Sermons

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Confession: Stating the Obvious
April 21, 2002
Second in a sermon series on prayer
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Luke 18:9-14

Last week, we started four sermons on the topic of prayer. We talked about Jesus’ teaching us to pray simply, to pray with persistence and to remember we pray to a God who cares, who WANTS to hear our prayers. This morning, we’re talking about praying honestly. We’re talking about a particular type of prayer, the confession of sin. Look with me at one of Jesus’ parables in the gospel of Luke, 18:9-14.

In order to really hear this parable, you’ll need to use your imagination just a bit. You’ll need to forget what you know about Jesus’ conflicts with the Pharisees of his day, and just remember that Pharisees were religious leaders. Respected by the people, upright, moral to a fault…surely a Pharisee knew how to pray:

“God, thanks that I’m not like the people around me…in fact, right next to me in the pew. Thanks that I’m not a thief, or a rogue, or an adulterer…Thanks that I’m not an immoral tax collector like this guy over here. Thanks that I’m different. Thanks that I’m spiritual; in fact I fast each week, TWICE I might add. And I tithe (though I can’t quite decide if that’s off the gross or net?) ...Thanks, Lord. I’m living your life, Lord.”

Surely God approved of this man.

The second prayer was much shorter: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” prayed the tax collector. Tax collectors…were schmucks. Not many were lower in the eyes of the people than a tax collector. One of their own neighbors who had sold out, was serving the hated Roman occupiers, was upping their tax rates to line his own pockets…Surely God condemned this tax collector.

Who might these people be today? Let’s see…a trusted religious leader and a less than reputable citizen… Maybe a senior pastor…and an ambulance-chasing lawyer?! Maybe Billy Graham and a paper-shredding auditor? Of course, there’s not a question about which would have God’s favor…is there?

The Pharisee has EVERYTHING…EXCEPT one thing…one critical thing.

The Tax Collector has NOTHING…EXCEPT one thing…awareness of his need.

And it is that awareness that cause him to cry out to God, to CONFESS, to pray his prayer of confession. Confession means simply “to tell or make known…to admit.” It is this heart of confession…the willingness to tell, to admit, to be honest with God…that causes Jesus to choose the immoral auditor, the ambulance-chasing lawyer, the Tax Collector. Jesus has (once again) reversed the status quo. So where does that leave me? And you? Am I someone…aware of my own sin, my own need? Who am I in this story?

Lots of people ask me: “Why do Christians spend so much time talking about sin? You don’t hear that in other religions, or psychology today.” It’s true. Most of our society doesn’t talk about sin. In fact, we’re coached not to. “Don’t dwell on the negative, don’t let guilt touch you, don’t take on responsibility for action…there’s always someone else who caused the problem. And so: Our judicial system is jammed with thousands of cases of people pointing the finger at someone else. If you drop your coffee on yourself, sue the store it was purchased from. If you’re addicted to the computer, sue the company that makes the computer games. If you run a red light, it must not have been hanging at the right angle…sue the city. The word of our day is: You no longer have to be wrong! We live in the postmodern world, filled with relativity. Nothing is really wrong…or right. Something is true for you, but not for me. So if nothing is wrong for me, there’s no sin, and no need for confession.

And here you sit, a Christian or someone interested, reading from the scriptures, trying to follow Jesus. And he keeps throwing out this word, sin. We can’t ignore it. Or paint over it, or talk it away. John Stott says,

“Indeed, Christianity is the only religion in the world which takes sin seriously and offers a satisfactory remedy for it. And the way to enjoy this remedy is not to deny the disease, but to confess it.”

Where are you in this story? The Religious Leader? Or the Tax Collector? Be careful how you answer. Jesus loves to reverse what seems obvious, to make us rethink what we’ve always thought. Jesus chooses NOT the one who outwardly appears to be a saint…but the one who confesses himself a sinner. The one who simply states the obvious…is the one close to God’s heart.

Listen to the words of some of our confessions:

“Lord, I have sinned in thought, word and deed.”

“Lord, I have not loved my neighbor as myself.”

“Lord, I’ve done the things you said not to, and ignored the things you said to do.”

“Lord, I’ve hidden from you, and tried to cover up my guilt.”

Cover-ups of wrongdoing didn’t originate with Enron, or with Watergate. All the way back in Genesis when Adam and Eve messed up and chose THEIR way over God’s…the hiding and the cover-ups started. Adam and Eve hide from God, and when God says, “Where are you?,” Adam says, “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.” He could have said, “I was scared because we disobeyed you.” He didn’t. In fact, the next thing he said was, “It was HER!...She did it! Or at least, she did more than I did.”

That sounds a bit like this Pharisee. He may not think he’s perfect, may even be thankful to God for his life…but he knows darn well he’s better than those around him. Of COURSE God approves the one who did the least wrong. Right? But no. He approves the one who comes broken, crying, and honestly…to ask for forgiveness. Comes to the one who acknowledges his need. The Tax Collector isn’t doing anything spectacular, isn’t telling God anything He doesn’t know. He’s just confessing…just stating the obvious to God.

