Soul Force

We Confess…

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

September 28, 2008

In the story of the Gossip I told during our Time for All Ages, I didn’t ask the question that occurs to me when I consider the end of the story: What does the gossip do next? What can she do, after all? Go home and hide her head in shame? Continue telling tales when she understands that doing so harms people and cannot be undone? Or does she perhaps attempt, to the best of her ability, to make amends for the wrong she has done to her neighbors? Does she apologize for her careless mischief and do her best to correct the false impressions she has spread? Does she choose to atone for her – might be say “sin?” Does she stop gossiping?

This tale is a variant on a familiar theme told in rabbinic midrash, interpretive stories which help to understand the teachings of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture; this story illustrates the 9^th Commandment, which forbids bearing false witness against your neighbor. Here’s a variant for grownups:

A man in a small village was a terrible gossip, always telling stories about his neighbors, even if he didn't know them. Wanting to change, he visited the Rabbi for advice. The Rabbi instructed him to buy a fresh chicken at the local market and bring it back to him as quickly as possible, plucking off every single feather as he ran. Not one feather was to remain. The man did as he was told, plucking as he ran and throwing the feathers every which way until not a feather remained. He handed the bare chicken over to the Rabbi, who then asked the man to go back and gather together all the feathers he had plucked and bring them back. The man protested that this was impossible as the wind must have carried those feathers in every direction and he could never find them all. The Rabbi said, "That's true. And that's how it is with gossip. One rumor can fly to many corners, and how could you retrieve it? Better not to speak gossip in the first place!" And the Rabbi sent the man home to apologize to his neighbors, and to repent.[1]

You may prefer pillows to chickens – whatever helps keep it in your head will do fine! We have all, I am quite sure, told tales of one sort or another in the course of our lifetimes – or perhaps better, I can assure you I have. Sometimes, as the woman in the story found it, the stories I told or the comments I made seemed insignificant and the harm seemed slight; but at other times I realized the costs my clever comments exacted, not only from the person referred to (usually out of the room) but also from those to whom I said the words, who correctly assumed that I might say the same sorts of things about them; and most of all from myself, as I grew isolated by clever remarks I threw off.

This is a simple illustration of the theme I’m struggling to express today: how we confess and make amends, how we go about forgiving those who trespass against us, how we are forgiven for our trespasses. Ramadan has just ended: “During Ramadan Muslims ask forgiveness for past sins, pray for guidance into the future, ask for help in refraining from everyday evils and try to purify themselves through self-restraint and good deeds.”[2] On October 9^th, our Jewish neighbors celebrate the end of their Days of Awe – starting this Tuesday with Rosh Hashanah – with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day of repentance, all of the sins of the past year are covered over and blotted out for the observant Jew. But before sins are forgiven by God, each person must go to anyone wronged during the year and ask their forgiveness first.

On the Christian calendar, Lent is a similar period of self-examination and repentance, and on the Unitarian Universalist calendar this practice falls on…. Ah, but you see, we have no regular, periodic occasion for repentance and forgiveness of sins. Some would say that’s because we have no sins, or perhaps better, no concept of “sin;” but I remind you of our story of the gossip. Surely a few of us besides myself feel at least some twinge of remorse and might be well-served by an opportunity to be forgiven and to forgive. Most of the religions of the world have some process by which repentance is offered and forgiveness received:

· From Buddhism, “Whosoever looks upon his wrongdoing as wrongdoing, makes amends by confessing it as such, and abstains from it in the future, will progress according to the Law.”

· From the Jewish Talmud: “Great is repentance; it turns premeditated sins into incentives for right conduct.”

· From Islam, a Shi’ite saying: “The sin which makes you sad and repentant is liked better by the Lord than the good deed which turns you vain and conceited.”

· From Hinduism, from the Laws of Manu: “By public confession, repentance, penance, repetition of holy mantras, and by gifts, the sinner gets released from guilt. In proportion as a man who has done wrong, himself confesses it, even so is he freed from guilt, as a snake from its slough. In proportion as his heart loathes his evil deed, even so far is his body freed from that guilt.”

· From the traditional religion of Kenya: “Let us rid ourselves of evil doings. Let every person ask pardon of the Great Light (Asis), The molder of us all, Who has given us this land to inhabit, and to multiply in.”[3]

I remember a lovely story of a tribe in Africa which has a remarkable way of addressing wrongdoing by a member. When someone does something hurtful, all the others gather in a circle around the wrongdoer and remind him or her of their true self, telling stories of the goodness they have done previously as a way of calling them back to their true nature and helping them to repent for and leave behind the wrong they have done. They are willing to sit for hours until the one who has done wrong sees the error and decides to make it right.

