Tiresome, right?

No one in their right mind reads through Judges or Kings in the Old Testament for fun.  It is tedious, predictable, and boring.  It does not take long to get the gift of it.  You get the rhythm.  Israel does evil, God allows them to suffer defeat at the hands of an enemy or spend time oppressed by someone even worse.  They cry out for relief or the unjust ruler gets his due when he dies and is buried with the rest of His evil lot.  Things go better -- for a while.  Then the cycle starts all over again.  A judged or a prophet or a better king helps but it is a story that everyone knows.  Why does God bother telling us this long train of corruption, sin, betrayal, and denial?  Surely Jesus has come along to release us from the cycle of fall and restoration, sin and forgiveness, right?

I wish the story of Judges and Kings was an anomaly.  It is not.  It is the nature of all our lives in Christ.  While we would prefer to see our lives as a steady progression of holiness, it is instead a predictable, tiresome, and boring story of temptation, fall, repentance, and forgiveness.  And all of this happens to the Christian and not to those who on their way to becoming one.  We live in the rhythm of daily contrition and sorrow over our sin, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration.  Then it starts all over again.  It is not simply a side story of our Christian life but the main story.  God knows this but we have deluded ourselves into thinking that this business of forgiveness is an occasional thing, for, you know, emergencies.  The rest of the time we are doing pretty well in this life of obedience, holiness, and righteousness.  Except that we are not.

The preparation for worship is confession and absolution.  It is not something you need to get out of the way in order to get to the good stuff -- it is part of the good stuff.  The confessional was routine in history and it ought to be today.  We examine our lives and consciences and what do we find?  We find sin.  We find a predictable, tiresome, boring story of screw ups, weakness, sin, and death.  And that is all our story would be except that we have a God so gracious that He is merciful to those who are so predictably weak and sinful.  Nobody in their right mind would keep up with the sins of the sinner except the mystery of this God who sends His only Son to be our Savior at the cost of His own life and Redeemer to rescue ours.  He does this not simply once on a cross but applying that cross daily rescues us from ourselves and the weak and halfhearted efforts we put into resisting sin and learning holiness.

Then the worship itself is filled with forgiveness -- maybe not quite as obvious as the formal ego te absolvo of the confessional but still pretty blunt.  The word mercy is heard in the Kyrie, the Gloria in Excelsis, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.  I mean it -- how many times do we sing or say those words to God?  Then in the Eucharist we hear it again -- given and shed for you for the forgiveness/remission of your sins.  Here we are telling God that we are past that and ready to move on to the deeper things of Christian life version 202 and He is putting us right back at the basics of 101 -- forgiveness.  It is not because God is stuck on it but because we constantly need it.  We are Israel.  Ours is the story of sin and God's the story of forgiveness and mercy.  This is the shape of Christian life.  This is not some perfunctory preliminary business to get out of the way before we get to the big stuff.  This is the big stuff.  

Honestly, if we really knew this, the lines would be long for private confession.  The fact that there is practically no waiting means we do not get this or how important it is or how our Christian lives never progress past it.  So for this reason God provides pastors to serve as the voices calling us back home, to confession and to absolution.  They are not perfect but need themselves what they are called to give to each of us in His name but that is their calling.  The sacrifice is not repeated but the fruits of that one all sufficient sacrifice are offered anew to you and me -- a people who constantly need to be rescued by grace, revived by mercy, and restored as the prodigals whom the Father loves more than anything.  Go to confession.  Go often.  It will become a profound blessing to your Christian life as it always was and will be.  God loves the sinner enough to send His Son to die for him, her, you, and me.  Does it ever get better than this?