Confession

I have a confession…my laundry room is messy. There are clothes hanging everywhere, and toys are all over the basement area you pass through to get there. I am sure this ruins your opinion of me and my family, but I want to go ahead and admit why I have locked all of you out of that corner of my life. It’s usually a big mess.

I’ve never been Catholic, and thus, I have never been to confession. But I have seen it a lot in movies and heard my Catholic friends from high school talk about it quite a bit. I must admit long ago I formed a pretty low opinion of the whole practice. I just dismissed it as nonsense that a man could speak for God about forgiving sins.

Now that I am older I think I am hedging a little on how sure I am that it is an altogether bad practice. In fact, I will say that we might just be better off if we had a confessional booth right here in the Springfield Church of Christ. We could get anyone in the priesthood of all believers to sit in it, and then we could all go about the Biblical command of “confessing our sins one to another.”

Better yet, though, we save the money on building the booth and just start confessing. The problem is that we are all too embarrassed to admit how messy our lives are. It’s like inviting everyone over to your house to go into your laundry room. I’m guessing your basement is just about as messy as mine, yet we all keep each other out of one another’s basements. It’s embarrassing, depressing, a reminder of things we are not all that proud of.

But what if we had a common practice of allowing people into the messy rooms of our houses? Wouldn’t that inspire us to clean them up? Obviously God knows all about your messiest rooms, so there is no need to hide. So why even confess something he already knows? Obviously, it’s because confession is not for him but for us. He knows we need to uncover all that stuff, confess it, admit it and quit pretending it doesn’t exist. That’s what it means to have a clean house in God’s eyes.

I don’t know much about Catholic confession, but I know it begins like this: “Forgive me father for I have sinned; it has been ___ years since my last confession.” How long has it been for you?

Mark

Submission

The literal translation of the word “Islam” is “submission.” In fact, if one reads some liberal expressions of Islam, we see them dropping the word “Islam” all together and using the English word “submission” as a replacement name for Islam. One website says,

‘Submission’ is the religion whereby we recognize God's absolute authority, and reach an unshakable conviction that God ALONE possesses all power; no other entity possesses any power that is independent of Him.

I think that most of us would say that “freedom” is one of the things we hold dearest when we think about Christianity. We highlight this aspect of our faith for good reasons. Christ certainly came to free us. Paul and others made sure we did not miss this, and they remind us continually in the New Testament of the freedom we experience in Christ. The references are too numerous to cite here.

Yet all this talk of freedom begins to make us think that “freedom” is the opposite of “submission.” This is not true. Freedom is the opposite of slavery. Freedom is the opposite of bondage. Submission is the opposite of what? It’s hard for me to even come up with the right English word…but the best I can think of is “being in charge.”

My point is that it’s difficult for us as Americans to think about submitting without sacrificing precious freedom. One of the things we see in our monuments here in Washington is the recurring, pervasive theme of freedom. We fought for it! We build monuments to it...and what happens when you build monuments to something? It’s easy to worship it.

Perhaps if we understand the difficult and counter-intuitive notion that submission and true freedom go hand in hand, we will experience the sort of freedom that God desires. Today we will talk about submission and what role it plays in the with-God life.

Mark

Being Students of the Game!

This week in the with-God life we look at how we’re to be devoted to a life of study. If we want to be more like Jesus, there must be a commitment to being students, learners, disciples of His ways and His words.

When I was in Uganda, I was part of a mission team that planted quite a few churches, and we found ourselves in a dilemma. We had to train leaders, and we realized an important part of training them would be formal study and learning of God’s word. We formed a training program called Basoga Bible School (BBS), and we instituted a curriculum. BBS is still going today, but it’s an interesting school because many of the leaders who attend BBS cannot read and write! The ones who can read and write are usually not “literate” in the same way that Americans might be. They talk to friends or listen to the radio to learn things. They are not illiterate but are largely “pre-literate”…or they don’t live lives that orient them to continually reading as you or I might be with our inboxes jammed with emails.

I’m not a very studious guy. I managed to make it through college by playing lots of intramural sports and then (secondarily) cramming at the last minute for whatever tests were required. I’m not proud of that history, but I might as well be honest that I am hardly the guy to wax eloquently about a life of study! But, the athlete in me draws me back to a phrase we always hear from TV commentators talking about sports. Whenever they want to refer to a particularly “smart” player in whatever sport, they almost always say something like, “He (or she) is such a student of the game!” What do they mean by that? Do they mean she sits and reads books all the time about dribbling or bowling or throwing a javelin? Certainly that’s part of it, but I would suggest that in a much bigger way they mean she is a much different sort of “student” than we think of when we normally use that word. They mean she is thoughtful, always watching, always eager to learn from what she sees the best of the best do on the field of play. She eagerly looks for and applies lessons to her “game”.

My point is that my friends in Uganda taught me a lot about being “students of the game”. BBS hopefully taught (and is teaching) them something about being students of the word. I think the cool thing about serving Jesus is that he is a living Word. We are called to not only study the static (but still living) word on the page in the Bible, but we are also challenged to watch His game (His life) and to imitate His moves, His techniques, His vision. May we be students of both aspects of the Word!

Mark

Pilgrimage

I’ve often thought how all the halls of fame in American sports are in crazy locations. The most famous one, the Baseball Hall of Fame, is in Cooperstown New York…not exactly a town where we find ourselves passing through the airport. The Football Hall of Fame is in Canton, Ohio, a town so obscure it makes Cooperstown look like Boston or Chicago. The Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield, Massachusetts, the home of James Naismith, its inventor. The less mainstream sports seem to have landed their shrines in even lesser towns: U.S. hockey--Eveleth, Minnesota; tennis--Newport, Rhode Island; racquetball--Gresham, Oregon.

The bottom line is if you are a sports nut who wants to get to a hall of fame, you have to set out to go there. It has to be a pilgrimage. You have to get in a car, get out a map, and journey to the holy shrine of Cooperstown or Canton or wherever. You ain’t gettin’ there by accident; it’s going to take some planning and some traveling….it’s going to take a pilgrimage.

My Muslim friends in Uganda understood very well the notion of pilgrimage. One of the great signs of true faith was whether someone had gained the name “Haaj” by completing the journey to Mecca at some point in his/her life. It’s the duty of every good Muslim to do it at least once, and that’s quite a tall order if you are an impoverished Ugandan and have no passport.

Certainly pilgrimages in other faiths can show us how dangerous and burdensome such “requirements” can be, and we should rejoice that our God made the journey, the pilgrimage to a foreign land, once and for all on our behalf. Yet there is an aspect to our Christian walk that is a pilgrimage. The idea that we are on a journey, not arrived, not settled or comfortable, is one that is evident throughout scripture. In fact, I would suggest a good portion of our troubles and woes in faith come when we think we have arrived and start building fences that God never intended we build. The with-God life is a life of pilgrimage.

Mark