Lent and Confession...

I come from a tradition where confession is typically relegated to one of the five fingers of the old "five-fingered exercise" made famous by Walter Scott and others: "hear, believe, repent, confession, be baptized." This relegates confession to the profession of a statement about one's understanding of the identity of Jesus and his role in the greater salvation history and life and action of God in the world. While this is a very valid facet to "confession," it is definitely only one side of the equation.

Confession has a much deeper place in the history of Christianity, especially at this time of year. As I write this, I find myself in the middle of the second week of the Lenten season, a time of introspection, reflection, transformation, and, yes, confession. During Lent, we discover the important place of confession in the process of transformation. Confession opens us up to the confronting work of the Spirit of God. Yet, sometimes, perhaps most of the time, we find ourselves pushing ahead with the masses at such a breakneck pace that "pausing," stopping for confession, is an impossible task.

Perhaps that is why Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing is one of my Lenten favorites. I continually find myself pulling this tattered, partially digested (by Shiloh, the family Labrador!) book off of the shelf around this time each year. The book is Kierkegaard's take on the "spiritual preparation for the Office of Confession" in the church. (The prayer that opens and closes that book are worth the price of the volume.) I leave you with these excerpts that serve as his summation of the volume:

My listener! Do you remember now, how this talk began? Let me call it back to you remembrance. It is true that the temporal order has its time; but the Eternal shall always have time. If this should not happen within a man’s life, then the Eternal comes again under another name, and once again shall always have time. This is repentance. And since at present no man’s life is lived in perfection, but each one in frailty, so Providence has given man two companions for his journey, one calls him forward, the other calls him back. But the call of repentance [the call back] is always at the eleventh hour, but not in the sense of being precipitate. For confession is a holy act, which calls for a collected mind. A collected mind is a mind that has collected itself from every distraction, from every relation, in order to center itself upon this relation to itself as an individual who is responsible to God. It is a mind that has collected itself from every distraction, and therefore also from all comparison. For comparison may either tempt a man to an earthly and fortuitous despondency because the one who compares must admit to himself that he is behind many others, or it may tempt him to pride, because, humanly speaking, he seems to be ahead of many others.

A new expression of the true extremity of the eleventh hour comes when the penitent has withdrawn himself from every relation in order to center himself upon his relation to himself as an individual. By this he becomes responsible for every relation in which he ordinarily stands, and he is outside of any comparison. The more use one makes of comparison, the more it seems that there is still plenty of time. The more a man makes use of comparison, the more indolent and the more wretched his life becomes. But when all comparison is relinquished forever then a man confesses as an individual before God—and he is outside any comparison, just as the demand which purity of heart lays upon him is outside of comparison. Purity of heart is what God requires of him and the penitent demands it of himself before God. Yes, it is just on this account that he confesses his sins. And heavy as the way and the hour of the confession may be, yet the penitent wins the Eternal. He is strengthened in the consciousness that he is an individual, and in the task of truthfully willing only one thing….

For pausing [answering the companion calling one back] is not a sluggish response. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But merely going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. But that way one does not come to will only one thing. Only if at sometime he decisively stopped going further and then again came to a pause, as he went further, only then could he will only one thing.

