Call to Confession

For those who have cycled through Years A, B, and C of the lectionary a time or two, you probably knew this text was coming. For many, it is one of the most uncomfortable texts in the Bible. How do we reconcile that David, the man after God’s own heart, and David, the sexual abuser and murderer, are the same person? And even if we are willing to face the difficulties of this text head-on, how do we even begin to build a worship service around it? Do we keep the tone somber? Do we overwhelm the senses with the weight of our capacity to sin? Do we pretend that David is just a single extreme case, that his sins are on another level than any of us could ever commit?

Honestly, none of those approaches sound like good options. In reality, David is not a singular case of particularly terrible sin. Sin is sin. It just so happens that David’s sins were written down and laid bare for all of us to read. So, we want to invite you not to approach this service with a particularly somber tone or to weigh down the congregation with the terribleness of human sin. Rather, we invite you to approach David’s sin as an invitation to lay our individual and communal sins bare before God by giving particular attention to the call to confession.

If your community regularly incorporates a call to confession into the liturgy, consider shaping the prayer of confession to allow space for individuals to silently lay themselves bare before God in the specificity of how they have each fallen short before concluding with a time of communal confession. If your community does not regularly incorporate a call to confession outside of the Communion liturgy, find a communal prayer of confession that the whole community can pray together that is different from what the community usually experiences as part of Holy Communion. We encourage you to use a prayer that uses modern language and addresses modern struggles with sin as a way of introducing your community to what confession can look, feel, and sound like outside of the liturgical context in which they usually experience it.

As you continue building the altar/chancel visuals, you might choose to go a little more minimal this week than other weeks but don’t feel like this week must be markedly more subdued than other weeks. If you’ve chosen vibrant greens or blues or other colors to include on the altar the last two weeks, do it again this week! If you’re spelling out the theme of the week in bright colors, do that this week too! The key is, don’t let this week stop the flow of what you have planned because confession is part of the flow of our worship gatherings. In this way, the visuals—and music!—can help the congregation experience the call to confession as a common, necessary, and beautiful act of worship we engage in as the gathered Body of Christ.