Keys to Healing Wounded Relationships - Getting Honest, Getting Real

Was it a good thing?  I guess at times, it was.  But a lot of times, it just bugged me and others, but I didn’t know how to stop.   Growing up, I had an overactive conscience.   If I did anything remotely bad, I had to tell somebody.  So if I broke something, even scuffed my shoes, I had to confess it.   If I said a bad word, even if it was only dang, I had to come clean.   Nothing was too small to drive me to unburden my heart.

And if it wasn’t enough for me to confess my wrongdoing, I felt compelled to confess others’ too.  I remember in elementary school, a classmate showed me a pen with a pretty lady in a dress on it.  I thought.  Oh, that’s nice.    Then he flipped it over.  Well the pretty lady was still there, but not the dress.   I was appalled.   I had seen something that I know I shouldn’t have.  I had done wrong.   So I had to tell the teacher, and soon that pen was long gone.  My overactive 

conscience certain didn’t put me in the running for most popular. 

And at home too, if I saw my sisters doing something wrong, I couldn’t let that wrong go either.    I had to do my brotherly duty and share the sad news.   One day my sisters thought that the pasta our mom had cooked for dinner would make a wonderful decoration for the big pine tree in the front yard.    As they hung the stands of pasta like tinsel on a Christmas tree, I warned them that I would have no choice but to report them.    Granted I could have called out to mom before they hung all the pasta, but I felt.  They should suffer the full weight of their wrong doing.   They were picking sticky pasta off that pine tree for a good bit of the afternoon and glaring at me the whole time.

Looking back, in some ways, my conscientiousness was admirable.  But it usually made me anxious and miserable.  And it led me to be pretty self-righteous with others.  But reading the words we’re about to hear this past week, I began to wonder.   Is this what James wants from us?   Should we be going about unburdening our wrongdoing to one another?   Should we be examining others for their own failings, and then alerting them to their moral lapses?   What does it mean to confess our sins to one another?  How will that heal us?   And what about these words about bringing back the wanderers?  What does that mean?  

But what James is trying to tell us goes far deeper than reciting our wrongs or those of others.  In these words, God is giving us a chance to have deeper, richer relationships, to heal old wounds; to live into the sort of honest and authentic community that can change the world.   How does that happen?   In these words, God shows us the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say.

James 5:16-20

What does James want from us here?   Should we go about sharing all our moral failings with each other?    Should we be calling people on what we see as their moral failings?   It can seem that way, but in James’ words, God is calling for something deeper.   God is asking us to do something more difficult and profoundly more powerful.     James is calling us get honest and get humble.  James is calling to do what will make our relationships deeper and richer, what will heal the wounds between us; what will shape a community that will change the world.

When in James God tells us to confess our sins to one another, God isn’t asking us to go to one another, and confess all our failings.   God isn’t talking about establishing a confessional booth for each other.   No, James uses a very particular Greek word, exhomologeo, that we translate as confessing.  The word literally means to come to the same words.   It means we affirm our sins to one another, we come to agreement about them.  We affirm them, come to agreement about them?  What does that mean?  If you think about it, it becomes pretty clear.  

Let’s say someone feels that you’ve sinned against them, but you didn’t see how you did.  Then later, you realized.  “Gosh, I think that person was right.  I did do them wrong.”   So you then go and affirm that they were right.   You come to agreement about your wrongdoing, and you seek forgiveness. (Tim Keller)

The preacher Tim Keller tells a story about the 19^th century evangelist, D.L. Moody.   In his day, Moody became the most famous preacher in the world.  Tens of thousands came to hear him speak on a regular basis.  He was a huge deal.    At the height of his fame, he was giving a lecture to a group of theological students.   At the beginning, he did a question and answer time.   And this one student threw him a smart-aleck sort of question, one really meant to trip Moody up.  This student was basically using his question as a way to take a shot at Moody, to bring him down a peg or two.   What did Moody do?   He came right back at the guy, gave him an answer that put this guy in his place.   He shot the guy down, sort of humiliated him.    And pretty much everyone thought Moody was justified in doing so.   Moody went on with his talk, but near the end he paused.   He said, “Friends, I have to confess at the beginning of this meeting, I gave a very foolish answer to my brother.   I ask God to forgive me, and I ask him to forgive me.  And he looked down at the student, whose face began to beam.   And within a few moments, the two men were in each other’s arms.”  

Now today people seem to go on TV all the time to confess some wrong-doing.  But it’s almost always when they have to, when they’ve been caught.  And it’s always something big that they have to own up to, to save their career in politics or sports or whatever.    But for someone in that day, of Moody’s fame, to voluntarily humble himself like that, it was unheard of.  Even today in most of the world, the idea of losing face, of admitting you were wrong is considered almost unthinkable.

