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Room (2015), Transitions, Gratitude, and Forgiveness

Room (2015) Review: Transitions, Gratitude, and Forgiveness - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

I went in to the screening of Room in a sold out theatre. I had never met the man next to me, but by the end we felt like friends, largely because we had spent most of the last two hours crying next to one another.

I can’t speak to what particular images impacted my neighbor so deeply. Yet, considering that Room is a film about an abducted woman and her child who are kept in a shed for years (a circumstance that very few viewers of this film are likely to have experienced), there is something extremely connecting about it. Its themes are universal: the difficulty with transitions, the importance of gratitude, the difficulty and necessity of forgiveness.

Since everything I’m going to reveal is pretty easily discernible from both the trailer and the movie poster, I’m not sure anything counts as a real spoiler, but just in case: here’s your alert.

The first portion of the film takes place in the shed that our protagonists call simply Room. Room is the whole universe; outside of Room is outer space — or at least this is the story that Joy (Brie Larson) told her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in order to normalize his childhood and to cope with her reality. Jack treats every item as though it has its own personality; characters created by his mother to ease the loneliness. “Good morning, Lamp,” he starts the day. “Good morning, Chair.”

Joy is in Room against her will and everything there is a reminder of her captivity; every item is necessary and conserved because her captor is not generous; every new addition to the space must be politely requested as though her abuser is her benefactor. It is an understatement to say she cannot wait to get out of Room and into another space. She’s willing to risk everything — her son’s life, her own life — in order to get somewhere else.

And then, miraculously (and it does feel like a miracle, full of more hope than my heart is accustomed to bearing), she gets out. We see her in the clean, well-lit hospital, happy to shed the clothing that her abductor had given her, delighted that someone else has prepared her a meal (and we realize this is likely the first time this has happened in seven years). We see her in the comfort of her childhood bedroom and the spaciousness of her household — we can’t help but notice how many rooms there are here.

It’s in her childhood home that there’s a moment when Joy lands on the couch and bursts into tears. From behind her hands she says to her mom “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m supposed to be happy.”

I lost it.

I feel the same way about my own life transitions, the most recent of which is from seminary to post-graduate life. I had looked forward to being done with classes, had looked forward to being able to do work in the world, had looked forward to being able to write my own pieces instead of what was assigned — and now that I’m here, and I’m not as happy as I thought I would be, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

It strikes me that the power of this scene is that it applies to anyone who has ever transitioned; the universal experience of transition is manifested in its essence in this particular transition. We, like Joy, were in a place that we did not want to be; we anticipated escape. And then we’re out of where we were and in a different space, but it’s not what we imagined. We’re supposed to be happy, but we aren’t. And as long as we keep trying to live into what we’re “supposed to be” feeling, we can’t name how conflicted and ambivalent we really are. We would never dare admit that on some level we miss the routine and familiarity of the place we once were captive. We’re unable to integrate the blessings and curses of our captivity into our present life, and to the extent that we cannot bear that complexity, we are held captive by it. Until we are able to bless the complexity our experiences, we’re held captive by them.

We’ve all been Joy on the couch, wondering why we aren’t happy. We’ve all been wandering in the desert, wondering why we ever left Egypt.

In the end, it’s Jack who is able to name what he needs, who is able to ease the transition. He asks to go back to Room, to visit; we get the sense that Joy would never have done this otherwise. While Joy lingers right outside the Room, Jack enters into its familiar corners. He notices that it’s smaller; he’s able to see it with new eyes, a clear sign that his transition is well underway and that there is no going back. When it’s time to go, he gently touches everything as he leaves it, with the tiniest benediction: “Goodbye, Chair. Goodbye, Wardrobe. Goodbye, Room.”

Jack knows he can’t stay in the nostalgia and safety and familiarity of Room. He knows it’s time to go, and I believe he actively desires to go — to play with his friend, to run with dogs, to explore the world that is now open to him. And yet, the leaving does not diminish his gratitude and affection for what he leaves behind. He is able to bless what his life was even as he moves forward into what his life is.

Perhaps, he must bless what his life was in order to move into what his life could be.

