The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
September 14, 2008
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Matthew
18:15-22
15‘If another
member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two
of you are alone. If the member listens
to you, you have regained that one. 16But if you are not listened to, take one or
two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence
of two or three witnesses. 17If the member refuses to listen to them, tell
it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let
such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. 18Truly
I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever
you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
19Again, truly I tell you, if
two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my
Father in heaven. 20For where two or three are gathered in my
name, I am there among them.’
21Then Peter
came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me,
how often should I forgive? As many as
seven times?’ 22Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I
tell you, seventy-seven times.
Sermon:
This is not a joke. But what do Bill Clinton, Ted Haggard
and Jimmy Swaggart all have in common? They made spectacular public confessions
that allowed them to come back from the brink of losing it all. In fact, their
confessions after sexual misconduct could be the model for how to get it right,
after doing wrong. So says Susan Wise Bauer in The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in
America. [1]
The William and Mary historian’s thesis is provocative. The American public will put up with all sorts of things as long as the confession takes a form that finds its roots in American Evangelical practice, and it does not matter whether the confessor or the listener is a part of that tradition himself. Evangelical culture is so intertwined with American culture, it has become the blueprint for all public confessions, which poses a challenge to those who are not familiar with it, but still get caught with their pants down in a nation that knows what it wants from the guilty.
The ones who know how to feed the dragon, come out all right. So President Bill Clinton, after his affair with his intern, Monica Lewinski, and his lies to the American public were exposed, recalled his Baptist roots and was able to deliver a confession that practically rescued his public image.
Whatever your opinion is of Bill Clinton, you cannot help but be in awe of his journey. Two months after being impeached for perjury in the House, the Senate voted to acquit him, and he left office with a 65 percent approval rating, higher than any other president in American history. In his wife’s recent ill-fated presidential campaign, he had to be kept out of the spotlight so as to not attract all the media attention. Eventually, he claimed that spotlight anyway, some would say with results that hurt his wife’s campaign, but the point is that he recovered from his initial White House disgrace with speed. His 2004 autobiography sold over 400,000 copies, and he even won a Grammy for the audio version. He was a rock star.
Four years later, we find in Bernard Cardinal Law a public confession that did not do the trick. On November the 3rd, 2002, at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross, with legalistic frosty words like, “I acknowledge my own responsibility for decisions which led to intense suffering,” he never managed to express regret and shame to the extent that covered the seriousness of his actions. Certainly allowing Catholic priests to continue to serve and molest children is a more heinous sin than chasing an intern around the oval office, but Law never gave the American public what it wanted – an Evangelical style public confession in which he was visibly sorrowful and admitted wrong doing.
Interestingly, the Boston Catholics who were his community, shaped, as we all are by this American model, whatever our denomination, craved this style of confession. But in coming from a Catholic tradition that believes in private confession, Law was unprepared to give a public one a style that was not his. A public call for his resignation from his fellow priests forced him to step down from his American duties and move to Rome, just four weeks after his public confession that did not work.
In the gospel of Matthew, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” To which Jesus replied, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”
Well, Jesus may have left us those instructions, but people of faith follow them inconsistently. Throughout history there are stories of leaders, in politics, religion and the arts, who have committed the same offense, but one will receive the public’s forgiveness and one will not. So who gets to make a comeback and why?
In Bauer’s thesis, the confession that will deliver the comeback needs three elements. It needs to be public, to admit wrong doing, without excuse, in such a way that the public sees you as one of them, an ordinary person.
Secondly, it must give the impression that the confessor believes that there is a spiritual war between good and evil; having been overcome by evil, the confessor explains that he has now chosen to fight on the side of good.
And lastly, the confession needs to acknowledge that the power of the leader lies in the hands of the followers. In the confession, the leader must offer the power back to the people, and give them the choice of whether or not to forgive.
The historian’s schema is eerily accurate. When we think of confessions in which the public has forgiven, they do seem to follow this pattern. Clinton did it, and most recently Ted Haggard, whose future remains in the balance. But for the classic, think of the Assemblies of God mega church pastor Jimmy Swaggart after the first time he was caught by a private investigator entering a Travel Inn motel with a prostitute back in 1988.
After that, the preacher, known as a champion of right wing family values, addressed his church and gave the classic American Evangelical public confession as he said, “I take the responsibility. I take the blame. I take the fault,” much of which was captured by news cameras in images of his weeping, tear-stained face that remain iconic. He ended up surrounded by his followers, and after being defrocked for a year, at his comeback sermon, the church held 5,000 people and his television show reached 800,000 households. Clearly, he had been forgiven, and much more than seventy-seven times.
