September 30, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

James 5:13–20

This morning after worship, four young people who are part of our congregation greeted me, and when I asked them what they had been up to this weekend, they all sheepishly looked away and laughed, and finally one of them said, “That’s why we had to come to church!” Now let me explain that this is not a group of Chicago’s most notorious hell-raisers, and if I had to guess, the weekend involved a little wine, some dancing, and making a little too much noise on the way into the apartment building late at night. But the comment they made to me reveals something deeper than that: the common cultural impression that if you go out and have fun, you come to church to pay for it. And in our tradition, that idea is most commonly associated with the prayer of confession.

Let me begin by saying I love the act of confession. Let me also say that if there is one element of Christian worship that I think is most often misunderstood, particularly by Christians themselves, my hunch would be that it is confession. The focus most often contains a negative connotation: you’ve done bad things and God wants you to tell someone about them and feel guilty.

Let me also begin by saying that I think that perception is terribly misguided. The purpose of tonight’s sermon is to tell you what I have come to believe about confession—that it is an incredible gift and something we should feel very positively about. I suspect that, because of all its negative connotations, many of you don’t really care about confession and would rather not hear about it. So I’m going to talk about confession indirectly by first talking about something I think many more of you will relate to and be comfortable with, something that bears a lot of similarity to confession: I’m going to talk about therapy.

Over the last couple of generations, the use and availability of psychotherapy of one kind or another has grown considerably. I’ve been to a therapist myself; it’s actually a part of what most Presbyterian ministers do in preparation for this career. I require every wedding couple that I marry to go to a couples’ therapist. Most of them come back and tell me how much they enjoy it: “we picked up some good strategies to deal with our fights”; “we got a better handle on what each other is thinking or feeling”; “we figured out a way to settle an old argument that we had never really resolved”; “we figured out ways to articulate things we knew were going on but didn’t really know how to talk about.” I have countless friends who have been to therapy; I’m close enough to a few of them to have talked with them about why they go and what it means to them. They say things like, “It helps you get your burdens out in the open so that you don’t have to carry them all by yourself.” “It helps you uncover things in your past that may be influencing or paralyzing you in the present, and in acknowledging them, to move beyond them.” In a broad sense, I would say therapy helps us to wrestle with an important set of questions. Who am I at my core? If there are things about myself that I don’t like, can I change them? Are there things that I can’t change and need to figure out how to accept? Who am I going to become in the future?

Some of these questions can be scary, to be sure, and therapy, when it works, can be difficult, sometimes even painful. But people in our culture continue to go to therapy and find it helpful, and I assume one of the reasons for that is that those big questions I was just citing don’t go away; they continue to eat at us if we don’t deal with them.

Therapy seems like a good place to deal with these questions because of how we understand the therapist. They are not there to pass judgment on what we’ve done; they are there to listen and help us make some sense of it. Sure, you could tell someone else you know, but unlike with friends or significant others, you don’t need to impress the therapist. You can be flawed or uninteresting. You can talk about things you’ve done that are mean-spirited or just plain bizarre and embarrassing, and those things aren’t going to cause the therapist not to want to spend time with you anymore. In fact, you’re paying the therapist, so you know that person is committed to being there for you.

So why am I telling you all of this? I’m telling you all of this because I find most of what I just said to also be true about confession in the church. And I have a hunch that the reason therapy appeals to so many people but confession does not is because we have an understanding of the therapist as a compassionate listener, one who wants to help us, one who is on our side, but when it comes to confession, we think of God as an angry judge who wants to punish us for our sins.

Now I’m sure very few of you came voluntarily to church this afternoon because your primary conception of God is that of an angry judge; but even so, when we start our time of confession, my hunch is that for some of you, God slips back into the “angry judge” category. So here is my first invitation to you: when we say the prayer of confession, remember that God invites us to confess because God is on our side and wants to help us as we struggle with the things about ourselves that are not great or where we have not been at our best. In confession, God is not the angry judge; God is the compassionate listener who wants to help us.

All of this, of course, begs an important question: if this comparison I’ve been speaking of is true, why not quit church and just go to therapy? I could offer a number of different answers to that, most of which would go far beyond the prayer of confession. But to stay on the topic, the beauty and uniqueness of confession comes in the fact that it is not just a private act of self-improvement; confession is a public witness that we make together as a community.

