KINGSVIEW

THE TAILGATING PREACHER AND OTHER CONFESSIONARY TALES

Michael A. King

Confession is good for the soul, the saying goes. There is much that could be pondered about the theological, biblical, or psychological complexities of confession, but here I want to do a much simpler thing: just tell how good to the soul some of the lighter forms of confession can feel.

My experience of this unfolded one evening at a church meal. A number of us sitting at the same table started telling stories of the unacceptable things we had done at various points in our lives.

My worst story was of the day sometime in recent years when, in a rush to get to a meeting at night, I tailed somebody mercilessly through turn after turn on the way to church. That already wasn’t good. But it got worse. At the very last turn, the driver I was tailing turned into the church parking lot. I was so ashamed I drove around the block. To this day I don’t know what congregant—among those who called me to minister better than that—I sinned against.

Meanwhile other stories from other tellers included stealing hot chocolate from a church camp and getting caught by a stern camp director.

Or how one member when younger was along with another worker helping his father do roofing. The other worker idly pondered whether it would hurt to fall two stories down to the dumpster.

As quickly as he said it he fell down into the dumpster.

Our church member gazed down at the errant worker. Just like that he fell down into the dumpster.

He observed to his coworker, "I guess it did hurt."

Up on the roof, as the chaos unfolded below, his father was hollering for his helpers.

Inspired by these stories, yet one more member told of a Christian from another congregation who one day in a convenience store observed a woman barely able to contain her impatience while waiting in a coffee line. She had on a WWJD—meaning what would Jesus do—bracelet. The Christian telling the story (we’ll leave to God the Christianity of our WWJD friend) took on nearly the role of God by confronting the errant one with the need for confession, though with the mercy laughter always includes. She leaned over to the impatient one and politely observed, "I think he’d have hot chocolate."

By the end of the meal, we were laughing so hard we were crying. And amid the laughter there was deep healing.

Why? Because as that group of us, committed Christians, laughed at each other’s foibles, we were also working implicitly on that age-old human project of figuring out what is right and wrong and what needs to be done when we don’t stay on the right side of the line.

Here the sins were smaller ones, so they only started us on a path we would have to travel more fully to work through the larger sins, but sometimes we learn from the small about the big. Even if in tiny ways, what we were doing was confessing to each other.

And what made the laughter so deep was not only that the stories were funny but also that we could feel within the act of telling them the healing lightness that comes when instead of fleeing our misbehaviors we together look at them and, by the very act of telling them to each other, begin to say we know we should live differently from now on.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church, and editor, DreamSeeker Magazine. He aims no longer to tailgate. (Portions of this column are adapted from an article that first appeared in Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology, Fall 2002, pp. 89-94.)