Sermon
Psalm 32:1-11
Confessing Sins, Protestant Style
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Psalm 32:1-11
Confessing Sins, Protestant Style
Any of you been to confession lately? Of course not! We’re Reformed. Reformed Christians don’t believe in confession. Or do we?
If you just got here, we’re using the Psalms to guide us through our Lenten journey, and the Psalm for today is Psalm 32, and, as you just heard in the reading, the premise of this Psalm is that the weight of our sinful nature is lifted only as we own up to our sins and acknowledge our need of God’s grace.
“Blessed is he whose disobedience is forgiven,
whose sin is covered….
When I kept silence, my bones wasted away….
I acknowledged my sin to you….
and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” (Psalms 32:1-5)
Confession and Forgiveness go hand in hand. So, why, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, did we throw out all the confessional booths? And, if we don’t use confessional booths, what do we use? What does it mean for us to confess our sins, Protestant style? That’s what I want to explore in the sermon today.
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When I became Presbyterian in 1991, I did some remedial work in the history of the Protestant Reformation, particular on the Swiss side of the Alps, as opposed to Germany. I read up on Zwingli and Calvin and a dozen other reformers, and then I flew to Geneva and took a tour of some of the historic places where the battles were fought.
On one of my excursions, I took the train up to Basil and visited the big church there – the “Grossmüenster” – overlooking the Rhine, and saw for myself where the Protestants stripped the sanctuary of all the statues and broke them into pieces. They dragged all the confessional booths lining the nave out into the street. Then came the altars – the high altar on the chancel and smaller ones in the transepts. Then they took down all the pictures – massive oil paintings of Popes and Emperors and Apostles and saints. They piled everything that would burn out in the street and set it on fire.
Austerity was to become a symbol of the Reformation. The bare walls and minimal furnishings would visibly proclaim one of our most cherished beliefs: That nothing should distract from our central focus on the sovereignty of God. To this day, Reformed churches are intentionally plain and simple, anything but ornate and cluttered.
But not only must things not get in the way, people must not get in the way, either.
Nobody comes between us and God – not the Priest, not the Bishop, not the Cardinal, not even the Pope. And this is why the reformers burned the confessional booths – not to stop us from confessing our sins, but to point us back to our Biblical roots, where one confesses his/her sins directly to God. Listen again to the words of Psalm 32:
“I acknowledged my sin to you.
I didn’t hide my iniquity.
I said, I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh.”
Psalm 130 puts it this way:
“Out of the depths I have cried to you, Yahweh.
Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my petitions.” (Psalm 130:1-2)
You find this throughout the Old and New Testaments: If you’ve got something to say, say it directly to God. You don’t need a mediator. Paul told the Philippians,
“In nothing be anxious,
but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving,
let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6).
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he didn’t say, “Just let me know what you want me to tell the Father for you …” No, he said,
“Pray like this: ‘Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9).
Abraham, Moses, the judges, the prophets, the kings, the psalmists; Jesus, Paul, the disciples, the early Christians … they all prayed directly to God. And so, the first point of my sermon today is this: To confess your sins, Protestant style, is to find a quiet place where, in the privacy of your own faith, you can pour out your heart to God in prayer.
Having said that, sometimes – say, times when you’ve said or done something hurtful or just plain stupid, it’s not enough to confess it to God; you need to be able to say it out loud to another person: “I did the dumbest thing yesterday” … “I didn’t mean to, but I think I really hurt Ginny’s feelings” … “I can’t believe I did this, but the other day I took something from work that doesn’t belong to me” … “I’ve got a really big problem, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Sometimes, telling God isn’t enough, you need to tell another person. And until you do, you’re going to be carrying around the weight of a guilty conscience.
Well, the reformers knew this as well as we, but they also knew the dangers of relying too much on individuals such as priests. Power corrupts, then it kills.
So they took seriously their baptismal vows and pointed out how each of us is empowered by the Spirit to serve the common good. This led to a fundamental doctrine of the Protestant Reformation we call, “the priesthood of all believers.”
God gives us the ability, collectively, to be the body of Christ in the world today, and God gives us, individually, the ability to care for one another. So that, when we fall short of God’s righteousness and the dark side of our human nature shows, we can confess our sins to each other.
Obviously, that’s the second point of the sermon: To confess your sins, Protestant style, is to seek out someone in the congregation to hear your confession.