Bauer suspects that years later and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Clinton may have used Swaggart’s confession as his model.
Let’s consider the unsuccessful public confessions of our day. Held up to the professor’s model, the schema works pretty well. Cardinal Law was not forthcoming with the public. He did not acknowledge that the issue of child-abusing priests was a struggle between good and evil, and he never gave the impression that he had moved from one side of that fight to the other. In his vague, distant remarks, he failed to take sufficient blame.
Lastly, in appealing to church hierarchies and rules that had no transparency to the laity, he never acknowledged that his power came from the people. He was a product of a system in which his power did not in fact come at the pleasure of the church members, and it showed. So much so, that eventually the outcry was too great, even from his own colleagues within that hierarchy. The model works.
In a strange twist, another example for the public confession that did not work, comes from the man who got it so right the first time. Three years later in 1991, Jimmy Swaggart was arrested for a traffic violation with a known prostitute in his car. This time around he announced to his loyal congregation who had forgiven him the last time that God had told him to keep on preaching, saying, “the Lord told me flat out it’s none of your business.”
The congregation rapidly diminished, until in 1998 large sections of the church were dark, empty and roped off, and the building was literally falling down. He had failed to reuse his own successful confession blueprint, and the public made him pay for it.
When did this ritual of public confession begin? There are two figures who Bauer sees as being in the public eye at the moment when the American people were moving from seeing confession as a matter between a person and his pastor or church, to being an act that is performed in full public view.
She cites Grover Cleveland as being the last public figure that survived a scandal without this type of public confession. In Cleveland’s case, he was exposed as having an illegitimate daughter during his campaign. Rather than speak himself, his Presbyterian minister spoke for him and on his behalf, assuring the public that the matter was being wrestled with spiritually. The public accepted that and he was elected, not for his personal history but for his political agenda. He would be the last public figure to pull that off.
Ted Kennedy was on the cusp of this change. By refusing to confess publically about the death of a young woman in his car at Chappaquiddick, he was a product of his Roman Catholic upbringing that understands confession to be private. But he also revealed his aristocratic roots, as one who did not believe his power actually came from the ordinary people, or that he was like them.
While he remained in politics and had enormous influence through his many years of service, he lost the presidential nomination, and was never able to achieve the office in his lifetime.
After the events of Chappaquidick, American culture grew increasingly more confessional, with talk psychologists on the radio, Phil Donahue on television and tell-all memoirs. In the 1980’s we also saw the rise in talk in the conservative Christian movement about cosmic battles between good and evil, or Godliness versus secular humanism, and other language that was so dramatically polarizing, we would come to call these “the culture wars.”
Right wing Christianity and left leaning therapeutic culture created a perfect storm where suddenly, public figures needed to make public confessions in order to be forgiven. Some did it well and survived. Some did it wrong and were not received back into the public embrace.
It’s easy to be cynical after reading a book like this. The historic scholarship is readable and convincing. The author does a good job of describing our current culture around public forgiveness. The question for people of faith calls us, in Augustinian terms, out of the city of man and into the city of God. In other words, just because it is this way, should it be this way? If not, does it have to stay this way?
Recent events in which New York governor Eliot Spitzer and his wife were paraded through the media after his dalliance with a prostitute, posed another opportunity for a public confession. In March of this year, the crusader for justice revealed a serious flaw, but his beautiful and educated wife stood by him. For the first time, this raised a nationwide conversation about why the woman had to go through the ritual of public confession with her man.
I think I had the same reaction as many women. I found myself talking to the television as she stood there trying to keep her composure: Leave your wife at home, buddy, and take your punishment like a man. I didn’t want to see her dressed up and ready for the cameras. I wanted her to be at home on the couch in her pajamas with a big old glass of wine, getting the chance to yell at the television herself.
This time around, public opinion seemed to turn against Spitzer for dragging his wife into it, and his negative appeal was exacerbated by the fact that he was not very publically forthcoming, but came off cold and reserved. He did not follow the rules to which the American public had become accustomed.