Father in Heaven! What is a man without Thee! What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee! What is all his striving, could it even encompass the world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who are all! So may Thou give to the intellect, wisdom to comprehend that one thing; to the heart, sincerity to receive this understanding; to the will, purity that wills only one thing. In prosperity may Thou grant perseverance to will one thing; amid distractions, collectedness to will one thing; in suffering, patience to will one thing. Oh, Thou that giveth both the beginning and the completion, may Thou early, at the dawn of day, give to the young man the resolution to will one thing. As the day wanes, may Thou give to the old man a renewed remembrance of his first resolution, that the first may be like the last, the last like the first, in possession of a life that has willed only one thing. Alas, but this has indeed not come to pass. Something has come in between. The separation of sin lies in between. Each day, and day after day something is being placed in between: delay, blockage, interruption, delusion, corruption. So in this time of repentance may Thou give the courage once again to will one thing. True, it is an interruption of our daily tasks; we do lay down our work as though it were a day of rest, when the penitent (and it is only in a time of repentance that the heavy-laden worker may be quiet in the confession of sin) is alone before Thee in self-accusation. This is indeed an interruption. But it is an interruption that searches back into its very beginnings that it might bind up anew that which sin has separated that in its grief might atone for lost time, that in its anxiety in might bring to completion that which lies before it. Oh, Thou that givest both the beginning and the completion, give Thou victory in the day of need so that what neither a man’s burning wish nor his determined resolution may attain to, may be granted unto him in the sorrowing of repentance: to will only one thing.

(From Purity of Heart, 216-219)

“Everyone Who Thirsts, Come to the Waters…”

“Everyone Who Thirsts, Come to the Waters…”

Third Sunday in Lent, 2007: 11 March 2007

Ps. 63:1-8; Isa. 55:1-9; 1 Cor. 10:1-13

The weather is finally warming up. The snow pack is starting to disappear. Green grass is beginning to appear. Signs of spring are all around us. Spring is the time of year when new life begins to blossom out of the cold death of winter. For me it’s a reminder that Easter is near, and as I prepare to celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection, it is a season of reflection, repentance, and confession. Call it a little spiritual spring cleaning. It is a time of restoration, during which I set to refocus my vision on Christ as the model for life. Spring is a season of introspection. Introspection is rarely easy and often painful, because most of us prefer to not examine the dark places of our own lives and souls. Instead, we try to forget how far we are from the calling of God, ignoring our shortcomings, our failures, and our sin. It’s much easier to remain intellectually focused, ritually and doctrinally sound, and emotionally detached from faith and the object of our faith. But I can’t do that in the spring. Something about the new life blossoming out of winter opens my life and allows God to confront me with Scriptures that dare me to look deep within myself and to allow God to heal the brokenness that I find there.

That is what this passage has done to me this week. I have spent everyday this week reading this passage from Isaiah 55 several times and opening my heart to the Spirit to let it do its work on me. It hasn’t always been fun, much less pretty, but there is such a strong word of hope and life here, that it has been worth the journey. It is a reminder that spring is a herald of Easter, where the God of resurrection brings about new creation and breathes new life into that which was dead.

[Pray.]

As we step into the world of our text this morning, we are ushered into a street scene. My mind immediately rushes to Proverbs 9, where we hear the competing calls of Woman Wisdom and the Foolish Woman. They send their girls out to the streets of town and have them call out from high places to all who pass by, “You who are simple, turn in here for water and wine and bread!” These sirens call out in the marketplace. They seem to know our desire, our need, our craving, our emptiness, our striving, our longing.

I have spent time among the street vendors in the African or Thai marketplace, listening to their competing voices offering up their wares. I watched consumers and clients, patrons and pilgrims bartering for the best deals, trying to get the best bang for their buck. (Okay, I confess that I have been one of those barterers!) The vendors call to us tempting us with fragrant foods and beautiful merchandise and colorful goods.

But the venders in life are not simply about handmade trinkets or cheap souvenirs. Their call strikes at the heart of that very longing and offers to fill our need. Here in this country we’ve made a multibillion dollar industry of playing on people’s needs and desires, dreams, longings, fears, and insecurities. We continually work to offer the next best thing that promises to fill the void, to solve the problem, to quench our spiritual, emotional, and relational thirst.

But all of these things are hollow, like the empty calories that we eat, hoping to feed our hunger, only to find that we are hungrier and more malnourished than we were before we ate them… As people, we struggle with the temptation of constantly striving for the next thing to satisfy our desires, to get our fix. We look to quench the deep thirst of our souls, to slake our hunger in so many places, in so many things, in so many people…. And far too often we buy into the lies; we keep the madness going. “We spend our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy” (55:2).

