“Guilt's Burden”
Staggering under a heavy load? Find forgiveness, cleansing and consecration in Christ.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 28, 2002
Text: Psalm 51
Some years ago, while ministering in Ottawa, there was a knock on the door of my office. Standing before me was a demure and dapper little old lady. Clearly she knew who I was and she asked if she could have a few moments of my time. This presented me with a problem that many ministers have - I didn't recognize her. I thought: "Oh Lord, please reveal to me her name. Please." But nothing came.
She walked in and sat down and I asked if she would like tea and she said yes, she would. Still, all the time it was agonizing: Who was this lady that I should know her? Clearly she was talking as if we had known each other for a long time.
She started to tell me a bit about her life and still no penny dropped. She gave a brief account of her history and of her past and then she relieved me by saying: "Now, of course you don't know who I am."
I said, "No, I don't," and I felt so wonderful inside.
She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye but a sad countenance. She said: "Reverend Stirling, I need your ear."
The story that she told me would have made any spy novel pale in comparison. It was a story of when she was seconded by the Canadian government to the Department of National Defence in World War II, in military intelligence. She had been seconded to one particular division, that of misinformation. Her role was to provide misinformation to the enemy, to throw them off-course.
She said: "There was only one problem, Reverend Stirling. After about four years, a telegram came to me directly and personally, informing me that one of our agents had been shot." The reason he had been shot, she realized, was the misinformation she had given him. It had cost him his life.
Fifty years after the event she said: "I have carried the burden of that guilt around with me all these years, and I simply don't know how to live with it any more. I don't know what to do and I have come to see you."
My approach to her was entirely wrong and misguided. I started asking her factual questions. I said: "Now, were you able to corroborate the information that you received? Are you absolutely sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, that you were responsible for the death of this man? Have you checked the facts? Do you know of what you speak?" Then I realized that the point of my questioning was irrelevant.
She had gone 'way beyond the facts. This was at the depth of her soul. This was at the seat of her emotions. This was dealing with her heart. No prodding or questioning by me could bring out anything she hadn't already thought about. She had asked all those questions. This woman was profoundly, to the depth of her being, riddled and burdened with guilt and she wanted my help.
Now, guilt is a strange thing. It can take many forms. Guilt can be a legal thing. By that I mean that there is a law that is established, written in stone, which says this is what constitutes a wrong and if you violate it, then your guilt will lead to an apportionment of blame and you will serve the consequences. That is legal guilt. That is the guilt that is apportioned according to a law.
But there is also ethical guilt. Ethical guilt isn't necessarily related to a particular law or the contravention of a law, but to a moral code.
If you read, for example, in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Jesus gives an example of this with adultery. He said, it is not so much that you commit adultery physically, you have even committed adultery if you lust after someone outside a marriage relationship. So he has gone from the legal definition to an existential, ethical dimension. Such is the nature, sometimes, of guilt.
Sometimes, guilt is very personal and the standard is in personal relationships.
When I talk to many alcoholics, for example, they have an inner compulsion because of their disease. They can't help their drinking. It is not a matter of their will. Drink gets hold of their lives and very often it will destroy relationships. It will cause an estrangement between them and their families. Very often the guilt that ensues does not arise from anything that they have done, but to a disease that they have that breaks the relationships, but nonetheless the guilt is very, very strong and very real.
Sometimes, guilt can be political. The liberation theologians have rightly brought this to our attention. Sometimes, there are nations, peoples who commit crimes, who do wrong and who are thereby guilty of their injustice.
The Prophet Isaiah once said: "We are a people of unclean lips." Guilt is not just a private, or individual thing. Sometimes it is a national thing.
Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the last century, during the Holocaust. The Holocaust is always a reminder that nations can suffer from the pathology that makes them sick and then they bear the burden of guilt.
Then there is a last type of guilt: It is the guilt that is addressed in our text this morning. I must admit, when I woke up this morning I thought, "Oh Lord, I really should have picked a brighter and more splendid text. On a day of rain and wind and misery they are going to love this one - a message of guilt, a message of contrition: 'Create in me a clean heart, Oh God. I am guilty.' We don't need that on a rainy day, do we, really?
Yet, this is in fact a psalm of good news. It is a psalm not only of guilt, but also of guilt's forgiveness.
We do not know who wrote this psalm. Some have speculated it was from the hand of David and transcribed later on. Some have said it was actually written after the exile as an example of what had happened to Israel when it was sent into Babylon and, in fact, looks back on the life of David as an example for all the people to share.
Well, whether it is the people of Israel and their general contrition or whether it is David and his own personal contrition, the fact is: It is really all based on the story you will find in II Samuel 11, the story of David and Bathsheba.
