March 5, 2006
The Spiritual Discipline of Confessing

Psalm 32 & John 1:4-2:4

Today we begin a series of sermons, linked with my Inquirer’s Sunday School Class lessons, on the Spiritual Disciplines of Lent. These are those “things” people seem to expect you to do with greater enthusiasm especially because it is the Season of Lent and in preparation to receive the joys of Easter.

These behaviors are part of the everyday year-round life of a faithful person, but they take on a special importance during the reflective and reverential season of Lent. Such practices include offering confession, being in prayer, fasting and abstaining from things that are particularly enjoyable, giving alms to the poor, and forgiving others. Again, these are ways of being faithful day in and day out, but we take special notice of them during this holy period. We “practice” them, so to speak, in order to better insure we might actually do them the other 47 weeks of the year.

Before we get into our first Lenten practice, let me address the phrase I am using to cover them all: Spiritual Disciplines. A spiritual discipline is a religious activity that is repeated in order to honor the One that is worship and, secondarily, enhances the life of the believer and, possibly, the larger community. A spiritual discipline is not punishment and it is not penance we do because of something we’ve done wrong. We Christians engage in spiritual disciplines purely out of our own desire to honor God and Christ. It is repeated, hopefully, enough to make it a natural and able to be done without much thought.

So now, our first spiritual discipline: The discipline of Confession.

Let’s begin with a true introduction to a website:

Daily Confession.com
is the only place in the world that you can go to truly confess your sin (or sins), your transgressions, your humanity, in complete anonymity.

So, let it go! Tell the whole world what you did (or didn't do.) Confess your sin (or sins) now on the world's Largest On-Line Confessional!

Get it OFF your chest and ON the only worldwide web confessional. This isn't gossip, it's the real thing. Get ready for some amazing revelations! Confessions are updated daily. This is where you can actually confess the sins that you would never admit to your priest, or your mother for that matter! Each confession is shamelessly presented to the entire planet, for the WHOLE WORLD TO READ! Confess your sin (or sins) now!Daily Confession.com is a Secular (Not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body) forum.

Now, I’m not so naïve as to have thought such a website didn’t exist, but it just never crossed my mind. And please don’t think I’m endorsing it (I even caution you to be careful going to it!) But it does offer us a contemporary understanding of exactly what our culture’s perceptions of this ancient discipline of “confessing” might be.

Okay, let’s check out just a couple of the more decent entries:
I eat all the time because the feeling of being full makes me content and happy. It makes me feel like I'm loved.
Now, the real beauty of this site is that not only can you confess (anonymously) to the world, but you can have the feedback of complete strangers!

MaxwellsWife posts a reply:
Maxwell tells me all the time --- 'It's just chocolate, honey. It's not love.' ---- You don't feel full, ever. That's why you keep trying to fill the void. You may love food, but it will never love you back. In fact, if you're not careful, it could very well destroy you.

`Gramps` responds:
What passes the lips sticks to the hips. Get counseling...

Okay, now that we’ve discovered our culture has a prurient penchant for penitential programming… let’s look at the basics of the spiritual discipline of confession.

The word “confession” might get you confused from the start because it is used in two different ways in the church. One way is to describe a formulation of beliefs, or a statement of faith, that has been crafted by church leaders for the faithful to follow, such as the Augsburg Confession or the Westminster Confession. We’re not talking about this kind of confession. The second meaning of “confession,” of which I am speaking today, is the practice of admitting one’s sin or sins, one’s guilt. It is essentially the same use as is seen in criminal law: to confess to a crime.

Now the other confusion that needs to be addressed is the misperception that only Catholics “do confession.” It is true that the Catholic Church has a much more detailed and ritually-intricate process for confession than the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). One only has to go to the movies for a while or watch television a few times before you witness a scene in which someone goes into the confessional booth. In Catholic teaching, the Catholic Sacrament of Penance (commonly called reconciliation) is the method given by Christ to the Catholic Church by which individual men and women may confess sins committed after baptism and have them absolved by a priest. (It is not necessary to confess sins committed before baptism, as baptism itself removes the guilt of sins.) This sacrament is known by many names, including penance, reconciliation, and confession. Confession is often seen as a prerequisite to receiving Holy Communion.

