On Disposability and Belovedness

Our Wednesday night enrichment series for Lent has us engaging the Psalms, which reminded me of this very Lenten sermon from last year on Psalm 51. So here is an offering from my nascent “archives.”

---

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.

You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;     wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

A couple of years ago for Lent, my family and I attempted to give up single-use plastics. We selected this as our discipline early, well before Ash Wednesday, and planned all that we would need to do to make this happen: remember to grab the dang tote bags from the trunk at the grocery store (I remain the worst at this), keep a set of utensils in my bag, the co-op sells in bulk so we’ll get our staples there… then, oh shoot can’t order online, anymore, can we? Wait that’s [insert any number of things] in plastic too? Add to the mix that our daughters were 4 and 7 at the time, and everything marketed to them is in plastic and is plastic, and well, I’m sorry to say Lent 2023 did not go down as one of my more “successful” fasts. 

We did try, though. And I’m not really sure such a discipline is exactly a “goal” one tries to "succeed" at, conventionally speaking. My family may have tried and failed to give something up completely, but what we managed to do instead was become aware- aware of just how often we take plastics for granted. How our society has embraced the convenience of using a thing ever so briefly before forever discarding it, where it will neither rot nor decay nor, despite our best efforts, reasonably be recycled nor composted nor will it feed something nor grow new life. 

No, plastic defies all of these natural, cyclical processes and just… goes on… perhaps forever? Longer than any of us, our children, our grandchildren will see, at least. 

It is, you might say, the exact opposite of ashes to ashes, dust to dust - the acknowledgment that God formed us from the very ground and that, as mortals, we will return to that stuff from which we were made. At the beginning of this Lenten season, we are invited to reflect on our own mortality with the imposition of ashes on our foreheads. And for me, I've always found that to be such a tender moment. As we confront the inevitability of death and the ways we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, we get the sign of the cross - marked as uniquely known and loved. 

---

We are beloved. Not to be taken for granted, used, and casually discarded. 

We are mortal. We are but dust. 

---

So in Lent, this decision to confront my relationship with single-use plastics took a decidedly spiritual and theological turn. What else am I taking for granted and casually discarding? Who else?

It is remarkable just how much disposability culture permeates our ways of being. At my church, we shaped an adult church school curriculum around this topic for Lent last year. We started with “stuff,” looking at plastics and then consumerism. Then, we looked at “others,” exploring mass incarceration as a means to “dispose” of certain people from society and later engaging disability justice. But we finished the series by looking inward, to our own selves. Because I think when everything around us can be easily thrown away, we also see ourselves as being easily thrown away. We lose sight of our own belovedness. 

---

Turning to the text, I wonder how you receive the words of Psalm 51, read frequently throughout Lent. It is one of 7 penitential psalms, likely the most well-known of the bunch. Perhaps due to several musical settings of it that I love, I find it somehow comforting? I realize "comfort" may seem a strange reaction, when the text includes such penitential lines as "against you, you alone, have I sinned," and "indeed I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me" and various other descriptions of transgressions and iniquities and all that harsh and scary biblical language that doesn't really align with the grace and love and liberatory justice that drew me to Jesus. 

And so I want to take a moment to recognize that this language can be, and has been, weaponized in the church. For some, perhaps some of you, the message from church leaders, family members, or others around language like this emphasized and in fact bred shame. As Brene Brown characterizes it, shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. That, to me, sounds kind of like viewing ourselves as disposable. It sounds like distrusting our belovedness. 

And I do think shame is what the psalmist is feeling. The superscription to the psalm (language at the beginning of some psalms that is gives information about things like authorship) tells us that Psalm 51 is intended to represent the voice of King David, after he has raped Bathsheba and had her husband Uriah murdered. So I mean… part of me is thinking, yeah a little shame is warranted here, David! 

Now that said, shame is still probably not a useful response to even abhorrent behavior such as this. Back to Brene Brown, she makes a distinction between shame and guilt. Shame, she explains, looks at the self and says I am unworthy… of love, of community, of God. I as the whole of my person am unworthy of these things. Guilt, rather, looks at behavior and acknowledges, “I did a bad thing.” And people who do bad things are still beloved. They still belong. 

We all do bad things. We all hurt people. And yet by God’s grace, we are all still known and loved. God will not just throw us away and give up on us. Thanks be to God. 

---

Which doesn’t mean it always feels that way. Because shame is also a universally-felt emotion. It doesn’t take committing David’s high crimes to have shame. Society imposes it on us. We impose it on ourselves. We don’t feel good enough. We don’t feel successful enough. Smart enough. Responsible enough. We use too much plastic! We consume too much stuff! We don’t give enough of our time and talents to the church, or to a movement, or to people who could use our help. We spend too much time on our screens. We are too complacent about, too complicit in, systems of exploitation and oppression. We are not a good enough friend, or parent, or child, or lover. 