This is where the message of the book of James enters into the conversation. James does an interesting thing in reminding us to confess our sins: he invites us to think about sin as an illness. On one level this is an ancient way of thinking that would have made more sense to James and his first readers than it does to most of us. Plenty of ancient writers believed that physical illness was a result not of germs or genetics but a result of moral failings: you get sick because you’ve done something bad. Those of you who know your Bible well will remember the story of the man who comes to Jesus referencing a blind man and asks, “Teacher, who sinned, this man or his parents, to cause this blindness?” (John 9). Thankfully, Jesus corrects the man, indicating that the blindness is not a product of the man’s sins; likewise we as modern people understand this correlation between sin and illness is false on the surface, but on a deeper level, the comparison is actually quite helpful in understanding the importance of being forgiven of our sins.

What sin and physical illness do share is their ability to separate us from other people (see Barbara Brown Taylor in Feasting on the Word). Illness separates us from other people. It doesn’t matter if you are sequestered in the intensive care unit, at home with the stomach flu, or walking around the office with a head-cold, avoiding handshakes and coughing into a tissue—there are few things in life that more instantly separate us from other people than being sick. Illness isolates us from other people. When we are honest about it, is it not true that our sins have precisely the same effect? When we wrong someone else, we distance ourselves from them. When the wrongdoing is out in the open, the anger and resentment that comes out of it drives us apart. If the wrongdoing is a secret, the guilt and fear we carry around about being discovered makes us uneasy and uncomfortable; it keeps us from being at peace with ourselves and keeps us from being honest with others. And whether the wrongdoing is secret or out in the open, we are also separated from others by the shame and embarrassment of having somehow fallen short of who we hoped we would be. All of the honesty and intimacy that so many of us crave so much is lost when we are separated from one another by our sins.

There is another side to this comparison between sin and illness. One way people show us the greatest love is when they demonstrate the willingness to be with us in the midst of illness. It is usually only a mother or a spouse or a time-tested friend who helps us when we are sick (and the only people we would want to help us). Likewise, the people we know and trust the most are the ones we know will forgive us when we have fallen short of the person God created us to be. The greatest intimacies in our lives, the deepest relationships, are the ones that exist not out of a false sense of our flawlessness, but out of an honest awareness of the ways we are far from perfect and out of the forgiveness that is shown to us in the midst of it.

The beauty of confession is this intimacy with God—the idea that God has created me for good and that I can be honest about the ways I have fallen short. My love for confession as a part of life in the church is that this intimacy is not something we experience alone. Presbyterians don’t ask you to visit a confessional booth and tell the minister, in private, what you have done wrong. We gather together in this place and we ask for forgiveness out loud. We make the bold declaration that God’s forgiveness is present here in this place of worship. Forgiveness is present here even among people who may not be your very closest friends, and in bringing our confessions together, we take this beyond being a private, therapeutic exercise as it becomes a protest about the ways we human beings, collectively, have been too violent, too prideful, too greedy, and too self-centered.

It is a deeply counter-cultural thing to do. One theologian has put it this way:

Lofty words are spoken at the dedication of a civic center or a country club, but no one confesses sin. Prayers uttered before football games and corporate banquets are devoid of confession. In Christian churches every week, though, people say in one form or another, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. . . . O Lord, have mercy upon us.” Week after week, Christian people repeat words like these, and by them they celebrate the freedom that belongs to those who know that what is truly good in human life does not finally depend upon our capacity to manufacture it. (Tom Long, The Witness of Preaching, p. 6)

The freedom of confession. The freedom knowing that forgiveness is possible, that fresh starts do happen, that hope is available for the future. When we say a prayer of confession and join our voices together in it, we say—everyone of us in this room—that we are committed together to standing up for a better life, a more forgiving existence, a fairer world. The person immediately to your left or right, who may be your closest friend or a complete stranger, makes this commitment with you as a sign that you are not burdened with carrying the message of hope and forgiveness all on your own. We are a community committed to holding those values together, not separated from each other by our shortcomings but connected to one another by our hope for the future.

Amen.