Confession: the seed of witness

In the last few weeks, I have had many conversations with two relatively new Christian converts. Both display a love for other people and an awareness and expression of their own falling short of God’s grace in doing so, and their willingness to ask for God’s forgiveness. Given their backgrounds, I am in fact not that surprised. It is often those who have gone through hardship, those who have had to put everything on the line, who see and experience God’s offer to us most clearly. 

And it is typically these folks who become some of the most compelling witnesses and in fact, evangelists for God. Why? Because when all the schemes we have, the distractions we use, and the people we think we are, are tested, when our concept of what is common sense or true, falls apart or is challenged, this is often the only point when we look beyond ourselves. We can no longer presume the ways we were taught, formed and shaped by our parents, our various cultural upbringing, even our own faith upbringing, are common to everyone. And we have to begin to ask, “what source sustains us?.” It is, in other words, only under the stress of getting beyond ourselves, out of our own heads, extending our hearts, that we become people who are capable of receiving the source of all that is created and all its order - God - and so becoming witnesses to this one whom we receive. 

Becoming a follower of Christ doesn’t start or even proceed when we have it altogether. Newsflash, Jesus’s own disciples stumble again and again as they follow him. See Peter’s own life! See Thomas demanding a visual sign post resurrection. See Paul killing Christians before finally joining them. Becoming a follower of Christ does not involve living a perfect life. If that were the case, then the law would have saved people, people like Job, for example. Of course most of you recognize this by now! 

In those who have endured suffering and in the midst of this, sought to find the one who has borne all things for us, I can see the threads of grace gathering others to God. These threads are present in the constancy of their confession to God where they have fallen short of loving others, whether by their own pain, their impatience, or jealousy, or envy, or anger, or fear, or condemnation, or their holding grudges. I can see these threads spread out to others in their thankfulness that in spite of their broken actions, they are aware that God forgives them, which in turn compels them to act differently towards others; to act with courage and faith, rather than resorting to their own sense of righteous action.

And in their praise, their constancy of attentiveness, their reading Scripture, meditating on it, placing themselves into the midst of it and finding God’s judgment and mercy there, of recognizing the profound gift of being forgiven and sustained in God’s love; in these aspects of attentiveness I see a praise that overflows where feelings and ensuing actions that grow out of sin is replaced by a character of endurance founded on the hope that God is truly there with them.

Their actions become the arms and legs, the eyes and ears, the very heart of Jesus Christ’s body, walking the Earth, speaking to those whom He encounters and drawing them to himself. In their confession, thanks, and praise, we find in the Scriptures and so in life, that those who have borne and endured some of life’s hardest realities, yet sought Christ even with fingernails on his cloak, to be the very means by which others have the courage to open up to God. 

Paul writes of this: “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Jesus tells his disciples that "The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.” He sends his disciples - including you and me - out into a world that struggles to see and hear or even to trust that God forgives, that God loves, that God desires them. He tells us to be wise. To be aware that we will face opposition and indifference; but not to fear as we engage them for he will show us the way and change us so that we might become people through whom others can encounter God. And so he gives us examples of those who faced intense suffering, loss, persecution, unfair circumstances, threat, illness, exclusion, lack of resources, and hatred. Through them he shows us that confession opens us to a life of eternal love with God, this side and the other side of the grave; a promise made sure in Jesus, that provides us with both the courage and endurance to bear witness of thanks and praise to this reality with others - right here and now - who may struggle to see and believe this. “When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” AMEN