So this little piece by Victoria Safford nicely frames, I think, where we left our conversation last week. For those of you who weren’t here last Sunday we began a three-part series on guilt and forgiveness. In my sermon on guilt, I pointed out what I believe to be a spiritual dilemma in the lives of many Unitarian Universalists, especially those who didn’t grow up Unitarian, a dilemma about guilt that I can summarize, perhaps, using this language of the wretch-soul debate in “Amazing Grace.” Simply put, many folks who come to All Souls have left faiths that they believe dwelt too heavily on the wretch side of the equation –- placing too much emphasis on human sin and guilt—and have sought a faith that paid more attention to the soul side of the debate, to human possibility and capacity, only to discover that while, yes, they had found a church where now they could sing “soul” instead of “wretch” during “Amazing Grace,” they nonetheless couldn’t get rid of a nagging sense that somehow that word, “wretch,” rang true, that somehow that shoe fit.

Guilt, I argued, and I argue, isn’t something we can escape by changing denominational affiliation, much less by changing the words to “Amazing Grace.” It’s something that we all deal with, all of our lives, because we do screw things up. We do commit wrong. Last week I tried to suggest some new ways of thinking theologically about guilt and sin. And this week I want to talk about how we can cope spiritually with our guilt, how we confess our sins, how we can make whole what we’ve broken. Let me just begin by confessing that when I sing “Amazing Grace,” and we come to that asterisk, that choice in the first verse, I sing the word “wretch” with gusto. It’s become a kind of spiritual practice for me, a way to embrace, if you will, my inner wretch, that part of me that is broken, that part of me that is imperfect. I claim all of that when I sing “wretch.”

There was a time when I didn’t like to sing that word; I didn’t like the sound of it. Let’s face it: wretch is an awful-sounding word. When it’s used as a verb, it means “to vomit.” Seems a little harsh to call a human being a wretch, seems like too definitive a rebuke. And then I learned that the word “wretch” actually comes from an old English word that means “exile,” one who is separated from his or her home. That understanding of the word “wretch” then helps explain the next line in the hymn “Amazing Grace:” “I once was lost and now am found.” Grace is what helps the lost find their way home. It’s what helps the one who is estranged feel whole again. When we are feeling guilty and wretched, cut off those we’ve wronged, cut off from our own true selves and our creator, how do we make things whole again? How can the exile come home?

Today I want to suggest a four-fold path home, a four-fold spiritual path toward making things whole again. And that four-fold path can be summed up in four words: to see, to say, to reconcile and to amend. When our guilty feelings are letting us know that we have done something wrong, the first thing that we need to do is to see. We need to be able to search ourselves, search our lives and see clearly where we’ve done wrong. This is the first step, and for some it’s the hardest. Because looking at our own error, looking at the ways that we have hurt others and done what we know is wrong, let’s face it, is a painful thing to do. It leaves us feeling ashamed; it makes us feel guilty. It forces us to see a picture of ourselves that doesn’t comport with the picture that we have in our mind’s eye. It’s a little bit like reaching back in your desk drawer and looking at that picture of yourself in your junior high yearbook, right at the height of that awkward adolescent stage, and you kind of look at it and say, “Oh, that wasn’t me!” And you kind of shudder at that image of yourself because it’s not how you want to see yourself. Many of us shudder from looking at our error.

Others of us have the opposite problem; we’re really good at noticing our faults. There are a lot of us who spend the first half of our restless nights, in fact, going through the entire day, cataloging all the ways that we failed to live up to this day. We have a hypercritical conscience. But the problem for those of us like this is that we get so caught up in our frequent guilt that it paralyzes us. We wallow in our wretchedness and can’t muster the strength to make a change.

So when I say that we need to see where we have committed wrong, I mean that we must see both clearly and compassionately. We need to see clearly so that we can understand where we’ve committed wrong, but we also must be able to see ourselves with compassion. You know, I told a story a little while back that I feel is appropriate to share again here at this moment. Not long ago, a parishioner caught me off guard by asking me a very direct question. She said to me, “Rob, what does the love of God look like?” I was taken aback because I didn’t have an answer for her. I went home and I thought about it for awhile and then I realized that yes, indeed, I do have an image in my mind’s eye of what the love of God looks like. And so I called the parishioner back and I said, you know, “For me, the love of God looks like the face of a loved one who has known you for years, who has known you long enough, frankly, to know better, and whose face nonetheless smiles on you with love.” The face of mercy and compassion. That’s the closest that I know to the face of God. And I believe that when we look at ourselves as broken and frail people, we need to look at ourselves with that same face that sees clearly and compassionately.

The first thing we must do is see and after we see, we must say. We need to admit it when we have done wrong. We need to confess it, out loud, to ourselves, to God, to the universe, to someone we trust and love. We need to name what it is that we have done wrong. You know, my experience is that it’s not enough to simply think, oh, I’ll make a mental note of that. The old Unitarian preacher and teacher, Henry Ware, Jr., once warned, “Good sentiments which merely pass through the mind are apt to leave no trace behind.” And I think if we’re honest with ourselves we know that that is true. There’s a certain kind of permanence that comes from speaking our wrongdoing aloud. “I have been unfaithful.” “I have been cruel.” “I have made a mistake.” To say it out loud is at once a confession and a judgment.