Through Jack’s eyes, Joy is able to see Room with tenderness. Yes, it was a prison, it was the site of countless rapes, it was the site of the death of her firstborn. And, it was in that prison that she bore her son, that she taught him to read and to bake, that she breastfed him and bathed with him with an intimacy that the world was not present to scrutinize, that they shared good and beautiful moments of play and tenderness.

When Joy, at her son’s urging, finally says goodbye to Room, we know that she has begun to receive the blessings that it offered her. She has begun to bear the complexity of the place. It’s the same moment that she begins, perhaps for the first time, to truly cease to be its captive.

room

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Living in the Tomb

Sermon: Living in the Tomb - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

Reflections on John 11:32-44, delivered at Our Lady of Guadalupe Episcopal Church.

*******

I would have stayed in the tomb.

In the Middle East, it’s hot. Which means decomposition sets in quick, and the stench of that rotting process is heavy in the air. So if I had been four days in a tomb, in the heat — essentially the tomb becomes a warmed oven — I think I would have been too ashamed to come out.

And on top of that, there’s the problem of the bindings. The text describes how “his hands and feet were bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.” In the burial customs of the time, strips of cloth were tightly wound around the body — they bound the jaw closed, the feet together, and the hands to the side of the body. Which means that even after the shock of finding himself alive in his tomb, Lazarus is faced with the problem of exiting the tomb. He cannot walk with his feet bound together. He cannot even crawl with his hands tied to his side. The text doesn’t describe what must have been Lazarus’s struggling exit from the tomb; we can only imagine the movements of rolling and shuffling and squirming that must have taken him from the darkness to the light.

I would have stayed in the tomb. It would be less painful to stay dead than to suffer the humiliation of exiting on my belly and the shame of exposing the community to the stench of my death.

And that’s not to mention life after the tomb. In a culture where the dead are considered unclean, untouchable — where does an undead person go? what does he do? who will be near him, eat with him, care for him?

In commanding “Lazarus, come out!” — rather than going in, gathering up Lazarus in his arms, and carrying him out like a fireman making a rescue — in commanding Lazarus to come out, Jesus is asking a lot of his beloved friend. Jesus asks for Lazarus’s struggle and his exposure. Jesus asks for him to risk living with social stigma. Jesus asks for his full participation.

I would have stayed in the tomb.

Unless, perhaps, it becomes too painful to stay in the tomb any longer. I think we all reach this point, in different ways, at various moments of our life.

Perhaps it’s physical — our body is in pain or we suffer an addiction, and we know we can no longer keep living the way we have been, that our lifestyle habits have become a kind of tomb that we must leave in order to have real life.

Perhaps it’s relational — something about the person I become when I’m with this other person has turned my home into a kind of tomb, has bound me up in some way that I no longer feel like I have agency, and I need to crawl to someone who can unbind me.

Perhaps it’s societal, living in a system that bends toward injustice and it even though it will be really difficult to get out, staying in the tomb, staying with the way things are, is just no longer an option.

Jesus did not prevent his friend from dying. Mary and the Jews have a point: If Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died. So it seems that Jesus did not come to rescue us from going through difficulties.

And on the other side of death, at the tomb, at this scene: Jesus does does not rush into the tomb to deliver Lazarus out like a fireman rushing into a building burning. Rather, Jesus invites Lazarus to participate in his own salvation. Having done what he could do in raising Lazarus to life, Jesus expects Lazarus to do what he could do by making his way out of the tomb.

It’s when each of us is in a place of death — of pain and suffering and stench and shame — it’s when we feel trapped and bound and unable to act — it’s in death that Jesus offers the possibility of new life. Jesus calls to us. He calls to us: Come out! He invites us: Come out! He offers us hope that there is new life waiting to be had. Come out!

Jesus looks at something dead and see it as full of potential for life. Jesus looks at a corpse in a dark tomb and invites a living body into the light. Jesus looks at his beloved one and shows that death does not have to be the end of the story.

Having done what he can do in inviting us to new life, Jesus expects us to do what we can do to in our own movement and struggle out of our tombs.

Come out! Come out!

