“Christian Disciplines: Confession” John 20: 19-23. James 5: 13-16 March 11, 2018

In the 1960’s, there was a very interesting and moving religious movie made called, ‘The Shoes of the Fisherman” with Anthony Quinn. It told the story of a Russian Catholic archbishop, captive in a labor camp in Siberia for many years, who was released, went to Rome, and after the death of the pope, was elected the new pope. There are many touching parts of the story as this man, who has lived a life of difficulty and simplicity, deals with the politics and wealth of the Catholic Church. But for the purposes of today’s sermon, I want to mention one scene.

An elderly priest, who has been advisor to several popes, has argued with the new pope many times. They have been adversaries over many of the new pope’s policies. Near the end of the film the old priest comes to the pope and says, “I have a confession to make.” The pope says, “Then you should go to your confessor.” The old man says, “I am a soul in distress, Holiness. You are a priest.” And he confesses his stubbornness and pride. The pope responds, “I too have sinned. I kept you at a distance because I could not tolerate your opposition.” And the two men sit down and talk.

On the subject of confession, we have to deal with the difference between the Catholic church and the Protestant church. But this scene shows confession at its most basic. Two Christians, with a difference between them, confessing to one another their sins. Confession does not have to be formal. At its heart, it is people sharing their deepest hurts with one another.

Those of you who have been to Catholic churches, or who have Catholic relatives, know the difference between our faiths at this point. In the Catholic church, Confession is a sacrament. Catholics are supposed to go frequently to church and confess their sins to a priest, receive instructions for penance, and be absolved. Protestants believe that the same thing can happen directly between the sinner and God, without the need of an intermediary. But both sides miss out on some of the dimensions of Confession.

Father Robert Capon, a theologian who likes to put difficult ideas into descriptive language, talks about the differences like this: “Protestants accuse Catholics of emptying their trash cans, just so they can get back to the fun of loading them up again. Catholics accuse Protestants of hiding their garbage in their closets. Protestants replied that they got rid of their garbage every night, not just once a month or once a year—and to the great Dump-master himself, not to some underling. But secretly, both sides had to wonder whether they had done the transaction right. The Protestant, whether he had really repented, the Catholic, whether he had let it all hang out; and both whether the act they did was sufficient. That is, they assumed that it took some properly done spiritual transaction to get forgiveness. And they wondered, each according to his own lights, whether they had done It right. And even if they decided in their own favor, they still both felt the burden of uncleanliness. The religious life consisted of feeling good until you felt bad. Which was always pretty soon.

But at its most basic, Penance takes on a new meaning. It’s not a special piece of business by which you purchase something you couldn’t get elsewhere, but a special kind of party at which you celebrate what you have always had but were lately guilty of neglecting. There are two of you in the funny little box, priest and penitent, a couple of perpetually forgiven sinners, telling each other,

from different points of view, incredible old stories about what a friend you have in Jesus.”

Like the two priests in the movie, Confession is just two people sitting down together, talking about their lives and their faith.

Why then, is Confession a Spiritual Discipline? Shouldn’t it just be a private practice between sinner and God. Why does it need to involve others? Well, many times it doesn’t. The Scriptures are full of instructions that Jesus Christ is the one to share your sins with. But there are also other biblical teachings, like the one in the Book of James, today, that say, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” And from the Gospel of John, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven,”

Confession is a difficult Discipline for us because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin. We cannot bear to reveal our failures and shortcomings to others. We imagine that we are the only ones who have not stepped on the high road to heaven. Therefore, we hide ourselves from one another, and live in veiled lies and hypocrisy.

But if we know that the people of God are first a fellowship of sinners, we are freed to hear the unconditional call of God’s love and to confess our needs openly before our brothers and sisters. We are not alone in our sin. In acts of mutual confession, we release the power that heals. Our humanity is no longer denied but transformed.

In these days, we are more likely to go to a therapist for confession, rather than to a priest, a minister, or another Christian. Partly that’s because we know that therapists are trained, and we want to make

sure the person we are confessing to knows what they are doing when they respond to us. And that’s important. There are lots of bad counselors out there.

I talked to a woman once who had been to a minister in her own church. She was having an affair, and she regretted it. He told her that the only way to save her marriage was to sleep with lots of men, so that she could appreciate what she had. I’m fairly sure that he was willing to volunteer for the job. She was smart enough to see that his counsel was just as sinful as her behavior.

So, we have to pick our counselors wisely. But what happens when we confess.

First, we need to realize that often-times when we commit sin, we don’t really know why we do it.

The story is told of a little girl watching her mother prepare to bake a ham. At the end of the process just before placing the ham in the baking pan, she cut a small section off each end. “Why do you do that, Mommy? The little girl asked. Her mother answered, “That’s how my mother always did it, let’s ask her.” So, they called the grandmother, and she responded, “I’m not sure I know. That’s just the way I always did it. Let’s ask my mother.” SO, they called the great grandmother. She was now in her nineties, but she was still sharp. “I remember why. I cut off the ends of the ham because my baking pan was too small.”

That’s the way it is with some of our sins. We don’t know why we do them. We just know that we’ve always done them. Someone needs to listen and point out our destructive behavior to us.

The second reason we need to confess is, so we can reexamine our beliefs. In Lyndon Johnson’s biography, there is a moment when he is asked to reflect back on the Vietnam War. He said, “I never felt I had

the luxury of re-examining my basic assumptions. Once the decision to commit military force was made, all our energies were turned to vindicating that choice and finding a way somehow to make it work.” And therein, of course, says the biographer, is the heart of that tragedy in a nutshell.

