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LENT: Do Unitarians Need

Confession and Forgiveness?”[1]

INTRODUCTION: Keith Miller, at one time a very popular Christian writer, told of a visit to a church where he conducted a weekend event. One of the breakout sessions included Keith’s meeting privately with the board of trustees and the minister.

As they met, Keith described the pressures that our culture places upon us, especially when we work closely with other women and men, or we are left at home alone a lot. For whatever reasons, sometimes we can lose our bearings, violate our trusts, and break the commitments we have to those we love. He went on to say though, that forgiveness is available.

No one said anything or made any response. Later, the minister asked to meet with Keith privately. He was furious. He said, “Do you realize that you were talking to the leaders of my congregation. They are not only some of the most upright and important leaders of this congregation, but all of them are highly respected in this community as women and men of integrity.” He said, “I resent your insinuating that they could have been involved in an extramarital affair.”

            Keith was naturally chagrined. He had not meant to charge any member of the board with having had an extra-marital affair, only to suggest that there were resources available to help them work through that if needed. He apologized and promised not bring it up again.

            To his absolute amazement during the rest of the weekend, every single one of the members of the board privately contacted him, admitting to failings such as he had broached. They also disclosed their frustration that there was no way they could ever admit it to their own minister, because of his unwillingness to admit that they too might be in need of confession and forgiveness.

            What about us…we Unitarians…do we ever need an opportunity to confess to mistakes…to ask forgiveness…or is that too farfetched to think? We long ago rejected the notion of “sin” and that Jesus Christ could save us from our sin. But even so, we know we’re not perfect; we know we make mistakes; we may even be carrying a heavy emotional load of guilt.

So as Lent approaches, is there an alternative to thinking of ourselves as sinners needing to be saved? Is there a way even for Unitarians to confess and to find forgiveness? Part of the context for us even to talk about our failings is the realization that:

I. WE ARE INCREDIBLY BLESSED.

We are fortunate indeed that we live in a nation whose political system is amazing, although not quite so amazing at the moment. We occupy a part of the planet whose longitude and latitude have to be among the most fertile and productive on the globe. And we have a cherished plank of religious freedom imbedded in our constitution, (although I must say that I disagree strongly with this past week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision. It upheld an appellate court’s ruling in favor of the right of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas to demonstrate and yell while a funeral is underway for soldiers killed in battle. I certainly agree that the 1^st amendment guarantees us free speech and the free exercise of religion. But that does not mean that I can yell “fire” in a crowded church; I can not scream hate filled words only five inches from your face; I cannot repeat a string of obscenities to a classroom of middle high students. Nor should the justices have concurred in ruling that during funeral services Westboro Baptist can disparage the young men who died serving our country. That says nothing about contravening their 1^st Amendment rights to repeat the ignorant drivel they shout at those scenes. They just don’t have a right to do it in front of a church building during funeral services.

(Though that is not necessarily on his agenda, we are incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Simon here from the ACLU, who can help us in the Q & A after the service, to understand why the first amendment implications of the case trump the reasons I just stated, or put another way, how could the Supreme Court not agree with me!).

            So back to the sermon: We are incredibly blessed and without question, we should cherish the religious freedoms imbedded in our constitution, which insure that we can have these kinds of conversations. Nonetheless:

II. OUR MISTAKES, INCLUDING THE SUPREME COURT’S, ARE A CRUCIAL COMPONENT OF HUMAN PROGRESS.

Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas in The Medusa and the Snail puts it even more forcefully. He states that without the capacity to blunder, instead of the 30 million varieties of species on this earth, there would be only one, an anaerobic bacterium. There would be no great music, no brilliant art, none of the depths of discovery and the heights of attainment that we as a species know – were it not for the mistakes we make. In fact, he says our DNA was programmed from the beginning to make small mistakes. “If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong….We are built to make mistakes, and coded for error.”

            All of which is to say that it is precisely because of the mistakes of the past, that we have the capacity to elevate ourselves to another level of living. We can use our mistakes to become very different kind of people. How so? The answer is:

III. We have the capacity to learn from the mistakes of the past so as to create a better present and future.

Spanish philosopher, and later Harvard professor, Jorge Santayana, has written that our species seems to be the only one that can not only reflect on past mistakes and learn from them for the present, but we also have the capacity to determine to live our lives differently in the future. We have the ability to lead our lives, to transform mistakes into life lessons, to change failings into virtues, to lift our lives up out of the muck of self-destructive behavior, into that which is lofty and admirable. We can use a miserable past, to inform a better present, to launch a more promising future.

We can change lemons to lemonade, vices to virtues, and failures to success – simply because we have the capacity as a species to learn from the past, so as to make the present and the future, a thing of beauty and promise – namely, we can lead our lives.

So back to the question posed in the sermon title: “Do Unitarians need forgiveness and confession?” (Annie Estlund wrote me an e-mail in response which read, “It depends upon what you’ve been doing!”) So let me propose an alternative way:

UNITARIAN STYLE FORGIVENESS AND CONFESSION.

