Coming Clean

We live in a confessional culture. It’s been called the "Urge to Purge." Or even "Psychic Bulimia." I can remember back when Phil Donahue was shocking. But these days the things people have to display to get on Jerry Springer or Sally Jessie Raphael hardly raise an eyebrow in the culture. We’ve gotten so jaded that the heavily hyped disclosures in magazines celebrating celebrity rarely get much more than a yawn. The only movie stars, musicians, or politicians who get criticized for revealing their addictions, weaknesses, foibles or faux pas are the ones who have had the temerity to stand up for traditional morality. The only sin that can’t be forgiven is the idea that forgiveness might actually be necessary. Aside from that, the more bizarre and pathetic the behavior being admitted, the better. Confession, it seems, is now seen less as good for the soul than as good for publicity. Thomas Robert Dewar's sage observation that "confessions may be good for the soul but they are bad for the reputation" is quaintly passe. Increasingly the quest for fame calls for infamy.

And this strange reversal about the nature of confession has even invaded the church. The act of confession in many cases has become a formal assurance that people are basically O.K., that no real transformation of the heart is necessary. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together asked “whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness." Now, more than fifty years later, I’ve attended countless meetings with fellow pastors about how to attract Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers and so on back to the church. One of the ideas being floated is leaving the confession out altogether. “That puts people off,” they say, “It gives them a negative feeling about God.” Or "they already feel bad enough."

And believe it or not, I can understand that. The night before I became a Christian, I spent about 2 hours talking to the man who was my pastor me during the first half of my Christian life - the first 8 years. I had a lot of questions... like, did I have to believe in a 6-day creation. But the most important one, I think, was, “Did I have to say I was a bad person?” And John said, “No, all I had to say was that I needed God.” I don’t think I really started to understand sin and confession until at least a couple of years later. I thought being a sinner meant being a bad person, and I didn’t think I was. All I knew was that I was starving to death.

I was really lucky to get John as my spiritual leader. Because most of the people I met later at the Baptist seminary where I studied were convinced that people had to start with a conviction of sin before they could come to a saving knowledge of God. And in a way that’s true.

But if you’re brought up in a culture that (1) defines sin as ‘bad things that you should be punished for’ and (2) doesn’t think people should be punished for anything but intolerance or, maybe, murder, how can you even identify the need that drives you to God as ‘conviction of sin’? Hunger, yes, emptiness, yes, need, yes... but guilt?

Some people are so wounded that they cannot bear to face their own sense of guilt, because it is not safe. Life has taught them that love is conditional, and that confession will be met with punishment and shaming, rather than cleansing and renewal. For these, the initial embrace of God’s people does, indeed, need to be gentle and affirming. But in order to grow, eventually we must all face our own internal demons - we all have them - and turn them over to God to deal with.

Psalm 32 is one of the great penitential Psalms. One of the greatest gifts David gave God’s people was to teach us how to repent. Because no matter what it is that we have done, or said, or thought, or felt, I doubt that any of us can outdo King David. He seduced a woman and then killed her husband to keep from being found out. And yet as soon as he saw what he had done, David brought it to God, saying in Psalm 51, "You desire truth in our inmost parts," and "create in me a pure heart, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." He knew that God alone could create that clean heart, that it was not within his power to cleanse himself. And later in Psalm 139 David said, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me..." For he knew that there might be other areas of his life about which he was deceiving himself. Being honest with God often entails going back and retrieving more forgotten items from the back of our mental storage bins.