Empty Altars: An Introduction (part 1)
The following is an excerpt from a book I'm writing on confession... content subject to change.
I am sorry. I was mistaken. I was wrong.
These three words. So simple. So elementary. So rare. For all the culture wars and spitting mad conversations, these three words would go a long way toward peaceful disagreement. And yet, while holding our master’s degrees and doctorates in theology, morality, and ethics, we find these phrases difficult to say. Difficult to mean.
Confession is a spiritual discipline. It is the appropriate, loving, Christ-like response to the pain and hurt we inflict on others. Confession is about humility and peacemaking. It requires courage, consistency, and compassion. God’s Church should be Exhibit A in the litigation for the virtue of confession. The American Church, in particular, has a skeleton closet filled with bones – from genocide to slavery, to segregation, to sexual abuse, to political extortion and massive coverups. We, the American Church, have plenty of opportunities to model the peacemaking work of confession. We are responsible for inflicting needless hurt, pain, and trauma on millions of people over the centuries. These are facts we must face as we follow the road of discipleship paved by Jesus.
Some of you are probably starting to worry this will be a church-basher, that I have somehow dismissed the immense good that’s come from churches throughout the centuries, and that I hold some loathing for God’s Church—quite the opposite. I love God’s Church and have committed my life to manifesting its beautiful ideal. That love compelled the writing of this book. God’s Church, in its most accurate form, reflects the love of God from within to those without. It is a beacon of hope that directs us all to the love of Christ. It is the city set on a hill, whose light should shine brightly and whose works should compel those in darkness to glorify God in heaven (Matthew 5:14-16). This is the church I love. This is the church I champion. Unfortunately, the shine from the church feels too dim, and lately, our works repel people away from God rather than draw them to Him. And frankly, much of such repulsion concerns our unconfessed sin.
How do we respond to an injured and scarred generation fleeing the church, and often the faith, due to unnecessary, unconfessed church hurt? It’s simple. We do what the Bible tells us to do. We confess. To God and to those we have hurt. And we resolve to love better.
But how?
Church Hurt is nothing new. People have been hurt and damaged by religious groups throughout history. I can think of a few Jesus interacted with who might raise a hand to testify. Like, say, the woman caught in adultery. As she lay on the dusty road at the mercy of a mob of the religious right, ready to enact righteous judgment upon her with stone in hand, what thoughts ran through her mind? How do you think she felt about the “church” of her day? Or the woman with her alabaster box who suffered scolding by the religious elite for her “wasteful” act of love and worship for Jesus? Or the man whose withered hand Jesus healed on the Sabbath? Or the blind man whom the Pharisees discounted because his blindness was, of course, a punishment from God? In each case, the Pharisees chose the Law over love. And in each case, the religious cast a dark shadow, not a marvelous light.
We could find dozens of examples in the gospels of people who suffered damage or hurt by the “church” of their day. This is why we meet John the Baptist as he shouts down the Pharisees from the wilderness, “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” In what was undoubtedly a signature tone of agitation, John warns “the righteous” representatives of God that their “tree” would be cut down if they did not produce “fruits of repentance.” (Matthew 3:7—12) But to repent, one must first confess. One must acknowledge they are headed in the wrong direction before making changes to get back on course. Repentance is precisely that – making changes to get back on course. But repentance requires confession. And confession requires humility. John had seen the Pharisees weaponize the Law against the poor, diseased, and foreign-born of Israel. The Pharisees became a reliable source of hurt and pain instead of hope and healing. They needed to be humbled. They needed to repent.
So yes, John was right to challenge them with his demands of confession and repentance. But they resisted John’s message and rejected the very thought of confession. Besides, who was John to challenge them anyway? He lacked any real credibility. He was an outsider and a wild heretic with non-conformist ideas. Unlearned. Unqualified. Unwise. Feasting on locusts and honey in the woods like a madman. They could dismiss his message as easily as they could dismiss him. To the Pharisees, John’s judgmental and negative message felt more annoying than anointed. Ironically, those are precisely the words to describe the role and function of the Pharisees in the mission and ministry of Jesus.
Here, two thousand years later, not much has changed. The religious vipers among us are still clutching stones and law books in search of something and someone to wage their weaponized doctrine against. They still discount people for their sins and limit the scope of God’s holy work inside hand-drawn boundaries formed from misshapen fundamentalism and orthodoxy. And when a voice cries out in the wilderness for confession and repentance, true to pharisaical form, those voices are resisted, rejected, and ignored as wild and disqualified, unlearned, and unworthy of a second thought.
— end of excerpt—
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