After my last post, a friend of mine asked me to write about confession in the liturgy. In this post I have tried to fulfill that request. But before I talk about confession, I want to lay out a backdrop for the subject by exploring the formational power of liturgy. While Christian worship is directed at God, the way we worship shapes and informs our lives. Even though Sunday morning church services are not as central to American culture as they once were, they continue to structure our week. The entirely arbitrary division of time into seven day units, with one or two of those days set apart as special, conditions the way we experience the passage of time. Remnants of worship remain in those who leave the faith of their childhood. My friends who grew up in the Catholic church, even those who would no longer consider themselves religious, find the use of guitars and drums in a service strange and a little irreverent, while I, who grew up with this type of worship, find a high Catholic mass to be curiously formal. Ritual shapes our tastes and perceptions in lasting ways.

Such ritual is not limited to churches that consider themselves “liturgical.” Every church has a liturgy, a pattern or model by which they structure and order the parts of the worship service. Sometimes the structure is determined by what has always been done. Other times it is simply copied from the church down the road with higher attendance. For some churches, the liturgy is guided by marketing concerns, the desire to make the church more attractive to “seekers.” Whether the liturgy of a church is formal or informal, the shaping power of the worship remains.

Since everything needs a fancy Latin name, I would call liturgy a forma formans, or a form that forms. Liturgy is a structure that structures the lives of those who participate in it. Participating in worship—liturgy means the “work of the people,” pointing to the active role of the worshipers—shapes people into something, hopefully more fully formed and Christ-like Christians. The liturgy is thus a pedagogical activity as much as it is an act of adoration. Liturgy as a forma formans is a concept that I would like the reader to have in mind as we set out to examine confession in the liturgy since liturgical confession no only gives us the opportunity to confess, it also shapes our attitudes and mindset towards the practice of confession. Since my own experience for the past few years has been in the Anglican tradition, that is the liturgy that I will focus on.

In a building that has some sort of symbolic significance, like a memorial, the arrangement of the parts, the way the structure directs the viewer’s gaze, and the shape of the architecture all convey meaning and value. For example, the 9-11 memorial in New York includes two sunken pools in the footprints of the old World Trade Center towers. By giving shape to the absence of the towers, the pools call attention to the lost not only of buildings but also of life that occurred on September 11th. In the same way that a memorial may be designed to focus on a certain architectural point, so is a liturgical service structured around the Eucharist. Switching from architecture to story-telling, we can see the Eucharist as the climax of a plot that includes an introduction, rising action, and a falling action; it is the point to which the entire narrative leads. That which comes before the Eucharist points to and prepares for its celebration.

Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 that one should prepare for the Eucharist by examining himself for sin. The liturgy weaves this preparation into the service through moments of reflection on our sins and confession. Sometimes the liturgy includes the prayer of humble access just prior to the Eucharist, which uses the language of the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:28 and the centurion in Matthew 8:8 to Jesus. The prayer is a new addition to the liturgy, relatively speaking, that gives the worshiper an extra push towards a humble mindset and awareness of sin before taking the Eucharist. It follows older parts of the liturgy that do the same thing. The Lord’s prayer, which includes “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” always precedes the Eucharist. Before this there is also a time of confession and repentance prior to the giving of the peace in which worshipers confess their sins against “God and our neighbor.” These points of confession in the liturgy prepare us for Eucharist, so that we may eat and drink of it in the right way. As Paul makes says in 1 Corinthians 11, eating and drinking the bread and wine in an improper manner may lead to divine punishment.

Through means of these preparations, the liturgy forms us in the habit that confession and repentance are necessary for drawing near to God. Just as repentance is important before communion, a meal with Christ, so our relationship with Christ involves repentance. In a service we physically enact this drawing near to God by leaving our seats and going up to the altar to receive communion. (Communion is brought to those who are physically unable to go up to the altar, a reminder that when we are unable to approach Christ in our weakness, he seeks us out. Because we could not go to heaven, God came down from heaven and took on flesh to save us and bring us to heaven. cf. The Parable of the Lost Sheep). From a pedagogical perspective, this is kinesthetic learning, teaching that reinforces a lesson through motion and physical activity. Through this the liturgy shapes us as individuals and as a community to recognize the importance of regular confession and repentance to drawing near to God. It calls attention to the way that sin can put obstacles in our relationship with him. While the liturgy is forming our vertical relationship, the one between ourselves and God, it also shapes our horizontal relationships, between ourselves and others.

