I have a fun thing to share with you.  As of two days ago, I have now been ordained as a pastor for exactly ten years.  That means that my post-college working life has been split exactly in half:  10 years in business, 3 years in grad school, now 10 years in ministry.  Now, Earl Palmer over at University Presbyterian just hit fifty years ordained.  It’s going to be hard for me to catch him.  But I figured if I preach until I’m 87, I can do it!

We continue on with this series we’ve called “Following Jesus Together,” looking at life in the community.  Today we’ll read once again from the book of James. 

You know, the great reformer Martin Luther did not care at all for the book of James.  He called it an “epistle of straw,” noting with many others that it contained no clear reference to the resurrection of Jesus.   I personally see that more as something assumed in James.  James is a book of practicalities, written in a time of necessities.  There was no blueprint on “how to be church.”  The church itself had to figure out how it would survive, even thrive, as Christ gathered His people.

This morning, then, we’ll read from James 5:13-16.  Please stand for the reading of God’s word.    

It’s an interesting world we live in.  Our culture, at least in the U.S., has been deeply marked by a number of influences in the past few decades:

1. relativism--the idea that there is no universal truth.  Nothing is right or wrong, it’s just right or wrong for some people.  And woe be to you if you are seen to be making a moral judgment on someone else’s decision.  Tolerance is the shining virtue of our day.
2. individualism--the autonomy and independence of the individual has totally eclipsed any sense of what is good for the larger community.  
3. disappearance of personal responsibility--nobody is responsible. 
   

One of my favorite musicians right now (besides Kurt Dyhrsen!) is Jack Johnson, who does a song called “Cookie Jar.”  It’s a song that is partly about the impact that media have on us. 

It’s about a boy who shoots someone--the boy’s line is

“I pulled the trigger…but you can’t blame me because I’m too young.” 

Then it switches to the boy’s father who says,

“Sure the killer was my son, but I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.  It’s the killing on the TV screen, you can’t blame me, it’s those images he seen.” 

Then it moves to the “media man” who just points his camera at what the people want to see, then it moves to the maker of the movie that the boy had based his life on.  The poignant phrase at each step is:

“You can’t blame me.”

So:

• absence of any standard for right and wrong,
• tolerance as the highest virtue,
• the glorification of the individual,
• the disappearance of personal responsibility…

And so we end up in this sort of bizarre world where we can have hundreds of people ride buck naked through the streets of Seattle to celebrate the summer solstice…but a public high school orchestra in Everett can’t play an instrumental-only version of “Ave Maria.” 

Or we lament over the horrible price drunk driving extracts from our culture (nearly 20,000 people died last year), yet there was a story in the newspaper just a few weeks ago of an attorney team which takes great pride in getting repeat drunk driver offenders back on the road quickly, because to ban them would infringe on their individual rights.

In a culture like this is should come as no surprise at all that words like “sin” and phrases like “Confess your sins to one another” become just ancient, dusty, meaningless words. Don’t use them, you might hurt someone’s self-image; don’t use them, you’re insinuating that there could be a right and a wrong.

This is not a new development.  It’s been going on for years and years.  Way back in the mid-1970’s a psychiatrist named Karl Menninger, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin? 

“Where has sin gone,” he asked.  “Is it no longer involved in our troubles?” 

Menninger chided the preachers of his day for not preaching about sin.  He argued that redefining sin as just a cultural taboo or a social blunder or a regrettable lapse missed the mark entirely.  He pleaded for the reinstatement of the word “sin” describing an aggressive quality…that signified a breaking away from God, and from other people, an act of rebellion and alienation, a deliberate stepping over a line.

The Christian faith is all about forgiveness.  But if there is no sin, there is nothing to confess.  If there is no sin, we don’t need forgiveness.  And the idea that Jesus was accused of blasphemy because he had the audacity to forgive sin…makes no sense at all.

In 1000 BC, sin seemed alive and well.  King David, Israel’s most outstanding king and “the man after God’s own heart,” chose to have another another man’s wife, Bathsheba, and committed murder in order to make it happen.