For those of you who may not know the story, it is not the Bible at its most pleasant. King David is sitting out on a beautiful, sunny day and he looks down the hill and sees a beautiful woman lying on a roof-top. He is enamoured of her. So he enquires who she is and finds out that she is the wife of a man called Uriah the Hittite, who is part of his army. David goes to her and has sexual relations with her that result in the birth of a child. And so, in a devious way, David arranges for her husband to be sent into battle in the most dangerous place, in order that he might be killed. When this has been arranged and Uriah the Hittite dies in battle, after some time David marries Bathsheba, all the time knowing that he has been responsible for the death of her husband.
In many ways, this story tells us that David broke all the laws that I mentioned. He's guilty at every level. He is certainly guilty of breaking the law because, really, he committed murder. He has broken an ethical code because he has committed adultery not only physically, but also in his heart. He has certainly broken a relationship and destroyed it and caused an estrangement. He has even brought his nation into a sense of sin and guilt because he is its leader and what he has done has a bearing on the whole of the nation. At every single level, then, David has a form of guilt.
But what makes this so powerful is that this is theological guilt at its heart. David says: "Against You and You only, Oh God, have I sinned." In other words, the real sin, my real nature of what I have done wrong is not just to Bathsheba, not just to Uriah, not just to the nation. It is an affront to You.
And I think that when that woman came into my office that day in Ottawa, what she wanted to talk to me about was not all the other guilts, but the guilt of her soul, the guilt of her heart. She felt it had broken her relationship with God.
This psalm is about rebuilding that relationship. It's about letting go of that guilt and having that burden removed in order that David the King, and the people of Israel, might be of service to God in the world.
William Tuck, in a wonderful sermon that he preached on this in the United States, said that the most important thing David does in this psalm is offer a word of contrition and confession. What is so spectacular about this psalm is that David does not try and cover up his sin; he doesn't try and apportion blame to his enemies; he doesn't try to put his guilt down to some other source or some other form. No, David is very clear. He comes right out and says: "I am guilty. I repent. This is what I have done wrong."
There are many people, my friends, who think that, somehow, the removal of guilt or the removal of the burden requires something more than honesty. It doesn't. All it requires is honesty. An honest appraisal of our own self. An honest statement about what it is that burdens us. That is the only condition, the only thing that God requires of us - an honest and an open heart. That's what David had in abundance. That's why this psalm is so gripping and so emotional.
Oh, there will always be the cynics will say: "No, what this is really about is judgement."
La Rochefoucauld once said, and I quote: "Repentance is not about remorse for sin, but about fear of consequences."
In other words, he takes the cynical view that the reason people repent of their sins, that people want to get rid of their guilt is the fear of the consequences. There are a lot of people who think religion is about that: that the heart of religion is really spelling out the consequences to make people feel bad, to cause fear in their hearts in order that they might be contrite.
In fact, the opposite is true. What this story shows is that David's love for God is so great that he feels he can come to God and honestly and openly, without any reserve, just simply say: "This is what I have done wrong" - regardless of the consequences. "Here I am." This is the honesty. This is all that God requires.
When that woman came to me and when she told me what she had done, I said: "This is all that God requires of you. Whether you are guilty for what has happened or not, all God wants is an honest appraisal of what is going on in your own heart and in your own soul. Just name it and let it go."
For there's a beautiful second part to all this. The second part is the cleansing.
David writes: "Create a clean heart in me, Oh God, and renew a right spirit within me." In this passage, the language is rich in imagery that people would understand. For in his times, people would understand that when he says "I want you to turn your face away from what I have done," it is equivalent in the Hebrew to having something written down in stone and having the slate cleaned. That's where the term comes from - a clean slate - having it all just wiped away so there is no record of wrong-doing.
A number of years ago, when I was moving house, I had to search through my personal belongings to see what I was going to take with me and what I was going to throw out. I came across the scariest thing I have every seen in my life: my school records.
I took them to one side with all the doors and windows locked, and I began to read them. And they terrified me, because I haven't improved at all. One of the teachers wrote (and then I realized this was in every year, in every school that I was ever in -- and you'll identify with this): He talks too much. Another comment that kept appearing: "He should keep better company." (That's you, of course.) There were other things. The English teachers unanimously, nation by nation, said: "Punctuation non-existent." One said: "Punctuation, when used, wrong." Just ask my editor. Some things never change.
I looked at this and I thought: "Oh my gosh, I wonder now how long do they keep these records in the schools? What happens," thought I, "if I ever became famous? Will the media ever dig into my background and find this stuff? I'd be dead. I really would."
