Lament as Confession

A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli with Foundry UMC, March 7, 2021, Lent 3, “Learning to Sing the Blues” series.

              Text: Psalm 51:1-17

Lament is what we do when bad things happen to us or those we love. We’ve been focused on that kind of lament the past couple of weeks. But what about when we do bad things to ourselves or to others? This also inspires lament, when guilt at the damage we’ve done causes us to experience anguish, that terrible weight of realization that you can’t undo the thing, that it’s just out there in the world. It might be public. It might be just between you and the person you’ve hurt. It might be secret. But in any case, it’s happened and it’s in you. What will you do with it? As with any suffering, difficult emotions, or reality, we are invited to bring it to God in prayer.

The so-called “penitential psalms” of lament are models. Today we received Psalm 51, the Psalm traditionally included in the Ash Wednesday liturgy. Every year these lines land in my being with a thud:

…I know my transgressions,    and my sin is ever before me.Against you, you alone, have I sinned,    and done what is evil in your sight,so that you are justified in your sentence    and blameless when you pass judgment.Indeed, I was born guilty,    a sinner when my mother conceived me. (Ps 51:3-5)

Another, perhaps less familiar prayer, Psalm 38, includes these lines:For my iniquities have gone over my head;    they weigh like a burden too heavy for me.

My wounds grow foul and fester    because of my foolishness;I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;    all day long I go around mourning.I am utterly spent and crushed;    I groan because of the tumult of my heart. (Ps 38:4-5,8)

These lament prayers in scripture give us words that viscerally describe the experience of suffering both the guilt and consequences of our own iniquity, sin, and “foolishness.” In that often railed against verse, Psalm 51:5—the verse that makes it sound like babies are horrible sinners—what we receive are words of pain and grief at the unavoidable participation in sin even from our earliest moments of life; because none of us, even as children, are free from the capacity for self-centeredness and ignorance and doing harm. 

There is a difference between such awareness of human sin, true remorse, and confession and words spoken or actions taken in an attempt to evade responsibility or do damage control. For some, what really makes them upset is not that they’ve hurt someone, but getting caught in their wrongdoing. They may do a press conference or release to issue a public apology to try to cover their backsides. But at the end of Psalm 51 it says:

For you (God) have no delight in sacrifice;    if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;    a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (51:16-17)

Going public with your transgression will be deeply painful, but notice here that the public act of making a sacrifice is nothing more than hypocrisy unless that public act is attended by a true acknowledgement of the harm done and a heart broken by the pain of it. 

At this point, some of you may be tempted to check out of this conversation, turned off by all this sin and guilt stuff. So let me acknowledge that, for ages, there has been an unhealthy and unbalanced emphasis on sin and judgment in Christian preaching and teaching. Whether intended or not, the message received by thousands upon thousands of the faithful is that we are born bad and that God is mostly interested in judging us, giving us grades based on performance, and deciding who’s “in” and who’s “out” of heaven. As a result of this long imbalance, lament as confession will likely feel much more familiar and “traditional” than the rage and searing accusations against God we’ve encountered from Jeremiah the past couple of weeks. 

Wanting to balance “original sin