 I just quoted Jorge Santayana’s comment on our capacity to improve our lives all on our own. But finding forgiveness is more than personal will power. He also states that there is a distinctly spiritual dimension from which to view it. He writes that every species on Earth has an innate sense of confidence and trust in the created order. We have confidence in the way things are in our world and Universe. We trust that we can live each day with the hope of tomorrow. We are not a mass of single, solitary souls living alone; no, we are connected to that which is more than we are, and from which we have grown to trust for today, and the today’s that will be yesterdays, tomorrow. We can take that innate sense of trust to the bank…we all have it…we never question it, because it is integral to who, we as a species, are.

But all of us at some time or other, due to the sheer living of life, feel ill at ease within and disconnected from that inner confidence and trust. That disconnectedness may come from a tragedy, a great loss, or even unknown causes. Or it may come from our having violated our own understanding of how we should live and how we should relate to others. Whatever the reasons, our lives can seem torn from the Source from which we derive life itself. The result is an inner angst at the very core of our existence.

Confession of our failures, our mistakes, and our omissions, are at one level an intentional effort to re-engage and reconnect with that deeper sense of reality with which we were born. It’s an effort to play the music of our soul in a higher tune; to transpose to a more tuneful key; to find the feeling that enables inner peace and wholeness to flourish.

It may well be that confession is not a one time act as much as it is the journey of a lifetime, reconnecting to life at its deepest levels…to drill new wells of understanding…deeper and deeper. In the process, we can infuse our lives with insights and practices by which we will continue to reconnect.

(Joyce and I were planning to fly to the Bahamas tomorrow to see her dearest friend, but the friend became ill and we had to cancel. Immediately, we both thought of spending the time renewing the spiritual practices we learned about but haven’t implemented from our visit to Sedona, AZ last summer…which we planned to do over Christmastime and a dramatic health episode interrupted…but the practices are now waiting and calling. And if they meet our expectations, I’m hoping we can share some of them with you.)

How do we apply the insights and practices I mentioned as they relate to forgiveness and confession? Where do we go? What do we say, and to whom?

Who was the comedienne who developed a stage identity with the line, “Can we talk?” So I ask you: “Can we talk?” I’ll be Frank and you be Earnest for a moment. We know there have been times in our past, when we did not do what we knew to do, and times we did what we knew better than to do. It may be general knowledge or we may be the only one who knows about it. Regardless, every now and then, the memory of it is like a tiger crouching behind the door. But that painful recurrence is not unique to us.

In fact, O. Hobart Mowrer, a prominent psychologist of the mid-21^st century, at the very time and place that he was to be inducted as president of the American Psychological Association, did something that nearly destroyed his career and almost ended his life. Afterwards, although trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as a student of a host of behavioral disciplines, he struggled to regain his selfhood and professional integrity. The answers he finally came to were amazingly close to the 12-step practices of Alcoholics Anonymous. But instead of 12-steps, I’ve taken a Unitarian shortcut and reduced them to 3-jumps. Here they are:

1. JUMP 1: Confess what you’ve done to someone you can trust and whose opinion matters to you. The rule, though, is that whomever you confess to, their opinion must matter to you.

2. JUMP 2: Ask forgiveness of the person wronged preferably; but if that’s not possible, then disclose your desire to seek forgiveness to someone who should understand.

3. JUMP 3: Seek to make things right as nearly as possible, even if at some cost to you. It’s called restitution…not 20 “Hail Marys,” but concrete acts of remediation.

Three jumps: confession, forgiveness and restitution…Unitarian style.

CONCLUSION.

To have lasting impact, when we gain spiritual awareness, it needs to find expression in efforts to work to correct the societal inequities of our county, state, nation and world. In other words, spirituality is incomplete without social justice; social justice without spirituality ends up in burnout. Our faith is incomplete if it’s only expressed within; we have to act without to make this a better world.

            To inform us on how to do that, we’re honored today to have the executive director of the Florida ACLU, to speak to us briefly about the current concerns of the ACLU, and after the (1^st service, he will be available on the deck to answer questions) service he will be available to answer questions out on the deck.

            I was also honored yesterday to join my Civic Engagement class at FGCU in Tampa, where several hundred mostly college students protested PUBLIX’s unwillingness to pay an additional penny per pound to the farm workers who provide us the gorgeous vegetables we’ve come to expect. McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Taco Bell, KFC…you name it…have all agreed to get on board…except for PUBLIX. One of the things said at the rally was the suggestion for faith groups like ours to have everyone save their receipts for a month and then we could put them all together and take them to PUBLIX and say, “Hey! We are your customers. Look how much we spend here. Now do the right thing. Add on one penny per pound for the stoop laborers of Immokalee.”

            As we consider our lives both in the present and past, it may well be that there are issues there – some elephants in the living room – whose existence we have not admitted to. They are in the past, and yet they are also a very real part of our present. Even though we’re Unitarians, and reject the notion of sin, blood atonement, and judgment…confession, forgiveness and restitution may work for us.

Shalom. Salaam Aleikum. Amen. And blessed be.

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