Luke 1: 67-79
Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for God has looked favorably on the Lord’s people and redeemed them. God has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of God’s servant David, as God spoke through the mouth of the holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus God has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered the holy covenant, the oath that God swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness before God all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Last week in adult education, a subject arose that made me glad Ed Martin was at the front of the classroom rather than myself. The dreadful subject of which I speak is none other than that grim and worrisome matter known as confession. I mean who really wants to talk about confession? If we talk about confession doesn’t that mean that we will have to go on one of those long unpleasant guilt trips to hell and back? Perhaps, we should just leave the business of confessing to those fire-breathing evangelist types.
I must admit that as I was sitting there in adult education listening to Howard Thurman’s confession of sin, I began to feel a bit uneasy and contrite myself. I was particularly struck by Thurman’s confession concerning war. In confessing his “own share in the ills of the times,” Thurman laments, “I have not worked for peace; I want peace, but I have voted and worked for war.” I realize we have a number of different perspectives on the war in our church, so I won’t presume everyone is with me on this, but my personal reaction to Thurman’s statement was a flood of images and feelings not only about the War in Iraq, but also the War in Vietnam, and the War in the Congo, which is the deadliest war since the WWII. Some of the images that came to me were from a documentary I recently watched called “Winter Soldier.” This film captures the testimony of Vietnam vets who came to Detroit from all over the country in 1971 to testify about war crimes that they either participated in or witnessed.
One of the soldiers in the documentary had a very likable personality, and it was a rather jarring juxtaposition to hear his sweet, light voice recount the murders he committed during the war. At one point, he talks about the difficulty of speaking about what happened, and he recalls how he once spoke at a college about his experiences. A woman in the audience confronted him in a hostile way and asked whether he felt ashamed of what he did. In response, he asked the woman her age, and she said, “Thirty-seven.” He then replied that he was 19 when he went to Vietnam, and that really she was the one to blame. It was because she was “a crummy voter” that he had to go to Vietnam at all. In recalling the role of soldiers in the Vietnam War, we might also remember that a key, often unrecognized, factor in bringing it to an end was the rebellion of soldiers themselves. Consider, for example, how there were more than a half million “incidents of desertion” from 1966 to 1973. As one Colonel wrote in 1971 for the Armed Forces Journal, “Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse.”
It is estimated that more than three million Vietnamese were killed in the war. In estimating the number who have died in Iraq, one of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, published a study that estimates that the U.S. invasion and occupation has led to the deaths of more than 650,000 persons. On top of the deaths caused by directly by violence, there are also the deaths being caused by our use of depleted uranium, a kind of nuclear weapon. In one area of Iraq, it is estimated that 40 to 48 percent of the residents will get cancer. Whether one supports the war or not, the studies of respectable organizations indicate that what we are doing in Iraq is approaching the death toll of the Rwandan genocide. Is it then hyperbole for a former chief humanitarian official for the UN in Baghdad to describe the situation in Iraq as “genocidal”? I can see why confession would not be a popular subject these days.
Well, having heard the worst of the bad news, what is the good news for us? In our scripture for today, Zechariah’s entire song leads up to the final phrase declaring that God’s compassion for us will “guide our feet into the way of peace.” The translation in your bulletin says that it is God’s “tender mercy” which will lead us to peace. A more literal translation in place of “tender mercy” would be “the bowels of mercy.” I suppose today we might say the innards or intestines of mercy. How’s that for an image of good news? Back in Luke’s time, it was believed that compassion emanated from the gut, so Luke was giving an image of a very visceral kind of compassion. I have to admit it seems to make sense that God would need a compassion coming from deep down in order to forgive humanity of some of its sins.
In our adult education class last week, Claudia Martin made a great point when she said that confession is good so long as we don’t get stuck in it, and I think it’s the forgiveness of God’s deep compassion, God’s unconditional love, that gets us unstuck. It’s this forgiveness that allows us to get beyond wallowing in guilt. Forgiveness is what helps us to transform the quagmire of paralyzing guilt into a healthy sense of regret. Regret doesn’t keep one in denial about what has happened. It allows one to acknowledge what has happened and to learn from it while still moving forward. I like to think of unhealthy guilt as being like a small circle in one’s backyard. One keeps running around and around that circle of guilt and never goes anywhere. Confession helps us to get off that track.