Lazarus, Come Forth by Salvador Dali (1964)
Lazarus, Come Forth by Salvador Dali (1964)
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The Tao of Pooh: Sources of Wisdom

The Tao of Pooh: Sources of Wisdom - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

I purchased this book when I saw it used after it had been recommended to me by multiple people due to my then-fondness for all things Winnie the Pooh — a fact which should date how long I’ve been meaning to read it. And the multiple recommendations and the time it’s been with me and the energy of moving it from one place to another has all contributed to a bit of a sense of overhype.

I had wanted Hoff to draw parallels in the particular, to articulate specific intersections between taoism and these stories from the Hundred Acre Wood. Instead, he explains a taoist principle and then provides a quote or story from A. A. Milne’s work. And that’s it. He provides these sweeping stories and leaves the readers to draw their own connections. At times, I appreciated the freedom; more often, I felt abandoned — like he had an interesting thesis and got lazy in actually proving it, so instead he just laid out the evidence and said, “Here! See?”

Though he fails to thoughtfully execute the idea, his intuition is good. In the foreword, Hoff writes that he was in a conversation about the historical masters of wisdom when someone argued that they all come from the East; Hoff differed. He went to Milne’s work as an example of a wise Western Taoist.

That his example of Western wisdom is found in children’s stories is significant, and unusual for Western thinkers. I imagine that for many readers, The Tao of Pooh is the first work that took seriously a beloved children’s figure and helped explain why that figure was so important in their lives.

Perhaps this is the greatest gift that Hoff gives his readers: a certainty that wisdom exists not only in the West, but in children’s stories, in fantastical tales, and made-up realms.

Indeed, we humans are always “doing” theology. We can’t help but convey our understanding of the world in every act, with every word, and within every story. Of course we tell our theology to our children in the stories we share with them; indeed, this may be some of the most dense and raw theology. The created worlds in children’s stories often contain aspects of magic or make-believe, which is a condensed way to talk about realities. For one relevant example,”heffalumps and woozles” is a condensed way to talk about all the things in the world that make us feel uncertain about our security, anything from robbers to natural disasters. It’s a silly-while-serious way to introduce children to a difficult concept: there exists in the world something that is not for your best interests. In adult theology, we have another condensed way to talk about this concept: evil.

Storytellers want children to understand the world the same way we do and help them find their place in it. This is why so many new parents are excited to build their child’s bookshelf; they know they’re stocking their child’s imagination with lessons and beliefs about the way the world works.

Perhaps we’d do better to examine children’s stories more carefully and to choose which beliefs of the world we hand on to the next generations. Do you want your children (nieces, nephews, neighbor’s kids) to believe the world is fundamentally safe or unsafe? for them or against them? easy or challenging? What stories do you know of that convey these understandings of the world?

tao-of-pooh-book-cover

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Writing

On Writing - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

Here’s my confession: I don’t love to write. Finding the right words with the proper connotations is tedious. Moving those words into a linear order to convey non-linear thoughts and emotions is frustrating. Constructing a piece so that the reader has all the needed information before arriving at the next point and the next point and, eventually, the conclusion, requires an out-of-myself-ness that’s draining. My thoughts, I find, are unwieldy. They are animals, some angry, fighting, blood-thirsty; others weak, starving, simply thirsty.

And yet, here I am. At my desk, as I aim to be every morning (but truthfully, after checking emails, I only manage to keep myself here about half my mornings). I have a mug of tea, or maybe it’s just a glass of water, my phone is face down, my everything notebook at my side in order to refer to my scribbles about my life and try to make some sense of them. I swivel in the chair, I look out the window. I wonder when the dog will interrupt me to be loved. I manage to get a sentence or two out. Swivel, stare. Where is that dog? I hope he comes by soon, to check on me, to be loved.

I’m here because, while I may not absolutely love the process of writing, I do love reading. Everything is arranged in a logical way, and after going through a well-written paper I understand the conclusions and it’s all so simple; I could explain the universe, or at least this fraction of it. For a few minutes, I feel secure in some new knowledge. Then the information gets admitted into my inner jungle of a world where it interacts with lurking creatures who live there, and this new piece quickly mutates into another unwieldy beast.

