“In the beginning God made of nouyt heuene and erthe. Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of depthe; and the Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris. And seide, Liyt be maad, and liyt was maad…” (Gen 1:1-3). When John Wycliffe translated Genesis 1 into the English language for the very first time, this is what people heard. They heard for the first time and in their own tongue that God made heaven and earth, but what’s more, that he did so “of nouyt,” ex nihilo, out of nothing. By a mere and mighty act of speech, God spoke the world into existence. Thus, God is a creator, but a particular kind of creator. He is a poet. He is, at the first, a speaker and his creations are spoken, ex nihilo but also per verbum. This is incidentally, precisely what we confess in the words of the Nicene Creed, “I believe in God the Father, the Almighty, maker [poetes] of heaven and earth…” He is our poet, and we his poem, as St. Paul says, “We are his workmanship [poema], created in Christ Jesus…” (Eph 2:10). We are God’s greatest poem, and indeed we are the subject of the first spoken poem in the bible, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
This creative poetry of Genesis 1 sets the stage for the fundamental act and relationship of man to God. God is the one who speaks, we are the ones spoken into existence, who listen and receive his address, and who live in response to this address. God is the author of my life story and my life story is lived in response to him. This response is what the church identifies as “confession” which occurs liturgically in the Divine Service and is, indeed, the sum and substance of our speech in the Divine Service. Confession, according to the grammar of the New Testament, means to “speak back to God what he has said to us.” Depending on what God has said confession can take on a number of different forms— confession of faith, confession of praise— but the first form is the confession of sins.
I.
In the confession of sin, we speak in response to God’s word of Law. God’s Law is that word which stops our mouths, holds us accountable to God, declares us guilty, and damns us eternally (Rom 3:19-20). We say, “I am by nature sinful and unclean… I have sinned against you in thought word and deed, by what I have done and left undone” because this is precisely what God has said to us. He has interpreted us according to his word as ones who were “brought forth in iniquity” and “conceived in sin” (Ps 51:5) and that our whole life is lived “against him, and him alone” (Ps 51:4). Jesus’ categorical words are for us: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Ps 14:1-3; 53:1-3). By the word of the Law, I am convicted and identified precisely as this “no one,” and “none.” I am one of the band of no one’s who has not done the law, does not understand God, does not seek after him, nor does any good. I am no one and nothing.
As such, this word of Law is for me, a sinner, a “letter that kills,” a “ministry of death carved in stone,” and a “ministry of damnation” as St. Paul says (2 Cor 3:7-11). This is God’s first word to humanity and the first word that we come to grips with. Where the rest of humanity lives attempting to pridefully justify or excuse itself, Christians enter with the posture of humility, saying those ancient words, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, “my fault, my own fault, my own most grievous fault” (Lutheran Service Book, 254). Instead of justifying ourselves, we Christians justify God according to his words and declare that he is true and everyone else is a liar, ourselves included (Rom 3:4)! If we were to speak our own words about ourselves they would not be true. The only truth about ourselves can be found in God’s words. He says that we are sinners in need of forgiveness, so we are, and so we say back to God. Jesus’ first sermon to Israel was “Repent!” (Mk 1:15) and his first sermon to us is the same, “Repent!”
Thus, when we prepare for the Divine Service, we prepare ourselves with the service of confession and absolution. We enter confessing our sinfulness and asking God to “create in me a clean heart, O God, and breathe thy free Spirit into me.” (Ps 51:10). We ask to be created from nothing.
II.
The blessed thing about God is that before we ask, he has already answered. The answer to our prayer is indicated by the very first words of the service of confession and absolution. This service begins, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” to which the congregation makes the sign of the cross and replies, “Amen!” Of all the moments in the service, this is perhaps the most strikingly peculiar. By all appearances nothing has been yet said and yet the congregation replies, “Yes! That’s true!” The source of this peculiarity chiefly lies in the fact that, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” isn’t a sentence. Any child of seven could tell you that this is a fragment, containing neither subject nor predicate, and is therefore, grammatically incorrect! And in this sense, nothing has actually been said.
But, as any child of seven could also tell you, the nature of a fragment is that the subject and predicate are assumed from what has been said before. And in this case, for most of the congregation the “before” is quite a long time before. Oftentimes, it was before speaking and even before memory itself that the words, “I baptize you…” were spoken and pure water was sprinkled over them. But herein we have our subject and predicate! “I baptize you…” In this way, the congregation enters church and prepares for the Divine Service on the strength of their baptisms and thus, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is as much to say, “You are baptized!” to which the congregation says, “Yes! This is true!” By hearing these words, we hear the words of our baptism and by receiving the sign of the cross, we receive the sign of our baptism.
