The Pastoral Practice of Hearing Confession

Transcript (edited for readability).

One of the electric things that happened to me was, ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, I was asked to lecture in Eastern South Dakota on confession and absolution. It was an ecumenical retreat. One of the people present was an Irish priest, an old Irish priest, and he — I mean, it was just fabulous. He recognized, of course, what I was saying right away, and he knew the kind of support system in Catholicism for priests who hear confessions regularly, you know, as part of their vocation. And he taught me all kinds of stuff, and we became wonderful friends. I just loved that guy. And he, for example — one of the most important things that you can do if you start hearing confessions is learn to forget. It's natural, of course, that the old Adam becomes fascinated with the sins of the neighbor. Now you've got evidence. Somebody comes and confesses, and the old Adam wants to feast on this kind of stuff, you know? And so it starts to accumulate in your memory.

The most important thing I can tell you about that is, upon hearing confession, immediately to pray, and to hand what you have heard over to Christ Jesus. And, you know, my prayers are fairly impertinent at that level. You have importuned me now. You have brought information to me that I can't handle, and I expect you to take it off my back, because if I try to carry this, it's going to kill me. And that is literally the truth. If you start trying to carry what people confess — you will become the goat of Leviticus. You will become a sacrifice. You're not expected to do that. Christ Jesus does not expect you to do that. He died for the sins of the world. His death is sufficient. You don't need to add yours to his. So you give it to him. And you can even name it when you do, though I don't recommend it. I mean, you can say, You know what I heard, and you know what has been confessed. In your name and in your stead, I forgave this person his sins, or her sins. And I ask you now to take the memory from me, to lift this burden from me. And he will help you with that. I've never known him to fail me at that point. Of course, I'm getting better and better at forgetfulness, but in this case, his help has been very significant.

So people will come to me and say, Do you remember when I made confession? And I say, I'm sorry, I don't. There have been too many. It's been too much. That's one of my favorite stories — there was a priest and a nun who were always in conflict, and the nun was always getting direct messages from the good Lord, which she was passing on to the priest, and he was good and sick of it, you know — stupid, charismatic bull. He was not going to put up with it anymore, and he said to her, All right, the next time you get a message from Christ Jesus, ask him what sins I confessed this morning. She said, I will. So the next morning, he saw her, and he said, Did you ask Christ Jesus what sins I confessed this morning? She said, I did. He said, What did he say? She said, He forgot. Perfect. That's the promise: I will remember your sins no more. So you've got no business remembering them either. You make haste to forget. Of course, this is the way the mind works — the harder you work at forgetting, the more indelible the memory becomes. So the best way I know is by prayer. You just say, You're going to have to help me. I can't think of this every time I meet that person. I can't think of it between some guy's knees. I can't do this. You have to — and he will help you. He will help you.

Another, even more important factor is that every confessor has to have a confessor. That's a great thing about Doxology — you guys have one another, and you can make a regular practice of it, once a week whether you need it or not, and so be in the discipline. Because in confession, you pass along what you can't carry. You don't have to have names and addresses, and you don't have to have specific details, but you can say, This is what I was told, this is what I heard, and this is becoming heavy for me. So it's very important to have a confessor, and to be regular and faithful in going to confession.

For a long time, my confessor was an old Laestadian Finn. He was a retired school principal in Minneapolis, and he'd grown up among Laestadians — they're a group that practiced confession and absolution — so he knew it from his family. And I loved him with my whole heart. There was nothing I couldn't confess to him. And my reward for this was that the last thing I did before he died was to absolve him. He was fabulous. He had a major stroke. I knew he was going to die that morning. I was sitting next to him in the intensive care unit, and I said to the nurse, How long do you think he's got? She said, Maybe five minutes, not more. So I waited four, and then I stood up beside him and put my hand on his head. His name was Melvin. I said, Melvin Salo, in the name of Jesus Christ, I forgive all of your sins. And as soon as I started, his arm came up and he grabbed onto my arm, and he held it until I said the benediction. And when I finished the benediction, he was gone. And it was perfect — his dream was to die in the absolution, so that the last word he heard in his life would be the first word he would hear in the life to come. And we did it. So I trust the good Lord carried out his end of the bargain. Just perfect.