So I write something, I wrestle, I struggle, I re-phrase and re-order. I hate the piece. I hate my poor writing. I boil. This is shit!, I inwardly yell. Eventually, I decide I can’t take any more of that topic, or, as a godsend, the deadline approaches, and I stop. I call it good enough.

Some weeks go by.

Then, my hatred calmed, cooled, and stilled, I revisit the work. Perhaps I decide I’m able to work on it again, perhaps it was just returned to me from an editor. I read my own thoughts, but on paper they’re more clearly explained. The wild beasts are tamed, the fledglings are cared for. I realize, this is really good. I second-guess myself, check the header, Did I really write this? It all seems so much more manageable in this black-and-white linear space. It seems, even, hopeful.

And I move back to my desk, ready to tame the next portion of the jungle.

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Integrative Project Presentation

To Play with a Child Named Sorrow - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

This Spring, I handed in my final master’s work, called an Integrative Project, titled “To Play with a Child Named Sorrow: Engaging Sin, Grief, and the Self-in-Relation through Myth and Fairy Tale.” I spent 15 months to write and then whittle down to 70 pages, and then whittled further until I had a 10minute presentation. The abstract is below; click through here to see the presentation.

Western theology’s understanding of sin on pride has focused on pride, which has furthered the oppression of women. In the last 50 years, feminist theology has made great strides in explaining how pride (“masculine sin” developed by male theologians) oppresses and has named “feminine sin” (which I term echoism) as diffuseness, a lack of a sense of self, a defining of one’s self by relationship. However, theology has failed to discuss the ways in which these sins interact with one another and how we interpersonally move from sin to grace. In “The Myth of Echo & Narcissus,” we see the ways in which pride harmfully emphasizes the self and how echoism harmfully emphasizes relationship. In “The Tale of the Handless Maiden,” we come to see the transforming process of grief, which frees us to love. This is not simply a balance between pride and echoism; this process is a transformation of human character that comes through an active process of receiving God in the midst of grief. The burden is not on humanity to find a way to manage or balance our sins. Rather, as the tale shows us, characterological change frees us from the constraints of sin (with emphasis on either self or relation) and frees us to love as selves-in-relation.

See the 10-minute presentation here: https://vimeo.com/138362284

"Echo and Narcissus" by John William Waterhouse
“Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse
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Imago

Imago - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

A young girl rolls in the cool fountain water some distance from where our feet dabble. She calls over to us: “What does God look like?”

Her mom smiles and whispers to me, “She likes the light and easy questions lately.”

“Mom! What does God look like?” the daughter insists.

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Do you know?” her sincere eyes turn to me.

Well… God looks a little bit like your mom. And God looks a little bit like those ballerinas practicing in the grass. And a little bit like that man playing the saxophone. And a little bit like each person walking by and driving by. God looks a little bit like me. God looks a little bit like you.

I want to say that, but I hesitate, attempting to gauge what the mother’s reaction might be, and before I can resolve to risk it, the mother answers her again: “No one knows. God can’t be seen.”

The mother and I look to the girl, the girl looks down into the rippling water, and the moment is gone — but for the whisper in my head: Everyone who has eyes to see knows just what God looks like.

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Prayer for Graduates

A Prayer for Graduates - post on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

In my last week as a Divinity student at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, the registrar approached me. She explained that the last thing that happens before walking into the graduation ceremony — after the rehearsal and the formal photos and getting into our caps and gowns and lining up in the order in which we’ll walk — the very last thing is a prayer, offered by one of the graduating Divinity students. She asked if I would pray for our graduates this year.

So on a sweltering Saturday in June, at the registrar’s cue I left my place in the ordered lines and stood before my peers. I knew that the other speakers that morning were all on the theme of pilgrimage. This is the prayer I offered.

*          *          *          *          *

At the end of the prayer, I’ll lead us in singing the doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” We’ll sing it two times through. There are a few pronouns in the doxology; feel free to use whichever pronoun you wish, or to simply say “God” instead of pronouns, and in the multiplicity of our choices we will more fully bear the image of God.

The Lord be with you. And also with you.

Let us pray.

Divine One from whom we came, and to whom we go,

It has been such a long journey.
We have walked through valleys of readings.
We have hiked trails of paper-writing.
We have climbed through practicums
and scaled internships
and trekked through so much work to be here.