This puts a lot of responsibility on us, when we’re on the receiving in of confessions. We have to be mature in faith. We have to avoid the temptation to stand in judgment. To be best of our ability, we need to give sound advice. As importantly, we need to be good listeners and respect the need for absolute confidentiality: When someone confesses his/her sins to you, don’t breathe a word to anyone – period!
We’re called to be a priesthood of believers, and that involves, among other things, caring for each other, confronting each other, when necessary; comforting each other and confessing to each other.
But, as often is the case, confessing your sins to someone in the congregation – someone you trust and admire and know is on your side – is just the first step. After you’ve gotten it off your chest, if what you’ve done involves hurting someone else, the next step is to confess your sin to that person. This is what theWestminster Confession says:
“As every man is bound
to make private confessions of his sins to God …
(so ought he) to be willing … to declare his repentance
to those who are offended,
who are thereupon to be reconciled to him
and, in love, to receive him.” (6.086)
And so, if you’re keeping notes, here’s the third point of what it means to confess your sins, Protestant style: Sooner or later, you have to talk to the person you’ve offended and ask for his/her forgiveness, as well.
No one knows this better than the folks in AA. It comes in the eighth or ninth step of their twelve step program. You have to go back to the people you’ve hurt and make amends. Your recovery won’t be complete until you do.
I had a minister friend years ago who got hooked on drugs and alcohol. In no time he lost everything – his wife and kids, his ministry, his self-respect. When he hit bottom he turned to AA and, with a lot of help, it turned his life around.
When he got to this step in the program, he went back to his presiding Bishop in the United Methodist Church. He said he needed to own up to all the shenanigans he’d gotten into. He said, at first, the Bishop was reluctant to see him. “Let’s just let bygones be bygones,” he said. But my friend insisted not only to meet with the Bishop personally, but to go over his personnel file. It was thick with reports of his misconduct. As they went over the report, page after page, he’d say, “That’s not the half of it, Bishop. Let me tell you what really happened!”
This went on for over an hour until finally they got through the whole file. Before he left, the two men prayed together, then he walked out the door, free and forgiven. The weight of his sin was lifted. He could lift his head high once more.
His presiding Bishop was one of many he went back to see in the process of his recovery. He left no stone unturned. If he hurt someone, he sought them out to say, “I’m sorry. I hope you’ll forgive me.” If he cheated someone, he paid them back.
This is the third and, perhaps, most important step of confessing sins, Protestant style – to go to someone you’ve offended and admit your fault. It’s seldom easy, and it doesn’t always have a happy ending, but it’s the only way to experiencing forgiveness fully and of being reconciled to someone you’re at odds with.
I was visiting with a man the other day, who told me about a kid in grade school who used to pick on him every day. “He used to beat the pulp out of me,” he said. This went on for years – all the way from grade school through the tenth grade, when he finally got big enough to make him stop. But, by then, the damage was done. He would carry the scars of abuse the rest of his life.
He said, “I went back for my thirty year class reunion. We were in a big group shaking hands with each other and getting reacquainted when I turned to the man behind me and there he was – the class bully. I was supposed to shake his hand, but, to be honest, I wanted to belt him.”
Then he said, “I’ll never forget what happened. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m so glad you came. All these years I’ve been wanting to tell you how sorry I am for the way I treated you. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
The man told me, “To think, all these years he’d been carrying that burden of guilt. And I was just as weighted down with anger toward him.” He said, “We looked at each other for a long time without saying a word. Finally, I said, ‘I really appreciate your saying that. It means a lot to me.'”
Well, they didn’t exactly hug and kiss and make up, but they did shake hands, and that’s a start. Seeds of reconciliation were planted. By God’s grace, they’ll grow in time.
Here’s what I hope you’ll take home with you this morning: When we confess our sins, Protestant style – that is, when we pour out our hearts to God in prayer; when we seek out a listening ear from others in the congregation; when we screw up the courage to face those we’ve hurt – it lifts a burden and opens the door to reconciliation. I’d even be so bold as to say it enables us to hear the Good News that our sins are forgiven. First John says it best:
“If we say that we have no sin,
we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins,
he is faithful and righteous to forgive us the sins,
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:8-9)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Copyright 2007, Philip McLarty. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB), a public domain (no copyright) modern English translation of the Holy Bible.