The Burden Lifted
Psalm 32[1]
If we live
in a world defined by dissatisfaction, as we discussed last week, we also live
in a world defined by competition. There’s probably no better time of year to
talk about this. “March Madness” isn’t just about basketball. It’s a symbol of how
deeply competition is drilled into our lives. In every area of our lives, from
school, to work, to sports, to even the games we play for entertainment. The
level of competitiveness in our world can leave us feeling like life itself is
a “zero-sum game.” That’s just a fancy way of saying that somebody has to lose
so that somebody else can “win.” In a tournament like “March Madness,” a whole
lot of “somebodies” have to lose so that just one team can win.
I realize
that this competitiveness is so much a part of our way of life that some of you
may seriously ask whether there is any real alternative. We see it when more
than one company has to “compete” for our business. That can be a good thing.
To be sure, we also see many ways in which cooperation brings people together
for mutual benefit. I think of how communities rally around a farmer who has
been injured or is sick and can’t get their crops planted or harvested. But at
the end of the day, when the driving force is to “win,” that means “beating the
competition.”
I think
that’s at least one of the reasons why the message of God’s grace gains so
little traction in our culture. The idea that God’s unfailing love is
unconditional, unqualified, irrevocable, and unlimited, and that it extends to
everyone, everywhere regardless of who they are, where they’ve been, or what
they’ve done, just doesn’t compute for us. Like everything else, we view love
as something we have to “win” by outdoing others. Even many of us who sing
God’s grace in church every week may try to “win” God’s love for ourselves with
our morality and our religious devotion. But the very effort means we view
others as the “competition.” Maybe that’s one reason why the church has lost so
much spiritual credibility with so many in our day. The idea that God extends
his grace and love to all people everywhere solely because that’s who God is gets
lost in the drive to “outdo” others. We just cannot envision a world in which
everyone “wins.” But maybe that’s part of our problem.
You might
think that’s a surprising way to introduce our Psalm for today. We hear the
language of “righteousness” and we think we have to “measure up” to some kind
of standard. In some of the Psalms, the bar for being “righteous” is set so
high it leaves us wondering who can ever reach it.[2] But that’s where the Psalm for today comes in. We discussed last week that in
the Psalms being “righteous” means trusting in God completely and wholly. Our
Psalm for today expands on that: the “righteous” who are “blessed” or truly
“happy” are not those who by their own efforts achieve some unreachable standard
of morality. Rather, the “righteous” are those who know that they are embraced
by God’s love.[3] They’ve learned to be vulnerable enough to admit their pain not only to
themselves, but also to God. When they do that, they know the meaning of the
psalm-singer’s words: “Happy are those whose transgression is
forgiven, whose sin is covered!” Unfortunately, we tend to hear this kind
of language in terms of guilt and shame. But this Psalm isn’t about guilt or
shame, it’s about grace.
This is
more than just religious jargon. The psalm-singer knows by experience the pain
of feeling “not good enough.” To paraphrase the ancient words of the Bible, when
we try to hide that pain, it becomes a burden that crushes us. It grinds us
down as long as we keep silent. Many of us may know by personal experience the
suffering that comes from keeping silent about our burdens. Some things are too
painful to admit, even to ourselves. That’s because we may we think we’re
unworthy of love and acceptance, by God, by others, or even by ourselves. But
the burdens we carry don’t disqualify us from God’s love. We’re more than our
worst failure. We’re more than the labels people put on us.
The
psalm-singer also speaks of the freedom that comes from honesty. The promise of
the Psalm for today is that when we admit all the ways in which we feel
unworthy or disqualified, we find God’s total and complete acceptance. Even the
language of sin and forgiveness demonstrates this. The variety of Hebrew words
for sin and forgiveness in Psalm 32 offers the promise and the hope that our
all guilt and shame in all its dimensions is resolved in every way that is
necessary.[4] And this total and complete acceptance is available to us just for the asking.
All we have to do is open ourselves enough to admit to ourselves and to God who
we are, what we’ve done, and how we feel about it. We may be able to share this
burden with a trusted friend or a counseling professional. The offer of healing
held out to us by God’s grace applies not only to what we’ve done, but also to
the pain we may carry for what has been done to us. When we name what hurts in
a safe environment, we find that we’re still loved by God. Always have been and
always will be. The joy and the freedom that comes from this kind of honest
vulnerability is rooted in knowing that we are accepted for who we are, now and
to all eternity.
In this
Psalm, as in the Psalms as a whole, the key to finding this kind of freedom to
learn to trust God’s unfailing love. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The
Psalms are filled with testimonies of the “blessings” that come from trusting
God’s unfailing love. It’s about more than just comprehending God’s love as a
concept. It’s about embracing God’s love wholly and completely with our whole
hearts as well as our minds, even with body and soul. It’s about entrusting all
that we are and all that we will ever be to God’s care! It may be hard to wrap our
heads around something that big. Maybe we need to bring it down to a level we
can grasp by taking the risk of trusting a friend enough to share our deepest pain.
When we do, and we find love and acceptance in the place of the rejection we
feared, the burden is lifted.
More than
that, this process of healing can lead us to a whole new sense of worth, value,
and acceptance. When the burdens we carry are lifted by God’s unfailing love,
or even by the love of a friend, we find the freedom to accept that we are
accepted. We find God’s unconditional, unqualified, irrevocable, and unlimited
acceptance. That’s what “grace” means.[5] It means we’re accepted by God for who we are, now and forever. Always have
been and always will be. When we find this level of freedom because the burdens
that may have weighed us down for years have been lifted, we’re free to live
fully in the present in a way that’s grace-filled and loving. We’re free to pass
on to others the acceptance we have received. It transforms us and everyone
around us, as God’s unconditional love is meant to.
[1] © 2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/30/2025 for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Psalm 15 is a great example: the psalm-singer asks a question that boils down
to who may live in God’s presence, and the answer is, “Those who obey God in
everything and always do what is right, whose words are true and sincere, and
who do not slander others. … They always do what they promise, no matter how
much it may cost” (Ps 15:2-4, GNT). I think we all tend to assume that
“I could never live up to that.”
[3] J. Clinton McCann, Jr. “The Book of Psalms,” New Interpreters Bible IV:806,
where he points out that one of the purposes of this Psalm is to demonstrate
the truth that “to be righteous is not a matter of being sinless but a matter
of being forgiven.”
[4] Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1–50, 266.
[5] Paul Tillich, “You are Accepted,” in The Shaking of the Foundations,
162. He says that we truly experience “grace” not by anything we decide to
believe or do, but rather it’s as if “a wave of light breaks into our darkness,
and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted,
accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not
know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try
to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything;
do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that
you are accepted!’” (emphasis added). See also James L. Mays, Psalms,
146: “Calvin observed that all that the Scripture says about blessedness in
other beatitudes depends on the blessedness commended here, ‘the free favor of
God, by which he reconciles us to himself’ (Calvin I:526).”
