Text: Psalm 32

My guess is that everybody here wants to be happy. We dream of happiness, we plan for
it, and perhaps pay almost any price to achieve it. Searching for happiness, one person
will make a lot of money; another gives all their money away. One couple will have five or
six kids (though that’s rarer these days: yesterday I read a report that said by 2050
the typical family – the majority of ‘families’ – will have no kids); another
person will enter a convent.

Ask the average person what he or she wants out of life and they’ll say without
hesitation: ‘I just want to be happy.’

I was phoned early one morning from a hospital. A troubled young woman in our church
had tried to overdose on drugs and threw herself into the Parramatta River in Sydney. As I
arrived at her bedside she said, ‘Rowland, I just want to be happy.’

Now occasionally we meet someone who enjoys being miserable – and who gets a perverse
delight in making others unhappy. There’s a beautiful/sad Usenet newsgroup on the
Internet – ‘alt.abuse.recovery’ – and the stories there of people – in our
culture, not just East Timor or West Africa or somewhere – who torture people, even
children are terrible.

I have a friend, a therapist who specializes in helping the adult survivors of
childhood abuse. I am her ‘supervisor’: and some of the case histories she
brings to our fortnightly sessions together would give you nightmares. How humans can
torture or rape babies and get pleasure out of it is beyond any normal person’s
imagination. Apparently there’s a Satanic/ritualistic group out there somewhere they
call ‘The Church of Asphyxiation’ which specializes in that art. Awful!

On a lighter note, Woody Allen apparently wasn’t joking when said of one of his
productions: ‘If my movie makes one more person miserable, I’ll be happy!’

Being rich or famous doesn’t make you happy. Aristotle Onassis said just before he
died: ‘I’ve just been a machine for making money. I seem to have spent my life
in a golden tunnel looking for the outlet which would lead to happiness. But the tunnel
kept going on. After my death there will be nothing left.’ His daughter, Christina
Onassis, seriously attempted suicide at least once. Richard Burton tried to drink himself
to death. That brilliant thinker Voltaire wrote: ‘I wish I had never been born.’
Gould, the millionaire (there weren’t so many back then!), when he was dying, said
‘I suppose I am the most miserable devil on earth.’

Have you heard the definition of a ‘celebrity’? It’s someone who works
all their life to become famous enough to be recognized, then goes around in dark glasses
so that no one will know who they are!

Some Swedish psychologists studied 1000 happy people. Some of them were old, two were
blind, one had an incurable disease… but the great majority of them were free from
tension and fear, they enjoyed friendships with other people, and had a goal in life.

So here we state a very important principle: Happiness is not attained by trying hard
to be happy. It’s a by-product of doing other worthwhile things. Happiness is
serendipitous: the experience of making happy discoveries while looking for something
else. Happiness is where we find it: rarely where we seek it!

Happiness is many things… but primarily three:

[1] Happiness is enjoying living with yourself. It’s the art of ‘being
yourself’ and not wanting to be – or be like – anyone else. Robert Louis Stevenson
once said, ‘To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the
only end of life.’ No person is on earth by accident. You are unique – an
unrepeatable miracle of God’s creation. And God does not love anyone more than God
loves you! And moreover nothing you can do – or be, or become – can cause God to love you
any more or less than God loves you now. I like the profound wisdom of Hugh of St Victor:
‘God does not share out God’s love between all creatures: all of God’s love
is available to all of God’s creatures.’ Now that’s a difficult concept for
many of my clients who’ve been abused: they often naturally transfer their anger from
other authority figures who abused them on to God. And I have some sympathy with that. As
a perceptive pastor-friend says: ‘God has a lot to answer for.’ God has! (And
God will. And I believe we’ll all be surprised!).

[2] Happiness is loving service to others. Confucius said: ‘Those who wish the
good of others have already secured their own.’ Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel
Prize for her work among the ‘poorest of the poor’ in India and elsewhere. I was
privileged, with my 14-year-old daughter, to visit the ‘House of the Dying’ in
Calcutta: and Lindy has been back there as a volunteer. (See her brilliant sermon on our
website: ‘The End of My Searching?’). A highly educated Mauritian girl entered
Mother Teresa’s order in India, and for three hours she lovingly bathed an old woman
who’d been found in a trash bin, where she’d been left to die. ‘This young
lady came home radiating joy,’ said Mother Teresa. "I have been touching the
body of Christ for three hours" she told me.’