Human beings who don’t reexamine their decisions but stick blindly to their choices will not only mess up their own lives, they can cause harm to many others. The more power they have, the more damage they can do. There is an even darker story about this tendency. Until recently there was a red brick prison in Germany known as Spandau. It held one-man, Nazi war criminal Rudolph Hess. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the aged Nazi wandered the halls and gardens of Spandau prison awaiting his death. Then one summer he strangled himself, and the aged prison was torn down.

Rudolph Hess never rethought or repented his decisions. Guilty of the most atrocious sins a man could commit, he never felt any remorse. Until the day he died, he thought of himself as the deputy Fuhrer of the Nazi party. Here was his last public statement at the Nuremberg trials.

“I was allowed for many years to work under the greatest son that my people produced in their 1,000- year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this. I am happy to know that I have done my duty to my people, as a loyal follower of my Fuhrer, I regret nothing. If I were to begin again I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what men may do to me, some day I shall stand before the judgement seat of the eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know that He will judge me innocent.”

Somehow, I think he got a different reception from God than he anticipated. In a monster like Hess perhaps we see a dim reflection of the dark side of our own natures. Repentance unaccomplished, whether it festers in an ancient prison, or in a quiet suburban backyard, is ugly and offensive. Feeling sorry is at least a beginning. But repentance refers to a real change.

So, we have a need to confess our sins, first, so we can see the patterns we are living. And second, so we can reexamine our assumptions and change the paths we are walking.

But confession is not just about our need to confess. It is also about our responsibility to hear confessions. We are called to be rescuers of those around us.

In Winnie the Pooh, we find this story. Eeyore, the donkey, is in the river. Pooh calls, “Did you fall into the river, Eeyore?” “Silly of me, wasn’t it”, says Eeyore. Pooh calls, “Is the river uncomfortable this morning?” Eeyore says, “Well, yes, the dampness, you know.” Pooh says, “You really ought to be more careful.” Eeyore says, “Thanks for the advice.” “Pooh says, “I think you’re sinking.” Eeyore responds, “Pooh, if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind rescuing me?”

If every people needed rescuing, we do. As Individuals, as a society, we are sinking fast.

One of the ways we can help each other is to offer forgiveness. To throw a rope to those who are drowning. Private confession can be that rope.

During the time of the Reformation, people began to move away from the Sacrament of Confession and experience the joy of addressing God directly. It was like a breath of fresh air. It became a trumpet call away from the formal Catholic system. But even Luther believed in mutual

confession. In the Large Catechism he writes, “Therefore when I admonish you to confession, I am admonishing you to be a Christian.

The person who has known forgiveness and release from persistent, nagging habits of sin through private confession should rejoice greatly in this evidence of God’s mercy. But there are others for whom this has not happened. Let me describe what this is like.

We have prayed, even begged, for forgiveness, and though we hope we have been forgiven, we sense no release. WE doubt our forgiveness and despair at our confession. The haunting sorrows and hurts of the past have not been healed. Eventually we begin to believe that forgiveness is only a ticket to heaven, and not meant for our lives now, or that we are not worthy of the forgiving grace of God.

That is when we need each other to offer forgiveness. In the Book of Common Prayer, following the call to repentance, it 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 come to me or some other minister of God’s word, and open his grief.’ God has given us to each other to stand in Christ’s place and make God’s presence and forgiveness real to us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person. As alone as I am by myself in the confession of my sins everything remains in the dark, but in the presence of a brother the sin has to be brought into the light.”

Last week, on television, I heard again the story of Marilyn VanDerbur Atler. She was a former Miss America from Colorado. My family actually knew Marilyn, because she went to high school with my eldest

sister. At high school, she was one of the golden students. Good at everything, beautiful, popular, intelligent. She seemed to have the world at her feet.

But she had a dark blemish on her life. Since she was a young girl, she had been sexually abused by her father. All through the years that she was achieving so much, she was feeling no self-worth. She had a brief and disastrous marriage. Finally, she called her old youth pastor, and asked to meet with him. And she told him the story of her abuse. Together, they called her old boyfriend, who she had walked away from because of not feeling worthy of his love. He came out to see her, and again she told the story.

From that time on, with the support of her old boyfriend, now her husband, she has counseled sexual assault victims across the country and the globe. She says that the worst action of all was silence. As long as she was silent, her self-abuse and hatred continued. Only after she confessed her story, and got help, was she able to be a beacon for other victims.

So, silence is often the greatest aid to sin. As long as we are silent about our own, or someone else’s sin, we can never be healed.

Now, Marilyn was a victim, not a perpetrator of sin. But it was her silence that she needed to feel understanding and receive forgiveness for.

The actions of Confession are the same whether in the Catholic or Protestant churches. First, there must be sharing the story. Confessing our own grievous faults. This is a reality therapy of the best sort since we are prone to blame others for our mistakes, instead of taking personal responsibility for them.

Second is receiving forgiveness. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 john 1:9). The penitent is then told, in clear authoritative words that he is total forgiven and free from sin.

The third step is penance. This is to put into action the behavior we need to do to change.

We can turn our life arounds and be set free of our mistakes. How I wish Lyndon Johnson had known this back in the sixties—the whole shape of our nation and world might have been different had this been so. Another famous man did understand it. Mahatma Gandhi was once approached by an angry your man who said, “You have no integrity! Last week I heard you say one thing. Today you are saying something different. How do you justify being so wishy-washy? “To which Gandhi replied quietly, “It is simply, really, my son. I have learned something since last week.”

How much wiser this is than thinking that we should never change our minds or our behavior. It is not a mark against us, is the gift of God than enables us to grow. Becoming a responsible steward of our mistakes and growing from them, that is the challenge. We can repent and be forgiven. This is the Good news of God. What a shame to get all the way through this life and never know this freedom.