With this invocation, then, before we even ask for God’s forgiveness we acknowledge that God has already forgiven us in the waters of Holy Baptism and therein has given us a bath to which we can return in every hour of need. It is not a meager one-time bath, but a “life-giving water, rich in grace, and a washing of the new birth in the Holy Spirit” (SC IV.9-10). Because it is so rich the significance of such a baptism with water is a daily significance. “It signifies that the old man in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance, and on the other hand that daily a new man is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever” (SC IV.12). Grammatically, baptism is a perfect verb, a past act with an abiding impact, something that has happened through the application of water and happens every day through confession and absolution. Baptism is, therefore, the foundation of absolution.
By baptism, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit goes about his very old work of creation. If it is God’s habit to create “out of nothing,” ex nihilo, then it is not until we are nothing that God can do something with us. In having God’s word of Law applied to us this is precisely what is done. By the Law we are killed and condemned, without the form of righteousness, and void of any good works. This is the first work of baptism: to drown and kill sinners, rendering them formless and void. But this is not the final work of baptism. Having been rendered formless and void, with the Spirit hovering over the water, the Father speaks his Word, and says, “let there be…” and there is. He says, “Let there be life! Let there be freedom! Let there be a dear child! Let there be holiness, righteousness, and blessedness!” And it is so and it is good. And whenever we return to our baptisms in confession and absolution, this same work of death and resurrection, of de-creation and re-creation, is mightily worked in us. The sinner is drowned and dies, and a saint arises to new life; out of the nothingness of sin and evil, God bespeaks us righteous by his holy absolution.
Christ Jesus declared to his apostles, “I give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven! Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19) thus imbuing his word with the same creativity and power as in the beginning. By the word of absolution the kingdom of heaven is opened and the living are made out of the dead, saints out of sinners, and sons out of strangers.
III.
Having confessed our sins and confessed our faith in the forgiveness of our sins, now, as the author of Hebrews says, we can “draw near to God with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Heb 10:22). In the Divine Service our “drawing near” consists not merely in standing in his presence or singing praise in his house, but in that we draw near to the altar, to the table that he has prepared for us, where he himself stands as our host and main course. By baptism Jesus calls us to the Supper to eat his very Body and very Blood which is “the medicine of immortality and an antidote against death” (Ignatius, Ephesians, 18-20). With this preparation and self-examination, we honor St. Paul’s own injunction to “examine yourselves” (1 Cor 11:28) before eating the bread and wine so as not to be guilty “concerning the Body and Blood of the Lord” (1 Cor 11:27) nor risk weakness, illness, and even death by eating unworthily (1 Cor 11:30).
This usage of the service of confession and absolution as preparation and examination for the Lord’s Supper hails back to the first century according to the Didache which coordinates the confession of sins and the celebration of the Supper (Didache 4.14; 14.1). In the church’s history, this service was most typically done privately and individually with the pastor and prior to the Divine Service. In Luther’s day, Friday and Saturday night Vespers were dedicated as confession services so that the people could individually announce their intention to commune, confess their sins, and be absolved. In his 1523 revised Latin mass, the Formula Missae, Luther enjoins that no one should be admitted to the Supper unless he confesses his sins and is able to confess in faith what the Supper is, what its benefits are, and who receives worthily (AE 53:32). In the Instructions for the Visitors 1528, likewise, Luther and Melanchthon state that no one should go to communion “who has not been individually examined by his pastor to see if he is prepared to go to the holy sacrament” (AE 40:296). These themes are carried through to our Augsburg Confession which states, “Confession in the churches is not abolished among us. The body of the Lord is not given to those who have not been examined and absolved…” (AC XXV.1). Of private confession and absolution our confessions are unequivocal that the practice is not only to be retained (AC XI.1; XXV.13) but “should by no means be allowed to fall into disuse in the church” (SA III.VIII.1).
Unfortunately, “disuse” is one of the only apt words for the state of confession and absolution today. Within the Lutheran Service Book, however, a very conscientious attempt has been made to recover the primacy, importance, and blessedness of confession and absolution. Each setting of the Divine Service begins with one or another form of confession and absolution. The service of Compline which can be used within the home is furnished with a unique responsory form of confession and absolution. There is an extended service of Corporate Confession and Absolution which is fitting for Ash Wednesday and other penitential days. And finally, there is an order for Individual Confession and Absolution so that individuals may confess and receive absolution privately from the pastor. I’ve personally found great benefit in making use of all of these services and my hope and prayer is that this congregation will be blessed by them as well. Confession and absolution is one of the greatest tools of the Gospel that a pastor has at his disposal for the care of souls and the comfort of consciences. By its use we take our sins seriously, and by the same token we take seriously Christ’s promise that his Body and Blood are present in, with, and under the bread and the wine.
Rev. Philip D. Bartelt
Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
24th Sunday after Trinity, 2024