It reminds me of a striking image from the Muslim tradition. Here in the Christian West, we have this popular image of the last judgment as an encounter with St. Peter at the gates of heaven. We tell lots of jokes about St. Peter and the gates of heaven, and about how he will look through the Book of Life after we die and how he will read the story of our lives and will pronounce a judgment upon us and tell us whether or not he’s going to let us in the pearly gates or whether we’ll be taking the down escalator, as it were. Islam imagines this fateful moment at the end of our lives differently. Rather than meeting St. Peter and having him judge our moral record, Islam imagines that we each stand alone on judgment day and that the Book of Life is opened up before us like a scroll. The story of our lives and of all of our moral choices, and it’s up to us, not St. Peter or anyone else, it’s up to us, to make a pronouncement upon that life. I like that image because I think it’s closer to how moral reckoning actually happens in our lives. I also like the line from the philosopher, Albert Camus, who says “don’t wait for the last judgment because it happens every day.” Each day we need to be able to not only see but say, testify as to the quality of our moral lives.

So far, the spiritual path for coping with our guilt and wrongdoing that I’ve outlined has been a largely private matter, a private transaction between ourselves and our maker, or ourselves and our conscience. But to imagine our moral lives in such an individualistic way is almost always shortsighted. Almost always, our moral errors create a tear in the tapestry of relationship, a tear in the fragile interdependent web that binds all of creation together. When our wrongdoing involves our relationships with other people, then the next step in making things whole is reconciliation. Now reconciliation probably deserves a whole sermon series on its own. Thich Nhat Hanh called reconciliation, “One of the most vital and artistic human actions.” And I’d add “difficult” to his definition. At the bare minimum, reconciliation begins with an apology, and “I’m sorry” seem to be two of the most difficult words to say in the human language. To say “I’m sorry” feels like going public with all of that guilt and shame that’s hard enough for us to admit to ourselves, much less to show it to everyone else. It’s like, again, taking that junior high yearbook and not just looking at that picture ourselves, but showing it to everyone else. It’s a painful thing to do.

Beyond apology, though, reconciliation involves some measure of mutual understanding. When we have wronged someone, or been wronged by someone, we need to learn more of what happened. We need to come together and understand our motivations, understand one another’s perspectives and through that understanding, come to a greater sense of reconciliation and forgiveness. Reconciliation is a crucial part of our recovery from guilt and our return to integrity and right relationship. The South African archbishop, Desmond Tutu, who served as the first Chair of the Truth in Reconciliation Commission in his country said, “Without reconciliation, there is no future together.”

See, say, reconcile and finally, the final step toward making things whole, is to amend, to change. I’ll bet we’ve all known some folks who are really good at apologizing, folks who are ready to say they’re sorry at the drop of a hat and expect that, by doing so, that you will forgive them for their wrongdoing and then, the very next night, they’ll go out and do the same thing all over again and, once again, demand and expect that you’ll accept their apology. The great German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, had a name for that. He called it “cheap grace.” Cheap grace is when we think we can get off scot free, just because we’ve apologized. Even if we have no intention to make amends or to change. It’s just not that easy. The proof is in the pudding; we need to be willing to actually make a change. You know, to amend our lives, to make a change, doesn’t mean and shouldn’t be confused with a striving for perfection. Perfection is not the goal because it is not possible. Better and better is the goal. Learning from our mistakes is the goal. We are all exiles, trying to find our way home.

Boiling it down to four words -- see, say, reconcile and amend – makes it sound, of course, a lot easier than it actually is, but we all know how hard this work is. We all know how hard it is to look at the shameful places in our own lives. We know how hard it is to confess, not only to ourselves but to other people when we have done wrong. We know how hard it is to say “I’m sorry.” There is nothing about this work that is easy. But we know something else as well. Because any of us who has been through this process and who has come out the other side, knows also what it feels like to be able to have a good clear night of sleep again. We know what it feels like to rest with a clear conscience again. We know what it means to hold our heads up high and to walk about the world with integrity again. We know what it feels like to be in right relationship again with those we love. And that feeling is worth all the pain and hard work that comes before it.

Our closing hymn today is, of course, “Amazing Grace,” which means that, during the first verse, each of you will get to weigh in with your own theological commentary on my sermon this morning. Are we wretches or are we souls? If we’re honest with ourselves, of course, we know that we’re probably a little bit of both. Part wretch, part soul, part sinner, part saint, lost and found, exiled and homeward bound, all at the same time. I figure if, on any given Sunday, each of us searches our heart and is honest with what we find there, and sings out that truth with both humility and gusto, then somewhere in the sum total of all our voices, we will get the truth more or less right. That’s my hope at least. Amen