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Prayer is a pretty big deal. After all, at Commons we opened this year with prayer and we’re closing the year with prayer. From the Lord’s Prayer in the fall, to the Psalms prayer book in the summer, we’ve got instructions and illustrations to shape our prayerful souls in all seasons.
So what’s prayer to you? Is it the recitation of prayers you learned as a kid? Is prayer the words that spring up inside you like “thank you,” “help me,” and “I’m so sorry”? Maybe prayer is becoming less wordy and more connected to deep breaths, centred contemplation, and heart-soaring awe.
There are Christians in all kinds of traditions that pray the Psalms every day, morning and night. And sure, the prayerful poems are more familiar year after year, but they never stop speaking and shaping the human heart before God. Dive into the Psalms with us this summer and find yourself refreshed with honesty, lament, and praise.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm Bobby, and I love being one of the pastors on the team here at Commons even on a long weekend. I love being here. So I'm so glad you're here in the room with us. In fact, we're so excited that you came to church on the long weekend that we have special treats for you as you leave. Some of you may even double dip a little.
Speaker 2:You may have got a little treat on the way in. Maybe you'll get another one on the way out. That's totally cool with us. But still, it's in, like, thirty minutes, so just cool your jets. So earlier this summer, I led a responsive reading here in our Kensington Parish, affirming god as the source of all good.
Speaker 2:And after the prayer, one of our connection team volunteers asked me where she could find a copy. So I told her that we post all of our liturgy on the Commons Church liturgy blog, and I kid you not knowing this got her so excited. I think she clapped with delight. And it's even more meaningful to know about this blog because this person is moving away from Calgary this summer. So for her, knowing that she can, as she says, take a little more of comments with her was such good news.
Speaker 2:Now it is one of the joys of my job to write prayers and readings for this community, so I wanted to highlight that you too can take these prayers with you in the week or even share them with your friends. I know that's been actually pretty meaningful for some of you. And, again, you can find all of our liturgy, the songs that we sing, the prayers that we pray, all at commons.church/liturgy. There's so much good stuff there. Last week, you had the real treat of hearing Scott, our Inglewood Parish Pastor teach here in Kensington.
Speaker 2:And Scott thinks so well about being a parent and a pastor, an academic, and a friend. And one of the things I am always learning from Scott is how he frames community around parish life. And Scott highlights this with what he calls the liturgy of our gatherings. I mean, how beautiful is that phrase? Liturgy of gatherings.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Scott talks about liturgy as the work that we do in community which offers opportunities for transformation. And this liturgy, it's right here in these details of our gathering. Like, when you see someone else pray, you are moved to pray. Or when you experience the hospitality of a stranger just handing you a cup of coffee for free, you are inspired, right, to be hospitable and to be a bit more generous too. And when you sit together with all of your differences and listen to the same sermon, you realize you want so many of the same things.
Speaker 2:You want belief that is intellectual and honest. You want a meaningful connection. You want something true, maybe even something new about God. The liturgy of our gathering is what we have to offer a world that is so divided. And we're reminded again this week, so violent and so obsessed with scarcity.
Speaker 2:So Scott reminds us to see our stampede breakfast, our dinners with strangers, our parishes that serve real neighborhoods as places that spark belief. And I quote Scott here, Belief that the world still has pockets of kindness in it, that we can find ways to coexist with different backgrounds and perspectives, that personal change is possible, that God really might be good. There's so much wisdom here for the persistent relevance of the church and the way that the church can help you flourish in every part of your life. Which brings us to our summer series on the Psalms. The Psalms are a collection of songs that trace the liturgy of gathering for millennia.
Speaker 2:And today, we are looking at Psalm 32, a poem that digs deep into matters of the heart. And I am calling this sermon, blessed is the one who blurts it all out. And we are talking about confession as unembellished truth telling. So let's pray together, and then we will work our way through Psalm 32. Please join me.
