Of Faults and Secrets and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Scripture: Psalm 19

I wonder whether anyone has ever had a keener understanding of human nature than Mark Twain.  Consider his observations on unproductive anxiety: “I’ve lived through terrible things in my life; some of which actually happened.”  On happiness: “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”  On maturing—and perhaps also on parenting: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be 21 I was astonished at how much [he] had learned in seven years.”  On shame: “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.”  On moral purity: “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”  And on New Year’s resolutions: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

We are not a full month into a new year and yet many of us can already see the wreckage of our resolutions strewn about us.  I recall one January 1^st when I discovered that in the course of that first and single day I had laid asunder all three of my New Year’s resolutions—to lose a little weight, get more exercise, and watch less football on television—by engaging in a ten-hour-long marathon of college bowl games interrupted only by stuporous excursions to the refrigerator for more French onion dip.  This was, shall we say, an inauspicious beginning. 

And, of course, the higher we aim the harder we fall.  So if we find ourselves in February or March without a perfect record of keeping our checkbook balanced or sending birthday cards to relatives or reading the New York Times from cover to cover then it is possible that we will feel a tad of frustration—but unlikely we will experience a sense of deep personal disappointment.  We may, however, take our failures harder if our pledges involved making truly profound changes in ourselves: to be more loving, more generous, more grateful, more patient, more forgiving, more faithful, more selfless, more like followers of Jesus Christ.  In such circumstances, we may cry with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment if the same old law-breaker is to keep them?”

For many of us, this emotional struggle is made worse by the fact that we don’t feel comfortable talking about it with other people—perhaps even those who are closest to us.  After all, our “heroic vows of amendment” often involve a battle with an inner demon, and demons tend to be scary, unattractive, and alienating—not exactly the sort of thing you want to show off in front of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your partner, or your children. 

Yet again, Mark Twain understood perfectly.  “Everyone is a moon,” he declared, “and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”  Trying to bring light to that long-hidden and darkened territory is daunting and challenging stuff, particularly if we think we need to go it alone.

We find references to this problem throughout the scriptures.  One of my favorite examples appears in the seventh chapter of Romans, where we hear Paul’s full-blown exasperation with his own failures of resolve. “I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” he laments in verse 15.  But he continues.  In verse 18: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it!”  And in verse 19: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do!”  Now, notice this: amidst all this confession, Paul still keeps the details of his transgressions to himself.  “Everyone is a moon,” indeed; even our sainted friend, Paul, who in these passages sounds an awful lot like the rest of us.

Of course, the obstacles are still more imposing when we cannot, or do not, or will not see the faults we need to work on.  This is the special genius of those wonderful lines in Psalm 19, thrown in so casually they are almost thrown away: “But who can detect their own errors?  Oh, cleanse me from hidden faults.”  These verses offset the psalm’s theme of praise with one of humility—we may not even know what we don’t know—that presses straight through to those magnificent closing verses: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

This morning, I want to try to persuade you that this dilemma—how we go about working deep changes in ourselves given our fondness for our faults, and sometimes our blindness to them—is a solvable one as long as we do not engage in three different kinds of mistaken thinking.   If we fall into those errors, we run the risk of convincing ourselves that we are stuck in the mud of our old habits and that our efforts to live differently amount to nothing more than wheel spinning.  But, if we can see those errors for what they are, and move past them, then we have good reasons to be confident that we can shed our old skin and put on some new.

The first error occurs when our self-doubt, prior failures, or observations of the struggles of others convince us that we cannot change—a self-fulfilling prophecy that prompts us to abandon the project.  My friends, this is simply wrong.  Indeed, it is twice wrong.