So, first, you have a confessor — that's the second important thing. And the third important thing is to keep — I mean, the gift of forgiveness is inexhaustible, but the mind is limited, and so it's important always to be in study of the Scripture on confession and absolution, to be reading on the forgiveness of sins, and exploring dimensions of it theologically. In Luther, for instance, there are some magnificent sermons. The Hammer of God is one of my favorite sources — I mean, I've read that, I think, thirty-five or forty times. I keep reading it and rereading it. It was given to me by my parents when I was confirmed, so I've got one of the first editions of the translation, and I've kept that book beside me my whole life through. I can't give thanks enough for it. Well, we don't live in Sweden, in those times, but the problems that Giertz addresses are problems that we face day by day, and in him you have a faithful companion.

You find — I know, because I've been around lecturing on this — I know all kinds of people who are grace addicts. I call them grace-hardened sinners, and those people are great to have conversations with. So all of this is self-care — you're looking after your vessel, because if you don't do it, you're a sitting duck. The devil knows you're doing this. You're robbing him of his territory, and so he's not going to look on it kindly. So you will be tempted and have these difficulties to deal with. Well, my confessor was one of the greatest of all — you'll never find a confessor like that. So you find people. They're around. They're usually old, and they're usually fairly tough — the kind of guys who've served hard parishes and been used hard by their people, and they're soft. You want somebody like that. If there's one thing no Lutheran pastor has the right to be, it's shocked. When we confess that we're in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves, you should expect you'll find evidence of that in your parish. There are sinners there — real ones.

Is that enough on self-care? Good.

Could you speak some on the professional seal? Because with the assault on the Church in general these days, there's certainly a lot of pressure toward violating the seal, especially when crimes have been committed. Perhaps speak to the sanctity of the seal.

You bet. This is the kind of period that occupies the minds of already-prying state legislatures. They think we're hearing something that they don't get a chance to hear, so they want to pull the seal off the confessional and expose us. And, of course, what that does is destroy confession. If you break the seal of the confessional, you'll never hear another confession — you can count on it. And if people hear you blabbing stuff around, they'll cut you off right at the knees, and that's the end of you — the end of your ministry in that particular relation. And since you've been called to the proclamation of Word and Sacrament, the proclamation of the Word in the confessional is one of the important places where it happens, so you don't want to lose that.

It's conceivable that you might hear a confession that you have to report. It's highly unlikely, because most people who come to confession are people with sensitive consciences, and they are people who are thus disciplined, and it's not likely. The closest I've gotten to this is hearing fifth steps — when you start hearing fifth steps in AA, a fifth step is when a person makes a complete moral inventory and acknowledges it. I heard a fifth step once that went on for two and a half days. He was scrupulous and wanted to confess absolutely everything, and he had notes. I couldn't wash it off. It was just awful. So in situations like that, you might hear — if you were approached by law enforcement agents determined to penetrate the confessional, I'm absolutely positive that you could make arrangements where the sanctity of the confessional was protected. I'm sure that, because you've got allies — Catholic priests, for example, bishops, Catholic bishops. I wouldn't rely on any Lutheran bishop that I've met. There may be Missouri Synod district presidents who will protect you — I'm sure there must be, but I don't know any. But you can talk to law enforcement agencies and say, I have something I've got to protect here, and you're going to have to help me with that. I can imagine that that would be disrespected, but I wouldn't expect it.