So what does confession look like in real life?:

1) We go to God. Whatever we have done wrong, we have acted against being the kind of person God wants us to be. In Psalm 51, the Psalm David wrote after he was confronted with his sin with Bathsheba and the cover-up that followed, he writes: “Against you, God, you alone have I sinned.” David isn’t saying he hadn’t hurt Bathsheba, her husband, or many others…he had sinned against them too. But he acknowledges that ultimately…he has shattered his relationship with God…which is what sin does. He will need to do other things as well…but he also must go to God and confess.

2) We go to God…OFTEN. If we sin often, we go often. I’m so grateful that God makes Himself available to us. At each moment. There’s no need to wait for Sunday, no need to figure out the cover-up, or the right spin. God waits for us to go to him and tell him. When we don’t…it gets worse. Psalm 32 describes one of the effects:

“When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was upon me. My strength was dried up, as with the fever heat of summer.”

I can attest to that. Several times in my life, when I dragged my feet in coming clean in confession…I experienced a loss of energy, felt like I was dragging, something wasn’t right…a physical manifestation of not being right with God. God awaits our simple confession: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.”

No doubt you’ve noticed that there are a few things that go on in every single worship service at Bethany. Some of the elements change from week to week or season to season…but always, every single Sunday, there is a time to confess our sins to God. We come to worship God in spirit and in truth, and we want nothing to stand between us and God, between us and other people…and so we confess. Not just on Sundays…but also on Sundays.

3) We go and confess to others whom we have hurt. This is a very humbling thing. Many more times than I care to remember, I’ve had to go to someone and say, “I need to say I’m sorry for what I said,” or “I felt like I was gossiping. I’m sorry. I want to ask your forgiveness.” I’m always reluctant, I always fight it. But we can’t minimize it, we’re very specific, to apologize, and then specifically ask for forgiveness. It’s supposed to be one of the marks of the family of God, something that would set us apart. No need to feud, or make excuses, or put a spin on things.

I’ve always been a fan of Billy Graham’s, of how he has stuck to what the Lord has given him to do, of how he has avoided the difficult parts of being in the public eye, of how his ministries have operated with great financial and moral integrity. So I was very disappointed in these last weeks to read of the remarks of his on tape with President Nixon, many, many years ago, that were disparaging to Jewish people. But I also have so much appreciated how he dealt with it afterwards: issuing an apology, and asking forgiveness. No cover-up, no spin…just honesty, and a broken heart.

4) Sometimes, in confession, we need a brother or sister in Christ who may have had nothing to do with our sin…to hear our confession, to pray with us, and to remind us audibly and scripturally, of God’s heart and forgiveness. James 5 says, “Confess your sins to one another.” We can be Christ’s ambassadors to one another. Sometimes we are reluctant to do that because we don’t want to appear weak, or because we think that no one else has ever committed our kind of sins. But the Church is a collection of sinners, not saints…we walk with each other, and sometimes we are the hands and feet…or ears, of Jesus in a concrete way by listening to another’s confession, and assuring them of what God is like.

Richard Foster, the Quaker who has written and spoken a great deal on Prayer, tells a story of feeling like he was weighted down by things which had happened long ago in his life. He decided that God was prompting him towards confession, and he took several days, and mentally/ prayerfully revisited his life. He took some blank sheets of paper, and sat down the first day to write things that God brought to his mind that had hurt him, or sins he had committed. The first sheet was just things from his childhood. Then the next sheet on memories from his adolescence. Then a third sheet with things God called to mind from his life as a grown-up, sins and hurt.

When he was done, he asked an older man, a mentor, to hear this confession. And that’s all his friend did, was listen. For a long time. After painfully reading the entire thing, page by page, Foster started to put the sheets of paper back in his briefcase. But his friend gently took them from his hand, and slowly ripped them into tiny pieces and threw them in the garbage…a visual reminder, which he followed with a scriptural one, and then in prayer….of God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ.

5) Always, whether here, or when you pray with another person…there is an assurance of pardon. The last word is always a good word. It is the assurance, the reminder, the spoken Word in confidence, that God is a God of forgiveness. That he doesn’t want us to wallow in the same sins or memories time after time, year after year. That he invites us to lay them at the foot of the cross. That they have been taken care of, once and for all, and they no longer hold power over us.

I remember back in my younger days, training for basketball. Back then, if you were really serious, you would work out for part of practice in a “weight vest,” a vest loaded down with 15 or 20 pounds of metal. Then, if you were extra macho, you would also strap on ankle weights. Now, it was really difficult to run and jump and shoot with all that extra weight. I could never jump much without the vest! But when it was time to take it off and practice without it…boy, did you feel light! You felt like you could jump out of the gym! I think that’s a little picture of how God invites us, in confession, to take off those things that weigh us down…just coming and saying,

“Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.”

Pharisee…or Tax Collector. I don’t know where you find yourself in this story. But what Jesus says…is that there is a great future…for wicked tax collectors…who honestly ask for God’s mercy…who just state the obvious…and thereby get in touch with the grace and forgiveness that only Jesus can provide.