"While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged by sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, 'I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,'
and you forgave me the guilt of my sin." [Psalm 32:3-5]
You know that feeling you get in your gut when you're not sick yet, but you can tell you are going to be?
It's that feeling, almost like the calm before the storm, where you don't feel like you can throw up yet... but you can foresee that you have a middle-of-the-night date with the cold tile of the bathroom floor? You can begin to hear the sounds of your unhappy stomach, but you can't do anything about it yet. You know that feeling?
It's terrible, isn't it? And in a very real sense, we live with that nausea of our souls all the time. It's what it feels like to keep inside the rottenness we have allowed to become a part of ourselves... and to try to hold it in, rather than to vomit it out. Or, in our more proper-sounding religious jargon, that's what it feels like to hide our sin rather than confessing it to God. When we hold it in, thinking it will be unpleasant to have to bring up all the stuff from our past we now regret, we actually make ourselves sicker than if we would just get it over with and name it all... so we can be rid of it.
I know it might feel a little gross for a Thursday morning to spend time thinking about stomach sickness and vomiting, but in a way, I think it is really important and life-giving to have this particular conversation. See, I think often we assume that the reason we are "supposed to" confess our sins is that God needs this information in order to process our heaven points. I think we sometimes still operate with this idea that God is primarily the director of a heavenly bureaucracy, and that God can't process our forgiveness paperwork until we have official clicked "send" or submitted some kind of confession application to acknowledge our sin. We end up treating forgiveness of sin like God is sitting up in heaven saying, "I can't forgive you until you do the proper official ritual of saying you are sorry" (which, honestly gets forgiveness all backwards--if you have to wait for someone to say they are sorry before you can say you forgive them, you are confusing forgiveness with reconciling. It is possible--in fact, it is necessary, to be able to forgive what someone else has done regardless of if they have admitted their mistake to you.) But maybe sin doesn't need to be confessed because of God's need... but because of ours.
This is how the psalmist puts it. It's less like God does a good-cop/bad-cop routine with us in the interrogation room, trying to squeeze a confession out of us with a mixture of threats and offers of leniency for cooperation. And instead, it's more that when we keep the garbage bottled up, it makes us sick--not in our stomachs, but in our souls. When I keep hiding the stuff inside that I don't want to face, I'm the one who suffers more! Naming our sin, and being able to face it, acknowledge it, and then vomit it out, is what allows it to be taken away. It's not that God needs me to adequately verbalize my failures, or that God has some kind of passive-aggressive need for me to rub my face in all my screw-ups. It's that the longer I try to hold something toxic inside of me, the worse I feel, and the sicker I become. I start lashing out at others, or hypocritically calling our their flaws because I don't want anybody to notice mine. I start withdrawing from others, burning bridges in relationships, or hiding from others, because I don't want them to look to closely. I start getting bitter all the time, because, well, it takes all my concentration to keep from vomiting up what I don't want to admit is eating me up on the inside.
And here's the other thing that happens when we finally stop pretending or keeping our sin "in"--we lose the arrogance and pride that lets us think we are better than someone else. If I have to admit I've messed up, it lets all the air out of my balloons of self-righteousness--and it turns out that's a good thing. Once my holier-than-thou hypocritical ego has been deflated, I'm actually able to love others better [not to mention to love God without having to try to hide things from the One who sees all already], because I'm not trying to posture or position myself. I'm just a forgiven mess-up offering the same grace to other mess-ups that has been shown to me. Naming our sins, screw-ups, and failures to God lets that healing start--it turns out to be a gift of grace, too.
So when the poet here talks about feeling like God's hand was on him as he tried to keep his sin inside hidden from God, it's not like God is threatening him. It's more like when my son is up in the middle of the night with the stomach flu, and he wants to be well, and I want him to be well. And as much as it feels rotten to have to say it, I have to tell him that he needs to throw up rather than to try to keep it all in. Whatever it is that's got him sick needs to get out. The unpleasantness of vomiting isn't a punishment for getting sick, and confessing our sin to God isn't a punishment for sinning, either--it is the means by which what is toxic gets expelled from us, and we can be restored to life in the full. Facing it and getting it out of our system is what lets us be free of it. And confessing our sin--naming the things we don't want to face and acknowledging what we don't want to own up to--allows us to be unburdened. As James Baldwin put it, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." The church's word for that "facing" of uncomfortable things is to "confess" our sins--but maybe that word can come off like it's a bit of religious jargon. Maybe we would do better to put it in Baldwin's phrasing and say that we are "facing things so that they can be changed... before God." When you think of it that way, this is less about getting the words right to apply for the heavenly parole program, and more about getting the toxins out of our system so that we can be well again, and whole.
The reason we keep finding ourselves led to admit to God our mess-ups is not that we like to make each other suffer. It's the rotten stuff we are complicit in that is already making us suffer. Naming it seems scary at first because it means admitting we have messed up, that we are responsible, that we are part of the problem. But only by facing a truth can we deal with it. And sometimes it is only by vomiting up the garbage we have put into ourselves that we can be free of it and start over. And the whole time, from that first calm-before-the-storm awareness that something is brewing, to the moment of peace when we finally feel like ourselves again, and every moment on the bathroom floor in between, God is there with us, like a parent awake through the middle of the night, suffering along with us until we have gotten the sickness out of our system.
We don't go through the work of confessing our sins because of a heavenly bureaucracy, but because of our need to be made well where we are sick inside. Truth-telling about ourselves allows us to love others in the midst of their own failures and sins, too, because we no longer have to spend any energy judging them for their mess-ups.
That's the gift of confession. And it is ours for the having right now.
Lord God, free us from the rottenness inside us, and give us the courage to name our complicity in sin and rottenness so that we can be free and brought to life.
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