When You Stumble and Fall

Last updated on: August 31, 2015 at 10:11 am by Anne Kennedy

When You Stumble and Fall 2015-08-31T10:11:47-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Part of the Anglican order of service, oh whatever, we don’t say that, we say liturgy, part of Anglican liturgy includes the opportunity to confess your sins, in words provided for you by several hundred years worth of language not your own. It happens every week, whether you like it or not, whether you decide to mouth or to actually pray, whether you feel sorry or only know that you should feel sorry.

Speaking of confession, just to momentarily digress, I used to take my prayer book to church in boarding school, instead of my bible, as a rebellious and evil act of the will. When the festivities became, in my estimation, too boring or annoying (and whether they were actually so should be doubted because can a 14 to 18 year old know and judge, truly, how boring or annoying something is? I don’t think so.) I would surreptitiously turn to the back and read the 39 Articles. Don’t ask me what they say now, but at the time, I was pretty versed. What I should have been doing was reading and praying the prayer of confession, either in the Eucharistic Rite or in Morning Prayer. Either would have been good for me. I was a nasty little teenager, a judging and unkind person, in many ways, not that different from who I am now, although hopefully fewer people really have the chance to discover this truth. I was thinking of all this yesterday as I went to kneel during the confession and found I couldn’t because I, for reasons of sheer and unmitigated stupidity, had put my knee out the day before.

Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t exercising, or moving at all. I was sitting still, on the floor of my Sunday school room, for something like six hours, painting the new little wooden pieces of two new Cities of Jerusalem. The City is designed to take little children through the last hours of Jesus’ life. There is the Cenacle, the House of Caiaphas, Herod’s Palace, the Tower of Antonia, the Temple, the Mount of Olives. And the Walls, so so so much wall to paint. The more you paint wall, the more time you have to sit and think about Jesus being taken back and forth across the city in the dead of night, about the incredible travesty of justice, about his true innocence, about how desperately everyone wanted him dead, about how he could have stopped it at any moment but didn’t. Why? Why didn’t he? It’s really easy to sit, if you can’t kneel, in your pew and let your mind wander over the wide world. What are other people thinking about? Are they really praying? Do they feel sorry?

I sat and wondered about the reports of four hundred pastors having to stand up in front of congregations, maybe even like this one, and resign, in shame, because of their names being found on Ashley Madison. I guess if there were 38 million users (or hopefully maybe less if some of them were bots), 400 pastors isn’t that big a number. Better than a million, I guess. But not really. I am not fretful at all that the Internet would zero in on the Christians found to be on the site, and simultaneously give no consideration to those of little or no faith. No one should have been on, but certainly not Christians. We have a sexual ethic that prohibits that behavior and the whole world knows it. We’re not supposed to do whatever we want. Many of us, and sometimes the wide world, go along thinking that we are not doing that badly at being good. A few mistakes here and there, but on the whole okay.

So the first confession prayer, in the old 1928 book, can be pretty jarring if you think you’re basically fine, maybe even innocent like Jesus. The prayer begins this way, “ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” No health? I always stumble over the line and think, well, there must be some health. Maybe just a little? Couldn’t I have just a little health on my own? It is perilous to say the words aloud and try to mean them. The collision of the truth of the prayer with the lying, treachery of your own heart may cause an a quiet, invisible firestorm of discomfort and woe. Maybe anger, maybe sorrow, maybe irritation, only every so often, humility. The prayer for Holy Communion possess a similar stone of stumbling. If you paint a lot of wall and think about Jesus being judged, wrongly, and then executed, these words can feel alarming. “ALMIGHTY God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all people; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against your Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly your wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us…” The stone of stumbling here is “the burden of them is intolerable”. I swear, every single Sunday, without fail, as the words go by I think, to quote my own disordered mind, “I am tolerating them just fine, Jesus.” And that is not untrue.

On some level, I carry on all week sinning and being awful and hauling the burden of those sins around with me without too much trouble or discomfort. It’s not like I’m always sitting at my kitchen table, stricken and afflicted, because of my selfish unkindness, my bitter unforgiveness of others. But that I carry them around myself presently, doesn’t mean that it will always be so. Jesus is the judge. He is the king. If I don’t give them to him to carry now, I will have to go on carrying them forever, and then the burden will be intolerable, and I will have to tolerate it. Which is why praying the prayer, either one of them, is a goodness and a mercy. If you say the words, and stumble and fall, and try to stand back up on your own goodness, at the very least you have been momentarily knocked back. If you do it every week, it gets harder to stand up each time. If you do it every day, well, imagine what forgiveness might transpire. The fact remains, one of the burdens that becomes intolerable to bear is the ridiculous lie of your own goodness. I’m not saying it’s fool proof, but if you begin every day declaring how Not Good you already are, you might not so easily fall into the grievous and notorious sin of adultery. Confession of sin already committed, rather than not worrying too much about it, sometimes has the effect of giving a person pause before sinning anew. (Here’s something funny. Every time I have tried to write ‘sinning’, autocorrect has changed it to ‘winning’.) Mouthing a prayer of confession is Not Magic, Not Guaranteed, but it is, least, a way of putting a stone in your way, before you walk down the smooth easy road to sin.

No matter what, Jesus’ way to the cross was all stones and stumbling. But he went on relentlessly. He went without once looking back. He did it for me, and for every person who goes along and finds suddenly that they have fallen into the pit that they themselves dug. He did it for the one who looks carefully and discovers there is no health, that the burden is growing bigger and never smaller. If you stumble into him, stop and grab hold.

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