‘Tis the season for weddings for campus minister-types like myself this summer, and a recurring curiosity of rehearsal dinners has recently set me thinking. In the South, it is traditional at the rehearsal dinner, the night prior to the wedding, to have various family and friends stand up and toast the Bride and Groom. Usually, these toasts range from the somewhat thought out and effective to the downright repetitive and silly.
Almost without fail, however, a toast is given by what my wife and I now call “The Crying Groomsman.” He’s a tough guy, this one, not given to fits of emotion ever in his life. But suddenly as he recounts his appreciation (dare he say…love?) for his dear friend the night before his wedding, he starts to cry. Sometimes the crying is uncontrollable and causes his voice to squeak like it hasn’t since the man was a mid-pubescent twelve years old. Inevitably, he is totally embarrassed and apologizes profusely throughout his toast.
What’s going on here? I’ve come to believe that our words have power over us as we speak them. In other words, the young man who stands up to speak about his dear friend has probably never done so before this moment. He is shocked when, as the words leave his mouth, they take on new life. They become real to him. They move him in a way in which he wasn’t formally moved as he merely thought about them. We are accustomed to thinking about words and their effect on those who hear them, but what if the gun shoots both ways? What if I am changed along with my words?
The Apostle James seems to be the writer most acquainted with the power of the tongue. Being someone who makes his living off his words, many is the uncomfortable sermon through which I have sat squirming at James’ description of the destructive power of the tongue. But James tells us of the constructive power of the tongue as well:
Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.
Granted, the context in which James speaks is one of physical healing from sickness, but with all the attention given in his letter to the power of the tongue, I find it not wholly without application to our souls as well. In other words, there is something healing about the process of taking up words about our “selves” (words about our hopes, fears, delights, anger, hatred and rebellion), clothing our thoughts in those words, finding a trusted friend, and giving them those words. Christians used to call this process “confession.”
Now, I promised myself before I wrote this that I was not going to kill this post with a thousand qualifications and denials of being on my way to Rome by decrying the lost art of confession among evangelicals. That said, I in no way mean that the exercise of confession should be elevated to the level of a Sacrament.
I listened, recently, to an NPR Religion Podcast where the reporter interviewed a Catholic priest who was lamenting the decline of confessions in his own parish. At one point he noted that for many of his flock, it had been years since they had been to confession. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never done anything even remotely like confession, finding myself disobedient not to a quasi-sacramental exercise, but to a Biblical mandate to “confess my sins to one another.”
I’m not exactly sure what I’m arguing for here, or if I’m arguing for anything at all. It merely strikes me as interesting that for most of the students in my pastoral care here at Ole Miss, both God and Christianity are remote, abstract, and detached. Is it possible that (at least) one of the reasons why is that we have lost the art of confession; that is, we have stopped having meaningful words between us, and so, we have stopped being healed?
Bookmark/Search this post with
Love the post, Les. I don't
Thu, 05/31/2007 - 11:57 — Timothy McConnell (not verified)Love the post, Les. I don't think you're drifting toward Rome, but if you need a Protestant stop-gap: Bonhoeffer has a great chapter on Confession and the Lord's Supper in his book "Life Together". So there's a Lutheran advocating confession! Without confession, we are alone with our sinful selves. Such is his argument anyway. He starts the chapter quoting that same verse.
I've heard a few rehearsal dinner speeches in my day. I have always put it down to young people only just learning that one extra drink right before adressing two hundred people makes a bigger difference than they thought!
Les, this is such a great
Thu, 05/31/2007 - 15:00 — Katie Pennock (not verified)Les, this is such a great post. Thanks so much. I have definitely experienced this "acting back" of words on myself as I speak them, especially during the rare moment of telling someone something true about God and the world--those rare precious moments when sanity returns and we say something true that we ought to say more often. And, inevitably, I believe it more just for having said it aloud to another--I teach it to myself in that moment.
This winter I visited a friend who was converting to Catholicism and we went to her RCIA class together. The topic that night was on confession and included a sort of "how to" about going to see the priest for confession. I think he quoted John 20, where after the resurrection Jesus tells the disciples: "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." (I would be curious about how you understand Jesus's words here.)
And honestly I came away lamenting that we don't have such a routine way of confessing our sins to one another (I belong to a PCA church)--really genuinely lamenting it and knowing that I live more burdened by sin and shame because of it and less joyful and free. And embarrassed that my friends and I never confess our sins to one another -- we navigate circumstances together and pray for them to change, but basically we manage our sin ourselves unless a person becomes so destructive to herself or others that someone finally intervenes, and even that doesn't happen as often as it ought. I ended up "trying it out" (that sounds weird) a while later with one of closest friends -- a late night conversation where I told her what I'd been thinking about confession and then shared a long litany of sins. It took us a long time to get past the "12 point action plan to reform my life" and on to a basic reiteration of some good news about Jesus and forgiveness, but in the end it was really beautiful and I walked away unburdened and grateful. But *boy*, we sure are out of practice, both me and my friend, at the basics of a conversation that "merely" communicates: "This is the honest reality about my life" and "Well, let me tell you about the Lord and His mercy to sinners."
Thanks Tim and Katie, I
Thu, 05/31/2007 - 15:59 — Les Newsom (not verified)Thanks Tim and Katie,
I really have no intention of suggesting anything ecclesially significant or sacramentally profound. I just don't think we talk to each other. If we did, we'd probably be both horrified and comforted by what we'd find.
L
It kind of bugs me that we
Thu, 05/31/2007 - 20:56 — Ben Graber (not verified)It kind of bugs me that we worry about "elevating" something to sacramental status. Is confessing our sins somehow "lower" than taking the Lord's Supper or being baptized? I have a hard time thinking so. It seems to me that confession is simply an act different in kind from the sacraments. It's an act of word, something in a way less material than the sacraments, but certainly, it seems to me, on a par with our reading and hearing and singing God's Word.
I've been thinking about this as I've started to move into the "accountability partner" phase with some old RUF buddies. It seems like it wouldn't be such a terrible thing to think of one another as our confessors, not in such non-Biblical terms. Accountability is all well and good, but it's pretty easy to turn it into a means of embarrassing ourselves into avoiding sin. That's hardly the point, is it?
Not sure where I'm going with this exactly; it just seems like one more place where American evangelicals have tended to forget how to be the people of God together.
Ben's comment reminds me of
Sun, 06/03/2007 - 17:29 — Timothy McConnell (not verified)Ben's comment reminds me of something I tried in my seminary days. We formed a 'covenant discipleship group' -- five men committed to bettering themselves under God's grace, modeled after the same group begun at Oxford by Charles and John Wesley. Hard questions about our sins in a group committed to uphold privacy and wish the best for one another. That was a powerful experience.
Les, came across this comment
Fri, 06/08/2007 - 08:33 — Brian Habig (not verified)Les, came across this comment by Calvin about a more "institutional" practice of confession. He writes to Farel, "I have often told you that I should have thought it unwise to abolish confession in our churches, unless the rite which I have lately introduced [i.e., private meeting with pastor before sacraments] be established in its place.... It is no new thing that pious souls should fear our falling back into superstition, whenever they hear of our establishing anything that has even a remote similarity to Popish inventions. Although I cannot expel these doubts from their minds, for we have not the means of doing so, I may express the wish that they may be somewhat careful to separate the good wheat from the chaff and the tares."