How Should I Confess?
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Over the last few days, I’ve talked a good deal about the importance of confessing our individual sins to God. This is a real, concrete way to show God our love. This morning, however, as I was confessing my own personal, individual sin I began reflecting on another important way we need to confess.
A couple of news articles I’ve recently read came to mind. The first was about our overcrowded prisons in Oklahoma. In the article, a prison official blamed the problem on our “tough on crime” mentality. The second was an article about immigration. A prominent immigration lawyer pointed out the flaws in our federal policies that focus solely on closing the borders and fail to address the inequities that cause the problem in the first place. He also talked about a new Oklahoma law that is causing employers to fire immigrants (whether legal or not) because of the paperwork that will be required in the future.
It’s not my intent here to get on a soapbox about prison or immigration reform, both of which I feel strongly about. I tend to want to point fingers and blame others for being insensitive and blind. This morning, however, I found myself confessing “our” sins. It struck me that many of the social problems in my city, my state, and my country are due to corporate sins. They are not caused by a few uninformed legislators; they are caused by our corporate mentalities of protectionism, fear, and selfishness.
As a community, we want to look away from the growing number of homeless people. We want to ignore the problem of the millions who go uninsured hoping someone else will fix it. We want to keep the disproportionate distribution of wealth at the status quo, especially if we have more than others.
As a citizen of this world, I share responsibility for what happens to fellow inhabitants. I cannot simply blame others when mentally ill people are thrown into prison because we are more concerned with “being tough” than we are with helping individuals deal with illnesses they did not cause. I cannot alleviate my guilt by blaming legislators for passing laws that cause huge backlogs of paperwork and costs to poor families that want a better life in the United States.
Because I am part of multiple communities, I must confess not only my individual sins, but also our corporate sins. I demonstrate my love for God by admitting I am part of the larger problem, that I recognize some of the ways our world takes advantage of and oppresses others. I think God is pleased when I recognize my culpability and responsibility.
The difficulty with such confession, however, is that I am immediately convicted about the importance of involving myself in the communal process of finding solutions. Confession does that. It is an admittance that I have failed, but it also points me to new, alternative behavior. It shows me a different path from what I have been taking. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we are so reluctant to confess. It might require that we (all of us together) change the way we think and the way we act.
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