Some of you might know that in evangelical churches confessional sermons are often a big hit. Recently, the New York Times ran an article about a woman who rose to national fame because of a confessional sermon entitled, “No More Sheets,” a reference to hotel bed sheets amidst which various promiscuous activities took place. Over a million copies of this sermon were sold on video. Well, this morning I plan to launch myself into homiletical stardom by telling you a confessional story I call: “Confessions of a Sports Fan: Penitence for Paper Pennants.” I was seven years old, and I was already a sports fanatic. In that seemingly innocent pre-pubescent stage of life when the giants of the playing fields are more like Greek gods than steroid abusers, at the top of my list of lustful desires was a sport’s pennant to hang on my bedroom wall.
I desperately wanted a sport’s pennant with a University of Illinois football helmet on it. I dreamed about it. I fantasized about it. I talked about it incessantly. Then, with the kind of ingenuity that only moms possess, my mother came up with a solution to put this matter to rest. With scissors and glue and an assortment of colorful construction paper, my mother proceeded to make for me paper sports pennants. Sadly, however, I suffered from that sinful condition kids often suffer from: real thingism. Like kids everywhere, I wanted the real thing. Kids don’t want replicas of Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls. They want real Hot Wheels and real Barbie dolls. I wanted a real sports pennant bought from a store. In a fit of destructive rage, I threw a whirlwind temper tantrum that destroyed all of the beautiful paper sports pennants my mother had so lovingly made. The costliness of sin, I tell you!
For the next 23 years, I carried around guilt over my horrific deed. I think part of me even wanted to carry around this guilt. I thought it was a sign of love for my mother that I should feel guilty over my act of savage destruction. After silently harboring such feelings throughout my childhood and young adulthood, this past year in a moment of climatic confessional guilt I finally spoke to my mother about this sin that had weighed down on me for all those years. With anguish, I told her the story, and without missing a beat, my mother said, “Oh, I don’t even remember that.” And that was it. I sat their stunned. I had been beating myself up for years over those paper pennants, and my mother didn’t even remember them. At first, I almost felt let down. I wanted her to remember. I wanted to feel the guilt of seeing the pain in her eyes over those long lost paper pennants torn to pieces. But, then, a feeling of relief began to sweep over me. I realized that I no longer had to keep running around that same old circle again and again. I had been running around that circle for 23 years, and now I was finally free to leave that little backyard in the corner of my mind. At long last, I was free of my own self-inflicted punishment. Now, having told you this juicy, heart-wrenching confession, I am expecting all of you to launch me into stardom by ordering copies of this sermon to give away to friends as a holiday gift.
A part of being non-guilt ridden Christians who can get off the circle of unhealthy guilt and get on the liberating path of healthy regret is the belief that we are all made in the image of God. If we start from the belief that deep down we have this tremendous potential for good, then one gets a whole different result than believing that one is an inherently bad or evil person. If one starts from the presupposition of one’s tremendous potential for goodness, then confession isn’t an act of self-hatred but an act of self-affirmation. Confession says, “You’re not destined for the scrap heap of sin. You are not like some junker of a car damaged by years of transgressions. In fact, your Hot Wheels are still good as new. You’re still the real deal. You’re still an invaluable child of God.”
But realizing our great potential and getting on the right track are only the beginning steps for us. When Zechariah talks about the salvation of the Israelites, he is not just talking about the kind of salvation that forgives us of our sins. He is also talking about the kind of salvation that saves us from our enemies. For the Jewish people of Palestine, the enemy was the Roman Empire. The pathway to peace was the pathway out of the Empire. Is this the same kind of pathway our country as a whole needs today? I believe there is a richness of meaning and purpose to be found for us as Christians in this country as we seek to get on the pathway of peace. There is a richness to be found in God’s deep compassion for the world. There is a richness to be found in orienting ourselves toward the goodness of God and away from the evils of empire. There is a richness to be found in running a race that isn’t run in vain around the same old circles. Let us therefore lift our voices to God and sing as the slaves once sang, “Guide my feet while I run this race, guide my feet while I run this race, for I don’t want to run this race in vain.”