When I wrote last week about the prayer of general confession found the Book of Common Prayer’s Morning Prayer service, I mentioned an interaction I had with a woman who used it for her justification for preserving Morning Prayer over the Eucharist as the primary Anglican liturgical service. While it is indeed a beautiful prayer, how does it compare with the prayers of confession from Anglican Eucharistic liturgies? Today it’s time to reflect on these prayers. I’ll mostly focus on those of newer Anglican rites (e.g., the 1979 Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer (BCP) and the Anglican Church of Canada’s Book of Alternative Services (1985)), with occasional reference to the language of older BCP versions.
Let’s look at the text:
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us,
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name.
Amen.
I’ve always loved the simplicity of the language here. There’s no hiding behind flowery language or euphemisms. Rather, it gives it us — and as we pray it, we give it to God — straight. We have sinned in our thoughts, in our words, in our actions, as well as in our thoughtlessness, the words we did not speak, and our inaction. I’m always shocked when I hear proponents of older liturgies call the newer liturgies “weak on sin.” While it falls short (rightly, I would say) of the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, this is still saying that we have in every way failed to live out our basic calling as Christians: to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves. (It’s even stronger than the older language of the old BCP, which refers to our sin as happening “from time to time.”)
Right at the halfway point, it shifts gears from confession to repentance: we don’t just accept the intellectual proposition that we have sinned, but take responsibility for it. We apologize but also commit to doing better in the future. It’s this second piece that is the true marker of repentance — something too often forgotten. We ask for mercy and forgiveness, believing that God is merciful and forgiving, but we do this not just to get a clean slate that we’ll quickly muck up again, but in order to “delight in God’s will” and “walk in God’s ways,” “to the glory of God’s name.” The older versions express this same sentiment in terms of serving and pleasing God “in newness of life,” a wonderful Pauline reminder that Christian life is supposed to be a thoroughly fresh start to our lives, based in the ways of Christ, not Adam, in the Kingdom of God, not the kingdoms of this world.
I think this is a perfect, that is perfectly balanced, prayer of confession. It refuses to let us off the hook, drawing our attention to our thoughts, words, and actions, and our prayers of omission as well as commission. It includes apologies and requests for forgiveness, but doesn’t stop there, correctly recognizing that repentance is less about acknowledging the past than it is doing better in the future. And it grounds all this in God’s mercy and compassion, which are most explicitly revealed in and through Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it’s a great prayer to keep in our back pockets to use throughout our days and weeks, whenever we have a moment of truth that convicts us to repent and open ourselves up to God.
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us,
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your name.
Amen.
Matthew Root 