How in These Hard Days Do You Not Lose Touch with Your Best Self? Here's How

I admit it.   I’m getting tired of this.   This coronavirus life is making me cranky, impatient, frustrated, and yes, a bit sad and angry too.   In August, I’m taking some time away for study leave so I can prepare my sermons for the coming months.   By the way, I’m excited that we’ve already got an awesome guest preacher lined up.  Ben Sorensen, a pastor who currently serves as the vice-mayor of Fort Lauderdale, will be preaching while I am away.

But after I got Ben to fill in, I thought.  Hold on a second!  Where the heck am I going to go away to?  In the past, even if I stayed local for study leave, I had at least libraries to go away to.  But they won’t be opening.  And even if they did, would you feel safe spending hours there, even with a mask?  Heck, I don’t feel safe going to the grocery store for 30 minutes.  So, this year I’ll just come to the church office like I do now.  And I’ll just try to imagine that I am still kind-of away.  

But I get it. All in all, I do have it pretty good.  I’m not sick.  I have food to eat, a roof over my head.  But still, even with all that, these days wear on you, especially when no one has any idea when they will end, when some sort of normal will return.   And in the midst of all that, your nerves can fray.  Your patience can grow short.  You can lose touch with your best self. 

How do you rise above all of that?  How do you not let the challenges of these days hijack your life?   How do you not let your relationships fray, not simply your relationships with others and with God, but your relationship with yourself?   In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Psalm 32

How do these words on confessing your sin of all things help you cope with coronavirus life?  They help you more than you could ever imagine.  Because in these words, God is giving you a key to joy and peace not simply in these days, but for every day.  For in these words, God is simply saying.  Do you wanna be happy?   Then you gotta come out of hiding.

And let’s be clear, God in this psalm is promising you happiness.  Heck, it’s the first word of the Psalm.  “Happy are those who transgression is forgiven; whose sin is covered.”    And that last word, “covered” tells you more about the happiness God will bring you than any other. 

You see, people hide.  But in the beginning, people didn’t hide or at least the first two people didn’t.   It’s right there in Genesis.   “And the man and his wife were both naked, and where not ashamed.”   In other words, they didn’t have to hide.   They had no shame, no embarrassment, no insecurity.  They carried no secrets.  They had no hidden places.  They were naked and unashamed.    

But after the whole snake and the tree thing, that all changed.  No more naked and unashamed.  No, Adam and Eve grabbed fig leaves to hide from each other.   Then they heard God coming, and they hid some more.   And ever since, that’s what people do.   They hide.  And the more you hide, the less happy you become.

And if you don’t think you hide, then imagine if I could zap into your brain, and instead of preaching one Sunday here, I gave a highlight reel of some of the more… “let’s say”… interesting thoughts that you entertained over the past week.   Would you be like “Awesome, I can’t wait for you to share all my thoughts with the entire globe!”   I’d be willing to bet that would not be your reaction.  Heck, it wouldn’t be anybody’s.  We all hide,

But hiding wrecks you.   The folks in the rooms of AA say it well.  You are only as sick as your secrets.  Heck, in this psalm, they are certainly making this guy sick.  He says.  “While I kept silence, my body wasted away.”    That sure doesn’t sound good.  

But why does hiding make you sick?  It’s because the more you hide, the more alone you become.   You grow isolated from others.   You grow isolated from yourself.  You grow isolated from God.   And in your isolation, limited by your fears, your shame, you live a life so much less than what God dreams for you to live.  But you don’t need to hide.  You can be free.  You can live honest and unashamed. 

And you do it the way David who wrote this psalm did.  You bring yourself out of hiding.  But that coming out of hiding doesn’t come easy.  For to do that, you have to honestly face what you’re really hiding from.  That’s why David not only confesses his sin, he also confesses his iniquity.   Hold on.  What the heck is iniquity?  Heck, who even says that word anymore?  But trust me, iniquity is a really helpful word. 

Basically, when David confesses his iniquity.  He is saying to God.  I’m not only going to confess that I’ve done wrong things. No, I’m going to confess how much I liked it, how even though I knew it was wrong, hurtful, I still did it.  David is saying.  I’m going to face not just what I did.  I’m going to face why I did it.   

You see, sometimes, you can say you’re sorry for the wrongs you’ve done.  You can even believe you are genuinely sorry.   But in reality, you’re not so much sorry for the wrong.  You’re just sorry for its consequences.  You’re like that mule that David talks about in the psalm that only goes the right way when he feels the bit inside his mouth.  In other words, you only stop going in the wrong direction, when that direction starts hurting too much. 