Speaker 2:Our loving God. Today, we plunge into the waters of an honest psalm. We swim with blessing, and we also feel the ache of brokenness. So we haul ourselves up on the dock of forgiveness. This is where you interrupt all of our violence with grace.
Speaker 2:So thank you for the journey of the Psalms. They are so real and so beautiful and so layered. So if we are in need of refreshment today, oh creator, won't you refresh us? If we are in need of support today, o Jesus, won't you journey with us? And if we are in need of healing today, o spirit, would you weave your wellness into our lives?
Speaker 2:And may our inner world, our relationships, and our participation in creation all be places you transform us for our good. Amen. So some of you may know this about me. Many of you may not, but I am a very proud auntie. Hello.
Speaker 2:It's me, auntie Bobby. And Liz Gilbert calls those of us who choose not to have children but who love hard on the children in our lives, the anti brigade. And I love this so much. So last week, I visited my two month old nephew, Drew, along with his big sister, Emery. Wanna see a picture?
Speaker 2:Yes. So here we are. This visit was full of so many sweet little moments, picking raspberries in the backyard, holding baby Drew, which you can see I'm actually not a natural at, and dancing in the kitchen with Emery. And one of the things I am still laughing about is this moment that Dave, my sister's partner, told us about. It's a song that Emery sung to him last week.
Speaker 2:And the two of them were just out on the driveway, scooting around in circles, very on brand with Lime scooters right now. And Emery started singing this made up song, and I cannot believe I'm gonna say it out loud, but here it is. When you leak out your butt, call your dad. It kills me. It kills me, this kid.
Speaker 2:And, basically, it is everything that I wanna say about confessions, so I'm just gonna sit down now. Not really. I'm not sitting down. Because, I mean, she's right. In her little three, almost four year old life, this is full wisdom right here.
Speaker 2:Sometimes, you have an accident, and you just need to call your dad. And Eugene Peterson says that biblical wisdom tradition is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves in. And that's a bit of what Psalm 32 is up to. It's a wisdom psalm all about the wisdom of coming clean for the good of your soul and the good of your community, which is, of course, a different kind of coming clean than Emory was on about, but critical all the same. So let's get to the psalm, which begins with blessing.
Speaker 2:And it's not this kind of one off blessing that you associate with the word, like the blessing before a meal, the blessing of a bonus at work, or the blessing of a sweet, sweet parking spot. No. This is the state of blessing. And Psalm 32 begins with the contemplation of a double beatitude, all about what it feels like to live forgiven. Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.
Speaker 2:Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit. I love the confidence of these two verses. Notice how the speaker of the Psalm says, yeah. Yeah. I am forgiven.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. My sins are covered. And the grammar here is two passive verbs that make the speaker the object of forgiveness. And Hebrew scholar Robert Alter calls Psalm 32 a confession in the present tense.
Speaker 2:And what this means is that forgiveness is a completed action. So when the apostle Paul uses these same two verses in Romans four, Paul makes the point about belonging, and his point is that you can't get to belonging on your own. You get there because God gifts it to you. Forgiveness is this ground for your new life. So you aren't defined by your shame or by any horrific memory or your doubt.
Speaker 2:And in that light, what if the first truth you tell yourself on your way to coming clean and confessing is this one, not that you're so bad, but yet that you're so blessed. The psalmist has a preference for God's affection. Trusting and coming clean after a slip up is the blessed way to live. Now how often do you take an inventory of your sin? Honestly, I don't stare at my sin that much.
Speaker 2:I think many of us are just trying our best, and we're doing okay. Right? We're not really into being hard on ourselves about our mess ups. We learn from them, and we move on. But also, if we do have big mistakes we need to face, we are pretty good at distracting ourselves and justifying our reasons for the pain that we may cause.
Speaker 2:So what does it look like to fully attend to our sin? Well, last weekend, I was working on my new podcast. That's right, everybody. So coming this fall, Commons will have a new podcast for you called Between Sundays hosted by yours truly. And Between Sundays is all about finding the sacred in the everyday.
