Searching for Sunday, Part 2: Confession

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

February 28, 2021

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Let us pray:

In the day of my trouble I will call to you,
for you will answer me.
When I have done what is wrong
and displeasing in your sight,
O Lord, extend your love to correct me.
When I ignore those in need
and pretend that all is right with the world,
O Lord, help me to face the truth.
When I turn a blind eye to those
who have been stricken with poverty
and are facing the injustices that come along with it,
O Lord, teach me your way.
Enable me to extend your love;
and give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.
I will praise you, O Lord my God,
with all my heart;
and I will glorify your name forever. Amen.

Mark 8: 31-38

Jesus Predicts His Death

31He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

33But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

The Way of the Cross

34Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

A Message

Searching for Sunday, Part 2: Confession

We’re up to section 2 of Searching for Sunday, titled “Confession”. There’s so much to be said for that spiritual practice, for what Evans wrote in that section of her book, and for this morning’s Gospel reading. First, let’s take a look at Evans’ personal confessions in her pages. This is the portion of the book where Evans details her very painful decision to stop attending Grace Bible Church, the evangelical congregation she grew up in, that she and her husband Dan were proud young adult members of.

 

For some of us, deciding that we're not going to go to church anymore is a passive thing. We get occupied with other things in our lives. And then suddenly we realize that our priorities have taken us away from church, or we find ourselves sleeping in a little bit more on Sunday mornings and missing more worship services than we thought we would. It was different for Rachel and Dan. This was a very active, intentional choice, and one that broke their hearts. Perhaps Evans’ first confession to her reader is she didn’t understand that heartbreak is part of a life of faith. Still, there was a voice within her that told her that what she was hearing in her church was something that she couldn't live with anymore. She changed, and Grace Bible Church hadn’t. Their theologies weren’t compatible anymore.

 

She gave several specific examples. Grace Bible Church taught strict creationism and denial of evolution, and Evans became unconvinced that there was really a contradiction between faith and science (for y’all reading this: there isn’t!). Grace would only bless heterosexual marriages, and heavily participated in local protests against marriage equality. Evans wondered if God really intended for marriage to be a straights-only institution. Grace allowed women to teach women’s and children’s classes, but forbade women from ever approaching the pulpit, and Evans doubted that her neighbor’s sexism was truly Gog-ordained. Brick by brick, Evans’ doubts and concerns began to dismantle what Grace Bible Church had looked like in her childhood heart until one day she realized her relationship with Grace had been reduced to a pile of rubble. She and her husband had a sit down conversation with their pastor, and told him they were withdrawing their membership. Dan and Rachel walked out of the building and wept in their car for all they lost.

 

A common thread I see between Evans’ faith struggles, Peter’s faith struggles in this morning’s Gospel passage, and the struggles many of us face in this faith journey is that many of us long for clean, easy solutions to the problems posed by living as a Christian in this messy world. This is confession number two this morning: we cling to easy things that are wrong when God commands us to embrace hard truths.

 

While Evans struggled with the big questions in her head and desperately searched for “the right church” when perhaps there is no such thing, this morning Peter struggles with the reality of Jesus’ mission. Jesus, in the hope of preparing his disciples for the road ahead, tells them flat out that he already knows he is going to die violently and then rise. Despite already hearing the promise of the resurrection, Peter refuses to believe that anything bad could happen to Jesus, and begins denying Jesus’ words. Jesus shuts him down and likens him to Satan—that is, the adversary. Peter opposes and harms his faith as well as that of the disciples by refusing to face the hard truth of Jesus’ unavoidable crucifixion. He can’t grow as a follower of Jesus until he can have honest, difficult conversations with him.

 

Peter takes the brunt of the criticism this morning, but his feelings are hardly unique to him. Confession number three: so many of us fear our doubts, thinking they must be the enemy. In reality, it’s certainty that is the enemy of our faith. Certainty makes it impossible for us to grow, rigid in our views and unable to learn anything new from God. Doubt is merely a walking companion in this journey, and something that can help if you choose not to be intimidated by it.

 

Jesus has laid out a challenge before us: Build the Kingdom of God. And even though we know that this must be inherently back-breaking, heartbreaking, relationship-testing, expectation-busting work, we nonetheless roll up our sleeves and try to build the Kingdom with Lincoln Logs. We want Jesus’ vision to come together quickly and effortlessly, with neat little notches and grooves that make every piece fall perfectly into place. Forgive us, Lord.