And now, today. Today we summit. Today we pause. Today we set down our packs,
we tend to our blisters,
we enjoy the view from up on this mountain,
and we rest.

May we enter this rest with freedom to celebrate and freedom to grieve.

May this rest bear witness to the complexities of our circumstances and to the ambivalences of our experiences.

May everything that comes to us during this time of rest this morning be for our healing and for your glory.

As you have always been with us, you are present now, and will always be. Help us to remain present with you and with one another this morning.

Send us now with hearts open to receive your blessings of grief
and your blessings of grace.

Send us now with eyes to see and ears to hear all your gifts as blessings of beauty.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Praise God/Him/Her all creatures here below,
Praise God/Him/Her above ye heavenly host,
Praise Father/Mother, Son/Child, and Holy Ghost.

*          *          *          *          *

When I started singing, I thought my voice would shake, but it was steadier and stronger than it should have been, given the tears that were forming. People joined quickly, a few scattered voices providing resonant harmony that helped every voice come more alive.The pronouned places were a beautiful jumble, not unlike humanity. At one point I stopped singing and let those I have held in prayer hold me in song, and I wept. As we all sang the amen, I quietly walked back to my place in the queue.

And we walked upstairs, me struggling through my tears to follow the black robe in front of me.

Photo courtesy of Paul Quinlivan, MACP, MATC
Photo courtesy of Paul Quinlivan
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The Slow Regard of Silent Things

First, I wanted to send Patrick Rothfuss’s slim novel The Slow Regard of Silent Things to anyone who has a loved one struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder. I didn’t really realize, until about halfway through, that this would be a primary and accurate way to characterize the main (and only human) figure in the novel.

Auri lives under a city, finding perfect homes for found items. She listens to the silent things. She discerns their character and longing. She intuits the personality of a room to hear if it lacks a bottle or a button. She stops, regularly, to wash her face and hand and feet. Her life is devoted to making everything “just as it should be,” while keeping her own impact and desires as small as possible, save a few luxuries such as soap (of course it would be soap, in one who epitomizes OCD).

What’s shocking about this slim novel is how compelling all this listening and discerning and soap-making is for the reader. Although written in third person, we are pressed so closely against her back that we feel her heart beat against our breast; we lovingly regard the inanimate items as she encounters them. It becomes important to us whether or not there’s a button under a rug or whether a brass gear is content on the mantle. This novel helped me feel what a burden and a gift it is to feel the world so tenderly.

Which made me wonder if there was more going on here than a character study of a psychological disorder, made me wonder if somehow this willfully small girl carries within her the image of God.

I’ve heard, my whole life, of the MMA Champion version of God who takes up space with all His muscles and forcibly bends the cosmos to His will. In Auri, the image-bearer, we glimpse the god who wouldn’t claim a capital “g” for herself, the god who attends to the character of lost and helpless things, the god who sees that some items are more beautiful when broken. The god who, in smallness, is able to mend what is cracked and tend what is askew.

Auri carries the image of the god who works as hidden and quiet as a spirit, the god whose love whispers in slow breathes. She searches in the manner of the god who behaves like a woman searching for a lost coin or a shepherd seeking a lost sheep, restoring all things to their proper places. She lives like the god who is willing to become small, to empty herself and become humble.

 

Rothfuss’s novel is more than a psychological study. It is a parable, a portrait of a god who intimately and quietly loves a broken world.

Illustration by Nathan Taylor, published in the novel.
Illustration by Nathan Taylor, published in the novel.
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Confessions

This sermon was written for Evergreen Mennonite Church in Kirkland, Washington. The primary text was Psalm 51; referenced texts are 2 Samuel 11-12 and Philippians 2:5-11.

Before he was King of Israel, David was a shepherd boy. He was the youngest of eight sons; when he wasn’t doing the very unroyal work of tending sheep, I imagine he was picked on by his older brothers. And then, one day, an old man shows up and names him King. He was just an ordinary guy, more or less content with his position in life — then suddenly holds the responsibility of a Kingdom. David rises to the challenge in relationship, in military strength, in religious commitment — he is not only a good leader, he’s a good person, described as “a man after God’s own heart.”