I find myself struggling to find an appropriate and meaningful way to incorporate confession, repentance and making amends in words that can resonate within our own Unitarian Universalist faith tradition, words that we can use which come from the heart, words which are our own but still allow us access to a central element of religious meaning and practice in every tradition around the world. This morning’s unison reading, drawn from the Psalms and included in the old red hymnal, Hymns of the Spirit, represents one Unitarian appropriation of our Christian and Jewish roots. From our more liturgically-minded Unitarian Universalist friends at King’s Chapel in Boston, we have this General Confession from the Morning Prayers, found in their adaptation of the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life; to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.[4]

I have to confess that set prayers like these, even from our own tradition, never quite ring true for me. My friend Rabbi Shira Joseph from the Congregation Sha’aray Shalom and I gather with several other colleagues for a Bible study over lunch each week and one of us offers grace over the meal before we eat. Rabbi Joseph will be sharing with her congregation during these High Holy Days that she finds it difficult to offer spontaneous prayer as a blessing at these times, while the rest of us find it more difficult to offer a set formula each time. I’m not sure if my difficulty with set prayers stems from my own religious upbringing, which denounced set prayers as formulaic and meaningless, or if I simply haven’t found the particular words others have chosen to be meaningful to me. I am aware that regular repetition of a prayer that someone else has formulated becomes meaningful over time as it seeps into our consciousness, as we find of course with the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, which we say each week. Perhaps the best words of all are from that prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Aside from that, I have not yet found a prayer which expresses what I’m struggling with today: for forgiveness from what I have done wrong, for strength to make amends. I draw comfort from the poem “Praying” by Mary Oliver:

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.[5]

One of my difficulties – and perhaps you share it, too – is in the concept of wrongdoing, of sin, in itself. Many of us come from religious traditions which so insisted on our sinfulness that we want nothing to do with an exaggerated sense of our own evil. But perhaps we deny too much. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, says of his time in the concentration camp, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”[6] “Through all human hearts,” including our own. We tend not to find ourselves great sinners; we see others who do much greater wrongs than we can imagine ourselves doing. Perhaps we identify more with the older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son from our readings this morning, the self-righteous one who cannot bring himself to forgive his brother for having abandoned him and his father, rather than the one who has run away and been brought low. But surely all of us have some shortcomings we can identify – remember the Gossip and the feathers of the pillow or the chicken!

Part of the problem, of course, is with the very word “sin,” which I and I suspect most of you find difficult. As I often do, I turned to William Ellery Channing for help; he says,

I feel as if a difficulty lay at the very threshold of this discussion [of sin] which it is worth our while to remove. The word sin I apprehend is to many obscure or not sufficiently plain. It is a word seldom used in common life. It belongs to theology and the pulpit. By not a few people sin is supposed to be a property of our nature born with us and we sometimes hear of the child as being sinful before it can have performed any action. From these and other causes the word gives to many confused notions. Sin in its true sense is the violation of duty and cannot consequently exist before conscience has begun to act and before power to obey it is unfolded. To sin is to resist our sense of right, to oppose known obligation, to cherish feelings or commit deeds which we know to be wrong…. [Sin] is as extensive as duty. It is not some mysterious thing wrought into our souls at birth. It is not a theological subtlety. It is choosing and acting in opposition to our sense of right, to known obligation.[7]

As I said earlier, I struggle with the concepts of repentance, of confession, of wrongdoing and making amends. At the same time, I think that failure to consider how we make right what is wrong in our lives leaves us with a one-sided and somewhat shallow understanding of the real complexities of our lives. I certainly have no interest in re-imposing those modes of responding to the dark side of our selves which some of us have escaped at some cost. At the same time, I wonder if we might not find contexts in our own lives to engage on a regular basis in what is called in twelve step programs a “fearless moral inventory,” perhaps with partners or close friends, or even perhaps in small groups here at Second Parish. I don’t have the answers and I am deeply aware that in these matters we must be, as the Buddha put it, “Lamps unto ourselves.” I’d like to hear what any of you think about these matters and how we as a congregation and as individuals might address them.

I do know that in order for our lives to be transformed, we must choose what is good and leave behind what is bad. I do know that learning to do this is part of each of our spiritual journeys. I also know that a balance must always be struck between striving toward wholeness and goodness and taking the time to examine our lives and putting aside those barriers in ourselves which prevent us from becoming what we were meant to be.

We all scatter feathers of imperfection in our paths, and we can never gather them all back again; but we can do our best to become conscious of the errors we make and in so doing make amends as we can and vow to do better in the future. In closing, we would do well to remember these words from the Chassidim:

Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Pshishke told his disciples: Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he or she can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket, and, there, find the words: "For my sake was the world created." But when feeling high and mighty one should reach into the left pocket, and find the words: "I am but dust and ashes."[8]

Amen.