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers on faith. I like her because her coming to faith has been a very long and colorful journey. Her writing is not for the faint of heart. It is honest, probing, reflective, and at times incredibly raw. In a book of some of her reflections on faith, Lamott writes some compelling thoughts on her battle with her own “thirst.” It seemed to fit so well with our Scripture for today that I was drawn back to it all week. She writes,

“I knew by the time I was twenty that I was an alcoholic, even though I was not quite sure what that meant. I liked being an alcoholic; I liked drinking and getting high or drunk with other people like me—I thought of us as being like everyone else, only more so. More alive. Deeper.… And all sorts of other [lies] we tell ourselves when we have lost the ability to control our drinking.

“One day in 1985, I woke up so hungover that I felt pinned to the bed by centrifugal force…. I was literally glued to my pillow by drool. I decided to quit drinking. And I was doing quite well, in fact, until five o’clock that first night. Then the panic set in. Thankfully, I had a moment of clarity in which I understood that the problem was not that I drank so much but that I drank too quickly. The problem was with pacing. So I had a good idea. I would limit myself to two beers a night. Two beers! What a great idea.

“I went to the market, which was one block away, and got two beers—two beers, sort of. What I bought were two sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales…. I took the two Rainier Ales home, and I drank one. I got a little high, but it was only 5:30. And I realized I was going to have to make the second sixteen-ounce Rainier Ale last until bedtime. So after I put on my thinking cap, I realized that if I was going to pace myself successfully, I might need a little… supplement.

“Luckily, I had a Nike box full of prescription pills…. I took one blue Valium that night—so little, so helpless, smaller even than a tic tac—and washed it down with part of the second sixteen-ounce Rainier Ale. Twenty minutes later I began to feel better, a little calmer. More whole. More like God.

“So I was able to fall asleep that night at a nice early hour, like 7:30, and I slept like a baby and woke up twelve hours later, completely refreshed. Wow! I thought. This is fantastic: no hangover, no being glued to the pillow. Whenever people called that morning and asked how I was, I said I felt great, which was true, and that I was on the wagon, which I believed I was, in the reform sense of the phrase….

“By the fifth day, though, after drinking the first of my sixteen ounce Rainer Ales, I began to resent anyone’s attempts to control me—even my own. And so, as an act of liberation, I bought a fifth of Bushmills Irish Whiskey and had drunk it all by dawn.

“It only took me one more year to admit that I could no longer control my drinking. And finally on July 7, 1986, I quit, and let a bunch of sober alcoholics teach me how to get sober, and stay sober….

“Early on I heard a sober person say, ‘Religion is for people who are afraid of hell; spirituality is for people who have been there.’… I love to listen to [sober alcoholics] tell their stories of ruin; I’m a sucker for a good resurrection story. And I love to hear of their efforts not to see what was as plain as day…. I love these stories because they show where we began, and therefore how far we have come, from the blame and delusions of our drinking days to the gentle illusions by which we stay sober.” (Traveling Mercies, 184-189)

It would be easy to dismiss Lamott’s account of her attempts to quench her deep thirst with alcohol as someone else’s problem, as something to which we are immune, inoculated by some special vaccine that protects us from our own longings, our own compulsive cycles of sin and addiction. But none of us is immune to the longing to fill the restlessness of our hearts. We all find ourselves settling for cheap substitutes, for that which doesn’t give life. At times we all put in enormous “effort not to see what was as plain as day.” To one degree or another, we all suffer from the disease described by Augustine, who, after reflecting on all the things he did to find peace and fulfillment in his life, prayed, “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

We try to fill the emptiness and restlessness with that which is not bread and that which does not truly satisfy (55:2)….. For Israel in exile, it was a deep fascination with Babylonian power and the Babylonian gods. They thought that they could be their source of hope, security, and life. The contemporary exilic prophet Jeremiah put it this way, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jer 2:13) It is such an unnatural response: the people of God turning from the fountain of living water to go after that which doesn’t satisfy, putting their trust in cisterns that can’t even hold stagnant water, much less flow with living water.

