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“I Confess”, Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 8/17/14

“I Confess”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

Matthew 15:10-28

August 17, 2014

The famous theologian Karl Barth was attributed as once saying, “You have to preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper, [iPad, smartphone, or laptop] in the other.”  (Or he would have, had technology been then what it is now.)

My first confession of the morning: holding one in each hand this week, both arms dropped to my sides from the weight of it all.

Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of the city I called home for three years while attending Eden Theological Seminary.  Where many of my classmates and colleagues still live and serve and raise their children.  Where issues around race and class went from a slow simmer to an explosive boiling over in the aftermath of an unarmed 18-year old being shot and killed by a police officer.

Robin Williams, a source of light and laughter throughout the world, claimed by the disease that steals these very things –light and love—from those in its grip.  Whose death both stuns and stirs within us all the feelings for the ones we know and love whose lives – including our own – have been affected by this illness that “is no respecter of class, race, profession, wealth or talent.” (The Guardian)

This on top of already tense and devastating situations in Israel/Palestine, Syria, Iraq…

So we turn to scripture…and in this week’s lectionary, the three-year cycle of readings that cover broad portions of the Old and New Testaments, we find Jesus being, well, a jerk.  Racist, some have gone so far to say.  First ignoring the woman who had come to him for help, then calling her a dog.  Others defend Jesus, saying he’s using the rhetoric that was common to rabbis in those days, instead of being rude.  That the term he used to describe the Canaanite woman was one of endearment.  So yes, you could say that this is an uncomfortable passage to wrestle with this week.

READ MATTHEW 15:10-28

Pair that with the reading from Isaiah, set in the midst of turmoil for the Israelites.  There are those returning from exile in Babylon and beyond only to find others living in their homes, a disastrous economy, a mix of cultures and religions, and a lack of order and stability they’d known in exile.  And then are those who were not considered wealthy enough or important enough to have been exiled, who scavenged a living for decades, only to have those returning from exile whining and complaining about the disarray all the while showing off their fancy gadgets from their time in Babylon.  And added to the mix, others who had landed in this politically unstable country as neither Jewish nor native to the land whose futures were now on the line as the Jewish people figured out how to reorganize as a religion and a society. (Feasting on the Word, 339-340)

READ TOGETHER ISAIAH 56:1, 6-8

We’ve spent the weekend at NewWestFest at our confessional booth, or maybe we should call it our reverse confessional booth, as we’re confessing to others the ways that the church and Christianity and Christians have hurt others in the name of God.  The idea was inspired from a chapter called “Confession”in Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.  A few Christian students at Reed College decided to “come out of the closet” in their identity as Christians at their school’s version of the drunken spring festival.  Their first version of the confession booth was to put a sign on it that said “Confess your sins,” which, you know, would be funny, because these events are basically sin-fests, in their estimation.  They felt the only way this idea could possibly work was if they built a trapdoor in the confessional booth, seeing as how someone or someone(s) would almost surely burn it down. And then one of them came up with this:

“We are not actually going to accept confessions.” The others looked at him in confusion.  He continued, “We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.”

All of us sat there in silence because it was obvious that something beautiful and true had hit the table with a thud…

I wanted so desperately to apologize for the many ways I had misrepresented the Lord. I could feel that I had betrayed the Lord by judging, by not being willing to love the people he had loved and only giving lip service to issues of human rights.

For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole. But it isn’t a religious system; it is people following Christ. And the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.

That excerpt gets at some of the discomfort in this whole notion, doesn’t it?

1. Acknowledging that we do get in Jesus’ way. That as Christians we are not always like our Christ.
2. That there are corporate things of which we are a part – beyond our own personal judgments, misconceptions, and mis-steps – to acknowledge, to name, to confess.

As Christians, it can be painful to acknowledge that we are part of systems and events that have oppressed and hurt the very people Jesus called us to love.  Maybe we didn’t personally behead anyone during the crusades or use excessive-force evangelism, but we have certainly benefitted from being part of the privileged majority.  As Christians in the United States we can expect:

• to have time off to celebrate religious holidays
• to have easy access to music, TV, and movies that relate to our religious observances
• that when swearing an oath, we will place our hand on the religious book that pertains to our faith
• politicians responsible for our governance are probably members of our faith
• our faith can be an aspect of our identity without being a defining aspect (i.e., we’re often not introduced as someone’s “Christian” friend) (from http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com)

Privilege is complex, and it’s possible to be privileged in some ways and not in others;  or example, to be a Christian and to be a person of color.  To be white and to be gay.    To be male and to be poor.

