THE Lenten Psalm - 2006
"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me."
I put part of this passage on the marquee at the beginning of Lent. Create in me a clean heart, O God. I hope that has been the prayer of our congregation for these days. Lent is starting to wind down. This coming Sunday will be the 5th Sunday in Lent, and then the next Sunday is Palm Sunday.
Part of the mystique of growing up Baptist is our lack of sensitivity to the idea of confession - any kind of confession, really. We don't like public confession. We don't like repetetive confession - going back to God with the same old, tired things day after day. We don't like to enumerate our sins. Mostly, we just like to remind ourselves that Jesus saved us, and that we don't have to worry about our sin anymore. It is a backlash to Catholicism, I'm sure . . .
But that response to our sin isn't honest. It certainly doesn't square with the testimony of the Psalms. Psalm 51 starts out - "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin." The psalmist speaks as though forgiveness is anything but a forgone conclusion. His is a testimony of a continued relationship with God in which the sinner goes back to God as occasion requires and asks for forgiveness.
So I live in this tension - a tension between knowing that my sins are forgiven, and knowing that I must ask for God's forgiveness. Sometime back, I tried to reconcile that in my mind by suggesting that what we really ask for is that God help us appropriate the forgiveness to our lives that is already ours. This Lent, that explanation doesn't feel quite right.
I plan to write about this psalm for the whole week.
posted by the sojourning pilgrim @ 8:02 PM
1 Comments:
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