For us it may be different, but we struggle with compulsion nonetheless. We may try to fill our emptiness with an addiction: alcohol, prescription meds, work, food, gambling, sex, pornography. People use all of these things to still the restlessness of their hearts. It may be material things. You may be enslaved by a consumer driven society to buying the newest and the latest, the hottest items that promise to make life better and more worthwhile to live. It may be your relationships with people. You may be sucking the life out of your friends or your children or your spouse because you are asking them to fill a place and a need that only God can fill. Or maybe it’s power, which feeds us the false sense that we are dependent on nothing other than our own prowess, pride, proficiency and prestige, that in some way we are our own god.

We could even be trying to quench our thirst with something that is as seemingly innocuous, or even beneficial, as religion itself. But that may be the most dangerous compulsion, possibly far more dangerous than the enslavement to alcohol that Lamott describes. Spiritual things can become another commodity that we use to try to quench what only the life giving water of God can fill. Sometimes it comes in our need to get the next religious ‘fix,’ where we feed off of spiritual highs and need to have the next new religious experience in order to feel alive. Or, it can be the prideful need for right religious observance or doctrinal purity, where our faith is often placed in our rightness instead of God’s righteousness and our life is found in our purity rather than in God’s pure living water. Both of these are equally as dangerous and empty of what gives real life. They are religion as a drug, an “empty food” that doesn’t nourish or satisfy.

And it is here, it is here that our text encounters us, scrutinizes us, critiques us, and summons us to something new, something better, something real, something that satisfies and gives life (55:3), offering us something to quench our thirst and sate our hunger. But this is not just another cry from any ordinary vendor. The voice of street vendor crying out in our text is none other than the voice of Yahweh.

God calls us to give up our fascination with power, with possessions, with both lifeless religion and empty attempts at spirituality, and to return to the free, gracious, and compassionate gift of the only one who can give true life, who can deliver us from our enslavement to ourselves and to the principalities and powers of the present evil age.

God has moved and provided the grace, that which gives life. He offers us an alternative, a new vision of the world, where the priceless things that truly satisfy are given freely and abundantly. He offers us the chance to change and grow, to stop spending our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy. God offers us the knowledge and love of another on terms other than those of our own fear and compulsion. Will we continue in our idolatry, persist in our sin? Will we keep trying to feed our hunger with what doesn’t satisfy or nourish, drink that which doesn’t quench our thirst?

Thirst. Everyone who thirsts, come. Thirst. Thirst is all that is required. All you need is to admit your thirst. Give up the illusion that you can find something to quench your own thirst. Then come; don’t wait; come, buy and drink from the deep wells of God.

The cry of our hearts must echo the cry of the Psalmist from our call to worship today: “Oh God, you are my God. I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Ps. 63:1)

And God hears our cry and replies: “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters… Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear to me, and come to me; listen, so that you may live!” (55:1, 2b-3a)

Can’t you just hear the voice of Jesus saying to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water, water that will truly quench you thirst. The water I give will become in those who drink a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:10, 14).

But this morning, maybe we need to hear the call again. Maybe you find yourself compulsively going after things that do not satisfy. Maybe you feel the emptiness of a life nourished only on that which is not true bread. Maybe your soul is parched and thirsty for God, as “a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Hear the cry of God above the voices of the other street vendors this morning, “Everyone who is thirsty, come to the waters…. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let the return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (55:1, 6-7).

Thirst is all that is required. If you are thirsty, come, seek and find the Lord.

Lent and the Love of God

“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin that would exceed the love of God?

“Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that he loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men.

“Now go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love, you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love.