The preacher Tim Keller talks about when he started out in ministry, he encountered a husband was be a total jerk to his wife, cold, unavailable, harsh even.  And when she called him on it, he ignored her.  When she asked for counseling, he said no.  Then one day, she told him.  She wanted a divorce.  And that’s when this husband called Tim and asked desperately if he would see them.   And Keller did, and the husband ‘fessed up.   He acknowledged what a total jerk he’d been.  And for six months, he was better, kinder, more loving, more focused on his wife.  But then he thought.  “You know, she’s not going to leave me.”  And boom it was right back to jerk-town.   Well, some more time passed, and again she threatened divorce.  And again the husband called his preacher, desperately seeking counseling.  Now, Keller didn’t share the end of the story, but it sure didn’t sound like this marriage was heading in a good direction.  And do you see why?

This guy was not sorry for being a jerk.  No, he was sorry for the consequences of being a jerk, losing his marriage, failing as a husband, the embarrassment and humiliation of a divorce.  But for him to come out of hiding, he’d have to go deeper.  He’d have to ask some hard questions about why he treated a woman he claimed to love the cold and harsh way he did.  He’d have to face up to his iniquity, to his mess inside.   And that can be hard. 

Lately my son has fallen in love with the most surprising song.  It’s one called Monster by the rock band, Skillet.   For my son, he loves the song because he saw it in a video about Sonic the Hedgehog.   But as I’ve listened to it like a hundred times now, the song has begun to get to me, because its words hit closer to home than I’d like to admit.

The lyrics go like this:

The secret side of me, I never let you see I keep it caged but I can't control it
So stay away from me, the beast is ugly I feel the rage and I just can't hold it

It's scratching on the walls, in the closet, in the halls It comes awake and I can't control it
Hiding under the bed, in my body, in my head

Why won't somebody come and save me from this, make it end?

I feel it deep within, it's just beneath the skin I must confess that I feel like a monster
I hate what I've become, the nightmare's just begun I must confess that I feel like a monster

I don’t carry the level of rage this writer describes.  But I know enough of it to recognize that I carry a version of it.  I have ugliness inside of me, ugliness I’d rather not see.   And to be honest, these days of social isolation and fear and stress and anxiety have made more aware of it than ever. 

   

And recently, it’s made me more aware in a painfully uncomfortable way of how a lot of the ugliness in the world around me has helped me.   Years ago, I heard someone share the saying.  “If you see a turtle on a fencepost, you know it didn’t get there by itself.”   What I didn’t see is that I was one of those turtles.  You see.  I’m a straight white American male, and those four things, none of which I did anything to get, have given me advantages in life that lots of others didn’t get.  And for the longest time, I wasn’t willing to face just how unfair all that is or how I have even enjoyed basking in that undeserved privilege.  But more and more I see how much pain and loss this system that put me on the fence post has cost so many others.   And I realize. I have a responsibility to do what I can to change that.   And that begins with me not hiding from myself the reality that the world in which I live favors me in ways that hurt and limit others.

So, you come out of hiding, what then?   Well, then the happiness comes.  Why?  Because when you come out of hiding, when you face the ugliness within you and even around you, you have a God that covers it completely.  God says to you.  I get it.  You’ve got stuff you don’t want anyone to ever see.   You have stuff, you don’t even want to see.   But God says.  If you bring it out of hiding, I will cover it all.   I will take away the shame.  I will free you from it.  I will free you from feeling the need to hide ever again.   And with that freedom come happiness, comes joy, comes peace.

In the early Christian communities, when you were baptized, even as an adult, you went in naked.  And when you came out, someone placed on you a sparkling white robe. Someone clothed you in beauty. 

And how can God do that?  How can God cover it all?   God can do that because in Jesus, he was stripped naked and humiliated so you would never be.    In Jesus, God took your shame and ugliness so you can live unashamed, so God can fill you with beauty.  And Jesus did that because he loves you.  He loves you no matter what.  And his love covers a multitude of sins.  And in that love, you have nothing you need to hide.  Instead you can hide in him.   And a thousand years ago, a Byzantine 

monk named Symeon, in a prayer, described just how beautiful that sort of hiding is.      

We awaken in your body, O Christ,

As you awaken in our bodies.

I wake up inside Your Body

Where all my body, all over,

Every most hidden part of it,

Is realized as joy in You

And You make me, utterly, Real,

And everything that is hurt, everything

That seemed to me dark, harsh, shameful,

Maimed, ugly, irreparably

Damaged, is in You transformed

And recognized as whole, as lovely,

And radiant in Your light.

Come out of hiding.  Know that even in the darkest of these days, even in the days when that darkness gets to you, you can live free, naked and unashamed.