Speaker 2:So I was working on this new podcast where I'm in conversations with people who, at least for season one, are active in creative spaces. So Emmanuel Simon was my guest, also known as Oliver Throne in local poetry and rap circles. And Emmanuel said this thing before he read slash wrapped a poem. When talking about where his creative ideas come from, he said, well, sometimes I look at myself in the mirror. The mirror is a way for Emmanuel to know himself, to really see himself, not just the shape of his eyes or the braids in his hair, but a way for him to know himself as himself.
Speaker 2:And in his latest book, Richard Rohr likens looking in a mirror to the work of faith communities. And Rohr says, the true and essential work of all religion is to help us recognize and recover the divine image in everything. It is to mirror things correctly, deeply, and fully until all things know who they are. And I've been thinking about this idea of looking in a mirror a lot this week. Because if I'm honest, I do this too.
Speaker 2:Not because of vanity, but to know myself. When I've been upset, I have watched myself cry. When I've been unsure, I've stared at my face just to look for some kind of help. I watch to see what the emotions of sadness and anger look like in my countenance and in my body. But maybe there's so much more to this.
Speaker 2:Maybe in all of our faces, in our personalities, in our emotions, there is something of God there too. So the blessed way is about not looking away. It's about seeing what's really there in your life, in your relationships, in our world. The goal is to know all worlds as they really are our inner world, our relational world, our communal world, and to see what is good and true there, but also what is marked and broken. But to remember in all of it, it is within the reach of forgiveness.
Speaker 2:The goal is to not look away. And, yes, sometimes really seeing will be a lot of work. In Psalm 32, we find an invitation to feel what we feel in our bodies, to let it all out. Otherwise, we keep sin and shame inside resulting in a dishonest life. And that kind of life, a dishonest life, that will hurt like hell.
Speaker 2:Verses three and four. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy on me. My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. That's rough.
Speaker 2:Right? This wasting away, this groaning all day long. And what we have here is the psychosomatic condition of keeping sin undercover, locking our shame inside of ourselves, stuffing our feelings, like, deep, deep down. And many of us are socialized to keep silent about what is really bothering us. We know, either consciously or subconsciously, that to speak up, to really unleash our rage, to name our shame could cost so much.
Speaker 2:But what the psalmist is saying is that not speaking up will cost so much too. Notice how disoriented this poet felt, both silent and groaning all at the same time. And the phrase the phrases, they aren't meant to make a lot of sense. They're meant to convey this living contradiction. And the closest the psalmist gets to making sense of agony is to go further into the pain with these two figures of speech.
Speaker 2:First, the silence about one's sin feels like the heavy hand of God upon him or her. And it's a Hebrew idiom. That doesn't mean God is the one doing the pressing down. It just feels that severe. And second, the strength being sapped by the silence about one's sin could be more accurately translated as the sensation of summer perchedness.
Speaker 2:And the feeling of desert parchedness is actually super helpful when we look at what on earth sin even is here. If we expand the notion in the Psalms that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, we can affirm with our sisters and our brothers in the larger Christian tradition that all created things are intrinsically good. So what, therefore, is evil, and what is sin? Well, evil and sin are the absence of good. Julian of Norwich writes, I did not see sin, for I believe that it has no kind of substance, no share in being, nor can it be recognized except by the pain caused by it.
Speaker 2:And the Orthodox bishop Callistos Ware says evil and sin are always parasitic, the twisting and misappropriation of what is in itself good. And so Psalm 32 warns that sin stuffed down inside is parasitic too. Our mistakes, our abuses, our selfishness should be exposed and owned and accounted for. Otherwise, our sin, it eats us up. But we fear this kind of honesty, don't we?
Speaker 2:We delay. We put it off. We ignore it. But there is another way. And Psalm 32 offers a model for hard truth telling.
