Confession and Lent
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams preached in Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School yesterday as a warmup to his three-part Taylor Lectures. When he began to speak, I did something stupid that I regret. I tried to take a picture of him subtly, and it didn’t turn out well, so I took one… less subtly. As I did, he looked straight at me, and although I got a great shot, I felt like an idiot and wanted to crawl under my seat.
Instead of evaporating as I ardently wished I could, I listened to Williams’ sermon and felt like it was as directed at me as his glare when I photographed him brazenly and without his permission. He preached about Jesus’ temptation. He posited that Satan was testing Jesus the way a scientist tests a hypothesis, in search of a theory. Specifically, Williams wondered aloud if Satan was testing his theories about God, and that, during Lent, we might benefit from doing the same.
Test our theories of God, he said, and see if some of them might not just be… stupid.
As I ruminated over my gaffe, a specific theory I have about God rose to the surface of my consciousness: I carry a tacit belief that I’m supposed to get every interaction right, every time. As theories go, that one is stupid. On what body of evidence do I base my debunking? Where shall I start?
- I engage with people about 100 times per day, as do most religious and educational leaders I know. Statistically, this means that I can put a foot wrong in ten interactions per day and still be in A- range. Most days I only say or do something stupid 3–5 times. That’s a solid A.
- Last Sunday, I preached on the same text as Williams did yesterday. I made the argument that only the most arrogant person claims to fully understand the connection between human behavior and human suffering. In other words, beating up on and blaming ourselves is tantamount to playing God, and yet I can’t seem to stop myself from playing. Rarely have I had so many people say to me in the receiving line after preaching a sermon, “Me too.”
- A Friend Who Gets Me gave me a pad of post-it notes a couple of years ago with the heading, “I’m almost positive I’m going to offend at least one person today.” I had to find them online and buy more within weeks, as that’s the only heading I want on my to-do lists.
So. A theory I’ve carried around about God is that I need to ask for forgiveness of sins, and that God will indeed forgive me, but only when sins are few and far between. So I should only ask forgiveness from time to time, projecting my limitations in grace onto God. In actuality, I do and say things that cause me to ruminate and self-flagellate; rinse, repeat; pretty much every day and twice on Sundays, and I know in my heart of hearts that God will never run out of patience with me. What kind of reset might be available to me?
I stumbled across an old teaching tactic this week that I hadn’t thought about in a long time: the “critical incident report.” A go-to methodology for ministerial leadership education, “theological reflection,” begins with choosing a cross-grained experience that made us feel… something. The minister, or minister-in-training, tries to capture the critical incident in all its detail, including the icky parts. Then, they write it down, share it with a supervisor, and ask, “Where is God in the midst of all this?”
I am most blessed to have colleagues and friends who function as supervisors in my life. I have more people to whom I can turn and say, “Want to hear about the spectacularly stupid thing I did?” than I can count on one hand. Yet, until Rowan Williams told me to pay attention in a different way, I’m not sure I would have counted God among those colleagues and friends.
My new prayer for this Lenten season: “God, do you want to hear about the spectacularly stupid thing I did?” Confession might be good for the soul, but God doesn’t need it; God already knew about my silly gaffe. It’s I who needs it, as my theory about God needs to make room for the possibility — the fact — that, by virtue of my not actually being God, I’m almost positive I’m going to offend at least one person today.