Until one afternoon when David saw her bathing on the roof and her beauty overthrew him. Now, David knew how to keep his head about him. When confronted with the well-shielded, well-armed giant Goliath, he remained cool enough to lethally aim a pebble. We wouldn’t expect this man to commit a sin of fiery passion — yet he does.

Afterwards, in his guilt, he tries to cover his sin by sending Bathsheba’s husband to the front line of battle. All his life, David had worked consistently to bring about the Kingdom of God — conquering Jerusalem, naming it his capital, vowing to build a temple there. He’s the last person we would expect to order the slaying of one of his own men, the last person we would expect to commit a sin of cold calculation — yet he does.

We have, in our cultural collective, a certain types. We say things like “He’s the type of person who would give you the shirt off his back” or “She’s the type of person who would sell her own mother to make a buck.” We have similar types of people for the kind of person who commits adultery, or the kind of person who commits murder. David, we might say, doesn’t fit the type — yet he sins.

Which is why I sometimes hear this description of David: “He was one of Israel’s greatest Kings, except for that Bathsheba business.” But I take some comfort in “that Bathsheba business,” find solace in the fact that David fell into such terrible and — let’s just say it — such obvious sin.

I take comfort because David seems, on the surface, to be the exemplary person who has his life together. Scripture tells us that he’s handsome. He’s an intelligent strategist. A strong warrior. He’s King of the Chosen People of God. He has absolutely everything by which we would mark success — the title, the house, the body, the wealth, the respect. The strong prayer life, commitment to God. And yet his sins here reveal that he doesn’t have it all together — they show that he’s as human as I am.

David is a person committed to God. David exploits his power in order to fulfill desire; David exploits his power in order to conspire a murder. In all of this, David shares our humanity.

The King and I seem to have little in common. We’re certainly separated by three thousand years of time and half a globe of distance. We’re separated by culture, social status, power, authority, privilege, and gender. And yet, to fail to read David’s humanity as intimately linked to mine denies the ways in which, on my best days, I am just like him — beautifully and brokenly human. Caught up in sins of passion, conspiring in sins of calculation. Exploiting the power and privilege I do hold.

For although I am not royalty, but I do have power and agency in my own small domains, as we all do in our jobs, our friendships, and our family systems. I have the power to treat others with dignity and respect. Power to exploit or manipulate others for my own ends. Power to ignore others as though they don’t carry the image of God.

 

*     *     *

It’s an oft-spoken saying that preachers should have a bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, and it was in reading the news these last few weeks that I began to see the gift offered us in David’s psalm. For what makes David a great leader isn’t the military strategy or the political savvy, it’s this moment, this psalm. What makes David a great person is the ability to see his actions as wrong, to admit to that wrongdoing, that sin, and to move toward reconciliation. What makes David a great leader is that he confesses his sin as publicly as the sin was made, that he sees his personal actions as intricately tied to the national systems.

I mentioned that I only began to recognize this modeling as a gift when I put my bible in one hand and my newspaper in the other. As I read about the act of terrorism at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston; as I read about the following acts of terrorism in burning black churches throughout the US South; as I read the countless tweets, facebook updates, blog posts, and journal pieces of African American people begging our nation to collectively realize we have a race problem — David’s psalm became such a gift.

In the same way David doesn’t seem to fit the type, we don’t seem to fit the type either for this sin of racism. Most people don’t identify as racist — even White Pride groups say they aren’t racist, they just love their heritage. And if even they don’t admit racism — what are the chances that the average American will? What are the chances that a people concerned with matters of social justice will recognize their own racist tendencies?

And when I look at the people gathered here — well, I doubt any of you are donning white sheets and setting fire to the lawns and churches of your black neighbors. There are no confederate flags among us, on our cars or our clothing. We just don’t fit the type of person who is racist.

So David’s story gives me pause. David doesn’t fit the type of person who would be an adulterer or a murderer. Before Nathan came to him, I don’t believe David thought of himself as an adulterer and murderer. But when confronted, he responds: “Have mercy on me, O God…blot out on my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, my sin is ever before me.”

