( presented in Worship at Horizon Unitarian Universalist Church – Sun, Sept. 1, 2008 )
Call To Worship
From Hymns of the Spirit with Services – Beacon Press, copyright 1937
from the Fifth Order of Service
From the cares that fret, the burdens that weary, the voices that disrupt us, we turn aside to the quiet of this house of worship. Here the noises of the outer world are hushed, and our thoughts are lifted to contemplate the ways of mystery beyond naming.
We rejoice this day, in the unquenchable and eternal light that lights every person in this world. In that light we are ashamed of those greeds within us that have darkened our own souls, and those selfish customs among us that have shadowed the lives and spirits of others. We seek the illumination of wisdom in all of our doings, until every child is brought out of darkness into this marvelous light of life.
A Story for All Ages (there are many variants of this story, this is one of them…)
Once upon a time there lived a little boy who became angry at the slightest provocation. If he felt he was not getting his way at all times, he would fly off into rage at those he felt had wronged him.
One day, his father decided that his son needed to learn a valuable lesson. So his father gave him a hammer and a bag of nails and told him that each time he would lose his patience, he should nail a nail behind the door in his room.
The first day the boy nailed _37_ nails behind the door!!!
In the weeks that followed, the boy began to make progress. He began to learn to control his temper, each day that went by he would nail less nails behind the door as he learned to master himself. Finally, he discovered that it was easier to control his temper than to pound nails behind his door.
The day ultimately came when he could control his temperament throughout the day. He was so proud for the progress he had made, and he ran to his father to share his accomplishment. His father told him how proud he was, and suggested that he should remove a nail each day he could control himself.
Many days passed and for each day of his mastery, the youth removed the nails faithfully from the door. Finally the day came when he could announce his father that there were no more nails to remove from the door.
His father took him by the hand and led him to the door. He told him: I am proud, my son, you have worked hard, but look at the holes in the door. You must not forget that never more will it be the same. Each time you lost your patience, you left scars exactly as the ones you see here.
Always remember, when you fling your words in anger it may seem you are able to withdraw them, but in the way and things you have said you may devastate a person, and the scar can last forever. A verbal offense can be as damaging as a physical offense, only perhaps less visible.
Reading:
From Hymns of the Spirit with Services – Beacon Press, copyright 1937
Prayer of Confession from the Twelfth Order of Service
O thou unseen source of peace and holiness, we come into thy secret place to be filled with thy pure and solemn light. As we come to thee, we remember that we have been drawn aside from m the straight and narrow way; that we have not walked lovingly with each other and humbly with thee; that we have feared what is not terrible and wished for what is not holy. In our weakness be thou the quickening power of life. Arise within our hearts as healing, strength and joy. Day by day may we grow in faith, in charity, in the purity by which we may see thee, and in the larger life of love to which thou callest us. Amen.
Another story:
There once was a scientist, who lived in great fear for the shortcomings and failures of the world and was determined to find means to diminish them.
He spent days enclosed in his laboratory in search of answers to his doubts about mankind’s future. One day, his young son, invaded his sanctuary and said that he had decided to help him in his work. The scientist, distracted by the interruption, attempted to make his son go out to play someplace else. Seeing that it would be impossible to get him out of there, the father looked around the lab to see what he could give his son to do to distract him.
He noticed a magazine sitting amongst his paper, with a beautiful map of the earth on the cover. So with a pair of scissors, he cut the map in many pieces. Along with a roll of adhesive tape, he handed it to his son saying:
—Do you like puzzles? Then I’m going to give you the world to fix. Here is the world all broken. See if you can fix it! See if you can do it all by yourself.
He calculated that the child would take days to fix the map, but a few hours later, he heard the voice of his son calling him calmly:
—Father, father, I have done it! I managed to finish it all!
At the beginning the father could not believe the word: “Is it possible at his age to manage to fix a map he had never seen before?” Then the scientist took his eyes away from his writings sure that he would see a child’s poorly constructed map. To his surprise the map was complete. All pieces had been placed in their right places.
How could that be possible?
-My son! You did not know how the world was, my son. How did you do it?
-Father, I did not know how the world was, but when you removed the paper from the magazine to cut it, I saw that on the other side there was the figure of a man… When you gave me the world to fix, I tried and tried but I couldn’t do it. Then I remembered about the man, I turned over the cuttings and started to fix the man, because I knew how he looked. I managed to fix the man, I turned over the sheet and found that I had fixed the world…”
The Message
The EASY prayer goes like this:
I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault. In my thoughts and in my words. In what I have done and what I have failed to do. And I ask Blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, Our God.
I sometimes tripped on that Apostle’s Creed, but Confession was something that I really owned!
I call this the easy prayer, because this was the prayer that you got to say in a group every Sunday, the general penitential rite was part of the Mass. We would all examine ourselves, but in the privacy of our own anonymity, thank you very much.
