Up in the mountains there was a family that had an outhouse out back on the property. There was a little boy in the family who hated using that outhouse. It was hot in the summer, cold in the winter and it smelled horribly all the time.
So one day the boy decided he was going to do that outhouse in. The creek that ran by the outhouse was up and he thought he could make it look like the work of the flood if he found a way to push it in. He found an iron bar and he went out to the outhouse, slipped the bar under one corner of the house and with one huge push he turned it over into the creek that ran right by it. The outhouse floated on away.
That night his father came in and told him they were going to have to take a trip together to the woodshed. There was always bad news for the little boy. The little boy asked why and his dad said, “Son, somebody pushed the outhouse into the creek today. Was it you?”
The boy ‘fessed up but he added, “I read in school where George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree and his father didn’t punish him.”
“Yes,” the boy’s father answered. “But George Washington’s father wasn’t in the cherry tree when he chopped it down.”[1]
Confession, they say, is good for the soul. But you and I know that as human beings we can resist confession even when we know it’s good for our souls. We don’t want to admit that there are things we have done that need to be brought up for air and light. We don’t want to believe that being honest with ourselves and others is necessary. We’re pretty content believing that we don’t need to change. We may recognize that inside there is turmoil and discontent, but somehow we get the idea that other people or outside forces are always the source of that discontent when, in fact, confession would reveal that most of what needs to change is in here.
This is also true for nations. Following the decades of enforced segregation in South Africa under the system of apartheid, there were a lot of folks who called out for retribution and pay back – to bring justice on behalf of the black and colored citizens of that country who had been locked out of anything resembling equality. Others felt that a process of sorting out rights and wrongs would be so massive and cause such dislocation that there ought not to be any looking back at all. Just keep moving forward.
What the country did, though, was to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People were invited to come and stand before the commission and to testify to what they had seen, what they had experienced and what they had done. The results of the commission were mixed. It allowed truth to be told but it did not always lead to reconciliation. But for some of the people who came, just being able to tell their story was a powerful act of confession.
In Capetown, South Africa, a man told the Commission the story of how he had been shot in the face by the police during a political gathering in one of the settlements. As a result he lost his sight. “He also told of how, two years later, the police beat him with electric ropes, suffocated him, forced him to lie in an empty grave and tortured him in other ways.”
When he was asked how he felt after having delivered his testimony, he replied, “I feel that what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn’t tell my story. But now it feels like I got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story.”[2] Confession – revealing what is deep and most true about us – for individuals and for nations can be healing – like getting sight back.
Why am I talking about confession this morning? It’s not just because we’ve been talking about it this week in the wake of David Letterman’s confession of moral failings on national TV. That was a strange sort of confession. It was brought about because of the threat of extortion. It was done in front of his studio audience and it was not really clear if he was doing the whole bit as a monologue. Even Letterman himself called it creepy.
No, the reason I want to talk about confession is because I believe that’s where we go when we pay attention to the passage from Hebrews this morning. “The word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”
That’s quite a statement. It says to me that if we are really confronted with a new life in Jesus that it is not just some pleasant little endorsement we are making. We’re not just choosing Jesus in the same way that we choose a brand of clothes. I might choose a certain designer or a certain label because I want the brand to speak for me – to tell other people that I have a certain kind of taste or certain values. My clothes, rather than my words or actions will speak for me. I might still be an insecure, hopelessly uncool person, but my clothes will tell you something different.
That’s not how it works with Jesus. Jesus doesn’t just want your endorsement – Jesus wants your life. Jesus doesn’t just want you to put a fish on your car and go on as if nothing else has changed – Jesus wants you to fish for people. Jesus doesn’t just want you to go to church on Sunday – Jesus wants you every day of the week. And it’s because Jesus has a two-edged sword.
