LENT 1 2005  The General Confession 

In the name of God, from whom no secrets are hidden.  Amen. 

We are now in the Lenten season, the great season of repentance which leads up to the drama of Holy Week and the awesome triumph of Easter. This is a time of reflection, of review – a time when, as individuals and church communities, we sift through our thoughts, our actions, our attitudes and seek to align them more completely with God’s desires. It is both a challenging and an affirming time, as we tick some boxes and put big red crosses, and the comment ‘could do better’ in others.  

Throughout this Lenten season, I will be preaching a series of sermons on the General Confession, taking it section by section and examining it in detail. The Confession is a pivotal point in our Eucharistic liturgy. Taken together with the absolution, it is the moment at which we acknowledge our own weaknesses, God’s great love for us and the transforming nature of the encounter between humanity and God. This encounter is at the very heart of the Gospel. Forgiveness of sins is inseparable from the Gospel. 

We have only to read the New Testament to see that a large part of Jesus’ ministry was to forgive sins. Stories such as that of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11), the healing of the paralytic in Mark 2, and the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32), emphasise the place of forgiveness in bringing wholeness.  

All the indications are that the early church took sin very seriously. It quickly became a society of perfectionists and forgiveness of sin was not full or free. One became a Christian by baptism. At that point former sins were forgiven, the slate was wiped clean. But if you committed sins after baptism, there was no recourse. They were, of course, expecting the end of the world at any moment. The logic was that the baptised were waiting for it, keeping themselves free from sin and ready for God’s judgment. Christians, of all people, could not afford to come to the judgement of God with sins on their conscience. As time went on and the kingdom did not arrive on cue, converts adapted by postponing baptism until death approached. After all, if they were only going to get one shot at forgiveness, then the only sensible strategy was to put it off as long as possible.  

As one commentator wryly notes, ‘this situation proved intolerable’. Early in the third century, a church father, Tertullian, wrote about the steps taken in the church to deal with sins committed after baptism. A sinner could be received back into the communion of the church after a rigorous program of public confession and penance. But only once. Tertullian called it ‘the second plank to salvation’. 

Through all of this a fundamental characteristic of the nature of God seems to have been lost from view: God’s forgiveness knows no limits. The church has always felt a tension between the seriousness of sin and the free gift of grace – in these arrangements the boundaries being placed around God’s action seem to speak more of human limitations than of God’s love. 

By the early Middle Ages some adjustments had happened (not surprisingly) and a system of private confession, penance and priestly absolution evolved. This was deeply personal and also recognised the endless forgiveness of God. No limits were put on the number of times a genuinely contrite penitent could seek and receive forgiveness.  

Humanity being humanity, however, over time this system became corrupt and a major focus of criticism for the 16^th century Protestant reformers.  They attacked the sale of pardons, compulsory confessions unrelated to any sense of wrongdoing and many other distortions of the practice of penitence.  

The English reformers, like their Lutheran and Calvinist counterparts, dismantled the system, proclaiming a gospel of forgiveness. They insisted that God’s grace was freely available to all repentant sinners. Confession was to be made in public once more, but not by individuals naming their sins but by a general confession. Individuals were expected to acknowledge their individual sins in their hearts as they said the words together in public. Every eucharist was understood as an occasion for receiving forgiveness anew, as indeed we understand it today. 

In the Anglican tradition, the practice of private confession where an individual names their sins before a priest and receives absolution, has not been abandoned completely. There is an acknowledgement that there can be times in a person’s life when this ministry is enormously valuable. But it is not compulsory. The tag often used to describe the Anglican approach to such private confessions is ‘All may, some should, none must.’  

In our public worship, each time we share in the eucharist, we have the opportunity to lay open our brokenness and its consequences before God, trusting that we will be forgiven, given an opportunity to start again.  

The general confession holds in balance our awareness of our sins as individuals and the knowledge that we stand together in our sinfulness. We are all sinners, although our individual sins may vary greatly.  It is a moment of great significance in the liturgy, a point at which we come humbly before God, united in our humanity. 

‘Merciful God, our maker and our judge’. The opening part of the confession is a salutation to God, which describes in a nutshell both our understanding of the nature of God and our relationship.  

It is God’s mercy which allows us to approach with confidence and without fear. God looks upon us, as individuals, the congregation of which we are a part, and indeed the whole human race to which we belong, with mercy. Whatever we have done, God wishes us no harm but rather seeks to make us whole.  

‘Our maker and our judge’ signals our complete dependence. It also highlights God’s enormous investment in us. In judging us, God has much at stake, for we are created by God and it is God’s creation that is being judged. This is no dispassionate, arm’s length judge we are dealing with, this is the one who created us.  

The word ‘judge’ needs to be teased out carefully here. We tend to associate it with words like ‘judgemental’, expecting a harsh and punitive assessment of our misdeeds. This is, I believe, a mistake. A judge, in the best of all possible worlds, carefully weighs up a situation and seeks to understand what is truly going on. Judges in our courts usually sit in judgement on a particular case, a particular situation in which wrongdoing of some kind is alleged.  

God, sitting in judgement on us, assesses and evaluates us as a whole, in all our complexity, rather than looking at one or other particular sin. This far more searching examination is based on a loving desire to bring us to wholeness, to save us from the consequences of our sinfulness.  It is at the heart of salvation. God’s judgement is not to be feared, it is to be welcomed and embraced.  

Let us lay ourselves open in faith, confident that the judgement we face will be loving and merciful, drawing us ever closer to the God who made us and seeks our greatest good. Amen. 

Sarah Macneil

February 2005