Stronger Still--July 21, 2023

Stronger Still--July 21, 2023

    "You are to be praised, O God, in Zion;
  to you shall vows be fulfilled.
 To you, the one who answers prayer,
  to you all flesh shall come.
 Our sins are stronger than we are,
  but you blot out our transgressions." [Psalm 65:1-3]

Well, there's quite a confession being made here, isn't there?  "Our sins are stronger than we are."  It is an admission, not merely of having done a bad thing (like "I took an extra cookie from the jar," or "I said those mean things to somebody online"), but of being under the power of sin, too.  There's an admission of powerlessness here, and quite honestly, it's not the kind of thing we're good at admitting in our day.

How many times have addicts insisted to their loved ones, "I can quit any time I want!" only to continue on in their destructive patterns without any evidence that they can kick their habits alone?  How often do folks proudly quote Henley's poem, "Invictus," with its famous line, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," completely convinced that they can mean them sincerely?  And how often do church folks (often with preachers leading the charge) reinforce all of that? 

We are really missing something important when we talk only about "sins" as immoral actions to be punished for, rather than to see "Sin" also as a power by which people are held captive, and a mess in which we are all entangled and snared?  We Respectable Religious People can get so obsessed with debating "Is X action a sin, or not?" or "Did you properly repent of Y action that we have deemed sinful?" that we miss how the Scriptures talk about sin more frequently as an enemy that holds us captive.  Worse still, the Biblical writers tell us, the grip of sin on us is a captivity from which we cannot free ourselves by our own sheer willpower or brute force. What we need is more than just a scolding finger from heaven telling us what we've done wrong, but the divine hand that breaks the chains that have held us prisoner, and the holy power that bears the weight of those shackles to set us free from them.

When we listen to the words of the psalmist here, we are brought face to face with sin as a power.  To take these verses seriously means realizing that we have a way of getting in over our heads, that sin feels like an undertow pulling us under the surface of a stormy sea.  And in those moments, it does no good to lie to ourselves and say, "I can stop any time I want," when the truth is that sometimes we don't know how to be free from the grip of sin in our lives.

Imagine someone struggling with a drug addiction problem, who maybe in a moment of clarity wants to get help.  But they don't have money to go to a residential rehab facility somewhere, so they're left with less effective local treatment where their old social circles can easily lure them back in.  Meanwhile, they're struggling to hold a job to put food on the table for their kids, and if they have to miss work for multiple days because they're sick from detoxing, they'll get fired and have no income, and the kids are then at risk to boot.  How do you find a way out of that situation without someone from outside of it offering resources, time, or help that lets the person take new steps out of the dead-end they're in?  It can feel like an utterly hopeless situation, more than the person struggling with the addiction can bear if they're all alone in it.  And it can certainly feel like there's no way "out" without someone else stepping in to help bear some of the burden.  

Well, if you can imagine that (or any of a hundred other scenarios like it), you're on track to see how the psalmist here pictures the power of sin.  It's something we can get stuck in, so that we can't even seen how to be free of it any longer, like we are held in its power.  In that case, what we need is more than a stern reminder that we've been breaking the rules--what we need is the help of Someone who can carry some of the burden we're under, Someone who can bring relief beyond what we can do for ourselves.  We need the God the psalmist has in mind, the one to whom "all flesh shall come."  We need God as more than just an impartial judge refereeing our actions and labeling our bad actions when they are bad--we need God to intervene on our behalf to set us free, when we are overwhelmed by the mess we have found ourselves in, and when we cannot get ourselves out.

That's part of why the tradition from which I come makes a regular practice of publicly confessing that sin is a power in which we have been held captive, not just a list of dos and don'ts.  We need to be honest with ourselves about our need, so that we're clear what we are actually calling on God to do for us--not simply to overlook one or two bad actions on the divine Permanent Record, but to free us from the powers we cannot get out of on our own.

Today, then, let's be honest.  We aren't just people who occasionally step a toe over the line--we are people held captive in the power of sin and we regularly chains ourselves back into its prisons in our worst moments.  We find ourselves in dead-ends we cannot get out of, and we need someone who can pull us out.  We need the God whose love bears with us where we are, in other words.

And once we're brave enough to see that this is exactly our condition, we find we see other people in a new light.   It becomes harder to just blame someone else for their bad situation, when we might well learn that they feel trapped and are aching for a way out of the mess they're in.  It becomes harder to paint someone else as beyond hope or beyond redemption, once we realize how easily any of us could end up in a dead-end without any warning.  And it becomes easier to see how much we have in common with the other sinners, messes, and failures around us, rather than telling ourselves we're "better" than anyone else.

Today let's see ourselves honesty, and others around us as well--let's borrow the words of the psalmist and admit when our sins are stronger than we are... and so we'll call on the God who is stronger still.

Lord God, be stronger than our sins, and rescue us from the captivity we keep selling ourselves into.