In the Blessed Mother Church of my youth, the Sacrament of Reconciliation was the gateway to receive the Sacrament of Communion. They gave you plenty of training, but when that moment came, when you and all the rest of your little kiddie posse were lined up waiting to go in for that first visit to the confessional, it was gut-check time. For my Protestant brothers and sisters who are not familiar with this particular rite, I’ll share the mechanics. (And for My catholic siblings here today: perhaps this will bring back some fond and terrifying memories!)
The priest is sitting in his booth, typically between two other booths. This is for the formalized version. There was a truly terrifying variant in my youth where the priest would just set up shop in a big open room, with a simple divider in between himself and the penitent. There were a LOT of us little scamps who said there was no way they’re going to get us to confess THERE!
Inside each booth is a kneeler, and a screened window with a sliding door, about head high for a kneeling person. In a terrifically clever and modern way, the kneeler is typically equipped with a pressure switch that turns on a light outside your particular confessional to let folks outside know that there are “doins’ a transpirin’” inside. Don’t want to wander in on someone sharing their innermost errors…
I’ve heard tales that in the days when boys actually learned manly arts like morse code, some little scamps liked to send messages by blinking the light. Now I don’t know morse code, but I can testify that on occasion I saw that light doing a little dance.
Did I say “gut-check?” I think I should have said “sphincter time”, because it was pretty tense waiting for that terrifying moment when your turn came up… You’ve been examining your sinful life, to figure out what you need to say, and you know there must be something, and you know the priest is there to hear YOU…
Bless Me Father for I have sinned…
We’re both here. I know it. You know it. But we have to be official about why we’re here today. You have to own your sinful self.
It has been bluzbluza since my last confession…
Now when I was young, confession was pretty regular, so I could rattle off with good conscience that it had been a week or 3 weeks, or whatever, since I had been in for a visit. As you work your way up the age ladder, though, and have more control over when you have to go in there, you start to think “Wow, do I really want to tell him that it has been THAT long between visits.” But they taught us that it was more important that you got your self back in there, than how long it had been, so I sometimes fell back on old faithful:
“It has been a long time since my last confession…”
And then you list your sins.
Now I admit, I often felt pretty inadequate as a sinner: not because I didn’t feel sorry for my sins, but my sins seemed pretty lame. I said a bad word. I had impure thoughts about that girl over in the third row. I took the Lord’s name in vain. The comedian Eddie Izzard tells a funny tale about confessing to a vicar in the Church of England, one searching for a TRULY original sin, to which Eddie suggests “I poked a badger with a spoon?”
Okay, so now it’s time to wrap it up:
“For these and all my sins, I am truly sorry.”
I often wondered, about that “all my sins” part: was that for the stuff you forgot or was it really a DODGE for the ones you didn’t want to share? I think more than one of those guys I went to catechism with were using it as a dodge; what can I say - they were a pretty rough crowd.
And then he gives you your penance. Typically a number of prayers, a few Hail Marys, A handful of Our Fathers, an Act of Contrition. And he sends you on your way.
There is nothing like the spring in your step coming out of there! You made it!
I can do those Hail Marys standing on my head!
I AM ALIVE! THE WORLD IS GLORIOUS AND I AM A PART OF IT! THE WEIGHT IS LIFTED!
I am reconciled with God and the World!
Until NEXT TIME!
Now I know my Protestant Brothers and Sisters, turned their back on most of this ritualized stuff centuries ago. But confession is not just a quirk of Catholics. The Buddhists have a tradition of confessing your sins to your elders, as a discipline in understanding your truth. Additionally, both our Buddhist and Hindu brothers and sisters have to think about running up that Karmic debt; will I come back as a cow for eating so much meat?
Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holy Day, is the annual Day of Atonement, where the focus is on Sin and Forgiveness. The Kol Nidre is the start of that service, and goes like this:
In the tribunal of Heaven and the tribunal of earth, by the permission of God — praised be He — and by the permission of this holy congregation, we hold it lawful to pray with transgressors.
The cantor then chants the prayer beginning with the words Kol Nidrei and repeats three times the following words:
All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths.
The leader and the congregation then say together three times
“May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault.”
I have to admit, I really like that acknowledgement of all of our faultiness, and the prayer that even the strangers be forgiven.
In selecting stories for today, I was moved by the metaphor of “the nail holes in the door” in our Story for All Ages. I’ve had opportunity in the last 10 years or so to try and go back and fill in nail holes I believed I had created in the past, some of them real, some of them imagined. Sort of like Earl on Thursday night’s “My Name Is Earl”, except a lot more humbling. Jason Lee makes it seem easy in comparison, the comedic highjinx aside.
This morning we heard the confession from the 1937 Unitarian prayerbook, and we even sang a confession from our modern era prayerbook. But lets admit it, you were pretty surprised to see that thing was actually IN our prayerbook weren’t you?
C’mon, you can tell me…
That’s not UU… Is it?
UU makes me feel good…
I don’t believe in that superstitious confessional stuff…
I can see where it would be possible to get that idea. It doesn’t come up much, does it?
Why is that?