[3] The third relationship is, I believe, with God. And that’s the theme of our
psalm, Psalm 32. This psalm or song or hymn was probably written by David, and tradition
says he wrote it a year after he had committed adultery and murder and was faced up to his
sin by Nathan the prophet. It’s one of the so-called ‘penitential psalms (the
others: 6, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143).

Psalm 32 celebrates five keys to happiness:

{1} CONFESS – AND YOU’LL BE FORGIVEN (32:1-5).

This psalm is actually a case-history, says one commentator. There are three stages in
the psalmist’s experience. The first stage is one of abject misery (verses 3,4).
Ancient Jews – and others (and others not so ancient!) – tended to connect all sickness
with sin. Job’s so-called ‘comforters’ pressed that point almost brutally:
‘Name a single case where a righteous person met with disaster!’ (Job 4:7). Job
was more enlightened, and insisted his sickness might have nothing to do with sin, a view
Jesus confirmed (see John 9:3). However Jesus cured a paralyzed man and said ‘My son,
your sins are forgiven’ (Mark 2:5). Certainly there is sometimes a connection between
‘sin’ and ‘sickness’. An interesting book I read in the 1960’s,
S.I. McMillan’s ‘None of These Diseases’ makes the point that a number of
common diseases, like high blood pressure, migraine headaches, heart trouble, peptic
ulcers etc. may result from our failure to live right and/or obey God’s laws. His
slogan: ‘It’s not what you eat but what eats you that makes you sick,
often!’

In my counseling practice I regularly come across people whose physical health is poor
because of unresolved guilt or anger or fear or shame. Sometimes, in Shakespeare’s
words, we need ‘more… the divine than the physician.’ A popular writer on
these matters, Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Paul Tournier, tells many stories of patients who
must choose between two roads – the clinic or Christ.

The second stage in the psalmist’s experience is ‘repentance’ (32:5) –
which is turning from our sin to God. It’s a simple, decisive act, and you can sense
incredible relief in the psalmist’s words as he does this. Recently I listed the 100
books I believe every thoughtful person should read – you can find the list on my website.
High among them is Augustine’s ‘Confessions’. In that moving book he tells
of his conversion to Christ as he read Paul’s words in Romans 13:13-14: ‘All at
once, as I came to the end of the sentence, my heart was filled with a sunshine of
confidence, before which all my dark doubts fled away.’ Psalm 32 was his favorite
psalm: he had it put on the wall at the end of his bed.

Here we pause however to make two theological observations. Our view of our sinning can
range across a spectrum, from finding sins where they don’t exist at one end, to
permissiveness at the other: both extremes are spiritually and psychologically unhealthy.
The second thing I want to say is that Augustine’s preoccupation with humans’
sinning has cast a long theological shadow across the centuries, so that in our creeds and
theological statements of faith the Church has always mentioned sin but never love. In
other words, the ‘Pharisee’ in us may think sin is the essence of what a human
being is. It’s not: rather humans are created in the image of God, who loves them (in
spite of their sinning). Read Matthew Fox’s brilliant book ‘Original
Blessing’ on this point.

The psalmist’s third stage was blissful happiness (32:1,2). I read somewhere that
no language has so many words for ‘sin’ as the Hebrew, so sensitive was this
people’s relationship with their God. There are three words here which mean
‘wilful disobedience,’ ‘missing the mark’ and ‘wrong-doing’.
But there are also three words for forgiveness here – it’s a burden , lifted away,
God has canceled a debt, the Divine Judge has put the sin out of sight.

Forgiveness, in the Bible, is an event, not just an idea. In the forgiving transaction,
something tangible happens. Our sins are ‘blotted out’, cast into the sea,
though they are scarlet they become white as snow, removed as far as the east is from the
west (an infinite distance, unlike northness and southness which are finite!). When God
forgives, something happens. We are released from a crushing burden, and rather than
re-enacting the atonement by punishing ourselves, we simply receive it. We are invited to
‘own’ our sins, then ‘disown’ them. To confess our sins to God is not
to make God aware of something not already known. Rather, until we confess them our
relationship with God is spoilt: there is an abyss between us. When we confess them, if
you like, bridge-building commences. God’s forgiving grace meets our confession, and
we are ‘reconciled’.

The second key to happiness in this psalm –

{2} PRAY – AND YOU’LL BE RESCUED (32:6-7)

This psalm is a ‘maschil’ or psalm of instruction, and it tells us that if
we’ve got a problem we ought to share it – with God in secret, and in joyful praise
in the congregation.

