MY KIND OF PEOPLE [SU, 7-5-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

MY KIND OF PEOPLE          [SU, 7-5-20]

I heard of a man who was new in town. He visited church after church, without finding one where he felt quite right. Until he went to First Presbyterian. He got in a little late, right after the opening hymn, and heard the congregation intoning the prayer of confession: “We have done those things we ought not to do, and we have not done those things we ought to do.”

He sighed with satisfaction. “My kind of people at last,” he said.

Those words of the prayer of confession are from the lectionary Epistle reading for today, from Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, Romans 7:15-25.

Paul had a life-long theological and personal struggle with how grace and works go together. He was constantly saying that since we are saved by Christ, we are no longer sinful, but we sin anyway, so we need to cut it out, but we are not saved by our stopping our bad behavior and doing good stuff, because…

To a Bible student, this is confusing. I confessed this one day to George Paterson. George was just about the smartest and kindest and most Christian man I ever knew. He was one of the professors in the School of Religion at The University of Iowa when I was a doctoral student there, and later he was one of our best friends, as he and Ida Belle served as surrogate parents for daughter Katie and her husband, Patrick, while their one-year-old son was in Children’s Hospital in Iowa City, defeating cancer, and they were surrogate grandparents to Joe. And often hosts to us when we were in Iowa City.

In later years, when we lived far enough away that it was difficult to get to Iowa City, we would meet them half-way, usually at Wisconsin Dells, to spend weekends together, eating and talking and driving around to see the loons. My semi-colon, leftover from my colon cancer surgery, gets me up early in the morning. In a motel, so as not to wake Helen, I leave our room and go to the lounge. So one morning, in WI Dells, I was sitting there reading Romans as my morning devotions when George came in. We started talking about Paul’s theology. That’s when I confessed this secret I kept through a whole career of preaching.

“I don’t understand what Paul is saying,” I said.

George sighed. “Thank goodness,” he said. “I never understood what he’s saying, either.”

We concluded that Paul was speaking a great truth, but neither Paul nor George nor I could find the right words, and put them in the right order, so that we, and others, might understand that truth.

We have friends who were Methodists for a while, and liked it, but went back to the Presbyterians, anyway. “We miss the prayer of confession,” they said.

Through my years of ministry, I generally followed the standard order of worship: praise, confession, word, and response. Methodists skip right over the confession anymore, it seems. We go directly to the affirmation of faith. After all, the past is past. We need to be reminded of what we believe/do NOW. As Lutheran music prof Lorraine Bruehl said, “The quintessential Methodist song is not so much ‘O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,’ or ‘Amazing Grace,’ but ‘Are Ye Able?’”

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that the goal of the Christian life is “to go on to perfection,” to become perfect, in love. But you can’t go on to perfection unless you first confess that you are not perfect, that you do what you shouldn’t and don’t do what you should.

I miss the congregational prayer of confession in Sunday morning worship, too, so I add it in for myself. Confession is good for the soul, so I’ve heard. It doesn’t seem to help all that much, though, in trying to understand Paul. It’s nice to know, though, that when I’m confessing, that I do what I don’t want to, and I don’t do what I would, that Paul and I are confessing together.

John Robert McFarland