Proper 21B (10/1/06) “Let Us Confess Our Sins”

James 5.13-20, Psalm 19

The second lesson for the past few weeks has come from the letter of James, the brother of Jesus, an often overlooked gem of the New Testament. In today’s text, he continues to write very practical words about the struggles that we Christians face as we seek to live as God would have us live, and as we want to live. One particular verse here is on my heart this morning, verse 16 of chapter 5: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

I’ve just come back from the annual General Retreat of the Society of the Holy Trinity, a fellowship of Lutheran pastors to which Pastor Dean and I both belong. I look forward to this retreat more than just about anything else that I do all year. Here are gathered a group of pastors—this year some 175 of us—whose purpose for these three days is to pray together, to hear theological and Biblical presentations, to talk candidly with one and pray with one another about our ministries, our vocation, our own struggles.

And always one of the most moving aspects of this retreat is the opportunity to make use of our church’s liturgy for individual confession and absolution. Pastors, you know, are great sinners—perhaps no greater than anyone else, but surely no less than anyone else. So pastors need the healing power of God’s grace; and these particular pastors are anxious to unburden themselves to Christ through the ministry of other pastors, and to hear spoken to us those wonderful words: “Your sins are forgiven.”

For Christians, learning how to confess our sins is a lifelong discipline. Whether we are confessing individually to a pastor, or here on Sunday at the beginning of the liturgy, or in our own private prayers, confession is something that we must learn to do. It doesn’t come naturally. John R. Powers wrote a charming novel called The Last Catholic in America, written as a kind of amusing memoir of a Catholic childhood in Chicago. The narrator recounts his parochial school instruction before making his first confession—how he was taught to make a list of all his sins, and how many times he committed each one. As a seven-year-old boy, his list consists pretty much of lying and disobeying his parents, so he duly writes everything down. After he’s been to confession, he suddenly realizes that he miscounted his list of times he disobeyed his parents, and so when he told the priest he had disobeyed six times, that was a lie because he really disobeyed seven times, and so he hurries back to the end of the line so he can get it right, lest anything dreadful happen to him while he has these two unconfessed sins on his conscience!

How do we learn to confess? For me, the words of Psalm 19 which we sang this morning are among the most helpful in Scripture in this regard. Unfortunately, we only sang the last half of it this morning. The first half is a wonderful hymn to the glory of God in the natural world: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” The Psalmist focuses particularly on the sun, which moves across the sky enlightening everything.

Then, in the portion we sang this morning, he abruptly begins talking about the law of the Lord. It seems a strange turn to take, but it is quite deliberate. He wants us to think of God’s law as being like the sun, which is so glorious, so dependable, and so enlightening. You can see the parallel in verse 11: “By them also is your servant enlightened”—the Psalmist is enlightened by the law of God, just as the world is enlightened by the sun.

But what the light of God’s law shows is not always a pretty sight! What it shows is that we are sinners. Our text translates verse 12, “Who can tell how often he offends?” but that is not quite right. It means more like, “Who can detect his own sin?” or “Who can understand her own sin?” The Psalmist here is touching a mysterious truth: we are in bondage to sin, we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone—well, you know the drill. But we are so trapped in our sin that we cannot even see it—much as a person who lives in a chaotic, messy, filthy room doesn’t even realize things are a mess. We don’t realize how pervasive our sin is—until the Word of God shines on it.

Next the Psalmist makes a distinction between “secret sins” and “presumptuous sins.” Let’s start with the latter. A presumptuous sin is something we do or say or think that we know is wrong—even as we do it. The Hebrew word here literally means “proud”—this is something we do that is wrong, and we know it is wrong, but we do it proudly, brazenly, defiantly. These sins, the Psalmist says, can “get dominion” over us. When we brazenly defy God, you see, we eventually lose the will to do anything else. We are truly “in bondage to sin.”

But the “secret sins” are something else again. Here he isn’t talking about things we try to cover up, hoping no one will find out. Those sins are really “presumptuous sins” because we know they are wrong. No, here the Psalmist means the sins we don’t even admit to ourselves. “We have fine names for our own vices,” wrote Ian Maclaren, “and ugly ones for the very same vices in other people.” Someone else is stubborn and argumentative; I’m just standing up for what I believe. Someone else is catty and nasty; I’m just clever. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, young Pip finds all sorts of reasons why he’s not going to visit his sister, who is critically ill; but he knows the reasons are all just a cover. Later he reflects, “All other swindlers on earth are nothing [compared] to the self-swindlers.”

But if we’re not aware of it, can it be a sin? Well, often what is invisible and unknown is more destructive than what is open and obvious. An undetected virus cannot be treated. Secret sins, we might say, are like viruses in the soul. They destroy us, eat away at us, without our even being aware of them.

So what is the cure for these secret sins? Well, the cure is confession, of course, and this is where careful self-examination comes in. You cannot confess what you do not see. Honest self-examination involves more than just saying to myself or to God, “Gosh, I know I haven’t done so well recently, and I’m sorry.” Honest self-examination means being uncomfortably specific. Luther criticized the teaching of the medieval church that one must scrupulously remember and confess every single sin, and yet he insisted that one be honest with oneself and with God. It would be “really quite unlikely,” he writes in the Small Catechism, that one would be completely unaware of any specific sins. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it very simply: In order to be confident of God’s forgiveness, I must “call my sins by name.”

Luther’s suggestion about how to do this self-examination is still a good one. Take one of the commandments; remember or review your catechism explanation of it, so that you have the big picture in mind, not just a narrow literal view. And then examine yourself in light of that commandment. For example, the eighth commandment says “You shall not bear false witness,” and the catechism explains that we do not “betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the kindest way.” So I must consider: have I said anything today, or this week, that was unkind about someone else? Have I assumed the worst about someone, instead of the best? A careful self-evaluation using the commandments prepares me to be honest with myself and with God.

From my own experience, I would strongly commend to you the practice of private confession. Go back to James’s words: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” One responsibility of a pastor is to be available for this kind of confession. It is, Luther says, valuable for two reasons: First, it helps us in the discipline of examining ourselves by pushing us to “call our sins by name”; but more importantly, it enables us to hear the words of absolution spoken personally and directly to us. The pastor says, “By the authority of Christ, I declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.” For me, hearing those words of forgiveness addressed to me, not just generically but specifically and individually to me, has great power through Christ to comfort my heart and free me from guilt and shame. If you would like to know more about how to do this, either Pastor Dean or I would be glad to talk with you about it. Or you might have a look at the liturgy for individual confession and forgiveness on page 196 of the Lutheran Book of Worship. Of course it is always the case that anything you might share with your pastor in that context is absolutely and strictly confidential.

The Psalmist, after reflecting on presumptuous and secret sins, concludes with that beautiful and familiar prayer: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.” This prayer is an acknowledgement that we sinners need to look to Christ for direction. That is how we grow. We receive this gracious gift of forgiveness, but if we do not look to Christ for the strength and the will to live new lives, we fall right back into the same secret and presumptuous sins. “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight”—that is the goal, you see, for which we are always shooting. Acceptable in God’s sight—not my own, for I do not even always know how to recognize what is right and wrong, let alone how to change myself. But in his mercy, God bends to me and hears my prayer, and he will form my words and my thoughts as I continually turn to him. Indeed he is my strength and my redeemer.