That’s a violent image, isn’t it? The word of God is more cutting than a two-edged sword, piercing down to the joint and the marrow, laying us open so that there is nowhere to hide. Because, you see, Jesus knows what that if you are going to be transformed it’s got to be a change right down in the center of your life, where soul meets body and where your intentions, your thoughts and your desires are born. That raw stuff that is at the center of us all – the stuff we don’t want to acknowledge, the stuff we don’t want to pull out for others to see, the stuff that we keep hidden away, stuffed inside – that’s the stuff Jesus knows needs to be changed because it’s our true self. And no matter how much you try to paper it over or put fish stickers on it or dress it up in your Sunday best – that stuff is going to be around your soul like a millstone until you bring it out through confession.
When you think about it we wouldn’t want that word of God to be anything less than a two-edged sword would we? A word that left us just the same as we have always been is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t confront sin and woundedness is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t speak truth to us, that didn’t liberate us, is no word of God at all. A word that didn’t open us up to something greater than ourselves so that we could experience real redemption, real reconciliation, real forgiveness, real transformation – this is no word of God at all.
The theologian Karl Barth says:
An imagined Word of God, …however well and truly imagined, as a mere dream…remains outside the real world and existence of [human beings], leaving the other subjects in the sphere of our world and existence unmolested, but also unillumined and unconsoled in the depths of their creaturely existence. But now God has become [hu]man, and therefore Himself a creaturely being, in His Son, and in this human world of ours His Son lives on in the form of His instruments and their witness. So His power in this testimony is also a concrete power at the heart of this sphere, consoling and healing, but also judging and assailing.[3]
Do you hear what Barth is saying here? A word of God that only consoles us without also judging our lives is not worthy of being called God’s word. A word of God that only heals without assailing us is not worthy of the name. We want a God to turn the world upside-down because look at the world!
And here’s the good news – God has sent the word that the world needs for its salvation. The word is Jesus Christ. As Hebrews says, this is our great high priest – God’s son – who came and lived among us. Who knows what our weaknesses are like because he was one of us. He was tempted like we are, though he did not sin. And because he is priest he can make the offering that needs to be made.
You remember the sacrificial system that God had established in the Hebrew scriptures. In order to atone for the people’s sin, the priest would take an animal and sacrifice it on an altar. He would take a knife and pierce the animal until it was laid open before God. The priest would do this over and over because the problem of sin was never “solved.”
Now, Hebrews says, Jesus has become the priest who offered himself as sacrifice. Once and for all. He has gone to the cross and laid himself open for the worst that could be done to him. Pierced in his side. And victorious because ultimately God is victorious over sin and death. Ultimately God wins. And God is merciful and God loves you and me and this world so much that God does not want us to remain as we are. God wants us to win, too. To be made new. “When anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation; everything old has passed away. See, the new has come” [2 Co. 5:17].
The folksinger Nanci Griffith has a song called “These Days My Life is an Open Book.” In the song she is talking about raw and desolate her life is as she looks for love in this world. She sings this song as if to a lost lover who now only exists as a memory.
“These days my life is an open book,” she sings, “missing pages I can’t seem to find. These days your face in my memory is in a folded hand of grace against these times.” She’s singing about a lost lover but what if that lover is God? What if that lover is the one who knows who she is…who has walked beside her in this world and who knows her story is not a tale of loss but a promise of grace “against these times”?
What if your life were an open book with a story being told in its pages? And what if that story were being written and rewritten by a God who loves you and who wants to make you whole? What if there is a home for you and me? And what if we go there together? To go with boldness and openness before the throne and to let our lives be remade in the likeness of our brother Jesus? What if? Thanks be to God.
Hebrews 4:12-16
For the word of God is alive and powerful and more cutting than a two-edged sword. It penetrates to the point of dividing soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Before this word no creature is hidden. All are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
So then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the son of God. Let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses - he was tested in every way that we are only without sin.
So let us approach the throne of grace with openness so that we can take hold of mercy and find grace for help in time of need.
[2] Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Vol. 5, Ch. 9, http://www.polity.org.za/polity/govdocs/commissions/1998/trc/5chap9.htm.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.2, [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956], p. 676.
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