On Behalf of Many, My Confession...

From First John Chapter Four…

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is love:  not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  If we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.  We love because He first loved us.  If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, Whom he has not seen.  And He has given us this command:  Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

From James Chapter One…

If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.  Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:  to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

From James Chapter Five…

Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for each other that you might be healed.

MY CONFESSION

My dear friend, whom I may not yet know…

As a follower of Jesus, I wish, in this very moment, to express to you my deep sorrow over the ways in which people, JUST LIKE ME—and including me, have, at times, perpetrated great harm to you and to others just like you down through the centuries.

I am so sorry…

…for our arrogance and condemnation of anyone who does not live up to our own warped standards of what is right and what is good.  (Even though we, ourselves, don’t live up to it.)

…for our hatred of those—even amongst our own family and community—who are different than us.

…for our great earnestness in the imperialist expansion of our political, social, and economic agendas instead of the expansion of God’s love in our hearts toward you and toward everyone around us.

…for the crimes we have committed in the Name of the Church and, through our silence, for our our support of the perpetration of abject evil against our fellow human beings.

…for our participation in the killing of innocents who did not believe or think the way we did

…for our ostracizing of those who did not hold to our narrow views of “the truth.”  

…for our participation in the killing of “non-Christians” during The Crusades.

…for our participation in the burning of innocents at the stake during The Inquisition.

…for our inhumane treatment of native Americans, such as the Sioux, the Navaho, and the Cherokee.

…for enslaving Africans, that we might live lives of ease, and for labeling such practices as "biblical” and “godly.” (And they are neither.)

…for our stony silence during The Holocaust.

…for our love of money and wealth and of all that money can buy.

…for our hording of resources.

…for our waste…of time, resources, talents, and dreams.

…for placing our love of politics above our love for God, our love for you, and our love for every other neighbor of ours on this planet.

…for turning a blind-eye toward those in need and for our failure to feed those who are hungry, to clothe those who are naked, and to heal those who suffer illness.

…for our unhealthy commitment to narrow dogma that excludes those who don’t believe, feel, talk, or act the way we do.

...for telling lies about others to better our position or to help us feel better about ourselves.

…for being far more interested in converting someone to our narrow ways of thinking and believing than being interested in getting to know and to love that precious one just as he or she is, and right where he or she is.

…for our general teaching that sex is somehow bad or dirty and that our prejudice, rampant mistreatment of others, and unchecked pollution of our environment is somehow good and right.

…for our active participation in the destruction of other cultures.

…for attempting to ease our consciences and to bolster our own puffed-up views of ourselves by muscling our way in to do for others what they can and must do for themselves.  (Contrary to no one's opinion, but that of we the arrogant, we DO NOT know what’s best.)

…for throwing money, machinery, and manpower at the problems we see here and abroad instead of giving of ourselves and our hearts to the selfless service of those in genuine need.

…for raping the world of its resources that our selfish and transient desires might be satisfied in the moments of our cravings.

…for imprisoning and marginalizing (in a multiplicity of ways) the poor and the innocent so as to silence their voices and to shield them from view.

…for our ungodly silence as children have been molested and trafficked sexually all over the world.  (And for being a willing participant in such a trade.)

…for our silence as millions of children have been brutally murdered and millions of women have been traumatized through the genocide of abortion.

…for our treatment and degradation of women and children, especially, those who are poor and needy.

…for our love of money, power, and fame.

…for our love for the practice of controlling people through guilt, self-centered anger, and manipulation.

…for condemning those who do exactly what we do:  drink excessively, rape and beat-up our wives, molest and beat-up our children, enslave the innocent, cheat on our spouses, lie on our tax returns, steal from the poor, kick people when they’re down, and stab our “friends” in their backs.

…for our gossip and biting sarcasm at the personal and professional expense of others.

…for the unfiltered expression of our “opinions” as though we were somehow speaking for God.

…for our arrogance and haughtiness at the thought that only we have the whole truth and that if you, stupid person, want to become smart like us, you better come listen to what we have to say and mentally adopt into your own plethora of beliefs whatever it is that we say.

…for setting ourselves up as judge, jury, and executioner of the length, width, and breadth of mankind.

…for our hatred and fear of those different from us…different in belief, different in history and custom, different in life-style.

…for our slander of the poor, the downcast, and the under-represented.

There is so much more than I could confess, but I think I would like to just stop there for now.

I am so sorry for all of these things, oh dear one, and I ask you, someone that I may not yet know even, for your forgiveness.  I ask also, when you encounter or think of me or of someone like me, that you pray and ask God to heal us and to do for us that which we cannot do for ourselves, and that is, that He would change us and make us more like the passionate lover of people and humanity that He is.

"The Our Father."  Of Jesus, from Matthew Chapter Six...

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy Name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.

Please…be at peace, my friend.