 

If you’ve been following United Methodist news, then you know very well that our global Church has been facing a seemingly impossible task for the last generation. The task was to build a just Church, one that truly reflects Jesus’ love, and in my opinion, our reluctance to face this challenge head on has lead our beloved denomination into a deep, dark chasm that we now must climb out of. Our Church is enormously divided right now, and though this sincerely is not our root disagreement the fight we keep coming back to is about sexuality. One camp believes marriages must only be blessed between one man and one woman, and that only cisgender, heterosexual people can be trusted in the ministry. Another camp (the one I belong to) seeks to bless all unions brought together by God and desires to see all people called by our Creator into the ministry supported by the Church through ordination without consideration of sexuality or gender identity. The global Church sought to solve this impasse two years ago in St. Louis by calling a special session of the General Conference. I committed a sin then, one that many of us committed, that I need to confess to.

 

I had just given birth to my son Alexander, and as GC2019 was unfolding I bundled up my baby boy and snuggled with him in the big rocking chair, watching the GC livestream on my phone. I believed history was in the making and I would get to witness it. The One Church Plan was favored to pass, and if it did the homophobic language in our Book of Discipline would be stricken, and churches would be left to do what was right in their own eyes. Looking back two years later I now acknowledge that wasn’t a good plan, which is why it didn’t pass. So many of us craved a simple, clean answer to a division within the body of the Church that has been splitting it in two. And because we could not have the hard conversation about how incompatible our theologies have become with one another, bad decisions, ignorance, and homophobia took over. I turned off my phone and wept as the Conference not only kept the Discipline’s homophobic language but reinforced it through a tragedy we call the Traditional Plan. Lord, have mercy.

 

The General Conference was supposed to meet again the very next year, In May of 2020, and several plans were on the agenda that could have taken the place of the Traditional Plan. But then the pandemic began. GC2020 was pushed back just over a year, to August of 2021. Last Thursday the Council of Bishops announced that GC 2020 is being pushed back yet another year, to August of 2022. While it’s the right decision to keep people safe and to avoid disenfranchising our siblings in other countries who can’t easily travel to the US and who wouldn’t have equal access to a virtual conference, still, it is justice delayed. And delayed. And delayed again. Lord, have mercy.

 

I confess that I hoped for a simple answer where there is not one. Our beloved denomination has some very hard truths that it must face or else the mission of Jesus will be forever lost. We are being adversaries to one another and ourselves to think that there will be a painless answer. We United Methodists must admit that our theologies have grown very far apart. Like with Evans and her church, perhaps our views have become so fundamentally different that we must part ways. I confess that often I bemoan our Church “giving up the fight” when actually we’re in the process of letting go.

 

This is a world in crisis. A world filled with Traditional Plans. A world where we have turned to the simple but wrong solution so many times that we now occupy a skyscraper built from bricks of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and xenophobia. Despite seeing the enormity of the evil structure, I confess that we still attempt to solve the problem by repainting the walls. What Jesus commands of us is that we demolish the skyscraper down to the ground, and build something completely new from scratch. This is very hard work to do, and I confess that I have not helped enough in achieving it.

 

But the most powerful thing that the practice of confession does for us is it brings us to a threshold where instead of having to live as repeat offenders of sin, we get to let it go. We confess to what we did that we shouldn’t have, we confess to what we didn’t do that we should have, and we apologize. And then because we’ve laid those burdens down, we get to transcend that place of brokenness and become the builders of the Kingdom. It’s a good place to be. So why don't you join me in some of my confessions. I've been a United Methodist all my life, and I love Jesus, but I haven't done a lot of this right.

 

I confess that at one point in my life, I really believed that homophobia and transphobia were things of the past. They so aren't.

 

I confess that I further believed that racism was over. Segregation is illegal and we’ve had an Arican American President, so POOF, I believed racism had vanished. The truth is that I was just conveniently able to ignore the racism all around me, from which I benefitted, because of the lightness of my skin. Lord, have mercy.

 

I confess that I have participated in divisive us vs. them rhetoric in our Church, nation, and world. What we need to heal is accountability, justice, and dismantling of oppressive systems, not finger pointing.

 

I confess that there’s lots of days that it’s not easy for me to come to church. I confess that I have doubts, too. I confess that there are some days that I don't know what God was thinking when God called me to do this work. I confess that I'm not perfect. I confess that I am fallen. I confess that I don't know what the answers are. And I think that there's a glimmer of Good News in there, that we can embrace our uncertainty together and look to Jesus for the answers.

 

I confess that I have said, done, and supported ignorant things. I didn’t know better. But in the words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

 

So friends, I invite you to think this week about what you would like to confess. It's a good practice, especially in the season of Lent. It empowers you to rebuild that which you have damaged in the past. So open your heart to Jesus and let go of the stuff you’re not proud of. Then roll up your sleeves and get to work for the Kingdom.

 

Amen.

 

Friends, I invite you to receive the benediction: Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard your going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all of God’s people we say together: Amen.