Keeping Confession
What do you hear when you read the word, CONFESSION?
Do you hear Jon and Kate and Eight and laying it all out there for the tabloids?
Do you hear Dr. Phil, admonishing a husband who does not compliment his wife, or a wife who does not tell the truth to her husband?
Do you hear tell-all novel, tell all memoir -- Confessions of a Shopaholic, Confessions of a Teen-Age Drama Queen, Confessions of a Superhero, Confessions of a Manhattan Nanny? -- that is supposed to reveal the inside dirt, inside secrets of a life different than your own?
Do you see a priest in a confessional booth, and a sinner pouring her heart out to him?
Do you hear Usher (Usher - Wikipedia)singing in the background -- These are my confessions? Usher is a modern-day crooner -- a cross between Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson, and his song about confession is about a boy coming clean with a girlfriend, telling her all the secrets of his past to set the record straight, that she might not be shocked when she learns his secrets? Here confession is airing out the laundry.
Do you imagine one of the many myriad of websites where you can post your confessions secretly? Most of them are pretty torrid and, quite frankly, sensational to the point they are difficult to believe. Thus, I won't link you to any here. Many of them are pretty tame, though, ranging from: "I hate my job and I don't work very hard" to "I have a crush on my best friend's boyfriend." You get the idea. Confession here is a chance to get off the chest a guilty pleasure ("I eat at Burger King at least every other day and when my mom asks me about it I always lie") or a small peccadillo ("I took the last donut and when my wife asked me where it was I blamed it on our daughter").
I wonder, do you think of St. Augustine's Confessions (Augustine's Confessions) - his landmark work written 1600 years ago which is both an admission of his faults as a fallen man and his statement of faith in Christ as a redeemed sheep of Jesus' fold? It is a tough book to broach, but worth the read because it places the two concurrent understandings of confession side by side.Understanding one: confession is admission of wrong, guilt, or involvement. If you like shows like the Closer this is the point of the drama itself -- to make a confession happen. This is the understanding that our culture has hyper-developed.
Understanding two: a confession is an expression of belief, beliefs which can and should be affirmed and shared. Think creeds. The Greek word was omologia -- the "words we hold in common" or the "faith we profess."
If we, as Christian people, believe, as a confession of faith that Jesus forgives sins then the whole point of confession is to confess the former in trust of the latter -- offer our sins to Christ (understanding 1 of Confession) in order that we might be made whole (understanding 2 of Confession). They are not mutually exclusive. They are interdependent, if you will.
Trouble is, when I survey the landscape, I see too many cultural messages that want to divorce the two.
The culture around us seems to be saying, "It is ethically right to admit guilt and confess shame, but to confess faith is an intellectual embarrassment." It is as though the human heart knows that from time to time it must be cleaned (see Psalm 51) but we have no idea which "detergent" to use.
If you are reading this today and feel trapped in shame, my suspicion is that your spiritual claustrophobia has less to do with your willingness or unwillingness to confess the wrong than it does with incomplete understandings about why you are confessing in the first place.
C.S. Lewis once wrote about a "great divorce" between God and humanity. One of the divisions I see, and I think many suffer for it, is a divorce between admission and belief, between confession and profession, between confession of sin and confession of faith. They are not mutually exclusive and they were, as far as I can tell, never intended to be.
May God grant you strength as you keep your confessions.




