Declaring the Joy of Confession

Homily delivered to the English Church in Villars, Switzerland. Sunday 6 March 2016

This Sunday is sometimes given the name Laetare Sunday, meaning “Rejoicing Sunday.”

Here, we have arrived to the mid-point of Lent. As a Church we look back to the somber reminder of our human mortality a few weeks previous manifested in the ashen mark, “remember that dust you are and to dust you will return.” But we also look forward to the arrival of Palm Sunday and Passion Week when our collective cries of, “Hosannah” and then “Crucify Him”, are mingled together like water and wine. In the middle of this season, we know where we have come from and we know where we are going.

So why, four weeks into this lenten journey, does a “rejoicing” Sunday appear on our doorstep?

This would not, on first glance, appear to be a season of rejoicing. This isn’t how it works, many would want to say. Lent is a somber time. It is a time of penance, of fasting. It is an opportunity to confess and recognize the depravity of a misdirected humanity. It is here with ashes on our head that we confess our sins to a big and angry God so as not to be smashed on judgement day. We need to escape hell; we need to go to heaven, and our faithful penance helps the cause.

This is too often Lent’s reputation. To non-believers it would appear the perfect example as to why humanity has evolved beyond a religion for the weak, and even to many believers, Lent is a mark of stale tradition and a voiceless, shackled religion that has no authority in our modern age.

Laetare Sunday, however, flips this caricature on it’s head. Here, in the middle of Lent, we are reminded that the fundamental joy of the Gospel cannot be escaped. To preach the Gospel is to preach joy. To preach confession is to preach forgiveness. To preach fasting is to preach feasting. To preach Lent is to preach rejoicing.

Lent asks us to put on a certain veil, much how a church’s crosses and icons are veiled during the upcoming Passion Week. But this shrouding does not take away from the reality in which we live. If anything, even more attention is called to its true nature. The somber shroud of Lent “veils” the Gospel’s joy for a time, but doing so only serves to magnify it. The deep joy cannot be covered completely, and at every, single turn Lent proclaims this joy, and Laetare Sunday is simply the recognition of this present reality.

The scripture readings for today echo this stance. They demonstrate for us the inherent joy in God’s redemption plan, and how even when this mission appears shrouded, God is at work in the dirty business of a broken humanity. In the profound and powerful pattern of confession and forgiveness, God empowers his people, in joy, to declare that forgiveness to one another.

This is the crux of our lessons today: a God-breathed joy that brings forgiveness and redemption carried forward in the work of his people. Yes, there is quite often tension between the old life and the new. But it is through these tensions that we are given the opportunity to step more and more fully into God’s redemptive work.

Let me repeat the words of St. Paul to the Corinthians (II Corinthians 5:16-21), “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting us to the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”

This message is a far cry from how one may view a religious confession, and I’m not trying to make a depressing straw-man of the Lenten season, but if we walk through this time focusing on the confessions and the ashes, dwelling on the veil itself rather than the glory behind it, we miss the underlying joy that is born through a season of honest confession. I titled this message, “Declaring the Joy of Confession.” And here, Paul is doing precisely that; he is calling God’s people to a magnificent, beautiful reconciliation. The reconciled become co-laborers in the great story of redemption. We are given the ministry, and then given the authority to declare reconciliation to others, to bring them also into the story.

At the end of our prayers of confession in a typical service, the priest normally stands and declares forgiveness over the congregation. This is not out of a mystical, priestly magic. The priest simply speaks aloud a declaration given in power through Christ to all believers. It is an invitation.

We can expand on the joy of this declaration seen in Paul’s letter more practically in our next reading, the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32). I have to say, it’s an intimidating task to be given scripture lessons that include this story. This has become a beloved classic of world culture. Countless sermons, books, paintings, and every other expressive medium have been inspired at one time or another to this parable; it is that powerful. That resonant with the human story.

