{"id":911,"date":"2011-11-28T08:35:44","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T14:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=911"},"modified":"2011-11-28T08:35:44","modified_gmt":"2011-11-28T14:35:44","slug":"beyond-regret-the-psalms-in-our-worship-42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/beyond-regret-the-psalms-in-our-worship-42\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond Regret: The Psalms in Our Worship 42"},"content":{"rendered":"

The retreat from regret, the aching sorrow that crushes a spirit and snuffs out the first flicker of hope and goodness, begins with repentance.\u00a0 Repentance allows us to cast away shame by acknowledging it and refusing to give it control over our lives, a control exercised in the quiet places in which we hide ourselves from others.\u00a0 Far from being a humiliation, repentance is the first step to exaltation.\u00a0 It is the end of humiliation because it is the first and greatest exercise of courage to which we can aspire.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Psalm 51 shows a profound knowledge of the power of repentance.\u00a0 The earliest commentator on the psalm, the person who added the superscription to it, thought it so powerful that it could serve in the story of the most dramatic moral failure of a righteous person that he knew about: David’s adultery with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of her husband Uriah.\u00a0 The psalm itself is later than David’s time and must originally have served much broader purposes.\u00a0 There’s nothing in it unique to the sins of the flesh or of violence; anyone’s sin, if deep enough, can find its release in this psalm.\u00a0 In fact, the last few verses seem to imply a date after the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar and before the rebuilding of the walls by Nehemiah.<\/p>\n

“Be gracious to me, O Elohim, in light of your loyalty; erase my iniquities in view of your abundant mercies…. For I know my iniquities, and my sin is always before me.”\u00a0 With this opening, the psalmist begins to acknowledge the reality of sin (without naming it, since this prayer can apply to anyone!) and its public nature.\u00a0 It is not hidden from the one praying or the One prayed to.\u00a0 There is no use pretending anymore.<\/p>\n

But how public is it?\u00a0 Verses 4 ff. (6 ff. in Hebrew) seem susceptible to multiple interpretations.\u00a0 Does “against you only have I sinned” mean that the sin is secret (say, a plot not yet carried out, or sorcery, or something like that) or is this a case of hyperbole?\u00a0 The Bible itself, in distinction from some of its readers in church, never seems to think that sin concerns only God and the individual.\u00a0 Sin is communal; it involves others.\u00a0 And it would be illogical and morally dubious — obscene, really — to argue that acts of injustice or betrayal (say, failure to honor parents, or lying in court, or stealing, or murder, or adultery — just to pick up on the Ten Commandments) offend only God and not other human beings.\u00a0 Obviously, sins of this sort cannot literally be only against God.\u00a0 So we do well simply to say that sin involves God because people in a covenant with God (as well as with each other) betray the relationship implied by covenant when they do evil.<\/p>\n

In the text itself, the contrast is between divine purity and goodness, on one side, and human iniquity, on the other.\u00a0 The psalmist underscores the dramatic nature of the contrast by saying, “Yes, I was delivered in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.”\u00a0 A great deal of very questionable stuff has been written about this verse, as it has played its role in the unfortunate case made for hereditary sin and irremediable human corruption made over the centuries.\u00a0 Yet such ideas are very alien to the world of the Old Testament, which thinks that humans both can and should do good before God.\u00a0 In truth, it makes little sense to repent of sin if you can’t really repent of it!\u00a0 Since the psalm is poetry, it makes much more sense to read the line as, again, hyperbole.\u00a0 Perhaps we could paraphrase it this way: “We humans are a really messed up species, aren’t we?\u00a0 Our history is full of such examples, and so is my individual life.”<\/p>\n

The psalm moves from confession to appeal.\u00a0 Images of cleansing appear over and over in the second half of the psalm, shifting then to ideas of singing (songs of joy rather than of sorrow), and then in turn to the promise to teach God’s ways of forgiveness to sinners, presumably so that they too can experience those very ways.<\/p>\n

Finally, this psalm was not written as a mission text, in our sense, but there is something profoundly missional about the world it envisions.\u00a0 In this world, forgiven people celebrate their forgiveness by telling others of the possibilities for it.\u00a0 They pray for newly open lips (like Moses in Exodus 3-4).\u00a0 They come to a deeper understanding of their relationship with God, which is not rooted in sacrifice but transcends it by recognizing that praise is more essential than the barbecue!\u00a0 And they pray for a restoration of Zion and all it stands for.\u00a0 You can’t get more mission-driven than that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The retreat from regret, the aching sorrow that crushes a spirit and snuffs out the first flicker of hope and goodness, begins with repentance.\u00a0 Repentance allows us to cast away shame by acknowledging it and refusing to give it control over our lives, a control exercised in the quiet places in which we hide ourselves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nBeyond Regret: The Psalms in Our Worship 42 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/beyond-regret-the-psalms-in-our-worship-42\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beyond Regret: The Psalms in Our Worship 42 - 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