Both our readings from Matthew and Isaiah address the reality of how hard it can be to overcome the dominant systems of the day, the social convention and customs, to create space that is hospitable for all, not just those in positions of privilege and power.

In Isaiah, God promises that God’s house will be a house of prayer for ALL people – a really bold statement in light of the turmoil of sorting out who was in and who was out and what was whose throughout the return from exile.  This was God’s way of saying that God’s blessings are for ALL people, even the Gentiles, even the eunuchs, even the ones everyone else said were not a part of us.  “Those people.”

Jesus is doing the same here in Matthew.  All of this stuff about bodily functions and personal hygiene is Jesus’ way of saying there’s a place for all at the table, even the Gentiles who don’t have the same customs as the Jews.

Funny that the same conversations need to be had centuries apart.

Maybe that’s because these ideas are well and good in theory and they certainly make for good theology, and yet there’s something that gets lost in translation into our daily lives, our social norms, our political and cultural systems.

Maybe it’s because even Jesus struggled with this.  Matthew describes the woman who Jesus encounters just north of Galilee as a Canaanite, a term that hasn’t been used in centuries, that refers to her heritage.  The Canaanites were enemies of ancient Israel.  Jesus’ response to her pleas for him to heal her daughter makes it clear that he does not see her and her people as a part of his mission: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Jesus, who had just gotten done paving a way for the Gentiles to be welcomed to the table, tells this woman that because of who she is – not her personally but because of her ethnicity, her people and their history – he cannot help her.  He has the power and privilege in this situation, and he uses it to remind her of the differences between who society and systems say he is as an educated Jewish male and who society and systems say she is as a non-Jewish woman with a child who is sick, then understood to be a direct correlation to sin.

It would be easy to defend Jesus here:

She was all loud and up in his face.

She should’ve known that’s not how you get what you want.

He was just making an example of her.

When he called her a dog, he didn’t really mean it like that.

Jesus doesn’t need our defense, though. He’s in a position of power and authority with this woman.  Privilege doesn’t need protection.

It needs acknowledgment and accountability.

The woman in this story offers a bit of both.

She mirrors Jesus’ comments back to him, that he might see how his rationale for his words doesn’t hold water.  She challenges Jesus’ limited understanding of his mission.

And it makes a difference.  Healing occurs.

Healing occurs both individually and systemically. Healing occurs for the woman’s daughter; healing occurs between the Jesus and this woman; healing occurs across time and space through the shift in Jesus’ teaching and understanding of his mission to Jews and Gentiles.

If only all the conflicts in our lives and our world were resolved that quickly.  Maybe when we’re looking back thousands of years, it will seem like it only took a pen stroke.  In the meantime, we have work to do.  Healing, reconciling work.  That’s another sermon, at least.  More like a series of sermons, which, in fact, may be our emphasis this fall.

It’s hard to imagine the fullness of what healing and reconciliation can look like.  It’s a picture that can only be painted in community.  And the canvas must first be primed with confession.

When we confess, we aren’t defending the actions of ourselves or others.  We aren’t making excuses or trying to explain it away or place blame. We’re simply naming brokenness as we see it in the world and in our lives and acknowledging two things:

1. the presence and power brokenness has in and over our individual and collective lives
2. our role in that brokenness as human beings who are shaped and molded by systems of which we are a part

That naming might make us uncomfortable, sad, angry even.  And that can be okay, when processed in prayer and conversation within covenanted community.  And sometimes, with the crowd at NewWestFest.

After a week like we’ve had in the world, in a world where such a week can exist, there needs to be a place to share, to lament, to grieve, to confess.  It doesn’t require a physical confessional booth; it requires safe space among others who are on the road that grace built – a road that allows for sorrow and sadness and anger; a road that is beneath our feet no matter where we are on the journey but always keeps us moving along, closer to where God intends us to be.