Prayer Concerning a Clean Heart

                Read Psalm 51.

¹ Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
    blot out my transgressions.
² Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin.

³ For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is ever before me.
⁴ 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.
⁵ Indeed, I was born guilty,
    a sinner when my mother conceived me.

⁶ You desire truth in the inward being;
    therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
⁷ Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
    wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
⁸ Let me hear joy and gladness;
    let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
⁹ Hide your face from my sins,
    and blot out all my iniquities.

¹⁰ Create in me a clean heart, O God,
    and put a new and right spirit within me.
¹¹ Do not cast me away from your presence,
    and do not take your holy spirit from me.
¹² Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
    and sustain in me a willing spirit.

¹³ Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
    and sinners will return to you.
¹⁴ Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
    O God of my salvation,
    and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

¹⁵ O Lord, open my lips,
    and my mouth will declare your praise.
¹⁶ For you have no delight in sacrifice;
    if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
¹⁷ The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

¹⁸ Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
    rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
¹⁹ then you will delight in right sacrifices,
    in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
    then bulls will be offered on your altar.

 

 

               Clean hands I can hope to offer you, Lord, but hardly ever a clean heart.  I know myself well enough to know I can make good only half of the prayer of the psalmist.  I can discipline myself into making the words of my mouth acceptable in your sight, but controlling the meditations of my heart seems to lie beyond me. 

                Because it is beyond me, set me free from sentencing myself to forty lashes every time a mean, sordid, or petty feeling wells up inside me.  Help me to accept calmly the fact that such feelings are going to come repeatedly.  If I feel guilt or shame today, let them become the healthy, constructive guilt and shame that I attach to what I can control, and not the morbid, destructive guilt attached to feelings I can never hope totally to dominate.

                We know there are deep layers of our minds that will never be nicely civilized. As long as we live we will keep generating anxieties and hostilities that may shock us when they come bubbling into consciousness.  We know that some of the regions of our minds where we form feelings and dreams are out of reach to our management.  We have only shaky control of the gate through which they pass into the light of our awareness.

                However, I ask that I never use that for which I am not responsible as an excuse for shirking that for which I know I am responsible.  If I cannot shut out unworthy feelings, I can shut out unworthy deeds.  If I cannot block uninvited feelings from entering, I can refuse to give them the best room in the house, and I can refuse to encourage them to stay.

                These are not small things, and they lie within my power.

 

 

Lent: Reflection on Shame, Guilt, and Sin

Seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Thomas Watson argued that repentance was a spiritual medicine made up of six special ingredients. "If any one is left out, it loses its virtue." 1) Sight of sin, 2) Sorrow for sin, 3) Confession of sin, 4) Shame for sin, 5) Hatred for sin, 6) Turning from sin.[1]

            My heart has committed sins that my hands haven't gotten around to yet.[2]

            Pascal said that if everyone knew the innermost thoughts of everyone else, there would not be five friends left on Earth. 

On the First Sunday of Lent, church, which usually helps you to feel good, to celebrate, and to sing, beckons you to penitential acts of honesty that reiterate that we are, despite our achievements and our intentions, sinful.  We are not, as we are, right.  Let us be honest: We sin. 

            Shame, guilt, and sin. 

            Charles Darwin did a study of emotion in human beings and animals.  The one emotion he did not find among animals was that of shame.  You see, shame reveals a conscience sensitive to moral issues.  Blushing reveals shame.

            Guilt is different.  We may have committed a specific act that we know to be wrong.  Sin is not good, but the fact that we experience guilt is a good thing.  It reveals that we have a sense of what is right.

            The themes of shame and guilt are ones that many in our culture would have the church forget. In fact, many in the psychological world would counsel the church to go another direction. For example, Sigmund Freud said shame was a mechanism that cripples and inhibits the growth of the person.  Fritz Pearles, the founder of the Gestalt Therapy movement, said, "Shame, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and fear restrict the individual's expression." 

            At the same time, other psychiatrists will tell you that the truth about us is hard to come by.  We lie, particularly about ourselves.  So do not expect too much raw honesty from us about our sin.  We defend ourselves quite well. In fact, psychologist Dr. Vaillant believes that we become more adept in utilizing our defense mechanisms as we grow older, as we gain education and experience.  There is a cost to a life spent polishing the mask we present to others.

            In other words, we want to cover up shame and guilt.  However, it will always be there.  The conscience will not let us forget. 

            I want to ask you a question. Do you ever feel trapped by this fast-paced, frenzied, and complex world in which we live to be someone you do not wish to be and live a life that you do not desire? The author of Three Simple Rules (p. 7-8), Rueben Job, thinks many of us do. Deep within us, he thinks, we suspect that the path on which we travel is not healthy or right. We know something is wrong. We want a way out.

            The Talmud has a beautiful comment: "A sense of shame is a lovely sign.  Whoever has a sense of shame will not sin so quickly; but whoever shows no sense of shame in their visage, their father surely never stood on Mount Sinai." 

            Yet, after one honestly faces shame and guilt, what are we to do? When will the daylight come? The Christian faith has an odd response. You can repent.  If we can be honest for ten minutes here on Sunday, maybe we can be honest for the forty days of Lent, maybe then for the rest of our lives.  Lord have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  Because God does have mercy, we can be honest.  We need not loudly assert our innocence, for after we hung him on a cross through our sin, no one here has clean hands.  We are not right.  We have not done right.

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[1] --The Doctrine of Repentance (1668), 18.

[2] --Michael Horton, president of Christians United for Reformation, National & International Religion Report 10 (29 April 1996), 8.