If I, a sinner even as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

- from Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

We are all wired differently. We engage the spiritual life, the life of faith, in different ways. Some of us thrive on solitude, silence, and prayer, while others long for the boisterous clamor of fellowship or the emotive power of rich worship. Some crave the intense, intentional study of the Word, while others are filled with life by emptying themselves for the sake of others in service. Now, ideally we will find ourselves moving into fluidly between each of these spheres, as we see modeled in the life of Jesus, but most of us have a tendency to gravitate naturally to one or another. That is one of the reasons that we need community. We need to be in relationship with those who thrive on different aspects of the spiritual life because it will help all of us be more holistic in our faith; we need others like ourselves to remind us that we are not alone, to encourage us on the journey of faith.

That is one reason that I am so thankful that many in the Churches of Christ are (re)discovering the beauty of the Christian calendar. Growing up I remember listening to people preach about the resurrection at Christmas and about the birth of Christ on Easter Sunday. It was always a little strange to me, out of place, like eating turkey and dressing on the Fourth of July. Even then, at that early age, there was something inside of me, something about my wiring, that needed the natural movement of the Christian calendar to help make sense of the seasons of my spiritual journey. I am neither smart enough nor disciplined enough to live into all of the depth and beauty of the Christian life each and every day. I needed the ebbs and flows of the Christian year as a vital part of my spirituality to help me on my journey. I need the birth of Christ at Christmas after the season of anticipation called Advent, the resurrection on Easter after the season of fasting, repentance, and preparation called Lent.

This week we find ourselves right in the middle of the season many Christians call Lent. While for many of us this may just bring up memories of “fishy Fridays” in our elementary school cafeterias, Lent is much more than that. Lent is a season of personal and corporate reflection and introspection, of repentance and confession. (This is important in a tradition like ours that has often minimized “confession” to be a statement of our belief in Jesus before baptism.) It is a time of restoration, during which we our refocus our vision of Christ as the model for our own lives. It is a time of solidarity, where we seek to refocus our vision for the “least of these.” So, during this time we reflect on God’s work in the world, on Christ’s cruciform (cross-shaped) life and mission, and we reflect on how our own spiritual journey can grow more into a reflection of his life in the world.

From very early in the history of the church, Lent developed as a season of introspection and repentance for those who were studying and preparing for baptism. The early church understood the deep commitment that came with baptism, and they did not want anyone to enter the baptismal waters lightly or haphazardly, so this season of fasting and commitment was vital to those who were counting the cost of taking up their cross and following Jesus. It was also a time when the baptized community looked deep within their own hearts to consider their own lives, their commitment to and their failings in answering the call of Christ. All of this led to the renewal of their baptismal commitments during the celebration of Easter, a recommitting of their lives to the way of Jesus.

That is why this forty day season is so important to me. This is a time of deep reflection and introspection for me. It is a time of confession and repentance. It is a time during which I try to commit myself to dying to sin, to seeking the way of the cross, to hungering and thirsting for God, to living for the sake of others. It is a time of preparation for me, when I set my mind to reconsidering the intense and all encompassing claims of my baptism on my life and prepare to recommit myself again to walking in the way of Jesus.

I guess that is one reason that I love Dostoevsky’s words on the deep wells of the love of God that exceed all of my sin and failings. As I live in “continual repentance” for these forty days of Lent, his words serve as an empowering reminder: “Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin that would exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive.”

Merton & Lent

The Lenten season always seems to drive me back to my good friend Thomas Merton. Maybe its the deep introspection and contemplation of the mysteries of life and God. Merton did write a book called New Seeds of Contemplation, so it seems only fitting.

Here are a couple of quotes that I love from New Seeds that really strike me, especially during this time of year:

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. We are free beings and sons [and daughters] of God. This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. (32)

Be content that you are not yet a saint, even though you realize that the only thing worth living for is sanctity. Then you will be satisfied to let God lead you to sanctity by paths that you cannot understand. (59-60)