Compasses; Campfires; Confession

The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,” says Isaiah.

“For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God,” says Paul.

“Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man,” says Peter, in our Gospel reading.

This morning, we heard from three pretty high-profile guys in our faith… and all three of them are confessing. They’re acknowledging that they are unclean, that they are unfit, that they are sinful. We know, with the benefit of a few thousand years of hindsight, that they managed to turn things around and turn out okay, but, when we encounter them in the readings this morning, they are right in the middle of the confessing their sin.

If we back up a little, before these confessions, we see something else in each of their cases: a call. Isaiah was in the midst of being commissioned as a prophet; Paul was referencing the about-face he had on the road to Damascus after Jesus called him; and Simon Peter was reacting to Jesus, who had just effected for them a miraculous catch of fish, and then followed that up by telling him that it would soon turn into a miraculous catch of people.

There was a call that coincided with each of these confessions, and then, they all repented. We don’t necessarily see that in the excerpts of Scripture that we read today, but we know it happened, because we know what else happened in their lives. Isaiah’s lips were made clean, very viscerally, with a live coal from a seraph, and he went on to prophesy what the Lord had given him to prophesy. Paul changed from a persecutor of the early church into, well, Paul. And Peter, along with Andrew, James, and John, changed from fisherman into followers of Jesus.

So we see calls, confessions of sin, and repentance in our readings this morning… but how do we see calls, confessions of sin, and repentance in our lives today?

First of all, we all have a call. It’s the same as Peter’s, Andrew’s, James’, and John’s. It’s the same as all of the disciples’. Our call is the call that Jesus makes throughout the gospels: “Follow me.”

Jesus calls us to follow him, to chart a path with our life toward him as the True North. He has given us a map, he has cleared the trails, and he has given each of us a compass.

But the path is long, a lifetime long, and as anyone who’s ever hiked can tell you, staying on the path isn’t always easy. Sometimes the trail goes straight up hill, and there’s a nicer, gentler slope just right over there. Sometimes the path is hard to see, it’s barely there, because no one’s walked it for a while, and there’s a much-better-trodden one that seems to run pretty much parallel. And sometimes, when the sun is bearing down and the day’s getting hot, there’s a berry bush, or a fruit tree, just off to the left, glistening with temptation and the last morning dew.

So we deviate a little. Just a bit, but we’re not too far away. We’re still moving in the right direction, approximately. But ‘approximately’ can be dangerous. When you’re orienteering, navigating by compass, the difference of veering just a degree or two from the correct bearing will compound over time and lead you further and further off course.

Sin is what throws us off course. The Hebrew word that gets translated to ‘sin’, Khata, means to fail, to err, to miss the mark. When we miss the mark, especially when we’re wayfinding, it creates distance between where we are and where God is.

When we sense that distance, we need to admit that we’ve strayed and turn around and get back on the path. When we sin, we need to confess and repent.

Now, for some, the term ‘Confession’ conjures up dark little boxes where you list your sins to a priest in the shadows behind a perforated wall. There can be connotations of guilt, of shame, or of just going through the motions. But what confession is – the denotation – is far simpler. It means, in essence, to agree.

The Greek word that gets translated as ‘confession’ in most cases is homologeo, from homos—the same—and lego—to speak. To confess something, then, is to speak in accordance with, to say the same thing. To agree, to acknowledge, or to admit.

We use the term ‘confession’ in the context of sins, but also in the context of things we believe. We confess our faith during the Nicene Creed: we agree to what we as Christians believe to be true, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And we confess our sins, by acknowledging a standard – God’s standard – holiness, and by admitting that we’re not there yet. We can do this collectively, like we do in the Confession of Sin in our liturgy, where we use the plural ‘we’ and speak broadly about being a sinful people. But we can—and should—confess individually and specifically, as well.

It’s easy to fall into the temptation of leaning a little too heavily into ‘collective’ sin. In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says “Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those hum-drum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’.”

It’s easier to confess big, global, universal sins in which we play a part, definitely, but so do others. The responsibility is diluted. And that may distract us from our own sins, which Lewis calls hum-drum, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous, any less distancing. Our sins are the ones that come between us and God—not other people’s sins. Ours.