Speaker 2:It's called confession. Now when I was a kid, I had to go to confession at my local Catholic parish as part of catechism, and I'm not against that. The lesson for a child to face parts of herself that aren't kind, that aren't generous, that aren't truthful, there is nothing wrong with that. But I'm afraid that's not what I took from the experience. Instead, I tried to give the priest the answer just to get out of the room.
Speaker 2:So when he asked me what my confession was, I said that I had maybe, I don't know, been mean to my sister and my brother. The truth is I was mean all the time. And the priest told me to go and say a handful of our fathers and hail Marys. Again, I'm not against that. But it sort of felt like an end.
Speaker 2:And what I needed was a new beginning. I needed a way to tell the truth about the times in my life that I didn't feel like the very best Bobby or the times when I didn't trust something inside of myself and I got into trouble, or the ways that kids are cruel and I could have actually found some strength through kindness. That would have been a beautiful confession. Sometimes we need some coaching on how to get the truth out. So verse five.
Speaker 2:Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. So in Psalm 32 verse five, the words for sin, they pile up here. And one commentator calls the swift use of language the fullness of vocabulary. So the psalmist does not want to hide anymore with three different words for living against the good, sin, iniquity, and transgression.
Speaker 2:The poet lays it all out there. Now here's kind of a fun connection. The Hebrew verb for confess is yada. Sounds a bit familiar maybe? Well, there's a pop culture phrase spread by the comedian Lenny Bruce and later Seinfeld, which is yada yada yada.
Speaker 2:And George's girlfriend uses yada yada yada to skip over parts of her story, which causes all kinds of Costanza crises. Now counter that. Rather than skip over the parts of the story with yada yada yada, the Hebrew verb to confess literally means to throw and to cast. So when the poet acknowledges sin, the poet doesn't skip over parts. The poet blurts out his sin.
Speaker 2:He names it three times. He casts it out of himself. Confession isn't meant to be tidy or truncated. Confession is messy and more like oversharing. So about a decade ago now, I went through a season of big time oversharing.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean? Maybe some of you do. This is when you find yourself saying way more about any given situation than you mean to. So every friend I'd hang out with would hear the same story, and neighbors I'd just bump into on the street would get an earful, and people I had just met would get all kinds of top secret Bobby intel. And I would always walk away thinking, Bobby, what did you just do there?
Speaker 2:They did not need to know all of those personal details. But now, I look back with more kindness on all of that self disclosure. I was coming to terms with a part of my story I hadn't understood in the past, thanks to therapy. And I was working on my healing. I was practicing the art of blurting it all out.
Speaker 2:So every person who stopped to listen was an incarnation of God's loving presence. They were curious and patient and without judgment. You may need to blurt out your sins. The very real things that you do that hurt you and hurt the ones that you love. You may need to blurt out the sin that was done to you, the very real things someone else did that made you feel small, maybe deeply wounded you.
Speaker 2:You may need to blurt out something that, okay, maybe isn't sin, but it is painful, it happened to you, and you're not sure how to move on. Find someone who will listen and blurt it out. Confession doesn't have to be tidy to be beautiful and blessed. So tell your story once, twice, 300 times if you need to. And with each telling, may the grip of what hurts you loosen.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it will go away forever, but it will loosen, and you will heal a little bit at a time. Here's where confession leads the psalmist. Therefore, let all the faithful pray to you while you may be found. Surely, the rising of the mighty waters will not breach them. You are my hiding place.
Speaker 2:You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. I love this because the forgiveness of sins and the blessing of confession is not just meant for you. The psalmist turns from this divine encounter through confession and says, hey, everybody. You can feel this free too. An encounter with God that frees you should always find you turning to free each other.
Speaker 2:God is found in our most truthful spaces where we are honest with ourselves and honest with others. So pray, implores the psalmist. Pray. Maybe your prayer will sound like this. I need to be really honest about how I feel, so here I go.
