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
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
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