Bless Me Father, for I Have Sinned
A Sermon by Paddy Cavanaugh, Seminarian, for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (C), March 27, 2022.
Bless me father, for I have sinned, I have no idea how long it’s been since my last confession. These were the words I uttered awkwardly and with some embarrassment as I knelt in the confessional many years ago for my first one-on-one confession at an Anglo-Catholic parish in Boston. What brought me to this wooden booth on a cold winter’s day was an argument I had with my mother over politics in which harsh words had been exchanged that faded to lingering resentment and then lingering silence between us for several days. Having been raised in the Episcopal Church, where the idea of confession is often treated with a degree of suspicion, oftentimes for good reason, I had very little idea of what formal confession entailed beyond what I had seen in films or heard second hand from my Roman Catholic friends, and yet when I passed the sign outside of the church that said “confession offered here,” the heavy sadness weighing on my heart compelled me to walk in. The kindly priest, whose face was obscured behind an elegant wooden screen, guided me through a conversation in which I gradually unburdened myself from all of my uncharitable words and deeds which had been weighing on me that week. I told him all about the argument with my mother and the things I wish I hadn’t said, I told him about how I had been avoiding lunch with a friend for several weeks despite his regular attempts to check in on me, I told him about my complicit silence when a coworker made frequent racist jokes in the break room. By the time the priest had heard my confession and pronounced absolution over me I was in tears, not tears of shame at the litany of wrongdoing I had committed, but tears of relief at having set down a cumbersome load that I had been carrying like too many grocery bags for the past several weeks.
My soul suddenly felt lighter and I immediately called my mother and told her how terribly sorry I was for having been so stubbornly unkind and how much I loved and valued her despite our differences. I called my friend and set up a lunch date, and the next time my coworker made an untoward comment I took him aside and told him that though it may not be his intention, his remarks were indeed hurtful. In each of these instances, a relationship, either interpersonal or communal, and been restored simply because I decided to walk into that church and confess, or engage in what we formally call the sacrament of reconciliation.
Though my sins had not been of the same magnitude as those of the prodigal son, what compelled both of us to seek out reconciliation was a sense of being famished, spiritually or physically, by the consequences of sin.
Many of us, especially in this tradition, don’t have a good relationship with the idea of sin and confession, and so too often we avoid talking about it, especially from the pulpit. Some of our reticence to confront the reality of our sinfulness and our need for reconciliation comes from the internalized cultural baggage that comes with sin talk. The very word sin often conjures up images hellfire and damnation, like in the 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards’ infamous sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God” in which he graphically describes God’s wrath at human depravity or feelings of shame evoked when religious tradition coerces us into confession. Both of these are contrary to the very purpose of confession and are founded on a bad theology of sin. So what exactly is sin?
The word most often used in the New Testament to describe sin is hamartia, which when translated can mean to “miss the mark” as an archer might miss the mark of a target, or to “wander astray” as a traveler who loses the path and becomes lost in the woods. The mark or the path, of course, is love. When we sin we miss the mark of love or wander from the path of love, and the consequences of this are damaged or broken relationships with ourselves, with those around us, in the world, and with God.
Sin can happen at an interpersonal level when we hurt those around us with our words and deeds and it can happen at a collective, or structural level when we systematically fail to respect the dignity of every human being; when our political and economic systems contribute to the violence of poverty or the degradation of the earth. Moreover sin occurs not only in the things that we do, but in the things we have left undone. One of our prayers of confession in Enriching our Worship eloquently states “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” The common denominator of all of this sin is spiritual and literal estrangement from the goodness of God’s love that is present in the world and in all those who inhabit it.
But just like the father of the prodigal son, God’s constant desire for us is to be restored to right relationship, to be drawn back to companionship with himself and our fellow travelers on the path of love, and so in an act of love so lavish and absurd, God sent his only son, Christ Jesus, to be a sacrifice and model of reconciliation for each and all of us; that we might be set free from the captivity of sin and death and be made new, be recreated, in the image of Christlike life and love.
On this St. Paul wisely remarks that “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” God reconciled the world to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry and commission to reconcile ourselves to one another. Confession and reconciliation is not a burden St. George’s, sin is the burden and reconciliation in the love of Christ the cure. It’s the cure that frees our hearts from the mundane drudgery of every little and every big thing that estranges us from the prodigal love that is our birthright. The love that God so wishes to pour out with utter abandon upon our lives and the lives of those around us, no matter how carelessly we may have squandered it in the past.
When we confess we commit to repentance, a word which means to physically turn away from our patterns of sinfulness and towards that mark of love, and in this turning towards love God offers us forgiveness, no matter how flagrant, how offensive, or how often the transgression. God’s desire to forgive and restore us to love is so powerful it’s preposterous, it almost feels irresponsible. Why not teach that prodigal son a lesson? Why not make him earn back what he wasted and teach him the value of a dollar? Not so, God says. The prodigal son crafted his own punishment by disconnecting himself from the love of his father and the burden of it is was drove him back to the source and path of love that he had lost track of. The hell that God desires to save us from is not some fiery eternity of torment of God’s own creation, but it is the hell we create for ourselves when we alienate ourselves from love. God’s desire is that we be liberated from the shackles of sin and shame and restored to a new order of relationship and to become new creations in love because the old has passed away.
This is what the sacrament of reconciliation helps us accomplish. I’ll never forget an image that a friend of mine once shared, that came to her mind every time she knelt to say the general confession during worship. She said that as the final words passed from her lips she imagined little gnats flying up and away towards an open window in the ceiling of the chapel, never to be seen again. And as these gnats left her she felt filled with a sense of peace. Let go of your gnats this Lent, be restored to love and right relationship. Do not allow bad theology and an endemic culture of shame keep us from the gift that God has given us in the sacrament of reconciliation. Instead, claim this gift, claim this prodigal, this lavish, this absurd love that God is bursting to give you. And call then your mothers.
Amen.