This confession is part of our holy scripture; it was public in the kingdom in which David reigned. Because he held public office, as it were, his sins were publicly known — people talk. And in his psalm, he models for us what repentance looks like by showing the way in which true confession is AS public as the sin. For him, the people likely all knew or had heard whisperings; his confession had to be public.

For us it is likely smaller. I recently read a piece about race in Seattle. The reporter, in researching, wrote that she had approached a young African American man and told him, “I’d love to interview you; you’re so eloquent,” and then immediately hears herself sound, in her words, “like one of those people who said candidate Obama was so well-behaved, well-groomed, polite — for a black man.”

 

She could have just gone on with the interview. She could have caught herself in her head, confessed to God (privately), and said nothing to the man. He would have answered her interview questions, probably eloquently; she would have gotten her quotes for the story; no real harm done. Just her lingering feeling of self-consciousness after using a word with a history and his lingering feeling of needing to perform for white people to notice to him.

Instead, the reporter quickly confesses to the man: “I can’t believe I just called you eloquent.” He gives her a knowing look, and then begins to laugh, a bubbling outpour of grace, and she is freed to join in his laughter — the reconciliation complete in laughter’s grace.  And they carry on with an interview that, I imagine, was somehow more comfortable and authentic than it would have been had she refused to confess her sin as publicly as it had been made.

So, a confession of my own: I have, this week even, chosen a different route to walk because I saw a black man ahead of me; I am a racist.

Another confession: I am a white person talking about race, and I am very uncomfortable. This discomfort and unwillingness to talk about race is part of what makes me racist. And part of what makes me privileged; white people get to choose whether or not we discuss race.

Another confession: I’m only able to speak in this room, at this time, because education systems have privileged me — at least in part — because of my race.

I confess these sins; the reporter confesses her sin; David confesses his sin because the recognition of sin as sin and the appropriate confession of it are not only the first steps toward reconciliation, they are the direct cause of reconciliation.

I’m encouraged to confess my sins and to name my iniquities, because David does the same for sins that are, if we were to use a measuring stick (which we aren’t supposed to do, but if we were to), David’s sins would be “worse.” Adultery. Murder. And yet David is restored to God; it seems that nothing is beyond God’s capacity and willingness to forgive, even when justice cannot be served. David is restored to the community and reconciled to God even though Bathsheba’s marriage and Uriah’s life cannot be restored. God’s forgiveness of David is so complete that God blesses the union of David and Bathsheba in the form of their son Solomon — the wisest of all Israel’s kings. In a sense, we could say that wisdom is the result of confession.

That David is reconciled even though justice cannot be done — this lends me tremendous hope for the possibility of racial reconciliation. It will not be easy. It will require recognizing personal acts as sinful. It will require looking at national systems as sinful. It will require true confession and repentance. It will require a breaking open and cutting away of the callouses around our hearts, will require, as David says, brokenheartedness. David says “A broken heart, O God, you will not despise.” Today we might say, “A soft heart, O God, you will not despise.” It was modeled for us in Christ, who emptied himself, who refused to exploit his power so that he could be with us in our humanity and our suffering.

When it comes to racism in America, justice cannot be served this side of the coming of God’s Kingdom. We cannot undo slavery. We cannot reclaim the four million or more lives that were lost in crossing the Atlantic in cargo holds. We cannot bring back Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown, or Eric Garner. We cannot bring back the nine victims of Mother Emanuel Church– Sharonda, Clementa, Cynthia, Tywanza, Myra, Ethel, Daniel, Depayne, Susie.

Have mercy on us, O God,

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out our transgressions.

Wash us thoroughly from our iniquities,

and cleanse us from our sin.

For we are learning to know our transgressions,

and our sin is ever before us.

Indeed, we were born guilty,

sinners when our mothers conceived us.

Let us hear joy and gladness;

let the bones that have been crushed rejoice.

Create in us clean hearts, O God,

and put a new and right spirit within us.

Sustain in us a willing spirit.

Then we will teach transgressors your ways,

and sinners will return to you.

Deliver us from bloodshed, O God,

O God of our salvation,

and our tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

You have no delight in sacrifice;

if we were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Credit to Sarah Green, SarahGreenIllustration.com
Credit to Sarah Green, SarahGreenIllustration.com