I’m Sorry

I have a question for all of you today. At the beginning of all of our services we have a time of confession and forgiveness. Why? Why do we do it at all, and why do we do it at the beginning of our services? This isn’t rhetorical, I really want to hear from you. Confession, at its heart, is the time we take to be honest with God about our imperfections or the ways that we have sinned since last time we came to worship. Many confessions state that we come before God with the things that we have done knowingly and unknowingly as well as things that we didn’t do that we should have, again, either knowingly or unknowingly. Also known as sins of commission and omission.

The reason we do it at the beginning of the service is so that we can begin our worship with what Psalm 51 talks about. Verse 2 talks about asking God to wash us completely of our guilt and sin, verse 7 talks about being purified and washed again so that we are whiter than snow, and finally in verse 10 it talks about having God create a clean heart and a faithful spirit inside us. When we confess to God we are letting God know that we are sorry for the things that have happened this week and we are prepared to enter God’s presence with an open heart about what God desires for us in this world.

But just like last week about forgiving others, I think confessing to another person and God can be just as hard, and for some of us even harder than forgiving another person. Confession is just another way to say apologize, or to say I’m sorry. At the same time there is a lot more to it. What I mean by that is that saying I’m sorry can be easy depending on the situation. If any of us are walking down a crowded aisle of a supermarket or a busy street and you bump into someone, then for many people it’s really easy to just say ‘I’m sorry’. The other person usually responds with something like ‘Don’t worry about it,’ or “It’s ok’. Then we both move on with our day and it was such a small incident that we probably don’t even remember it ever happened by the next day let alone a week later. It’s easy to apologize, confess, when it’s something simple like that.

Confession is usually a whole lot more than that. So here’s my confession time. About 15 years ago Bekkah and I were moving from one home to another while we were living in Washington. We had some friends help us move and I was in charge of driving the moving truck to the new house once it was loaded up. A friend joined me in the truck and we made our way from the old house to the new house. While we were sitting at a red light I got a text from Bekkah. Since it was a hectic and stressful day I looked at the message in case it was something important and I responded to her. To be honest, I don’t remember at all what it was that she messaged me about. What I do remember is that after I put my phone back down, my friend looked at me and said, ‘You know you really shouldn’t be on your phone while driving’. He was right. I shouldn’t be distracted while driving by being on my phone. And what made the situation worse is that I was not only putting myself in that situation of being distracted but he was in the truck with me, so I was putting him in that situation and he couldn’t do anything about it other than correct me. This thought and others just flooded into my head. I muttered something like ‘You’re right,’ then the light turned green and we continued to the new house.

That encounter kept playing over and over in my head for the whole next week. I think what it ultimately boiled down to is that this relationship was important to me and I didn’t want this situation to hang over my head and be this unspoken thing between us. So when I saw him on Sunday I confessed. I told him that he was right about phones being a distraction and that I shouldn’t have been on it. I should have waited until we got to the house and then looked at my messages so that I didn’t put both him and I in that kind of situation. He told me it wasn’t that big of a deal, and that he accepted my apology. What I realized in that moment was that as much as saying sorry was important for him to know that I was in the wrong and I valued his friendship and holding me accountable, receiving that forgiveness did lift the burden of knowing I had done something wrong to someone I cared about. He knew I heard him and valued his concern and I received the forgiveness that I needed to have a clean heart and a better relationship with him.

This is why we see Jesus and Peter talking after Jesus has risen from the dead in the gospel of John. Peter has returned to his former life of fishing after having denied knowing Jesus and unsure of what he should be doing. Jesus values his relationship with Peter and knows that Peter feels the same way. Jesus, in this instance coaxes a confession out of Peter. He asks him if he loves him three times to essentially snap him out of it. Peter is so caught up in his head like I was about how I had possibly hurt my relationship with my friend, that Jesus reminds Peter how much he loves Jesus and after each time Peter says that he really does love Jesus, Jesus follows up the confession of love with a mission to go out into the world to take care of the people in it. Jesus restores Peter to wholeness through this confession of love, through his confession of the wrong of denying knowing him, so that the relationship can be made whole again. Once Peter is whole again, their relationship repaired, confession and forgiveness have happened, Peter goes on to carry out the work that Jesus had called him to do.

You have my example of confession and you have Peter and Jesus’ example, and the third I want to point out is Martin Luther’s. There is a famous story about Luther, that while he was still a monk in the monastery became very famous, or should I say infamous, for confession. Confession is a sacrament in the Catholic church and a very important part of what it means to be Catholic. I’m sure if you’ve never been to a Catholic church you’ve seen the confession booths on a TV show at some point. Luther frequented the confession booth as a monk. In fact, there were days where he would spend hours in the confession booth with the priest, and when he finally finished confession he would head back to his room, but while on his way back he remembered another sin that he had not confessed and he would race back to the confession box to make sure that he confessed that sin also, so that he would be freed from the bondage of sin, and so that he would be clean in the eyes of God. Luther believed in the power of confession so much that he almost kept it a sacrament when he attempted to reform the church.

While I don’t think that we necessarily need to be as extreme as Luther, and I don’t believe Luther the reformer confessed as much as he did when he was a monk, his intentions and motivation was in the right place. He wanted to be like Psalm 51. He wanted to have a pure heart. He wanted to be in right relationship with God and with his fellow brothers and sister in Christ. He wanted the burden of sin to be lifted from him so that he could be whole with his neighbor. He wanted to make sure that anything that was broken was repaired and that through confession, that apology, that I’m sorry, healing could take place. Through that healing a person could affect change in another person’s heart or even begin the process of changing another person’s life. And as I said, confession heals everyone. It heals the person who confesses, it heals the person receiving the confession, and it brings both closer to God. When that comes to completion then we will experience what Paul says in his letter to the Philippians, that the last confession that will happen is that all people will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord which is to the glory of God our Father. Amen.