So confessing our individual sins—articulating them, acknowledging them, and agreeing that they aren’t okay—is important. Do we, like Isaiah, have unclean lips? Are we, like Paul had been, persecuting people that we disagree with, or at least judging them? Are we, like Peter and Andrew and the other fishermen, stuck in a pattern that’s not bringing us fish, and yet we still can’t quite believe that listening to Jesus will help?

We articulate our individual sins, because, even though we can confess collectively, we can’t repent collectively. When we veer off the path, we have to get our bearings and get back on track, regardless of what the rest of our group is doing. We can encourage them to come with us, of course, but the responsibility is on us to change directions.

And changing directions is what we need to do. In Greek, the word for repentance is metanoia, “a change of mode of thought and feeling.” That’s what repentance is—a change. It’s starting at one point – one thought, feeling, opinion, worldview – and turning to another one. And it’s not just a change—it’s a choice.

Isaiah chose to say, “Here I am.” Paul chose to devote his life to growing the church that he had been trying to stamp out. Peter and Andrew and James and John chose to leave everything behind. We have to choose to leave behaviors and patterns behind, and this is where it starts to get harder. Choosing to change means moving from the abstract to the concrete, from thinking to doing. Isaiah had to follow through on his commission of telling the people of Judah some really not-great news. Paul moved from persecutor to persecutee. The disciples gave up the career and the life they had known to follow Jesus, a road that ended for some of them in martyrdom.

Repentance—change—choosing to follow Jesus isn’t easy, but we don’t have to do it alone. We can’t do it alone. In the First Corinthians reading, Paul says “By the grace of God I am what I am.” And Paul is not the most modest of apostles, but even he admits that he didn’t do it alone. “On the contrary,” he says, “I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the Grace of God that is with me.”

Hard work and grace. That’s what allowed Saul to become Paul, and that’s what allows us to become who we are called to be. It probably won’t be easy—like winding down an entire fishing operation, and explaining to your father why you’re not carrying on the family business—and it probably won’t be painless, although hopefully it won’t involve a live coal to the lip. But it will be possible.

It will look different for each of us, at each point in our lives. Maybe it’s just a momentary push through the bramble, and we’re back on track. But maybe we’re well and truly lost, and it’s almost dusk, and we can hear wolves in the distance… but if we stop, if we pray, and if we start gathering branches to build a campfire, we’ll find a match at the bottom of our pack. And when the darkness settles around us and our eyes adjust, we’ll be able to spot another campfire, way off on a distant hill that we can reorient toward… and come morning, we’ll be back on our way.

Because we’re always on our way. It’s a lifelong journey. And one of the beautiful things about our Liturgy is that a lot of what happens in macro over our lives as Christians happens in micro on Sunday mornings.

We get our call, in the church bells or the Prelude or the very first “Let us pray”. We listen to the Word, and what it’s saying to us today, and then we confess: First, our faith, in the words of the Nicene Creed, and then, our sins, in the Confession of Sin. We’ll admit that we don’t always follow Jesus as closely as we could, that our sins create distance and that we miss the mark… but, we’ll confess, also, that we humbly repent. We’re choosing, and we’re changing… our thoughts, our feelings, our opinions, our worldview, as well as our habits, our behavior patterns, our path, and our life.

After that, we move to the Eucharist. This is our immediate change – our change for this week, for right here, for right now, profound and real, in which we are transformed. We’re transported, just for a moment, to the end of the trail, to the top of that mountain where the campfire was, and we see God’s Kingdom spreading out before us. This is the change we take with us, that says, “take heart” and “keep on going”, that nourishes us and strengthens us for the changes ahead.

And then, after the Dismissal, we go out into the world, to live our change, to be the change, to veer off course a little bit, but then to come back.

We will veer off course. This is not a linear process. It’s not a set of steps that we follow once and then we’re done. This is continuous. We are always sinning; we should always be confessing; we should always be repenting.

And the good news is, we’re always forgiven.

Because we’re choosing to follow Jesus, and he chose to die for our sins. He has walked this path before us, and he has cleared the way. He is the way. No matter how steep or rocky it looks from here, if we commit to putting one foot down in front of the other, he’ll get us there. He’s given us grace, and he’s calling us closer – we just need to stay the course.

Amen.