In retirement, my worship attendance has become increasingly less frequent. And each time I do go, as I did this past Sunday, I’m reminded why.

Like most churches of my denomination (ELCA), the one I attended maintains the Lutheran practice of starting each service with a “confession of sins.” For some reason, this time left me more depressed and frustrated than usual. As such confessional rites go, this one was not especially harsh. In recent decades, more moderate denominations have moved away from the old mea maxima culpa, beating-your-breast language that was typical of the confession. Sins confessed these days are often more collective than individual, often more about omissions in our daily living than commissions of evil deeds and thoughts.

But what even these more modern confessions still can’t avoid is the notion that there is some Being-out-there that we need to plead with to get its approval. I realize that such a sin-forgiving God is what many people want. I essentially dropped the practice at my last congregation, with little reaction except from a handful of traditionalists. When I retired and an interim pastor took my place, that little group made a beeline for him and convinced him to put a weekly confession back in the service. Some still love their guilt, but most of us are over it.

Here is what we said on Sunday (bold print is the congregation’s response).

CONFESSION

Let us approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

God of all mercy, we have sinned against you, our neighbors, and your creation. We have gone along with prejudice, warfare, and greed. Help us to face up to ourselves, repent and return to you. Forgive us and restore us for lives of compassion and courage through our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Jesus says, “Come to me … and I will give you rest.” In Christ, we are met with grace, not judgment, with mercy, not condemnation. We are forgiven, renewed, and invited again into a life of freedom, love, and peace.

Thanks be go God. Amen.

Where is the felt need to do this coming from? Of course, it goes back to the ultimate conundrum of modern biblical religion: God. Where do we get the notion that there is a Being-out-there who has thoughts and feelings about us and who, if we do something to offend (as we inevitably do), needs to be placated so we will receive, as this liturgy says, an “assurance of pardon”?

While I know she meant well, the minister who led this portion of the service, to me, only compounded the problem by introducing the “Pardon” section with words to the effect of “Now hear this wonderful news!” But it’s only wonderful if the alternative is truly awful. What happens if we aren’t pardoned, forgiven, restored, renewed, or receive the other things this ritual promises? Why, to put it in black and white, do we need God’s forgiveness? And what does that even mean?

The crack I’m pushing my finger into here is that the whole sin/forgiveness motif just doesn’t work in modern non-fundamentalist Christianity. We don’t really believe it because we don’t believe in that kind of God anymore, yet we keep using the language.

I was struck how often in this Sunday’s liturgy the word “savior” was used to refer to Jesus. Again, what are we being saved from? What might surprise Christians, especially fundamentalists, is how rarely “savior” actually shows up in the Bible, including the New Testament. Only two of the gospels use it (John once and Luke three times, all in his introductory “Christmas” portion), and it appears only once in Paul’s authentic letters (Philippians). Yet some Christians give the impression that “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” tumbles out from nearly every page.

The problems with the ideas of God’s forgiveness and of Jesus as our savior have been obvious for generations, yet churches have been loath to touch them. “It would be so complicated. It would mean changing Christianity!” Exactly. But even with churches shrinking and closing by the thousands, apparently we can’t do that.

Does forgiveness have meaning or value today? Of course, but not because it comes from a Sky Father looming over us, based upon some celestial accounting operation. Forgiveness is the answer to one problem: guilt. And where is that guilt? It’s not in God; it’s within ourselves. We are the ones that have to do the forgiving because we are the only ones who can forgive ourselves. If it’s done nothing else, modern psychology has certainly shown us that.

Yet God isn’t out of the picture, if we can modify our understanding of God. Numerous modern theologians have tried to do this, but the church hasn’t been interested in their ideas. Today, what might be more persuasive is the renewed awareness of the teaching and experience of the mystics of both biblical and Asian traditions. For them, God is not a Being-out-there but the ultimate reality or “ground” of existence (as I quoted Meister Eckhart last week) which surrounds and fills us and all creation. Or as Paul is quoted saying in Acts, God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

How do the mystics say we know or find this God within and around us? It is only possible if we can find silence within ourselves, as Evan Gill explains in a short video, Why Silence Was the Only Thing Mystics Pointed To.

If you allow your mind even for just one moment to fall into a restful state, let your body just sink into presence, you begin to sense a kind of being that isn’t filtered through the mind. There’s no story narrating it. Without all of that noise and chatter, there can be a raw authentic encounter with what I like to call divine reality. I personally believe that this is what … all spiritual teachers were pointing to for thousands of years….

And what’s interesting about mysticism, … is that while they do use the word God, they often point to silence as a sort of doorway into this state of undivided presence. Teachers like Rumi, Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa of Aila, they all point in this direction. Silence is one of their greatest teachings. As St. Teresa said, “Settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon him in yourself.”

Or as the Desert Father Abba Moses told an inquiring monk, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Where is God? Not “out there” but right here, the Eternal Now, as our true essence. God is, in fact, our true self, which the Bible calls Spirit, metaphorically breathed into earthly matter at the creation, Genesis says. We are all, to use a popular metaphor, waves on the ocean. We come from the ocean, last a short while, and then disappear back into the ocean, but are never actually separated and never anything other than the ocean.

So where is this guilt that so often torments us? Not in our true divine self but in our false self, what we usually call our ego. This is the identity we have created over the years, the accumulation of ideas, stories, and feelings acquired from our experiences and interactions with other people and the culture around us. It’s expressed through all the things we call our personality, for good or ill. It is the triggered reactions we have to people and experiences. And it is the voices in our head, expressing an unending stream of opinions and judgments about events, other people, and especially ourselves.

It’s in the midst of all this that our experience of guilt is found, especially those voices. But as I said above, this is our false self. Those voices aren’t actually ours. They are spontaneous creations of our mind. Our true self is our awareness, which the voices think they are talking to but is actually an unaffected depth of silence and peace. It is the space between our thoughts. It is what we know when we experience our “I am-ness”, our awareness of our being.

So how do we free ourselves from our sense of guilt? Not by reciting the list of misdeeds a liturgy writer decided we should feel guilty about this week, so that we can be absolved by an invisible Supreme Being. That might have helped in the Middle Ages but not now. Freedom comes, as Jesus himself says in John, when we know the truth–by knowing our true identity, our unity with the sacred essence that upholds all reality and is our very center.

So, guilt isn’t absolved but seen through. It’s recognized as an attribute of a make-believe me, an idea in my head. But the real me is a silent presence of pure sacred being. And of course, we can only know that silent presence by being silent ourselves. We many never get rid of all the accusatory voices in our head, but we can calm them and learn to hear them differently and with a fully justified skepticism.

Ancient practices of meditation and self-inquiry, modern practices like psychotherapy, and disciplines like AA can all help unmask those voices as the frauds that they are. Putting our ego in its place, in biblical language, is what Jesus describes as losing our life in order to find it, and what Paul describes as dying so that Christ can live in us. All these can help us realize our true being and calling, to live in the Now in peace and freedom, manifesting in our lives the sacred Being which unites us with all those around us and the whole creation.

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