One of Paul’s central concerns in his first letter to the Corinthians is the disunity and conflict that are occurring in the church. 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 places that concern in the context of the Eucharist. The Eucharist should be an experience of Christian unity, which it was not for the Corinthian Christians. Our eating of the one body of Christ is a sign of our identity as members of the one body of Christ, the Church (1 Cor. 10:16-17). Sin is an obstacle to that unity, placing barriers in our relationships with others just as it separates us from God.¹ Thus in confession we repent our sins against “God and our neighbor,” dealing with the horizontal as well as the vertical.

Confession is followed by the giving of peace. Peace can only exist between members of the church when there is repentance and forgiveness. I think that peace is not the absence of conflict, but a state in which broken relationships and wrongs have been put right through forgiveness. Right relationships are necessary for peace. Righteousness and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85:10b).² This is what the arrangement of the liturgy teaches by putting confession before the giving of the peace. Service after service, the mindset that repentance is necessary for healthy relationship becomes reflexive. Kneeling for confession adds a kinesthetic element to the practice. Our external posture mirrors what our internal attitude should be. (I think that worship services should be modeled less after academic modes of education where a single person lectures on the Bible to a group of listeners and more on modes that incorporate physical training. This raises the question of how one teaches spiritual truths through bodily motion. While this may sound like a question for children’s ministry, I think it is relevant for adults.) Once we have confessed and repented, we are able to give peace to our fellow members in the body of Christ. Only when peace is proclaimed in our human relationships are we ready to eat the body of Christ and drink his blood in the manner that 1 Corinthians 11 commands.

I think it is important to recognize that simply asking for forgiveness may not be enough. As Matthew 5:23-24 says, “If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” We might also recall Zacchaeus, who repented by restoring his stolen wealth. Repentance may require more than simply confessing in the pew and giving peace. This is something that the liturgy does not do. It does, however, model the mindset and the attitude that is necessary for repentance. I believe that for individuals and for nations, confession and repentance are necessary steps towards peace. In a nation and world that desperately need peace this is all the more relevant.

While doing the work of worship, the liturgy, we are being shaped by the worship; the form forms us, forma formans. I have focused on the Anglican liturgy because that is the kind of tradition I have settled into now. Nevertheless, one can do the same kind of reading of a worship service that is considered “non-liturgical.” How is it shaping the worshipers and what is it shaping them into? We will be worshiping God for a long time, so we better start getting in shape now.

Post Scriptum
My own church journey has grown to be less about finding a perfect church or one with dynamic pastors; instead I look for one that offers a pattern or model for life that resonates with Scripture and Christian practice throughout the centuries, because the patterns I choose in turn pattern me, forma formans. As I grow older I look for form and structure—perhaps it is a literary thing too. Liturgy offers a beautiful and carefully wrought form for worship. Form need not be stuffy or deadening. Dante’s Commedia is highly structured, yet the pattern it offers is alive with motion and beauty, like an intricate dance. I long to find my place in the great dance that is the co-inhering life of the Trinity, the perichoresis.

Edit: Aug. 5, 2018
I have just been reading James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Many things that he discusses overlap with what I wrote in this post. He discussed confession in chapter 4 and I felt that it is worth adding a important aspect of confession that I missed. As he writes, confession is always followed by absolution. Once we have confessed our sins against God and our neighbor, the priest proclaim’s Christ’s forgiveness. When we sin, God is always there to offer forgiveness when we repent. His mercy is continually available, just as we hear the words of absolution and forgiveness week after week. When we sin, and we will, we must never forget God’s own offer of forgiveness.

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1. I would like to make a distinction about the way sin separates us from God. Because of the sin which we possess as descendants of Adam and Eve, we are divided from God. Unless we accept God’s forgiveness through Christ, we will be eternally separated from God by sin. After we have acknowledged Christ’s forgiveness, there is still the day to day sin, our habits, behaviors, and unconscious patterns that get in the way of our closeness with God. It is a little like a marriage. Even though a married couple may go through seasons of greater or lesser closeness, the state of union, the marriage, remains. Only divorce can end the marriage. Passing over the question of whether one can lose salvation, I think the Bible is clear, from the example of Hosea and the entire history of God’s faithfulness to the people of Israel that God will not give up on the marriage. ↩
2. In referencing this verse, I was reminded that a kiss is the older and more traditional way of giving peace, derived from references to the practice in the Epistles: Rom. 16:16, 1 Cor. 16:20, 2 Cor. 13:12, 1 Thess. 5:26, 1 Peter 5:14. ↩