Scripture: Psalm 32 and 1John 1:5-10
I’m continuing this morning with the theme of walking humbly with God, focusing today on the idea of confession, an important part of that process and maybe sort of a typical theme for the Lenten season. I’d be interested to know what you think I’m going to talk about under that general heading. I’m guessing it doesn’t sound like a very appealing topic, unless of course you think I might have some juicy personal confession I’m going to make to you this morning. If you’re thinking that, you’re going to be disappointed. What I think you might be thinking is something to the effect of, “Oh great. Not only do we get still one more sermon on walking humbly, we also get a sermon on confession, which probably means a lot of talk about sin and about how it’s good to admit that we’re sinners, how confession is good for the soul,” and so forth. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re not entirely wrong, because I do happen to think that confession is good for the soul and that is part of what I want to say today, although I may be thinking about confession a little differently from what you might expect.
I don’t know what associations the word “confession” might have for you, if any. If you have a Catholic background, and maybe even if you don’t, confession may bring to mind a booth with a partition with a priest on one side and a confessing person on the other and an exchange that begins “Forgive me father for I have sinned” and ends with some number of Hail Marys or Our Fathers as a penance. I am not speaking from first hand experience on this. I didn’t grow up Catholic. We have a number of Sojourners who did grow up Catholic, but I’m not sure how much first hand experience even you once-upon-a-time Catholics would have with that kind of confession.
In the old days, the regular trip to the confessional was part of the fabric of life for people who took their Catholicism at all seriously. And I have had Catholics from a slightly older generation tell me how the act of confession could become sort of a game. For one thing (this is what I remember people telling me) you might be in a bit of a playful mood and try to find a sin to confess that was a little bit different, so that you wouldn’t get bored and wouldn’t bore the priest by confessing the same sins over and over. (Maybe I just knew some devious people, but I had friends who told me they did that.) For another it could be important to choose a sin or sins that were serious enough to show you were sincere in wanting to confess but not so serious that you would get yourself in real trouble, give the priest a false impression of how bad a person you really were, maybe get a really severe penance.
I don’t mean to pick on Catholics, especially since no part of my background is Catholic, but Catholic or no, the idea of confessing, whether it is to a priest or to God or to a friend or partner can get pretty mixed up with a lot of maneuvering. Let’s see now. How can I present myself so that it doesn’t appear that I am pretending to be perfect but it also doesn’t appear that I am worse than I really am? And what does it mean not only to be honest with someone else but most of all to be honest with yourself? Because of course it is entirely possible for all of us to be too harsh with ourselves, perhaps confessing when we shouldn’t or needn’t, and equally possible to be too easy on ourselves, avoiding confession when perhaps we shouldn’t avoid it. Where is that exact point of truthfulness and honesty where we are neither too hard nor too easy on ourselves and where confession is neither more nor less than it ought to be? Confession may not be such an easy thing for us to sort through, and as for being good for the soul, maybe it is sometimes and maybe it isn’t sometimes, and it’s a wise person indeed who knows when it’s one and when the other.
This brings me to some associations with confession that are part of my experience. Now I think I’ll pick on Lutherans. I didn’t grow up Lutheran either, but I seem to have known a lot of Lutherans, because I have attended a fair number of Lutheran worship services in another life, and my main memory of those services were the unison prayers of confession that began every service by reminding us in no uncertain terms that we were sinners, that we had sinned against God in thought word and deed, that we had done those things we ought not to have done and had not done those things we ought to have done, that we were in bondage to sin and could not free ourselves, that there was no good in us, but that if we confessed our sins, God would be gracious and forgive our sins. I always wondered what God would do if we did not confess our sins and thought there was sort of an implied threat there, but not to worry too much about it because there we were confessing our sins and so God would be merciful to us.