It is wrong as a matter of human psychology and development; we human beings are hardwired for change—more change than we tend to believe.  Just a few weeks ago, a team of psychologists, led by Dr. Dan Gilbert of Harvard, issued a new report finding that people generally underestimate how much they can and will change.  Based on a study of more than 19,000 people (ranging from ages 18 to 68), Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues concluded that we are inclined to think of who we are as a relatively settled thing—even though later we see how much changing we still had before  us.  Dr. Gilbert says: “[We often look back on our earlier selves] with a mixture of amusement and chagrin.  What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us.  At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Dr. Daniel McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has studied the same phenomenon, offers this example to illustrate the point.  In the 1980s, at the height of the craze over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dr. McAdams had a conversation with his four-year-old daughter.  When he told her that someday the Ninja Turtles might not be her favorite thing in the whole wide world, she resisted—indeed, she refused to entertain the possibility.  Of course, eventually other things did indeed come to take their place in her heart, but here’s the most interesting point: this illusion is not limited to four-year-olds; studies show that it appears throughout young adulthood, middle age, and even our later years.  (John Tierney, “Why You Won’t Be The Person You Expect to Be,” The New York Times, January 3, 2013).  It goes with the territory of being human.        

More significantly, though, a belief that we cannot or will not change is inconsistent with the central tenets of our faith.  If we cannot change, then the calls we hear to do so from Moses, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Paul, and Jesus of Nazareth amount to nothing more than a cruel joke.  And our faith does not just subscribe to the idea that we can change; it adheres, with a sacred confidence, to the belief that in our searching encounter with God we are already changed.  As Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; everything has become new.”

This reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the writings of C.S. Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.” 

So the first error—which, as I say, is wrong both psychologically and theologically—is thinking that we cannot and will not change.  We can.  We will.  By the holy grace of God, we are doing so right now, at this very instant.  

The second error occurs when we think—and therefore behave—as though our faults are hidden.  I think that this, too, is twice wrong.  I suspect that more people know more about our weaknesses than we would like to believe.  But, more importantly, God knows about them, every last one of them, no matter how vigorously we have labored to conceal or deny them.

Indeed, the Bible is so absolutely clear on this point that it makes it two times in its first four chapters.  As we all know, in Chapter 3 of Genesis, Adam and Eve try to hide their disobedience from God, and, in Chapter 4, Cain does the same—and all of them meet with the same level of success.  God is not fooled and, at the risk of an extravagant understatement, is not amused.  Proverb 15 tells us that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place,” and that includes all the places in ours hearts, minds, and souls—even the darkest places.

So the second error lies in believing that we can keep our faults and our need to address them to ourselves.  We cannot, at least with respect to God.  Indeed, God already has a very good grasp on those issues—thank you very much—and already knows, infinitely better than we do, what needs to happen next.

Well, that leads us to the third error, which occurs when we think that we have to effect deep changes in ourselves alone and on our own horsepower.  This, I want to suggest to you, is the biggest mistake of all.  And, to get at just what a whopper it is, I want you to think about what it would mean if it were true.

If this were true, then there would be no reason for God to know what is in our hearts that has anything to do with love.  God would just be like some kind of omniscient CIA agent, spying on us and collecting data and turning us over to the proper authorities when we mess up—as we invariably do.  God would embody the most sinister version imaginable of those unsettling holiday lyrics: “he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”

No, no, and no.  God sees our faults and understands what we need to do differently in these sloppy rag-tag lives of ours.  But God puts this perfect knowledge of us to work on our behalf.  God uses it to bless us, to move us, to illumine us, to inspire us, to connect us, sometimes even to block and tackle for us, always to change us.  And, while we may give up on ourselves, God never gives up on us.

Toward the end of her book “Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers,” Anne Lamott writes this:

“God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back.  [A friend] says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense.  God doesn’t say: ‘I have had it this time.  You have taken this course four times and you flunked again.  What a joke.’  We get to keep starting over.  Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.”

If you are like me, your own change probably seems the slowest and most halting of all.  But I suppose we can take some consolation in a God who could say “You think you’re a tough nut to crack?!  Let me tell you about some guys named Moses and David and Peter and Paul.  And how they struggled!  I know; they talked to me about it ... all the time.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, ours is a God of hope and love.  And, where hope and love are possible, change is possible.  That is not just good news; it is, for our sordid and stubborn old hearts, the best news—ever. 

Amen.

A benediction: When I look out my window on this icy and frozen day, I can see no evidence that God is busily at work on spring.  And, yet, I know that He is.  Go forth into this good day knowing that--even when you cannot see it--God is also busily at work on you, with you, for you.  And know that you are blessed that this is so.