What effect did it have on him? 

• It ruined his family. 
• It alienated him from God. 
• It dragged him down physically.

Hear the words from Psalm 32, a psalm of David: 

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

Or later, in Psalm 51…that Mike just read,

“Hide your face from my sins, blot out my inequities.  Create in me a clean heart, O God.”

You say, “Dan, that example is a little extreme.” You say, “I don’t commit adultery, I don’t murder…”  But Jesus, of course, made it more clear in the New Testament.  We not only do things, but we think things, we hold things in our heart, we serve ourselves, we avoid doing things we know would be right.  Sin is alive and well, whether we chose to name it or not.  Owning up to that reality is a critical step for the community of faith. 

And it’s not just for my own personal faults.  We have responsibility for the state of the world we live in.  Let me tell you a story: Matt Friedeman lives in Jackson, Mississippi, and is involved in work in the city there. In August of 2000, he wrote this story:

“Several months ago I was on a TV show to discuss with other panel members recent problems plaguing the Jackson MS community. The city council was in disarray because the council president and another councilman were headed off to jail. The council president was caught making shady deals with a strip club in relation to a rezoning ordinance. The panel moderator looked at me and asked, 'Matt, whose fault is all of this?'

Suddenly I became agitated. I prepared to tell her in dramatic on-air fashion that we are a nation of laws and that the council president trampled on those laws. If we were looking to place blame, there was only one place to put it -- smack dab in his lap as he sat in his well-deserved jail cell.

This is what I was going to say, but I never got the words out. One of the panelists sitting next to me was a gentleman named John Perkins -- author, teacher, community developer, and national evangelical leader. Before I could respond, Perkins answered, 'It’s my fault.'

All heads turned his way. He elaborated. “I have lived in this community for decades as a Bible teacher. I should have been able to create an environment where what our council president did would have been unthinkable because of my efforts. You want someone to blame? I’ll take the blame. All of it.”

The purpose of all this talking about sin is not to heap coals of fire on ourselves, and or send you reeling out of here in depression, but rather to point us towards the remedy.  The same Martin Luther who said he didn’t like the book of James also said this:

“When I admonish you to confession…I am admonishing you to be a Christian.”

For Luther, confession was the doorway to forgiveness.  A Christian…confesses.  Period.

Every time that we gather for worship as a community…we take time for confession.  Every week, every Sunday.  We will a little bit later on.  Other things in the service move in and out and around, but one way or another, every week…we will confess our sin.  So let’s think about confession a little bit.

Confession is a discipline.  It is never the thing our heart longs to do.  Let’s be honest.  If I have wronged a human being, and know I need to admit it…I stall.  I try to justify my behavior to myself.  I hem and haw.  Eventually, I may reluctantly drag myself to the other person. 

We don’t relish it.  We take a deep breath.  Confession is a discipline.  But if we look at confession as merely a rote, obligatory part of being a Christian…we rob ourselves.  Confession is a gift.  It is an opportunity, an amazing opportunity.  We are invited to continually draw near to a God who is predisposed to forgive, to draw near to the heart of God and be washed clean and welcomed home. 

Confession is an individual act, between you and God.  In prayer, we come to God as individuals.  Usually it is in quiet.  Even when we pause here in worship for a time of confession, there is space to silently and individually admit to God the things on our hearts, or as Frederick Buechner says, to tell God the truth, what he already knows.  It’s best to be specific.

Three weeks ago, I had an introduction to a sermon all written.  I thought it was pretty witty.  For a week beforehand, and still as I sat in our quiet listening time, I wrestled with whether I should use it or not.  It was a little cynical.  It seemed like God kept asking me why I wanted to say that:  to be funny?  to make myself look good?  I argued and wrestled.  Before I walked up here to preach, it was obvious that I shouldn’t use it.  And it was clear that I needed my heart to be clear of the whole process.  And what a lovely thing to be able to say,

“Lord, I was wrong.  I heard your voice and wanted to ignore You.  Please forgive me.” 

Confession is an individual act.

