Spiritual Disciplines: Confession

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Psalm 32 and 1 John 1:5-2:2:

Years ago, the chaplain of the football team at Notre Dame was a beloved old Irish priest.  At confession one day, a football player told the priest that he had acted in an unsportsmanlike manner at a recent football game.

"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.

A number of years ago, a survey was done on the idea of sin, and what researches found was that that “although 98% [of people] said they believe in personal sin, only 57% accepted the traditional notion that all people are sinful and fully one-third allowed that they ‘make many mistakes but are not sinful themselves.’”  I think I understand where some of this is coming from and that is because the idea of sin has been used and abused in forcing people to sort of self-flagellate themselves of always feeling guilty about themselves or how they are terrible people. And then there are the ways it’s used against others.  Because very rarely do you here people who harp on the issue of sin talk about their own personal sin, usually it’s directed at what others are doing and how bad and evil and wicked they are, and people get sort of tired of hearing that.  The only time it’s usually leveled at ourselves it’s because we’ve been caught with our hand in the cookie jar, and then we are more likely to say, as the title of James Moore’s book says, “Yes, Lord, I have sinned; but I have several excellent excuses,” if we even call it sin itself or if we recognize it as a problem.

I’ve told the story that the most unethical person I have ever personally known told me, when I called her out on her behavior, that she made a confession to God every night and knew that she was forgiven and so she had nothing to worry about. And I had to tell her that’s not how confession works, because you have to want to stop doing whatever it is that you did wrong, not wipe the slate clean so you can do exactly the same thing again the next day. But, at least she admitted she was wrong, because at another church I worked for I had someone tell me he didn’t like saying the prayer that is used before communion because he didn’t feel that he had done any of those things and therefore didn’t need to say it. Which, because that prayer is so broad, basically said that he was saying he was without sin. But, what we hear in the passage we heard from first John this morning, if we say we are without sin, then not only are we deceiving ourselves, but we are also calling Jesus a liar. Pretty strong words, but it also means, if we deny our sin, that Christ really isn’t even necessary for us, because if we don’t need forgiveness then we don’t need Christ.

But perhaps some of that starts with our understanding of sin. There is a sense of sin having a meaning of missing the mark. We are aiming at doing one thing, but do something else. As Paul says, I don’t do the things I want, or the things he should, but he does the very things he hates. My own personal definition of sin, as you have heard before, is that of brokenness. We live in broken relationships for lots of reasons, including sometimes the sins of others, and that includes in our relationship with God. But, God doesn’t want that to be the case, which is the reason God sent us Christ, not to condemn us, but to redeem us, to bring us back into right relationship. To show us a different way to live. And so we understand that our brokenness, our sinning doesn’t make us bad people, it makes us human, and so we are given the opportunity and way to redemption, to righteousness even, and that is through the act of confession.

When talking about confession, Martin Luther, the one who started the Protestant Reformation said, “When I admonish you to confession I am admonishing you to be a Christian.” Might I even be so bold as to say that in order to be a Christian, we must participate in confession. We must confess our sins, or areas of brokenness, not just to God, but also to each other. Because otherwise, one, we are not being honest with ourselves or with God, two we are not truly seeking forgiveness, which means we are not understanding the saving power of Christ, three, it means we are not willing to admit we have sinned, which means we are saying Christ is a liar, four, we don’t think we are worthy of God’s grace, which means we are denying God that ability, and five, we are carrying around a weight we don’t need to carry, and finally, we are not claiming the freedom from sin and death that Christ has given to us, which means we are walking in the dark rather than in the light of Christ.

Confession leads to claiming God’s forgiveness for ourselves. That is what the psalmist tells us, “happy are those who transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” Or happy are those who have confessed, because he says that when he kept quiet, his body wasted away and he groaned all day long, for God’s hand was heavy upon him, which I would interpret to mean that the weight of his sin was heavy upon him, but then he acknowledges his sin and does not hide what he has done, and when he does that the weight is removed from him. In fact, sin is no longer mentioned in the psalm after his confession. Instead it is a celebration of the freedom and love that he has found in being freed from sin, in receiving God’s forgiveness, and in fact he finds righteousness in confessing because in turning over our misdeeds to God in confession, God seeks to lead us to the right path, to the path of righteousness, preserving us from trouble as the Psalmist says.

But really it’s not the confession that has changed things, it’s the forgiveness that has changed everything. Contrary to popular belief, or historic practice, confession is not about guilt or self-flagellation or thinking horribly about ourselves and dragging everything through the mud in order to punish ourselves. Confession is not about the sin and brokenness. Confession is about claiming God’s love and forgiveness for ourselves, and truly feeling it and living it. Confession is about transformation; about moving from sorrow into joy, from despair into happiness. It’s about knowing that we are eternally loved and claimed as beloved children, and we know that because God gave us Jesus, the light to overcome the darkness, the advocate who made atonement for our sins, and not just ours, but the sins of the whole world. It is for that reason, and to remember that possibility, that St. Augustine had the 32 Psalm painted over his bed so that he would wake up every morning and be reminded of God’s graciousness and the power of forgiveness.

Now because of the power of forgiveness and what Christ has done for us, we do not need an intermediary to confess our sins to, because Christ is our advocate. We can confess directly to God and receive God’s forgiveness directly. But in removing priests as intermediaries, we through the baby out with the bath water. Because the truth is, there are times when it might be necessary to make a confession to someone else in order not only to say it, but also to hear words of forgiveness back. But, sometimes the things we are carrying seem so big, so heavy, that we that as much as we might try and confess them to God, we never really have that sense of assurance of forgiveness, and thus making a confession to another can be freeing.  In the Book of Common Prayer, after the call to self-examination and repentance, it even says “If there be any of you who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein but require further comfort or counsel, let him [or her] come to me or some other minister of God’s word and open his [or her] grief…”

And so there are times when confessing to another, or to a group is necessary. In his book on the disciplines, including confession, Richard Foster says that confession is both a private discipline and also a public discipline. It’s not an either or, but a both and. We confess individually before God, but we also confess corporately, and believe me when I say that when we learn to talk about our brokenness more openly and honestly, and about the power of God’s love and forgiveness, then the church will stop being seen as the place of people who consider themselves righteous, but too often practice self-righteousness, to the place that is a hospital for sinners. As Jesus said he came not to save the righteous, but sinners; and that is the reason he came to redeem the world.

And it turns out another definition of confession, which is also found in scripture, is as a confession of faith. And so thinking back to what Luther said about confession, by making confessions to God, seeking healing for our brokenness, we not only confess to receive forgiveness and grace and mercy. But we also confess who we are and what our faith is because it admits that we are broken, we sin, and therefore we need the forgiveness and light and Christ to shine into our lives so that we can then live it out in the world.

John Wesley said that repentance and faith are tied together, and that repentance leads to faith.  He said that ii repentance we say that “without him I can do nothing,” but in faith we say “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens me.” And so we are called to practice confession. To tell God where we have failed and fallen short, as we all fall short, and to seek and claim God’s forgiveness. Some have advised to use the 10 commandments each night to see where we might have made mistakes, but I would advise simply answer these questions: Where have I failed to love God with all I have, and where have a failed to love my neighbor as myself? And perhaps even add, where have I failed to love myself? Do a moral inventory, as the 12-step programs require, not to beat yourself up, not to add guilt to your life, but for the opposite, in order to claim and live into the joy we find in forgiveness and love of God that has been poured out to us through Jesus Christ. That is the light that has been offered to us, and given to us, and so may we learn to walk in the light and forgiveness of Christ as we confess our sins so that we may in turn confess our faith. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.