The Need for Confession

The Need for Confession

January 16, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

A daily lectionary I use recently included Psalm 51 in its readings for a particular day. Psalm 51 is the great prayer of confession in the psalter. It begins:

 

Have mercy on me, O God,

       according to your steadfast

              love;

according to your abundant

              mercy

       blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my

              iniquity,

       and cleanse me from my sin.

 

For I know my transgressions,

       and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I

              sinned,

       and done what is evil in your

              sight,

       so that you are justified in your

              sentence

       and blameless when you pass

              judgment. Psalm 51:1-4.

 

Clearly at least some in ancient Israel knew what St. Paul knew centuries later, that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. Ancient Israel also knew the God is and always has been a God of forgiveness. A great many Christians have long claimed that God’s forgiveness of human sin came only with Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. Yet ancient Israel knew that God forgives human sin centuries before Jesus. Kind of makes you wonder why so many Christians have insisted that Jesus had to suffer and die before God would forgive sin, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want rather to talk about a different question that Psalm 51 raises for me, the question of whether we need confession and God’s forgiveness at all.

I belong to a very liberal, progressive Christian denomination, the United Church of Christ. Although I have criticized my denomination on occasion, and indeed although I will do so here, the UCC is where I feel at home. It is where my own liberal, progressive Christian theology is most welcome. There is however one thing about many of my liberal, progressive colleagues and fellow UCC members with which I profoundly disagree. I discovered it when I was in seminary. In my second year of seminary I served as an intern at a UCC church that is if anything even more liberal and progressive than are most UCC churches. It had been the first (or at least one of the first) Open and Affirming congregations in our area. A pastor who served there for many years before my time there had, I was told, spent more time out in the community agitating for peace and justice than he had spent with the people of the church. After I had been at that church a short time I asked the woman serving as pastor while I was there why she did not have a prayer of confession in her regular order of worship. She told me that the people of the church wouldn’t let her do one because they didn’t think they had anything to confess and didn’t want to beat up on themselves.[1] I was a bit dumbfounded, but as a mere seminary intern it wasn’t my place to try to change the church’s order of worship, so I lived with not having a prayer of confession in the service until my time at that church was over.

In the years since those days I’ve come to see the way that that church wouldn’t let their pastor include a prayer of confession in their worship service as emblematic of the way liberal Christians dislike prayers of confession and believe that we have nothing we need to confess. I always included a prayer of confession in my worship services, but I mostly used a “Call to Confession” as a way to explain to the congregation why we need to confess. I often used 1 John 1:8 as part of that Call to Worship: “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” I find that statement to be as profoundly true as St. Paul’s statement from Romans that I quoted above that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The belief that we have not sinned truly is self-deception. We are all human. That means that we are all finite, limited creatures not perfect gods. As centered selves we all live with the temptation of becoming self-centered rather than God- and other-centered. Some of us avoid that temptation better than others, but none of us avoids it perfectly. We all act too much in our own interest rather than in the interests of God’s people and God’s world. In other words, we all sin.

Personal sin is real and calls for confession to God as part of the process of living into the forgiveness that God extends to us even before we ask for it. Yet there is another kind of sin of which we Americans are all guilty. It is the collective sin in which we all live that causes me to want to go to confession every time I pay taxes to the US government. We all live in and legally must pay to support governmental institutions and actions that are profoundly sinful. We pay to maintain an obscenely large instrument of death and destruction, the United States military. In recent years we have paid to have children torn away from their parents, some of them never to be reunited with their families. We have paid to have nearly every environmental regulation and policy that used to be in place repealed. We pay the government to murder defenseless prisoners under the guise of legally ordained punishment as the Trump administration has done several times in its final days. Those of us who are not rich pay to make up, at least in part, for massive tax cuts for the wealthy that benefit only the wealthy and that cause enormous budget deficits that keep the government from doing much of what needs to be done. We pay to support a judicial system in which American institutional racism is sinfully on full display. We pay to support a government that responds grossly inadequately to crises in our nation like the crises of climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, drug addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. These systems and actions (or failures to act) are all profoundly sinful, and we are all part of them.

So do we have nothing to confess? Not just no but hell no! We all live in and with an enormous amount of sin. This is after all the world not heaven. We are all called to help build the kingdom of God on earth, but the realization of that divine dream remains a distant hope at best. Confession won’t solve our problems, but it can be part of the process of solving them by making us more aware of them and of our part in them. So let’s open ourselves to the truth that is so much not in us. Let us confess and open ourselves to God’s forgiveness, not to beat up on ourselves but as a step in the process of moving from being parts of sinful systems to being parts of the transformation of those systems. May it be so.

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[1] The UCC has a very strong congregational polity. It is not unusual for the people of a church to try to dictate things to their pastor that really are the pastor’s business, things like what’s in the church’s worship services. As pastors of such a church we have to choose our fights. I chose not to fight my church’s insistence that there be an American flag in the sanctuary, something that is wildly improper liturgically because the American flag is not a Christian symbol. Trish, the pastor at my internship church when I was there, chose not to fight the congregation over putting a prayer of confession in the worship service. She got around it by putting in a “Prayer for Healing and Wholeness,” which served essentially the same purpose.