Confession is also a corporate act.  We gather as the community that is following Jesus, and admit our sin.  Sometimes a worship leader does it on behalf of all of us.  Sometimes, as we will in a little while, we will pray together.  These prayers are usually a little more general, so we can all say

“yes, I need to pray this. I have sinned in thought, word and deed.” 

Individually we fill in the blanks.  But we come together to the Lord, admitting our need for Him, joining the company of sinners.  When we pray a prayer together, we own our contribution to the brokenness of our world.  When we confess together, we affirm the opposite of the things I mentioned about our culture at the beginning:  There is a right and wrong, I do bear responsibility, I need other people.

Confession is a corporate act.

Confession is also a community opportunity.  When James mentions “confession” here, he says,

“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another.” 

“Confess your sins to one another?”  Whoa.  That’s a whole nother thing.  I can confess to God, I can even join in a confession that many of us share in.  But my business is my business.  This is where “Following Jesus Together” really means something.  This is where “community” is tested.  In a culture which doesn’t even want to admit that sin exists, this is radically, radically countercultural. 

• What could possibly be useful about confessing to another person? 
• Why would I be so vulnerable? 
• Isn’t God enough? 

Maybe.  But maybe also we are just manipulative enough, and just strong enough truth-avoiders that sometimes our confessions to God in the silence of our hearts is little more than confessing to ourselves.  Sometimes we need to say things out loud.  Sometimes we need someone “with skin on” to trust our confession to.  Confession is one of the most little used disciplines we practice, to our own detriment.  We spend a good deal of time and energy concealing our sin, not telling others about it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed by the Nazis at the end of WWII lived in a seminary community in the 1930s (Finkenwalde) before the Nazis closed it down, and wrote a marvelous little book called Life Together.  In it he says that confession is what allows a real break-through to community to take place.  Sin, almost by definition, is dark, private, isolating, withdrawing and poisonous.  Confession to another person allows the light to break through. 

But what does it look like?  The Quaker author Richard Foster tells the story of sensing that there was something in his past that was blocking him from growing closer to God.  Reluctantly, he began to write down all of the things he could remember from his life that needed healing or forgiveness.  At the end of three days of reflecting, it was a long list. 

Having called a friend who was a mature Christian earlier, he took his sheet of paper and met with him.  Slowly, and painfully, he read through each thing on the sheet.  When he was done, he began to return the paper to his briefcase.  His confessor wisely stopped him, took the sheet of paper, tore it up into hundreds of little pieces and threw it in the garbage can, and then assured him of the forgiveness of Christ.

I have a friend who struggles with addiction to pornography, usually accessed via the Internet.  Incidentally, this particular temptation is out of control in our culture.  At least 60% of the males in the U.S. are hooked on looking at pornography on the computer alone.  Age doesn’t matter but, parents, if we are not at least talking with our kids about this, if we are not trying to engage around this issue then our heads are buried deeply in the sand. 

Anyway, periodically my friend calls me and says, “Dan, I blew it.” He tells me as much as he needs to.  I listen, and then I say, something like,

“I just want you to know how much Christ loves you.  And you need to hear that in the name of Jesus, I know that you are forgiven.  Jesus makes all things new, and again says to you, “Go and sin no more.”

Sometimes we need to confess our sins and struggles to another person.   Choose someone who understands that it is not a time to say “it’s no big deal.”  Choose someone who knows what it is like to practice confession themselves.  Choose someone who can hold it in confidence.  This is an amazing gift of the community of faith.

Is it a commandment from God that we must confess our sins to each other?  If that is the question we end up with, we’ve missed the point.  Confession is an amazing offer from God to break the holds that sin, addiction, bitterness have on us.  It lets the light shine into places that ought not be dark.  It brings us in touch with the Jesus of the cross who came for the very reason that we might receive healing and forgiveness…not wallow under the weight of guilt and sin.  Cornelius Plantinga once said,

“Human sin is stubborn (and I’m pretty sure we would all agree with that)…but not half as stubborn as the grace of God.”

“Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.”