Christianity Today has a new “open question” piece on “Why Confess Sins in Worship When It Seems So Rote?”
One of the responses is from Calvin Institute of Christian Worship director John Witvliet, who ends with a nod to the Psalms:
The church is blessed today with artists, musicians, pastors, and others who have a renewed vision for shaping honest, grace-immersed corporate prayer and confession. Many are doing so by returning to the Psalms, the Bible’s own school of prayer. Psalm 32 celebrates forgiveness, proclaiming, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven” (NRSV). Psalm 38, 51, 69, and 130 explore similar themes. May God’s Spirit bless these worship leaders with congregations willing to embrace their vision.
All three responses (the others two are by Kathleen Norris and Enuma Okoro) are worth reading, but I wish CT had solicited an opinion from someone who is against corporate confession since that is probably the majority opinion among evangelicals.
What really stuck out to me was the assumption in CT‘s question: Why Confess Sins in Worship When It Seems So Rote? Who says confessing sins seems rote? Our services at Trinity have a section called “We Are Renewed in God’s Grace” that typically includes a confession of sin and assurance of pardon, but what these consist of varies from week to week. (The CRC’s Worship Sourcebook contains eight possible elements of Confession and Assurance, viz., call to confession, prayers of confession, lament, assurance of pardon, the peace, thanksgiving, the law, dedication, with dozens of examples of each, many keyed to the church year.) Sometimes we use a hymn as a confession; if not, we sing a hymn of response. There’s no need to be repetitive without reason.
But there is nothing wrong with repetition either. Here’s the confession we used at the beginning of the worship service each Sunday when I was a kid:
Most merciful God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen.
(This is from the Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 56. Lift Up Your Hearts #640 is a variant of this prayer taken from The Book of Common Worship.)
These words may be “rote” if we say them without thinking. But if we take them seriously and enter imaginatively into them, they should inspire us to honestly consider the many ways we have failed and to reflect upon God’s grace. Believing they are “rote” seems like a failure of imagination.
Dave,
Nice post. I’ve beeen meaning to respond for quite some time now.
The confession part of worship is something that has been of great interest to me for some time now and I’ve been back and forth on how I see and understand it. We talked about some of this in our summer book club.
I remember growing up it seemed that we barely had any confession in our service. We had a section entitled “confession and assurance” or something similar to that, but we never really confessed. We were just assured of pardon for something we never confessed (at least not as a church body).
When I was in college I attended First CRC in Sioux Center, which I thought did a wonderful job of having appropriate Confession and Assurance, though at this moment I can’t remember the specifics of it.
During college I also started dating my wife who is LCMS and we would often attend a LCMS church in a small town west of Sioux Center. It was here that I encountered a more rigorous confession than I ever had before. I am familiar with the confession that you quoted above, but the one I seemed to encounter more often is from Divine Service I in the 1982 Lutheran Worship, p. 136-7:
One line that is in Divine Service II First Setting (p.158) that I have in my hymnal that is missing from your above quotation is the line, “We justly deserve your present and eternal punishment.” This line comes right after “…we have not love our neighbors as ourselves.” I find it interesting if this was omitted from other hymnals–perhaps you know.
Either way, these lines bring up my current struggle with how to understand confession and it’s place in Christian worship. Recently, at the Lutheran Church we have been attending here in Illinois the Pastor’s sermon concerned this issue of loving sinners vs. Christians. He seemed to be differentiating the two in an attempt to bring about people being more loving toward others in the congregation. He repeated often a line similar to this: “Paul is not asking us in this passage to love sinners, but he is telling us to love Christians.” In essence he was saying that we don’t have to love the “heathen” but we do have to love fellow Christians. I found this interesting coming from a Lutheran Pastor since we routinely recite the confession above or something similar where we remind ourselves that we are “poor, miserable sinners.”
I commented to my wife afterward that this struck me as incongruous. The Pastor seemed to be off-base on this if I am understanding the Lutheran confession correctly. If we are all sinners, but we don’t have to love them, then we don’t have to love anyone because we are all “poor, miserable sinners.”
But, I have wondered for some time now whether we are actually “poor, miserable sinners” or whether that phrase and understanding undermines the very thing that Christ did for us? If we continue to believe that we are “poor, miserable sinners” rather than people renewed by Christ’s death and resurrection, empowered to carry the Gospel to the world and “do even greater things than these” do we not undercut the very reason for our existence as a church?
It seems to me that we would do better to remind ourselves of the implications of what Christ did for us and start living that out, rather than spending time every Sunday ingraining this idea that we are utterly worthless and hopeless. Were we before Christ? Yes. Are we now? I’m inclined to think not. It seems to me that many in the church want to continue to believe that we are completely impotent to do anything, (much like the disciples) but all I think of when I hear this is Jesus telling the disciples “you give them something to eat.”
Perhaps I’ve gone too far now and have fallen for the trap of self-empowerment/betterment and all that, but I don’t think so. Christ promised that he would send his Spirit to help us and I think we often deny that in how we live.
The trouble is, is that I I have a residual belief that the confession is good and still has a place in worship, but I don’t really know what it is.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Justin. I remember that discussion from book club.
The confessions in the CRC’s Worship Sourcebook seem to focus on our sins rather than our status as sinners. I think that’s also the case for the confessions we use at Trinity.
The apropos Q & A from the Catechism may be #60:
Dave,
This is a very good quote from the Catechism. Thanks for the response. Merry Christmas!