Some of this comes, I think, from our “attractive” penchant for thinking “we got it going on.” Hey, we’re a smart bunch of progressive liberal religionists. We must have it going on, look at all the cool “got it going on” people who are around here…
Confession has that extra little humbling twist of the knife though. Not only do I NOT have it going on, but I have to OWN it? Ouch… And that seems to be one of the first challenges admitting that we HAVE sinned.
The Reverend Dr. Virginia Knowles wrote a terrific paper on worship where she talks about “ghosts” that haunt us as UUs, and I think some of them contribute to our confession aversion. One ghost is what I would call the Ghost of Efficiency: that worship produces no visible quantitative product and therefore can’t have value to us – we need to get out there and DO something.
And confession certainly doesn’t “knit the baby a sweater”, or get petitions signed, or stock the foodbank.
Another ghost that she describes is our fear of dependency: being all “churchy” is what those immature people do with their dependency on their little “fundagelical” religions. A third ghost she mentions is emotionalism: that we won’t be true to reason and science.
And I think all of these come into play when we ponder why we might shy away from confession. That stuff is just for people who’ve done something wrong!
As a Congregational Administrator and a resident fly on the wall, if I had Santa’s List, I would have no problem checking the “Has Naughty Tendencies” box next to a lot of your names.
Whether you believe in a universal scorekeeper, a clock maker, a process, or check the theological “none of the above” box, sitting down and looking at where we missed the mark puts us in that terrible position of being beholden. Maybe not to a galactic scorekeeper, but we have to acknowledge that we let our actions get away from us and that it spreads beyond us. We are forced to acknowledge that the stinky old “interdependent web” is all interdependent, and we’ve let our shortcomings spill out into someone else’s life.
And that really strikes at acknowledging our interdependence, when we see the effect of our actions in the world. We can be amazing forces for good and healing, but we can also terribly muck things up.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think humans are sinful because we’re inherently evil or anything like that. I think we’re sinful because we’re so woefully inherently ignorant and oblivious. Harlan Ellison is quoted as saying that the two most common elements in the world are Hydrogen and Stupidity, and I’m not sure he’s wrong.
In reading about Yom Kippur, I liked some thoughts that Rabbi Arthur Green had on sin. Rabbi Green says that early Rabbis believed that “’good and evil’ inclinations are the forces within each person who lead us to do good and evil…” And that sometimes they are personified and depicted as quarreling with one another, each trying to get us to follow their path.
To me an even more interesting model that Rabbi Green offered is found in the ideas of kelipah and pri, the shell and the fruit. In this idea, the mind or soul is the delicate fruit that begins to grow a hard shell around itself for protection. Your truest self is within that shell, and not subject to corruption, but the protective shell can turn evil, even becoming destructive. I really like that image. It reminds me of a callous: that thick hide that we develop when our skin has been punished too much in one place. That callous is what we put forth, when we don’t do the right thing, when we turn away from those in need, when we were silent when a single voice would have made a difference. Maybe Billy Joel’s “Stranger” IS that shell, the face we can’t recognize, because it is so distorted from the face that we know within our soul.
Philip Simmons, in a UU World article called “The Usefulness of Sin” thinks it is easy for us to slide into a comfortable moral and spiritual complacency, and I agree. We live in one of the most pampered times, in the one of the most pampered countries the world has ever know, and it can be easy to lose track of what life is like for the rest of humanity.
He shares the common definition of sin from our Judaic background: of an arrow missing the mark but he also counsels that we examine what mark we were actually trying to hit.
You WERE trying to hit a mark, weren’t you?
He points this out as another type of sin, born of thoughtlessness: we weren’t even TRYING to hit a mark!
Now I know some people are saying:
What’s with this guy?
He’s just hitting us with all that Catholic guilt stuff, and just trying to bring us down.
I could have stayed home and read the Times, and almost be to the Magazine by now…
Really, I’m not advocating going around dwelling on what sinful wretches we are, but there is a missed opportunity for growth in never examining our sins. Ask a scientist or successful businessperson: which events were more instructive – the successes or the failures?
One of our biggies, Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.” And perhaps Confession is a piece of that unsettlement. There is also a vital and integral piece at the end of that Act of Reconciliation: the healing. Being willing to acknowledge our shortcomings and brokenness is the first step to that healing.
I shared the story of the Scientist and the son, trite as it may have seemed, because I like the way it shows the scientists misplaced focus in where the change needs to be. Just as OUR perception sometimes can be too focused on the need for change in the OTHER:
“It’s that darn speck in my neighbor’s eye, I’m worried about. Have you got a tissue? My eye waters like crazy around this log…”
While our theologian James Luther Adams points out that the unexamined faith is not worth having, a more ancient source, Socrates points out the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps this is a bit of the examination he suggests.
May we have the courage to examine our strengths AND our frailties, and the wisdom to always reconcile our sins.
May it be so.
Benediction:
Brothers & Sisters (Saints & Mostly Sinners) Bow Your Head and pray for wisdom and blessing – May the truth that makes us free, and the hope that never dies, and the love that casts out fear, lead us forward together, until the dayspring breaks and the shadows flee away.