At any rate, some states have tried to make laws where you're compelled to disclose — like in Minnesota, they proposed that, and it was rejected, because there was still enough faith left in the public community to recognize that that wouldn't work. With all the Mormons in Idaho, I don't know what would happen. But I would bet on this: that you would find neighbors who would help you, short of the law. I have heard crimes confessed, but I have never heard capital crimes confessed. And I have heard confessions that made me wonder about the law. But as much time as I've spent hearing confessions and making absolutions, I have yet to hear a confession where I felt compromised in my office.

When Luther says, Go through the commandments — Luther heard confessions every day of his ministry. When you start hearing lots of confessions, you learn that sin is not very creative. It's derivative, and consequently there are very few surprises. Usually, if I hear the first sentence of the confession, I know what the last sentence is going to be — nearly. I mean, it can get pretty well there, because alcoholism is alcoholism, and drunken escapades are drunken escapades, and nearly everybody in an AA meeting has heard a description of bestiality at some point, and nearly everybody knows of crazy sexual stuff that has happened under chemicals. So that's the danger of fifth steps — I don't like to hear them, because I like to hear confessions. I don't like to be in these therapeutic things if I can avoid it. But on the other hand, Christ Jesus always has use for a sinner. So if there's nobody else who can hear the fifth step, I'll do it — if you haven't been asked, that's a good thing.

Peter talks about being sober and vigilant, and the devil will flee from you — he connects sobriety and attacks to the devil. Could you talk about that a little bit? What kind of access, especially addictions, gives to the demons?

Yeah. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, the devil is the father of lies. Addictive behavior by itself is deceptive — it begins with deceit, and the first lie, the original lie, is the worst one: This won't matter. This won't hurt. Nobody will know. You'll be fine. And then the lies start cascading. One lie requires the next, so Luther says a liar has to have a good memory, because one lie requires the next, and the next, and the next. I remember one time listening to All Things Considered on the radio — there was a public relations expert from New Orleans being interviewed, and she said, with a thick Louisiana accent, We always advise our clients to tell the truth, because it's a lot easier to remember. That's it — to be sober, to be vigilant, to be truthful — because what appears to be a white lie is the point of entry to the devil's deceit, and once you get in there, the whirlwind starts to accelerate, and the lies just multiply, and then you're in for a ride.

So when I was going around to those weekends dealing with ELCA pastors who had bedded down parishioners, almost invariably the narrative went like this: I didn't intend this. I didn't dream this would happen. I thought — and then one damn thing just led to another, and pretty soon I was in her bed. That was just one small lie added to one small lie, added to one small lie, and pretty soon it was a big lie. So when Scripture, under its inspiration, tells us the exact truth of the situation, to be vigilant about the original lie is to be protected. You watch that. Our puny little wills have limited options, but that's one option we do have. That's in Article 18 — that's something reason can comprehend. Even us benighted, slothful Lutherans can figure out when it's going wrong and stop it there. We can say, No, no, no, no, no. So we have an alternative at that point. It's when the lie is multiplied that we lose any freedom at all — we just start being driven along, carried along, sinned against, then sinning.

Remember that great line — Luther says the Scripture sets before us a man who is wretched, sick, captive, and dead, and adds to his illusions, adds to his misery, the illusions of Satan, his lord, that he is whole, free, and alive. So how many times have you heard an alcoholic say, I can quit any time I want? A friend of mine, a recovering alcoholic — this is the Romans 7 part of it — you're absolutely convinced that you need to do this in order to go on living, and yet you absolutely know that if you do it, you'll die. This is the conundrum. This was one of Forde's students, who had started drinking when he was seventeen, and he drank for eighteen years, and he said, Every morning I got up, and in order to make myself feel better, I drank what was killing me.

So, you alluded to this earlier today — in some sense, any habituation, whether it's sin involving a substance, or another person, or just an idea, is inherently — that's a good question. And so when we treat sinners with the gospel, specifically a word of absolution, knowing full well that sinners sin and that there will be need for further absolution, it seems to me that one of our responsible activities will be to help them grab hold of this new identity.

Yep — and take that freedom and fling it into the midst of this prison. I love it.