These are all sins worth self-examination and reflection, to be sure. Confession, both corporate confession shared in community and that confessed in our personal prayer life, is a worthy and good endeavor, one that puts us in right relationship with God and our communities. But ideally, confession helps us meaningfully work through guilt and fosters accountability rather than perpetuating the ways we feel shame over these things. 

Some regard this psalm a model for confession and repentance. I actually take issue with that characterization, because I don’t think shame accomplishes what confession intends. Looking at the specific text, I don't think that David has exactly sinned against God alone, as the psalm reads. There's the issue of Bathsheba and Uriah, as well as the larger community disrupted by the ordeal. The psalmist doesn't seem to really take real accountability for these sins and transgressions so much as he tries to bargain with God for forgiveness, which is not how I understand grace to work. Actual accountability might name the bad behavior explicitly and take ownership of it. He might ask for wisdom to make reparations to the people he has harmed. But instead, the psalmist just says, well, I was born this way - so fix me, God. Now this may not be very Presbyterian of me to say, given our Calvinist roots, but I'm not so sure this kind of hollow self-deprecation pleases a God who made us in their own image.

I also wonder about the imagery of being cleansed thoroughly of one’s sins, like they never even happened. I read a piece by a prison chaplain recently, and their observation was that people seeking spiritual guidance in prison often say of their past crimes, “I am not that person anymore.” But, this chaplain explained, what was far more spiritually transformative was for a person to integrate their past into their present understanding of themself: “I am a person who did these things and it shaped me into who I am now.” I can’t help but think of disposability culture again, how we try to discard entire experiences or phases of life from our understanding of our present selves.

---

So yeah, I don’t really think this psalm is a model confession. Nor do I think it says much of anything about God’s nature. But it does tell us something about how we, the children of God throughout the ages, attempt to relate to God. I am not a great king of Israel, neither am I a murderer, I promise. But, for all my critiques of this language as some sort of archetypal confession, I do hear myself in this psalm, in those moments when I doubt God’s grace could really extend to me. When shame threatens my faith. When I stop trusting that God’s ways are not our ways and worry God might throw me away like a plastic wrapper. Like how we so easily throw away others. Like how easily we view ourselves as disposable. I hear these words, and I don’t feel alone in those feelings. That is the beauty of the psalms, how they capture the breadth and depths of our shared human experience and emotions in trying to know God. 

I love Thomas Atwood’s musical setting of this text. It is truly by design that the musical setting brings the psalms to life. They are, after all, intended to be sung:

https://youtu.be/NdOten7bj0k?si=r9P4qcHggm--q2zQ

That tune… under that language… the way the soloist sings it alone and then the choir all join to sing it again together…  somehow assures me that the plea it expresses is relatable but futile. Music has a way of doing that, of communicating so much more than the text alone could ever. I sing it to myself often, and in it, I hear that God's love is abundant and God's grace freely given, even as the words sung suggest worry of the contrary. Though I have sinned, I am beloved… and in the company of a host of other beloved sinners just like me, who have brought their shame before God and felt it relieved. So for me, these words are comforting; though expressions of shame from the psalmist, they are not an affirmation of that shame from God. This psalm is a reminder that we can bring our shame to God to heal, but God will not shame us. God's desire is not to cast us away, as the world might do, but to always draw us closer to Godself.

Which is why I really love the pairing of this psalm in the lectionary with Jeremiah 31. The psalmist asks for a clean heart. But what Jeremiah tells us is that God has written on our hearts a new covenant; it’s already there; we don’t have to bargain for it or cleanse ourselves. Among the various smudges and stains of our life is also this mark of relationship with God. And as part of that relationship, God promises to forgive those sins and iniquities we beat ourselves up over. 

---

If you couldn’t tell from my earlier comments, I’m generally not a fan of “purity” and “cleanliness” rhetoric, really. It’s common in the Bible, but I suppose I’ve seen too many people hurt by it in the church - the people considered “unclean,” usually due to some marginalized status. And so, inclined against the rhetoric as I am, I wonder if the desire to metaphorically scrub our hearts clean might also cause us to metaphorically wash away that writing in Jeremiah - that relational dimension with God. The knowledge of our belovedness. 

That knowledge is the antidote to disposability culture, I think. Because I cannot truly see my siblings as the beloved children of God that they are until I know and trust that I am one, too. And if I don’t see others as beloved children of God, or at least some other recognition of their full dignity, then they are essentially disposable, aren’t they? 

Knowing our belovedness like this means releasing our shame. I hope Psalm 51 and our discussion of it might help in that endeavor rather than hinder it, but if David’s expression of shame only serves to perpetuate it in you, perhaps today’s hymns might better resonate: God’s love will not let me go, God abides with us in life and death, so shall my walk shall be close with God, calm and serene my frame. When we trust our belovedness, we can come to confession differently, without shame, confessing our sins so we can do the hard work of being accountable for the ways we have harmed others. We can find ways to be in true solidarity with people experiencing oppression and marginalization, because we are all beloved and we know it. We don’t need to clean our hearts, only to know and believe what’s already written there. May we be moved by that knowledge to usher in God’s justice and kin-dom on earth.