This past Sunday (February 22, 2026), I preached on Psalm 32 for the 1st Sunday in Lent. This is a short reflection on the story that I shared.
For many of us, the weight of a secret is felt physically. It’s the knot in the stomach, the tension in the shoulders, or what King David calls in Psalm 32 the "wasting away of bones." We live in a culture that oscillates between "oversharing" everything on social media and "hiding" the things that actually matter.
In the Christian tradition, particularly during the season of Lent, we talk a lot about confession. But for many, confession feels like a court summons—a necessary but terrifying admission of guilt.
To understand why confession is actually the greatest gift you’ll ever receive, we have to look at a man standing in the rain.
The Man in the Rain: Samuel Johnson’s Fifty-Year Secret
Samuel Johnson was the giant of 18th-century English literature. He was the man who wrote the first comprehensive English dictionary. He was brilliant, witty, and famous. But for fifty years, he was also a man haunted by a single afternoon.
As a teenager, Johnson’s father, a struggling bookseller, was ill and asked Samuel to tend his bookstall at the Uttoxeter market. Samuel, fueled by the arrogance of youth and intellectual pride, refused. He didn't want to be seen doing "lowly" work. His father went alone, worked in the cold, and died shortly after.
Johnson carried that silence for half a century. In 1784, at age seventy-five, the world-famous Dr. Johnson traveled back to that market. He stood on the exact spot where his father’s stall had been and remained there for over an hour, bareheaded in a freezing downpour, while the townspeople mocked him. Later, he wrote: "In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory."
The Trap of "Expiatory" Penance
Johnson’s story is heartbreaking because of that one word: Expiatory. It means he was trying to make amends. He was trying to pay the debt. He was trying to use his own suffering in the rain to wash away the pride of his youth.
This is the default setting of the human heart. When we realize we’ve messed up, we immediately try to balance the scales. We think:
"If I feel bad enough for long enough, maybe God will let it go."
"If I do enough 'good' things, they will outweigh the 'bad' things."
But as any Lutheran pastor would tell you, you can stand in the rain until you catch pneumonia, and you still won't be dry of your guilt. Why? Because you are trying to do a job that has already been finished.
The Lutheran Difference: From Law to Gospel
In many traditions, confession is seen as a requirement—a hoop you jump through to get back into God’s good graces. But Lutheranism views confession through the lens of the Gospel, not the Law.
In the Lutheran Small Catechism, confession has two parts:
Confessing our sins: Simply telling the truth about ourselves.
The Absolution: Receiving the forgiveness of the pastor as if from God Himself.
The unique "flavor" of Lutheran confession is that it isn't about the sincerity of your apology or the severity of your penance. It’s about the objectivity of the Word. When the Word of forgiveness is spoken over you, your sins are gone—not because you felt sorry enough, but because Jesus died enough.
How God Responds to Your "Uncovering"
Psalm 32:5 gives us the "Divine Pivot": “I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not cover my iniquity... and You forgave the iniquity of my sin.”
Notice the irony. When we try to cover ourselves (like Adam and Eve with fig leaves or Samuel Johnson with his own penance), we waste away. But when we uncover ourselves (confession), God covers us.
God’s response to your confession is never: "It’s about time. Now, go stand in the rain for an hour." His response is: "It is finished."
Why Confession is Freedom
If you are carrying a "fifty-year silence" or even a "five-minute regret," remember that the goal of the Christian life is not to become someone who never sins; it’s to become someone who has stopped lying about it.
Confession is the death of the "pious mask." It’s the one place where you don't have to be a "good Christian." You just have to be a real human being. And the moment you step out of the shadows and into the light of honesty, you find that God isn't waiting there with a heavy hand, but with a "hiding place" (Psalm 32:7).
Stop standing in the rain. The covering you need isn't found in your own penance—it’s found in the promise of Christ.