"I lost my temper and said some bad words to one of my
opponents."
"Ahhh, that's a terrible thing for a Notre Dame lad to be doin'," the
priest said. He took a piece of chalk and drew a mark across the sleeve
of his coat.
"That's not all, Father. I got mad and punched one of my opponents."
"Saints preserve us!" the priest said, making another chalk mark.
"There's more. As I got out of a pileup, I kicked two of the other
team's players in a sensitive area."
"Oh, goodness me!" the priest wailed, making two more chalk marks on
his sleeve. "Who in the world were we playin' when you did these awful
things?"
"Southern Methodist."
"Ah, well," said the priest, wiping his sleeve, "boys will be
boys."
Today we continue in our worship series looking at some of
the spiritual disciplines which are practices that help deepen our faith and
our relationship with Christ. We began last week by looking at fasting and the
different types of fasting and the reasons for fasting, which is one of the
spiritual disciplines that many people in different ways take on for Lent. And
today we take on another discipline associated with Lent, and that is
confession, and so I guess I should start with a confession for my terrible
Irish accent. Now normally when we as protestants talk about confession we have
this image of Roman Catholics going into a booth and telling their priest
everything they did wrong, and being assigned to say some hail Mary’s and our
fathers, even though we don’t know what that means, and then everything being
okay. And we don’t want to do that. But while that is certainly a type of
confession, that is not what we are talking about here, at least for the most
part, because there is a place for that, and we’ll get back to that.
Confession, or a call to confession, is found throughout scripture. Most importantly Jesus begins his ministry with the proclamation “repent for the kingdom of God has come near.” Repent literally means to turn around. Stop doing what you have been doing and go another way. But, it’s not just to turn around, it’s also to make a proclamation, a confession, of what you have been doing wrong, which is accompanied with a desire or an acknowledgement of forgiveness. But to get to that point, we also first have to recognize that we have done anything wrong.