Speaker 2:Maybe your prayer will sound something like this. I don't want to hate myself, so I need to make a change. Maybe your prayer will actually be wordless. Just a simple silence so that you can catch your breath and hear yourself think a quiet space is deeply prayerful too. The word, Selah, throughout the poem found in the footnotes of your bible indicates just this sacred pause where a shift, a quiet transformation takes place.
Speaker 2:The language of floodwaters in the ancient world is a metaphor for chaos and danger. So it's when we get the chaos of sin out of our bodies that we know ourselves as free. And the chaos, once ejected, it isn't going to make its way back in again. The final section of Psalm 32 highlights the wisdom nature of the psalm. Remember, the wisdom tradition is all about teaching others the art of living, the blessing of the good life.
Speaker 2:I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my loving eye on you. Do not be like the horse or the mule which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle, or they will not come to you. Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in God. Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous.
Speaker 2:Sing all you who are upright in heart. Now who's the I in verse eight? Who teaches? Who gives counsel? Is it the psalmist?
Speaker 2:Is it God? We don't know. And isn't that so great that the teacher could be either one, maybe pretty interchangeable? A wise elder who knows the way through confession and forgiveness, the very presence of the divine near enough to show you the way. The point is you can take a difficult journey.
Speaker 2:You can blurt out all kinds of messy confessions, and you can know yourself as loved. This is the wise way. Knowing that you aren't perfect, but you can always find a new beginning, not because you earn it, but simply because all the world is made whole with love, and that includes you too. I know it's hard to have a go at unembellished confessions, But I came across the wisdom of a mystic this week that offers hope. Now I love the words of mystics, especially when they're arranged poetically on a page.
Speaker 2:There are two books that do this beautifully, in my library anyways. Daniel Lodinsky's book, Love Poems from God, and Scott Cairns' book, Love's Immensity. So I took the words of Saint Isaac the Syrian, who lived in the seventh century, and I arranged them poetically, at least I hope, in a note on my phone. So here they are, and hear them as invitation. Be at peace with your soul.
Speaker 2:Then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you and so you will see the things that are in heaven. For there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the kingdom is hidden within your soul. Flee from sin.
Speaker 2:Dive into yourself. And in your soul, you will discover the stairs by which to ascend. The words of Saint Isaac the Syrian from the seventh century. Confession is a way to get at what's inside of you, to discover that the essential element of your faith is not your sin, it is your capacity to love. Now when I was leaving my sister's place earlier this week after visiting my sweet niece and nephew, I looked up from the car window and saw this.
Speaker 2:So months ago, my spouse, Jonathan, taught Emery the sign for I love you. His family always ends visits and conversations with the sign. And the reason is that his niece, now a teenager, was born without the ability to hear. So this Bateman tradition has been grafted into the Sockold family tradition. And without prompting, I always forget that she knows this, Emery signs I love you when we say goodbye.
Speaker 2:Now Emery isn't perfect. She's really cranky between six five and 6PM. She doesn't sleep through the night like her parents really need her to with a new baby in the house, and she is still learning her manners. But look at this. She knows she's loved.
Speaker 2:Even her hands communicate the fact. Being loved makes growing and learning and saying sorry possible. We're not perfect, but we are learning, aren't we? So let's keep loving each other all of the way through it. Let's pray.
Speaker 2:Our loving God, thank you for the beauty of the poems, the wisdom of the saints, the lessons about love that are all around us. As we take a moment to honestly reflect on the matters of our hearts, we ask, is there anything inside of me that needs to get out? Is there an apology I need to make? Is there a story I need to tell? Is there a feeling I need to identify?
Speaker 2:Jesus, we can traverse all these difficult places because it's in these places where we'll find you waiting for us to realize and encounter an important truth about ourselves and about our stories and about you. We are forgiven. We are loved. And spirit of the living God who is present with us now, enter the places of wounding within us, and will you heal us of all that harms us. Amen.