Our Broken Heart
Every Sunday at the 8:45 and 11:00 services, when we confess our sins against God and our neighbor, we make a profound yet counterintuitive declaration: “We have not loved you with our whole heart.” Not “hearts” but “heart.”
Rather than acknowledge that all of us as individuals have failed to love God as fully as we ought, we admit that, together, collectively, as a congregation, our singular heart has not been faithful. So unfamiliar is the concept of corporate sin that, every week, at least a few people unwittingly add an “s” to the end of “heart,” effectively reindividualizing the brokenness of our shared body. I do, too, from time to time, when my mind wanders and defaults to a more easily understood concept of sin.
Of course, the particular manifestations of our shared sinfulness can be identified as belonging to an individual. I am the one who reacted in anger when you cut me off in traffic. You are the one who gave me the middle-finger when I laid on my horn. But those expressions of sinfulness, although fairly described as individual sins, are signs of something deeper—a brokenness in the human condition that affects us all.
When we say together the confession of sin, we are asked to bring both to mind. In that prayer, we acknowledge that we have sinned against God “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” That language invites a flash of recollection of those personal experiences when we have missed the mark. But, then, we admit that our singular heart has not wholly loved God, reminding ourselves that our faults are also something we share. Finally, we acknowledge that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, reintroducing the plural as a way of holding together the consequences of both our individual sins and our corporate sinfulness.
You may also have noticed that the first-person pronouns throughout the confession are always plural. The only place in our liturgies when our confessions use “I” is in the rite of the Reconciliation of a Penitent, often called “confession” in the Roman Catholic sense. Unlike our siblings from that tradition, we do not require auricular confession in order that an individual may be reconciled to the body, but we offer that rite for those for whom the individual assurance of forgiveness may be an important part of their spiritual healing. Although I do not often go to confession or hear the confession of an individual, it remains an important part of my spiritual practice, and I invite you to consider adopting it as part of your own.
When we confess our sins in corporate worship, we embody a theology that has its roots in our Jewish spiritual ancestry. Although there have always been ritual responses to individual sinfulness, the practice of corporate lament and repentance is common throughout the Old Testament, especially in the psalms and the prophets. Sometimes, however, encountering the reality of that shared brokenness in scripture still catches us by surprise.
A while back, in a Bible study, someone asked whether language about God’s condemnation of God’s people for their sinfulness was justified, given that we can assume that not every individual was guilty of the same sin. Although that question is not only reasonable but necessary for those who seek to understand better the nature of a just and merciful God, it reflects our instinct that sinfulness is something that belongs only to individuals. We tend to believe that we are only accountable for the sins we commit, but our faith teaches us otherwise.
What does it mean to accept, acknowledge, and seek forgiveness for a sinfulness that infects all of us even if a particular manifestation of that sinfulness has never been a part of your life? One example that comes to mind is addiction. Even if the irresponsible use of a substance like alcohol has never been a problem for you, it remains a problem in your life because addiction is something that affects us all. In the twelve steps of recovery, we are invited to admit that we are powerless over alcohol whether it is our drinking or that of another that plagues us. Likewise, in our confession of sin, we admit that brokenness of the heart which we share with everyone else regardless of how that brokenness shows up in our lives.
The point of recovering a fuller understanding of the corporate nature of sin is not to make us all feel more guilty. We are the children of a loving and merciful God. Guilt and shame do not help us receive or model God’s forgiveness. But admitting the ways in which sinfulness is shared by all human beings allows us to pursue reconciliation with God and each other more fully. Pretending that any of us is immune from the effects of particular ways of being sinful impedes our ability to know the shared restoration God envisions for us.
Sin is both universally distributed and universally redeemed. We are all equally sinful and equally in need of forgiveness. It may feel hard to hold up to God a brokenness you share with others when it only seems to belong to them, but we do that each week. If we let those words shape our collective heart, our knowledge of our salvation can only grow.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
