the next step. The turning away from sin,
responding to the mercy of God so that we become new, so that we become the
person God desires us to be. Remorse is a feeling. Repentance is a behavior.
The
psalms are an amazing collection of songs, worship liturgy and prayers used by
the gathered community of faith long before the time of Christ. Many of these
ancient writings helped form the community of believers during the time when
they had nearly lost all hope--their temple and their holy city lay in ruins,
and the remnant of God’s people were exiled to Babylon. There, they expressed
the feelings and desires of their hearts before God--and no feeling--despair,
anger, fear, joy, or even physical pain were kept from God. They are all here
in the psalms.
In fact,
the psalms help us today recognize that our deepest feelings, those we hide
from nearly everyone else, are not only appropriate to express to the one who
creates and knows us best, but it is often helpful for both our well-being and
our relationships with God and with others to do so.
As a
two-year old, we all intuitively knew exactly how we felt and could
express it easily.
Think of a two
year old. Do they have any trouble at all conveying when
they are sad? When
they feel
bad? When
they are mad? When they are glad? When
they are
scared? Of course not.
These
five basic feelings, the five basic emotions are present in all of us. And we
could recognize them and express them when we were 2. But as we grow up, we
learn to suppress many of these feelings. As
we grow up, we are taught the behavior of how we express these feelings is
inappropriate, but we often mistakenly come to believe that the feelings
themselves are wrong. So we stuff and suppress the feelings, believing that
these feelings should never make their way to the surface. We do that for so
long, we even lose our ability to recognize many of these feelings.
Ask most
adults how they are feeling, and they will respond with states of their being
or mind. "I am fine. I am good." These are descriptions of a condition, not
a feeling. Limit people to one of five choices, (mad, glad, sad, bad, or
scared) and it becomes nearly impossible to sort the feelings out.
We have
come to know the feelings themselves aren’t the problem. It is learning
appropriate ways to express and talk about them that is the real trick.
That’s
where the psalms are most helpful. They help us recognize that God’s people,
for thousands of years, have felt the same things we feel. And if they could
trust God with expressing these feelings, perhaps we can too.
Confession is a process where we take the things that weigh heavily upon our
soul, our guilt and our pain, and express these before God. And the beauty of
doing so, as the 32nd Psalm reminds us, is that God will take those horrible
things we let out before God, and wipe them away. Blot them out. Make them
as though they are no more.
The 32nd
Psalm describes a process in which we take all that is bottled up inside of
us--our guilt, our sin, our feelings of worthlessness--and let them all out
before God. And in so doing, we trust that God will take all those things,
including our sin, our grief, our shame, and erase them completely.
Earlier,
Dr. Godbey led us through a reading of the first 7 chapters of the 32nd
psalm. I want to read it to you again, but this time from a wonderful modern
translation by Eugene Peterson, called "The Message."
Listen
specifically for the way the psalm encourages us to lift before God all of our
feelings, and trust God to help us know the healing that begins with trusting
God with those feelings.
Psalm 32 THE
MESSAGE
1Count yourself lucky, how happy you must be--you get a fresh
start, your slate's wiped clean. 2Count yourself lucky--GOD holds nothing
against you and you're holding nothing back from him. 3When I kept it all
inside, my bones turned to powder, my words became daylong groans. 4The
pressure never let up; all the juices of my life dried up.
5Then I let it all out; I said, "I'll make a clean breast
of my failures to GOD." Suddenly the pressure was gone-- my guilt dissolved,
my sin disappeared. 6These things add up. Every one of us needs to pray;
when all hell breaks loose and the dam bursts we'll be on high ground,
untouched.
7GOD's my island hideaway, keeps danger far from the shore,
throws garlands of hosannas around my neck. 8Let me give you some good
advice; I’m looking you in the eye and giving it to you straight: 9"Don't be
stubborn like a horse or mule that needs bit and bridle to stay on track."
10God--defiers are always in trouble; GOD-affirmers find themselves loved
every time they turn around. 1 Celebrate GOD. Sing together --everyone! All
you honest hearts, raise the roof!
Confessing sin,
the worst of our selves, the wretchedness that exists in us before God, brings
cleansing and wholeness--because of the amazing love and grace of an amazing
God.
John
Newton experienced such a turn. He put it into words in a poem, "Amazing
grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."
So
begins one of the most beloved hymns of all times. John
Newton, the self-proclaimed wretch who once was lost but then was found, was
born in London in 1725, the son of a commander of a merchant ship which sailed
the Mediterranean. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, John
Newton requested to be exchanged into service on a slave ship, which took him
to the coast of Sierra Leone. He then became the servant of a slave trader
who brutally abused him. Ultimately, John became captain of his own ship
which plied the slave trade.
Then, on
a homeward voyage, while he navigated through a violent storm, he experienced
what he was to refer to later as his "great deliverance." He recorded in his
journal that when all seemed lost and the ship would surely sink, he
exclaimed, "Lord, have mercy upon us."
For the
rest of his life he observed the anniversary of May 10, 1748 as the day of his
conversion, a day of humiliation in which he subjected his will to a higher
power. You hear his thanksgiving in the third stanza of his hymn. "Thro'
many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'tis grace has bro't me
safe thus far, and grace will lead me home."
After he
quit sea faring, Newton met and came to admire to very influential preachers,
George Whiteside, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism
He
himself felt called to preach, was ordained in the Church of England and
accepted the curacy of Olney, Buckinghamshire. Yes, the same Olney of the
famous pancake race, the same church whose bells summoned the young woman with
the frying pan to church on Shrove Tuesday. Newton's church became so
crowded during services that it had to be enlarged. In his later writings,
Newton aligned himself with his friend John Wesley and Methodism.
Sometime
between 1760 and 1770 John Newton composed the words we know today as “Amazing
Grace for a weekly service in the church at Olney.
The
origin of the melody is unknown. The Bill Moyers special on "Amazing Grace"
speculated that it may have originated as the tune of a song the slaves sang.
Newton continued to preach until the last year of life, 1807, although by that
time he was completely blind. And yet, as he proclaimed in the greatest song
of his heart, "but now I see."
His
tomb is inscribed with the these words:
John
Newton, Clerk. Once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slave in Africa,
was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ preserved, restored,
pardoned and appointed to preach
the faith he had long labored to destroy.
Today, and each Sunday in Lent, we will confess our sins before God. And
we will hear God’s assurance of pardon from our sin. And we will sing the
whispered lyrics of faith that lift our hearts.