We all know the story, and having just read it again, we are given the opportunity to dwell on how such a simple story is so densely packed with the beauty of confession, forgiveness, and redemption. But what really struck me in reading the parable again this week, viewing it now through “Lent-tinted” glasses, was the very end.

Just as the Father runs outside to the prodigal son, he comes outside also to his faithful son; he goes out and meets the faithful where he is: in his anger, in his frustration, in his feeling of rejection. For many, I think this is also Lent. We are invited to be honest and angry with God. In the midst of confession and penance we are given the freedom to question and doubt and react to the pain of brokenness that is all around us, even if that pain and suffering finds it source in our own selfish desires. God comes outside to us and He listens.

But then, when the Father speaks in response, you can just hear the joy brimming over, “Son, you don’t understand. You are with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours —but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. The brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!”

We aren’t told how the story ends, but I have to believe the son comes back inside. We don’t hear the faithful son’s confession; we don’t witness the confrontation of pain against joy, but I have to believe it happens. Just as Paul’s words invite us to participate in reconciliation, so the Father invites the faithful son to be part of the redemption process. He is saying in effect, “Come back inside. You have co-laboured with me in the fields, but co-labour with me now in the redemption of your brother. Let us both declare the joy of his confession. Let us share in it and celebrate!”

This celebration of the Prodigal Son also exemplifies for us another inescapable theme of the Lenten journey, and one that is tied quite closely to our readings this week: food and feasting.

In the Joshua reading (Joshua 5:9-12), God ends his regular manna delivery to the people of Israel. But far from being a “reigning-in” of the Lord’s favour, it is a powerful extension of his grace. For years He has fed the people from his hand. Food has literally appeared for them in the morning dew reminding Israel that in the same way the sun rises, the Lord provides. The two became inseparable. So how does God in ending the manna fit into our Lenten journey? How does it help us declare the joy to be found in this season of confession?

Because in this way, the Lord has invited his people to co-labour with him. He has promised this land for generations, he has delivered it, and now he invites his beloved to feast on its bounty. Each Sunday throughout Lent we break our fasting in order that we too may feast on God’s grace.

God’s end-goal was never manna. Manna was itself the forty years of fasting. It is the complete dependence on God for sustenance, for life and food. But by growing and eating the produce of the promised land, God declares over Israel that they are to labour with him. This isn’t because God has grown lazy of feeding and nurturing, or that he wants Israel to “make it on their own.” Far from it. God is calling Israel, as his calling us, into a life abundant where we labour to create with the Creator.

When we break our fast at the Lord’s Table, when we celebrate the Eucharist, at all times, but especially during Lent, we do three things. We look back to a God who sustains his people during their times of fasting. We look in the present to a God who hears our confession, forgives and gives us joy. And we look forward to a God who invites us to join him in the work of redemption, the work of feast-making. In the same way He forgives, we forgive. In the same way He feeds, we feed. In the same way He rejoices in creation, we rejoice to create.

The Jesus who was criticized for eating with sinners and tax collectors is the Jesus who prepares a banquet for the prodigal son, and invites the faithful son to join him in the feasting. The Jesus who was broken for humanity is the Jesus who invites us to feast on him, even in our fasting. It is this Jesus who declares over us the joy of confession, and enables us to do the same for others.

This is the message of Laetare Sunday. This is the message of Lent. We are invited into confession. We are invited to examine ourselves and to wrestle with the pain of our sin and the pain of those moments when we have ’lost all faith in humanity’. But this is not the end. As we dip our heads back down these next few weeks into the most somber season of the Church Calendar, do not forget the joy. In your fast, do not forget the feast. The veil of Lent is the gateway; the veil prepares our hearts to confession and to see the joy that is to come. We stand now halfway in the valley of Lent, but we look upward to the hill of the Cross, and then we look a little further.

We see there joy like the first glimmer of light before dawn. It is faint, and we know there is more pain through which we must first walk. But the light there, it is enough, and it is worth rejoicing in every, single day, because that light is the inheritance in which we now live.