Spiritual Hiccups - Optimistic Sinners

The last time Psalm 51 caught my eye, I reflected on what it meant to be a "born sinner," to embrace that label in the manner recovering alcoholics routinely repeat, "Hi, my name is Joe, and I'm an alcoholic."  This repeated admission is a step in being freed from the grip of their addiction, which presupposes that that they have found a source of hope, a promise of something better.

Perhaps the reason so many church goers find confessing their sinfulness such a "downer" is because it feels like nothing more than self flagellation, and not as an opening oneself to divine grace and healing.  But the writer of Psalm 51, who writes of being born guilty, a sinner when his mother conceived him, also says, "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."

I had a theology professor in seminary who impressed upon me the necessity of always speaking of hope when asking a congregation to join in a prayer of confession.  Saying to God, "I'm a sinner," makes no sense unless one is certain that God receives such a statement in a loving manner.  If God were some sort of divine cop trying to catch us when we break the rules, then confessing would seem rather foolish.  

Jesus once spoke of sinners, prostitutes, and tax collectors entering the Kingdom ahead of the "religious folk."  I wonder if this isn't because, at some level, most of us would rather trust in our own efforts and merits over trusting God's love.  Having been conditioned by our culture to "pad our résumés," to advertise ourselves, and to deflect blame whenever possible, we find it terribly difficult to imagine that God works completely differently.  And so those "sinners" who know full well they are sinners, have an advantage over us.  They are able to come before God without pretension, open to the love and healing God offers.

My theology professor said that we confess our sin to God because in Jesus we have discovered a profound optimism.  The closer we come to Jesus the more we realize that God's greatest desire is to reconcile and embrace.  And this optimism allows us to let go of pretensions and the false images of ourselves that we project.  We can stand before God, bearing even those dark corners of our lives we try to keep hidden, knowing that God loves even that part of us.  And so we can be freed from our false selves, and discover the true children of God we are meant to be.

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