And do you notice how Moody did it?  He didn’t confess the student’s mistake.   He didn’t talk about how the student disrespected him.  He just shared his own failing.   And secondly, he confessed his mistake in public.  Why?   Well, if he had shot down the student in private, he would have then confessed his failing in private.   But he had done so publicly, so he needed to acknowledge his failing in public also. 

As a general rule, if you sin only against God, confess only against God.  If you sin against only one person, then confess to that one person.   And if you sin against or before a whole community, then confess before that whole community. 

So for example, if you go up to someone, and say to them. “I have to confess that for years I’ve been resentful of you and your success or looks or whatever, and I just want to ask your forgiveness.”  That’s not cool.   That’s just weird.  They likely didn’t even know that you felt that way.  You didn’t sin against them.  You sinned against God.  Now if you say, “Out of my resentment, I have said mean things about you.  I have tried to sabotage your relationships with others.”  That’s a different story.   

The whole reason you confess your sins is why?  You confess in order that healing can occur in you, and between you and others.   So if you go to folks to confess things of which they are unaware, you need to ask.  Why am I doing this?   It may be your resentment coming out in a different way, just camouflaged in a veneer of righteousness.   If your confession creates a wound, rather than healing a wound, then you’ve missed the whole point. 

So if you’ve sinned against someone, you can’t just go to God and ask for forgiveness and leave it at that.  You’ve got to go to that person and ask forgiveness.  Not only that, even if someone else believes you’ve done something wrong but you don’t see it yet, you’ve still got to go.  In Matthew 5, Jesus says, if you are offering a sacrifice at the temple, and you realize that someone has something against you, then stop immediately and address that issue with that person.   Why do you do that?  

Because we have a way of telling ourselves stories, stories where we are the victim and others are the villain or where we see ourselves as helpless to do anything but what we did.  Why do we we tell ourselves these stories?  We tell them to get ourselves off the hook, but usually we’re not even aware of the story we’ve made up. 

Let’s say you are in heavy traffic, but your lane is going faster than the others.  So others are trying to merge in.   This one car tries to speed up to get into your lane.  You think.  It would be nice if I let this car in.   You’d want someone to do that for you after all.   But you don’t do that.  No you speed up and cut that car off.   But then what do you do?  You think.  “What was that guy thinking?   He can’t just crowd in like that.  I’ve been fighting this traffic a long time, and I’m already running late.   How rude!”   Woah!  Do you see what happened?  You became the victim and that other driver became the villain.  And why did you tell that story.  It got you off the hook.    
   

So when you go to someone who has something against you, you are going to check your story.  And almost always, you’re going to see things differently once you’ve heard their side.  Even if you suspect someone is unhappy with you, you need to go and check it out.  You need to ask.  Is something wrong between us?   If you are like me, you can think of so many times, when if you had done this, you could have avoided so much heartache and pain. 

Now when it comes to this time of confession, we need to realize one other thing.  If there have been wounds, the healing will take time.  Sometimes we want to do this, confess our mistake, and think that now everything can be all better. 

But in the story of the Prodigal Son, when the son came back.   He didn’t say.  “Dad, I’m sorry.  I blew my inheritance, but hey now, I’m back!”  No, he said.  “I’ve sinned against heaven and against you, I am not worthy to be called your son.  Treat me as a hired hand.”   He wasn’t simply making a nice speech.   He was telling his dad.   I know that I have broken your trust.  Things can’t be the same between us right now.  But I am committed to work for you, to do whatever is necessary to rebuild the trust, to restore the relationship.”   Relationships are for the long haul, and we need to realize reconciliation has to be for the long haul too.

And when we do this, what happens?  Yes, the relationship gets healed.  But more than that, we get healed.  Often, it is only this sort of painful, humble, honest confession that leads us to break free of behaviors and faults that have plagued us for years. 

If we do this, if we live in this way, do you see powerful it is?  Do you see how living in this way, with this sort of humble honesty, how it heals wounds, how it can even transform the world?    And we can do this, we can live in this vulnerability because we know that Jesus has already seen our failings, and forgiven them.   We don’t have to live defending an appearance of righteousness, defending our need to be right.   We realize that we can be wrong, and still be loved just as we are.  We can honestly face our own failings, because we know that because of Jesus, our failings are never the final word.  His love and forgiveness are.   In that love and forgiveness Jesus sets us free.   Jesus sets us free to face our faults, and in facing them, freeing ourselves to live in honest and real community with one another.