In order for the sacrament of reconciliation to be valid the penitent must do more than simply confess his or her known sins to a priest. The person must a) be truly sorry for each of the mortal sins committed, b) have a firm intention never to commit them again, and c) perform the penance imposed by the priest. Also, in addition to confessing the types of sins committed, the penitent must disclose how many times each sin was committed, to the best of his/her ability.

The reason this act is offered to a priest, according to Catholic doctrine, comes directly from scripture. After his resurrection, Jesus passed on his mission to forgive sins to his disciples, telling them, "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you. . . . Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (John 20:21–23). Thus through apostolic succession, priests are the primary persons with the authority of the church to receive confession and absolve sins.

In most Protestant churches it is believed that no intermediary is necessary between the Christian and God. The confession of sins is therefore mainly done in private, in prayer before God. However confession is often encouraged when a wrong has been done to a person as well as to God. Confession is then made to the person wronged, and is seen to be as much part of the reconciliation process as it is theological. In churches and cases where sin has resulted in the exclusion of a person from church membership, public confession is often a pre-requisite to readmission. In neither case is there any required format to the confessions. Many of the more liturgical traditions, such as Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian, will include a communal “Prayer of Confession” as part of every service of worship.

A couple of years ago the PBS program, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, which airs on Sunday mornings at 9 a.m., had a very helpful segment on Confession. The reporter spoke with Father J. Philip Horrigan, a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago and a professor at Catholic Theological Union Seminary. First, the reporter acknowledged that the formal practice of confession had declined. In 1965, a survey reported that 38 percent of Catholics went to confession at least once a month. By 1995, that number had fallen to 8 percent. But Father Horrigan had some very helpful words to say about confession, that I think would help us as we seek to make our Lenten journey more meaningful.
Just being able to say out loud, 'This is my brokenness, this is my humanity, this is what I've done, this is my sin' -- being able to say that out loud is tremendously healing. Being able to speak (of myself) with that kind of humility is really important. People who don't come to confession sometimes can't feel that sense of being free of the past… Sin is a fracture. It's a fracture in the relationship that we have with ourselves, the relationship we have with others and in the relationship we have with God and God has with us.
And finally, the crucial point I would like to make in regards to the spiritual discipline of confession can be seen in the little letter “s.” A huge distinction in how and what we offer to God in confession can be seen in the slight but powerful distinction between the word “sins” and the word “sin.” The plural, “sins,” leads one to focus on our own individual deeds and actions, and this is important. Each of us needs to be held responsible for our actions that “fracture” our relationships: with God, with others, and with ourselves. In a culture where no one seems to have the humility or the nerve to admit they are wrong, it is up to people of faith to step to the forefront and show there is moral power in admitting one is wrong – when it is true and whether or not it is advantageous to the individual.

But to leave confession on this, purely personal and individualistic level is to do the ancient practice wrong. If we look at the singular “sin,” and confess the larger, corporate sin of which we are a part, we complete the spiritual circle. This past Monday several of your leaders gathered with members of the Ohio Regional Anti-Racism/Pro-Reconciliation Team and we were challenged to look beyond the merely personal level of prejudice. Few people of good faith are able to confess personal acts of racism. We don’t tell racist jokes, we don’t fire people because of their accent, we don’t use the “N” word, and so forth.

But if we take corporate “sin” seriously, we can step back and see that we do participate in the larger sin of society. We are just recently learning how many banks and corporations were built on the foundation of slave labor, albeit over a hundred and fifty years ago. It has been within my own lifetime that laws separating black from white and giving special voting privileges to one race over another have been struck down.

Confession is a powerful spiritual discipline. There is no one way to do it, no right way or wrong way. There is guidance, however, in how to make it most effective.
- We can take sin seriously is a great start. Recognizing that we human beings have great power in making and breaking relationships, near and dear to us, as well as far beyond our imaginations.
- We can acknowledge both our personal sins as well as our societal, communal sin.
- We can recognize that whatever happens in the process of confession, penance, and absolution, it is never simply a therapeutic humanly-wrought process. It is of God. Only God can ultimately forgive us our sins and sin, and it is to God we are ultimately accountable. Not a website. Not a priest or pastor. Not even Oprah. Only God.

Amen.






Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2006 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096