Trouble is inevitable says M Scott Peck in another of my ‘top 100’ books
‘The Road Less Traveled’. Life is all about the way we cope with problems. To
some extent life’s best lessons are ‘learned in the school of adversity’.
For those who get on top of their troubles life may ‘get better and better even
though it gets harder and harder’. Different people react to trouble in different
ways.

Norman Vincent Peale had a famous prayer: ‘Lord give me ten big problems today,
please. Ten adult-sized problems, so that I can use your grace and strength to transform
them into triumphs.’ Now that’s O.K. for Norman Vincent Peale: he was surrounded
by loving people. But others aren’t. Some, facing trouble, ‘die’, become
immobilized, collapse when someone thwarts their plans or hurts them. I can understand
that a little: their coping mechanisms haven’t been allowed to develop for one reason
or another. Life is just too hard. Others explode in frustration or rage, externalizing
their feelings towards or against other people – or even physical objects. (I have a
client who buys secondhand spectacles from thrift shops so that she can stomp on them in
her kitchen when she’s in a rage!). Others internalize their anger and may become
sick or depressed.

The most creative response is of course to adapt to inevitable trouble, to use it
constructively, to ‘tack into the wind’. It’s all about the sometimes
impossible vision of God’s being ‘at work in all things for good.’ Where is
God when it hurts? I don’t know, frankly; it’s a mystery to sensitive,
thoughtful people. Perhaps God was in the same ‘place’ when Jesus asked the same
question as he died in agony on a cross. Is God responsible for all trouble? In the
ultimate sense, ‘yes’, I believe, unorthodox as that sounds, simply because God
has the power to prevent it. Why then does God allow trouble and pain? I once wrote an
article on that (look up Suffering on our website) and my best conclusion was that even
when we get to know a little of God’s love it might still be a struggle to understand
God’s ways. Half the psalms wrestle with this question (the psalms that don’t
get into our modern church songs!). But I am orthodox in this: if, as I believe, this God
became one of us, suffered with us and died for us, than perhaps the best answer to this
cosmic question is not a logical one after all, but an ‘incarnational’ one.

{3} SUBMIT – AND YOU’LL BE GUIDED (32:8-9)

The Scriptures assure us that we are not like rats in a maze. Generally God wants us to
know what God wants us to do and where God wants us to go. Paul wrote to the Ephesian
Christians and told them not to be fools, but to know the will of the Lord (Ephesians
5:17). He prays for the same wisdom for the Colossians (1:9,10, cf. 4:12). You find out
what God wants you to do by submitting to what you know already is God’s will for
you. It works the same way in any relationship. As I and my wife ‘submit’ to one
another, we learn more about each other’s ‘will’ and how to please each
other.

One experienced follower of Jesus put it this way: ‘When I have to make a
decision, and I’m not sure which way to go I pray hard and think hard.

When the time is up and I must act, if I have done all the thinking and

praying I can do, I say "Lord, show me the next thing to do." I believe

that the first idea that comes into my mind is the answer…’

{4} TRUST – AND YOU’LL BE PROTECTED (32:10)

Here the psalmist contrasts the wicked and the righteous. The wicked trust in
themselves; they live independently of God. The righteous trust in the Lord; they are
dependent on the Lord. A good New Testament text on this point is Romans 15:13 which talks
about being filed with joy and peace through our faith in God, who is the source of hope.
Happy people are trustful people.

You’ve seen this old verse haven’t you: ‘In the morning when I wake, I
say "I place my hand in God’s today," with faith and trust that by my side
He’ll walk with me, my steps to guide. He leads me with the tenderest care, when
paths are dark, and I despair. No need for me to understand, if I but hold fast to His
hand, my hand in His; no surer way to walk in safety through each day. By His great bounty
I am fed, warmed by His love and comforted. When at day’s end I seek my rest, and
realize how much I’m blessed, my thanks pour out to Him, and then I place my hand in
God’s again.’

{5} OBEY – AND YOU’LL BE JOYFUL (32:11)

Obedience is not fashionable in a do-it-yourself world. There are many verbs in the
Bible in the imperative mood. Jesus is our Lord: he has the right to command. But he is
also our Lover, and we should want to obey him (John 14:21). David, who was tempted to
think he was accountable only to himself, fell badly. (He should have learned form his
predecessor Saul’s experience: see 1 Samuel 15:22).

The key question for us is not ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ but
‘What does my Lord want me to do?’ Not ‘Why is this happening to me?’
understandable as that is, but ‘What is God’s will for me in this
situation?’ If we ask the right questions, we needn’t worry too much if we
don’t understand all the reasons for God’s actions.

The old hymn actually puts it well: ‘Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey!’