America was starting to ask questions, at least about the role of the wife. As the conversation about that continued, we were reminded of past public confessions that apparently came with a “couple’s only” invitation. The wife of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey appeared on Oprah, to explain why it was that she had stood by her man the first time around, as he resigned as he confessed to having an affair with a man known as a “poet” and a “sailor” who he had also appointed as his state’s homeland security adviser. The governor’s wife had, in 2007, written her own tell-all memoir, The Silent Partner, confessing to the experience of standing by the confessor, as she was now doing on Oprah.
In this, she apparently responded to yet another “couples only” invitation, joining her husband who had appeared on Oprah four years earlier to promote his memoir, entitled The Confession. The world of gossip about the private lives of public figures seemed to be turning in upon itself, like a hungry dog attempting to eat its own tail.
In the media attention to the role of the wife, my stomach was sickened, as I realized that I didn’t just want the wife to stay home, I wanted them all to stay home. I realized that I had had my fill of these tragic personal dramas played out on a public stage.
I had no desire to see Spitzer squirm in front of cameras. I knew that no spiritual or public good was coming of it. I wanted the legal system to do its work with him, but I wished that the spiritual work of confession could be done in private, in a community of faith, and that the rest of us would back off.
What we can require of our public and religious leaders is apology. We can expect them to admit to wrongdoing to those who have been injured, and to admit their fault in it. That is appropriate.
The emotionally wrought public confession leaves me feeling used. Having just read a historian’s schema for how to get confession right, and how to get it wrong, I realize why I don’t like watching either kind. They both are confessions with a purpose, and that purpose is usually the restoration of public popularity.
It is as if the American public has entered into a devil’s bargain in the public confession ritual. You, the sinner, lay yourself bare, and share lascivious, personal details of your life, which we will be disgusted by, and outraged by, but hungry to know nonetheless.
We, in return, having judged your emotionally raw performance, will decide whether or not to restore you to power. It is a spiritually barbaric ritual, one that in the future we may look back on with the same horror we view gladiators killing one another for sport at the coliseum, and the mad crowds who paid to see it happen.
Perhaps the most painful public spectacle came in August of this year, when John Edwards publically confessed that he had had an extramarital affair, now over, with a former campaign worker. Having lost his bid for president, and fearing the loss of his wife to cancer, he was forced to “out” himself before the media did it for him.
My heart broke for Elizabeth Edwards, who has performed under the public eye throughout the campaigns with such grace and joy, even in the face of untreatable cancer. The fact that she and her children had to be in the spotlight, as her husband confessed to a matter that he and his wife had already resolved, made me want to stand up and shout, “Enough!”
Could intelligent people of faith lead the way in our culture to restore confession to its rightful place? We could remind people that confession is ultimately to be directed to God and not to an anonymous audience. As people who believe in divine reconciliation, we should insist that the aggrieved parties be addressed directly without all of us sitting in on the conversation. As people who believe in confession, can we confess our own sin of voyeurism in all this?
If we refused to buy the magazines, and watch the television programs, and read the publications of those who hounded John Edwards until they were able to frame him in the company of the mistress he was no longer involved with, the media would have less incentive to produce such material.
If we trusted that pastors and parishioners talking privately in a spirit of confession actually makes a difference, perhaps we could let go of that public confession that smacks of show biz. If we grieved with the families who are disgraced in such situations, and prayed for them intensely, we might be less likely to pick up the magazine that rips open their lives for entertainment value.
If we restrained our lust for information about private matters, we might find ourselves attracting a better quality of candidate to public office, one who does not have to worry that his life will be destroyed by past actions that are seldom much different from that of his voters.
Christians have been told that we are to forgive seventy-seven times, but our culture has flipped that on its head. Instead, we want to hear a person confess seventy-seven times, and then even then, sometimes we borrow from God’s job description and do the judging ourselves. But who could blame us for judging? Have you seen these confessions?
Sometimes the confessions are false sounding. We have seen so many of them; we have trouble believing they are sincere. Sometimes the people obfuscate and make excuses; they do not deliver the remorse we need. But I would argue that no confession could be meaningful in such a setting.
Apologies should be delivered in public, with gravitas and purpose. The spiritual work of remorse and confession, the difficult restoration of the family and the desperate prayers for grace should all take place in more intimate spaces, like the living room, the pastor’s study, and in the company of saints who worship together week after week.
There in church, every week we all find the need for that prayer of confession, and we can all find something within us to contribute.
And it is there we meet Jesus who told us to forgive seventy-seven times.
He seemed to know that we would all be in need of it at least that many times.
[1] The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America, by Susan Wise Bauer, Princeton University Press, 2008, 322 pp.