And so I phoned up a Superintendent of Schools where I was at the time and I said: "I was wondering if you could tell me something. How long do schools keep students' records?"
He said: "Until the school burns down."
Made me want to be an arsonist right there, let me tell you, except I'd have to burn them down in a few countries along the way.
It's awful when you have this record of all the wrong things you've done. I felt guilty. I felt bad. All those feelings came rushing back to me when I read of all the things that I had done wrong. It was dreadful.
Now, for your information, I kept the records; but I am now pleased to say I have since lost them.
Well, that is how David is talking about God. God wipes the slate clean. The record is gone. He says: "Purge me with hyssop and I will be whiter than snow. I will be clean. Wash me. Wash me. Just let the record disappear."
I was talking just recently to a gentleman who has come back from Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. Dar-es-Salaam is a city that over the years has gone through many economic cycles, both good and bad, both wealth and poverty. Its people have suffered greatly over the years. Now they are suffering from a new scourge, a scourge that I have mentioned here before. It is the scourge of AIDS.
I asked him, when he had come back from Dar-es-Salaam, what he had found and what the people were feeling.
He said: "Andrew, apart from trying to work with the world to bring the drugs necessary for healing and to bring the education necessary to restore these broken people, to try and lift them above their poverty and help them live, there's one other thing that I realized as a Christian, as a pastor that I was confronting daily, and that was guilt."
Men were coming to him and saying: "You know, I had no idea how HIV was transmitted. I had no idea that the relations I had were causing this disease to spread and now I'm finding out that I might even be responsible for the death of someone."
He said to me: "Andrew, have you any idea of the burden of the soul that these people are carrying with them, often through no fault of their own, through never having received information? This is the kind of burden they are carrying. All I could offer them, as the only solace to a soul that had seen no obvious way out, was this great Psalm 51. As hyssop was used to cleanse the lepers and to restore them to whole people, so I said that is the power of God's forgiving grace. This problem is so great you will ultimately have to leave it at God's front door."
But the final part of this psalm is equally moving. There is a sense of consecration. David has experienced the forgiveness. The guilt has gone. The burden has been removed. The slate is clean. He has confessed and God has been gracious. He says: "I will share this joy with the nation. I will let others know your justice and your righteousness. I want to proclaim what you have done in order that I might be able to go back into the House of the Lord, into the temple with my contrite heart and be clean before you. I want others to know the power of this forgiveness and the grace that You, my loving God, have shown me."
Some years ago I read a story about a man who attended an Episcopalian church in Boston, Massachusetts. In this church, the man caused havoc. Every time the priest of this church tried to do anything good, he opposed her. At meetings of the Church Council, he would try and undermine her. Publicly, he would belittle her. He did everything in his power to put her down until finally, after a number of years, he moved to New Hampshire.
On day, when he was going to this church in New Hampshire, as he always did and was his custom as a good Episcopalian, he came forward for the Sacrament of the Eucharist. As he had always done, he put out his hands to receive the wafer, but this day was different. The minister in the church had just preached on a passage in the life and the ministry of Jesus where Jesus said: "Before you go and take your gifts into the temple, go and put right your broken relationships. Before you try and come and present your offerings, what I want is for you to go and put right that which is broken in your life."
As a result of that sermon, with his hands outstretched, he couldn't look up into the priest's face for the fear of seeing the face of the woman in Boston. So great was his guilt that he took the wafer and he walked quietly away down the aisle until the service was over.
He went home and he prayed for forgiveness. Then he decided to write the Boston priest a letter. You see, what was in this man's heart all along was guilt, or remorse. All his life, deep down, he had wanted to be a priest. He had wanted to be a minister but he had done other things instead. He had been more concerned with making money, more concerned about having a good name, and had never dedicated himself to what really was a calling in his life. Above all, he resented this priest in Boston. He resented her because she was a woman doing what he felt he should have been doing. Out of his anger and his hatred and his bitterness he had tried to make her life a misery.
And so, coming face to face with himself and finally becoming honest with God, he wrote her a letter and he asked for her forgiveness.
Days went by. Weeks went by. He heard nothing. He agonized in his soul until finally, one day, a tiny piece of paper came in an envelope. On it there were just three words and a signature. The three words said: Forgiven. Forgotten. Forever.
That is the kind of joy that David experienced in this psalm. This is the elation that he had. He knew that God was gracious and he wanted the world to know it.
And for people who live with a burden of guilt, whatever its source, here is the good news: When David said "Create a clean heart in me, Oh God, and renew a right spirit within me" God was saying Forgiven. Forgotten. Forever.
The burden was gone. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.