A Need for Common Confession

10 January 2021

 For the vast majority of my life, I have been a Lutheran.  Started out as a Baptist but that went sideways. For many years at this time on a Sunday morning I would be putting on a clean shirt and combing my hair before I walked the fifteen minutes to the church. Thanks to Covid-19 I have not attended in 10 months.  

 

One of the things I like about the Lutheran services is the common confession.  I view standing with 200 people and reading a printed prayer in unison as a clearing out of all the groady stuff that had accumulated in my soul over the previous week.  On Sunday mornings in the before times I would bow my head with eyes closed and then I would ask the Divine to forgive me for things I had done and left undone, for things that I had said and left unsaid for needs I had not acted to remedy or that I had turned my eyes away from.  I would intone that I was mightily sorry for these things.  At the end the pastor would raise his hand and say that through God’s mercy I was forgiven. When those words left his mouth I felt free and unchained of angst and guilt.

 

After this week I wish I felt that I could safely attend church but I don’t.  But if ever there was a time when an appellation to the Divine for forgiveness by a group speaking in unison, this week would be it. I need forgiveness for the hatred I have felt for those who stormed the Capitol and for the people who urged them on.  I believe, although I don’t think they would see it that way, that the demagogue and his adherents need forgiveness for their misanthropic and racist acts of violence against our nation and against the people who died. 

 

On this cold midwestern morning that I inhabit, it is hard for me to see how we make our way back to a point of relatively respectful debate about our beliefs as to what America is and what America is not. About what America can be and what America should be. The attack on the Capitol has torn the curtain in our temple and in many ways, there will only be the time before the insurrection and the time after that event when we speak of our nation’s history. There will a dividing line of our history before and our experiences after 2020 and the first week of 2021 tied both to Covid and to the end of the Trump presidency.

 

I wish we as a people could walk into a congregation somewhere and say words such as those set out above. I wish a Divinity could give us a reset to a fresh and clean start.  But we can’t and the Holy won’t. We are stuck here in the mess we are in.  All we can do is focus on justice, compassion and understanding, tempered by a strength in our beliefs in equality and dignity.  We must move forward disavowing the hatred that allowed the events of this week to occur. We must work to better our world while resisting the temptation toward the simplistic and easy answers that hatred, racism and xenophobia seem to offer.