But what if we didn’t mean it, didn’t really mean it. I mean, here is part of an actual prayer of confession from a book of worship: “We confess, O God, our unclean lips, our cold hearts, our turning away from our neighbors, our broken promises, and our unrepentant hours. We confess that we have squandered the gifts you have given us. We have neglected the land. We have grasped for goods. We have used each other. We have loved power more than people…”
That’s a lot of sinning right there. And whenever I have been confronted by prayers like this, and asked to join in saying them out loud, I want to say, wait a minute here. That’s pretty harsh. Have I done all those things just in the last week? Had unclean lips and a cold heart, turned away from my neighbor, broken promises, spent unrepentant hours, squandered gifts, neglected the land, grasped for goods, loved power, used people. Or am I supposed to be confessing a lifetime of sins every Sunday. Even then it’s a pretty heavy list. And now I have to admit that this can happen anywhere, in any church setting, in fact I have to confess that the prayer I just quoted is from the UCC Book of Worship, but the Lutheran churches I happen to have experienced were pretty heavy on confessing sin, so I thought I’d pick on them. They were as a whole among the best at communicating to us the message that we are carrying a very heavy burden of sin around with us and really need to unburden ourselves. The point, I guess, for me is that such prayers, far from putting me in an actual posture of confession, have the effect of making me defensive, wanting to defend my own goodness, justifying myself, feeling like I want to make clear to someone that you know I’m not really all that bad, I have a few good points, there are at least a couple of things that could be said in my defense. So I do have to say that I have had an uneasy relationship to this idea of confession for a very long time. It can lead to being too hard or too easy on oneself. It can lead to feigning a kind of guilt and remorse you don’t really feel, or it can mean being forced into a kind of posture of self-justification that is quite far from any true spirit of confession. Confession may be in theory a good and necessary thing, but it strikes me as a very difficult thing to get right.
But it does also strike me as an important thing to try to get right, especially if it is our desire to walk humbly with God. (And I will just mention that this will be the last sermon on that theme, at least for a while.) This, of course, can be a matter that is intensely private and personal. Confession can be a matter of being honest with God and with ourselves about some things in ourselves that we may need to change for the good of ourselves and people we love. That kind of confession can be extremely difficult, but when it takes place, it is also healing and empowering. But it is a very private thing and difficult to say very much about in a public setting. There is also a more public dimension to the question of confession and I want to try to speak a little bit from that perspective.
This world and our lives in this world are gifts beyond any adequate explanation or description, filled with indescribable beauty and wonder. The life we live everyday in this world is a miracle. And from a certain perspective every hour of every day, every minute, every second, ought to be filled with thank yous, sung, shouted, whispered filling our being with gratitude for this gift we have been given. Any response to this miracle that is anything less than total gratitude seems somehow inadequate, stingy and unappreciative on our part. That our souls are not filled to overflowing all the time in every way with gratitude is not, however, by itself reason to confess.
This world is also filled with more pain than any heart can bear, more sorrow, more injustice, more downright human cruelty than our senses or spirits can absorb. We cannot even take it all in, much less do anything about it. Yet how can we not want to do something about it, all of it? What part of the world’s sorrow is meant to leave us untouched? Which injustice are we going to say is ok? Whose pain is of no real concern to us? Yet we can’t attend to everything, in fact not very much of anything, just this or that, here or there. There is so much we leave undone. That we do not devote ourselves body, heart, and soul to dressing the wounds of the world, seeking justice, making peace, somehow trying to make the world hurt a less, that we don’t do all of this all the time is not, however, by itself reason to confess.
But put it all together and we do have reason to confess. It’s not just that we can’t fix all the world’s brokenness all at once. To think that we could or should would clearly be delusional, and therefore to feel guilty because we don’t would be based on the same very un-humble delusions. It’s not just that we can’t fix everything. And it’s not just that trying to fix one problem will sometimes make some other problem worse. And it’s not just that people disagree over how to fix problems and even what the problems are. And it’s not just that our well-intended solutions might turn out quite differently from what we intended. It’s all that and more, and it’s that all too often when we devote ourselves with a good heart to doing what we can to tend some wound or address some injustice, we will be forgetting to say thank you, forgetting to just let the world be and let ourselves just be and stop trying to fix anything in any way. But then it’s also that when let ourselves stand in awe and wonder and gratitude before the world and just let the world be without trying to fix it, then we are letting our voices go silent on matters where voices need to be raised, where our voices need to be raised.
All of which is simply to say that the brokenness of the world is our brokenness too. It’s not that we are the good guys coming to the rescue of a broken world. It’s not that there is a broken world out there and we have been sent to fix it. It is that we are part of that broken world, we participate in the world’s brokenness. And if we are to play any modest part in the world’s healing, we need to recognize our own need for healing and know that we cannot be whole until the world is whole and all of God’s people are whole.
Confession is not about admitting how bad we are. It is, among other things, about sensing our oneness with all other humans, living in a world where we cannot yet just give ourselves over to taking delight in God’s world—there is so much yet to be done to help God’s dreams come true among us—but where we also cannot not take delight in the miracle we find ourselves a part of. We are pulled always in different directions, and we will fail always, no matter what direction we go, but the good news is that wherever we are headed, whether we are involved in trying to change ourselves or some part of the world around us or whether we give our souls over to sheer delight, whatever direction we may choose to walk at any given time, we shall encounter God along that journey, and whether it be filled with joy or with sorrow, it will be a journey filled with the sacred presence of God, a presence that makes all our journeying holy. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 19, 2006