On Confession

 

This is the text of a meditation I will deliver this evening at the Ash Wednesday service at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Bellevue, Washington.

On Confession

Ash Wednesday

February 22, 2023

First Congregational Church of Bellevue, United Church of Christ

Rev. Tom Sorenson

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

 

We, or at least most of us, are United Church of Christ people. I am sure there is a diversity of opinion among us, as there should be. Still, on the whole, we tend to be quite liberal, progressive Christians. Here’s a truth about folk like us that I learned way back when I was in seminary. UCC people do not like to talk about sin, and they don’t like to do confession. When I was a seminary intern at Prospect UCC in Seattle, the people would not let their pastor include a confession piece in their weekly worship service. They said that they were good people and didn’t have anything to confess. They were good people. They were however not perfect people. No one is. They did have things to confess. We all do. We delude ourselves if we think we don’t.

Now, I grant you that the Christian tradition has historically stressed sin far too much. Christians have said for ages that the human problem is sin and that what we need is forgiveness. It’s not that sin isn’t a problem for us; and yes, we do need forgiveness. Christianity has overdone that part of the faith, but that doesn’t mean that awareness of sin and the need for forgiveness aren’t part of the faith. They are.

Why are they? I don’t think it’s because God won’t forgive us unless we confess our sin. I believe in a God of universal, unconditional love and grace who has forgiven our sin and everyone else’s even before we commit it. There is, however, still a real value in awareness of our sin and our confessing it. It simply is true that confession is a healthy spiritual practice. None of us is perfect. We all have room for improvement. I am convinced that each and every one of us has room for improvement precisely in the area of sin.

By sin I mean a couple of things. When I use the word in the singular I mean living as though we were somehow separate from God. Living without a lively awareness of the presence of God in our lives. I’ll confess that one for myself right now. When I use the word in the plural, I mean committing wrongful acts or failing to commit right acts. I’ll confess that one for myself right now too. Maybe you can confess them for yourselves as well.

When we fail to confess our sin and sins we bury them in the shadow of our psyches. There they fester and come out in unexpected and harmful ways. When we confess them we bring them out into the open. There we can see them, acknowledge that they are real, and confess them to ourselves and to God. We can clear them out of our souls. We can get them off of our hearts. We can repent. That is, we can commit ourselves to doing better in the future. When we do, we become psychologically and spiritually healthier people.

It's easy enough for us to say we have nothing to confess. It’s also easy enough for us to confess one or two little peccadillos and think we’ve done our work. True confession, however, requires more work than that. It requires inner discernment. It means taking a serious, hard look at ourselves. It takes spending time to discern what’s really going in our lives. It takes being honest with ourselves. I suppose superficial confession is better than no confession at all, but it’s not enough. To be spiritually healthy we need to go deeper. We need to discover what we’ve hidden in our psychological shadow. We’ll certainly find there things we need to confess.

Tonight we begin the liturgical season of Lent. Lent is traditionally a time of introspection, discernment, and confession. It is a time of clearing our souls so that we can walk with Jesus through the events of Holy Week, suffer with him and grieve as he suffers and dies, and only then rejoice in his glorious Resurrection on Easter. The ashes we receive tonight remind us of our mortality. They remind us of our need for confession. They remind us of our need for repentance. They remind us of our need to know God’s grace in our lives.

So whether you receive ashes this evening or not, I invite you into the holy season of Lent. I once heard a pastoral colleague say he wanted to find a way to make Lent fun. Lent is not supposed to be fun. It is supposed to solemn. It is supposed to be serious. It is supposed to be a time of preparation to experience the grief of Good Friday and the joy of Easter. I pray that each of you, and I, can experience it in that spirit this year. God’s grace is always there. There’s no question of divine condemnation here. We can however become healthier spiritual people if we take Lent seriously and do the work we are meant to do as we live through it. May it be so. Amen.