Sunday Morning Meds--You're covered

“Blessed is he. . .whose sins are covered”

After far too much traveling, I have come to the conclusion that motel rooms are not designed for people my age; they are decorated with entirely too many mirrors.  Wherever you look, full length panels of reflective glass offer you entirely unbidden views of your own sad and sagging mortality.

One of the reasons English TV comedies are more fun than American sitcoms is that English audiences, it seems, don’t demand physical perfection.  English comedies regularly feature unhandsome people; but American television offers a persistent diet of perfect shapes, both male and female, so many, in fact, that one begins to believe that such pulchritude is the norm.  Given all that gorgeous flesh, suddenly seeing your self bare naked on a six-foot wall is an epiphany of horrific proportions.  A few weeks ago I came home and told my wife I would never eat again.

I suppose I shouldn’t be equating sin with the body. Someone told me recently of a new study which maintains that John Calvin’s despairing views of the sins of the flesh was attributable, in part, to the revulsion he felt about the debilitating hemorrhoids he fought through most of his adult life.  If that’s true, it’s something I wish I didn’t know.

           

But there is a link here in this verse from Psalm 32, at least in my mind.  The exuberance of the line bursts from the realization that something repulsive is wholly taken care of, covered up, covered over, out of sight and, better yet, out of mind, even out of soul.  That something isn’t nakedness, but it’s close.

           

Sin isn’t so much an act as it is a condition, like dandruff or flat feet. Sin is something we never stop fighting. There’s no truth, says the Apostle Paul, in those who claim they have none. 

           

But the blissful joy of the opening lines of Psalm 32—or so it seems to me—is not the blessed realization that our sinful condition is gone, but instead our blessed assurance that God’s forgiveness has it covered—as in, “not to worry, fella, I got you covered.” Our greed, our neglect, our thievery, our hate, our drunkenness, our adultery, our pathetic pride, our green-eyed jealousy, even our pride—sin in all its pathetic naked horror, even the one we can’t forget, the one that haunts us, makes us sick unto death, that sin is covered because He’s got our back. 

           

David’s sins were legendary in the unsavory mess created when he couldn’t keep his royal hands off someone else’s wife, and then“covering” that sin by the sleazy murder of her beloved. 

           

All of that is gone, David himself testifies here in Psalm 32. It’s history. All that’s left is grace. Even though I should cut back on the snacking, it's a blessing to remember that, with grace, we're forever more than what we see in a mirror. We're covered--that way too.

That’s the story, David says.  Praise the Lord.