RCL Lent 1A
9 March 2014
Saint Faith’s Anglican
Church
Vancouver BC
Focus text: Psalm
32
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist on Sunday the 9th.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist on Sunday the 9th.
A little
more than two years ago our Diocese initiated a new programme called ‘Screening
in Faith’. The purpose of this programme
is to ensure that those exercising ministry in our Diocese have no criminal
records as well as screened to make sure that the people we serve are safe and
can trust in the ministry we offer.
I drove down
to the Main Street station of the Vancouver Police Department, completed the
required form, presented the letter from the Diocese asking for the police
records check and then waited as the young clerk entered the information into
her computer terminal. After a few
minutes, she smiled and said, ‘Well, this is a surprise. It won’t let me complete the form. I’ll try again.’ I wasn't worried; after all, there were
probably many requests flowing through the electronic universe.
About ten
more minutes passed without any success.
The clerk said, ‘This has never happened to me before. I cannot give you a report. If you want to continue the process, then you
will have to obtain a money order in the amount of $100, be finger-printed and
then wait for a report from the RCMP.’
Now I was worried. In an instant
I found myself racing through my past, trying to figure out what was going on.
As I left
the station to find my bank and obtain the necessary money order, I began to
worry and I do mean worry. Was I being double-checked because I had not
filed my US tax returns for a number of years?
‘No,’ I thought, ‘there are thousands of us in Canada.’ Had the RCMP discovered that, as a university
student, I had briefly subscribed to the Socialist Workers’ Party newspaper? ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I laughed, ‘how many
university students have done such things?.’
My mind was
still re-tracing the path of my life when I returned to the station. I was quickly and, I must say, politely
finger-printed by a sympathetic technician.
The clerk who took my payment, not the same one who had unsuccessfully received
my earlier application, smiled and said, ‘These things happen, you know. It’s probably nothing.’ For the next two weeks I was anxious and
jumped at almost every telephone call.
Then one
night I was watching ‘The National’ on CBC.
They broke the story that the RCMP, over the objections of many
municipal police forces, had instituted new rules. Any person applying for a police records
check whose gender and birthdate were the same as a known criminal offender was
now required to be finger-printed and the report cleared through the RCMP’s own
process.
I had been
one of the first persons caught in this new procedure. Somewhere in Canada there is a man, born on
the same day as I was, who has a criminal record. He and I are linked in the digital memory of
the RCMP and, in the future, I may have to undergo this process again. I am suspect by association; his guilt is, in
a very small way, attached to my name and my birthday.
But having
said this, I must confess to you that I do have secrets. All of us have secrets. All of us have or have had secrets that have
festered in our hearts, our minds, even our very souls. We have lost sleep over these secrets and, I
am sure, from time to time have been deeply worried that these secrets will
eventually surface.
‘While I
held my tongue, my bones withered away, because of my groaning’ says the
Psalmist, ‘for your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my moisture was dried
up as in the heat of summer.’ (Psalm 32.3, 4)
The Psalmist knows what you and I know; there are secrets, guilty
secrets, unpleasant secrets, that we conceal not only from our family and
friends, but even from ourselves. We
allow these secrets to sink into some deep pool, hoping that they will remain
there. But the current changes and the
secrets rise closer to the surface, causing us mental and physical suffering.
The mental
and physical suffering is not sent to us by God; it is not an active punishment
that God inflicts upon us. To the
contrary, God waits, just beyond the boundary of our suffering, anxious to
offer us compassion, forgiveness and renewed life. Our suffering is caused by our own refusal to
acknowledge the reason for our anguish and to open the door to God’s mercy and
grace. The Psalmist writes, ‘Do not be
like horse or mule, which have no understanding; who must be fitted with bit
and bridle, or else they will not stay near you.’
This saying
is true and worthy of all to be received:
Confession is not only good for the soul; it is good for the body, mind,
heart and soul. The word ‘confess’ has
at its root a Latin word meaning ‘to speak, to utter’. Secrets lose their power when they are spoken
and there are many ways to speak them safely and with confidence.
One way is
to utter them to God in prayer. I have
found in my own life of prayer that I find greater meaning in actually speaking
the words that are forming in my heart rather than trust them to silence. There are times when speaking the truth to
God, ‘to [whom] all hearts are open, all desires known, and from [whom] no
secrets are hidden,’ (‘Collect for Purity’, BAS 185) liberates me from the
burden those secrets, those fears put upon me.
We have all had moments when we have tried to deceive ourselves by our
silence, but speaking the truth to God removes the blinders from our eyes and
we are freed.
Then there
are times when our secrets must be spoken to those who are most likely to be
either sufferers with us or the unknowing victims of our secrets. I am speaking about the secrets that
genuinely harm another person. Carrying
such secrets often causes far more harm to those who bear them than the pain
that might be caused by speaking them.
From the
earliest days of the Christian movement we have recognized a third way of
speaking secrets: speaking the secret to
another trusted confidant who can help us say the words and free the soul to
new life. Through the centuries this has
sometimes been called ‘confession’ or ‘penance’, but I prefer the older term of
‘reconciliation’. When we are burdened
by secret guilts and fears, we cannot be ministers of reconciliation in a world
desperate in need of such ministers. We
cannot undertake to forgive others as God has forgiven us; we are too heavily
burdened by our own sins to ease the burden of others. But there are trusted people, ordained and
lay, who can hear the words spoken so that we can hear the promise of
compassion and forgiveness.
So, my
friends, let us search the deep waters of our hearts, minds and souls. Let us take hold of God’s compassion and, if
needs be, draw out of the depths those secrets which burden us. Let us speak them out loud, whether to God in
prayer or to another beloved of God who can help us shed the weight these
secrets lay upon us. For mercy embraces
those who trust in the Lord and joy for all who dare to let God’s light scatter
the darkness that clouds our souls. Amen.
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