And alongside that, you know, many people are medicating themselves with substances, or with sins, either to cover something, or, as I've discovered — paradoxically, with sexual sins often — not to feel good, but to feel something.

Yeah. A person is so zoned out they have no response to anything. And so — we don't want to move into the therapeutic — but still, I think knowing the mechanism of that addiction would be useful, and truly, it's the word that makes you —

No. The word and the community. You are the community embodied. You are the other.

And when that person — one person, the woman is so alone, the man is alone —

Yeah, exactly, a hundred percent. And when someone comes and makes confession, they're breaking code, they're breaking all the taboos, they're breaking through, doing something that's fundamentally unnatural. And when you hear the confession, oftentimes I find the confessor watching me to see the impact of the confession and see whether I'm going to make it — thank you, yeah, are you still there? I sometimes joke about that — I say, when somebody makes their confession, Look, I have heard this, and I'm still here. I'm fine. I'm going to make it. You can keep going. It's all right. Because they are so utterly alone, and the devil has convinced them that if they make confession, both they and the one to whom they confess will die of it, which, of course, is the devil's method of protecting himself from the power of the Word.

So you're a companion, and you can arrange things in such a way with people that you can emphasize the companionship. I like to sit on the same side of the desk sometimes. Sometimes when confession is happening, I get up and walk around the desk and sit down beside them. And sometimes I put my hand on the confessor's — the confessant's — shoulder. And sometimes I very seldom say anything at all — I'm there as a pair of ears, that's all I am, and that's it. But you can help. And sometimes humor is very helpful. I haven't fainted yet, I'm still reading — that kind of thing. Because people expect that. They're worried sick, saying out loud what they should never say out loud, what they never dreamed they would ever say out loud, and they're saying it out loud in the presence of a person who is sacred to them — that's why they've come — and they're scared, they're scared to death. Anything you can do to help with that is good, I think. We all learn different things to do.

I used to, at Luther Seminary — this is kind of a parable — the strategy for merging the churches that merged into the ELCA was to join the seminaries. So Luther Seminary, which was the old ALC, merged with Northwestern Seminary, which was old LCA. It was very difficult — nobody was happy. First of all, we had what was called maximum functional unification, MFU, which became the source of all kinds of humor — the initials were too suggestive — and the Luther students and the Northwestern students hated one another. They just despised it. I taught both — I taught Lutheran confessions for both faculties. But one of the great things that came of it was that Northwestern built this beautiful building with a chapel that was magnificent, and in the middle of the chapel was a crucifix. Sovik and someone — architects from Northfield — designed it. They were not the best architects in the world, but theologically they were wonderful. The building has barely survived — it had all kinds of architectural disasters — but that chapel has stood, and that crucifix — it was a statuary made out of wrought iron, and it stands there right in the middle of the pews.

And they designed a confessional in the wall on the other side of the wall from the chapel, in the sacristy, with one-way glass in the shape of a cross in that wall, so that you could arrange the confessional so that the person making confession looked over the shoulder of the confessor and saw the crucifix — saw the crucifix through the shape of a cross. That was beautiful. That was a great confessional, because the confessional itself preached, like a kitchen — it said, Here's what's available here. Just like that.

So we used that confessional. And that woman I told you about, from Idaho, who had such a terrible time confessing — when she finally made confession, I took her there. I said, I want you to dress up, no jeans — put on your best clothes, because Christ Jesus is coming after you, and he's going to get your sins. So you dress up for him. And we went, and I put on my robes, which I hardly ever do for confession and absolution, but I put on my robes, everything — chasuble, the whole business. I was about sacred business that night. And Christ Jesus dressed me to the nines, so that there could be no mistake that I was acting in my office, as the one whom he had sent to her. And when she confessed, she was absolutely distraught, and she kept looking up through her tears — she just expected the cataclysm, that the whole thing would collapse. And when I absolved her — I absolved her the first time, an hour later I brought her back and absolved her the second time, an hour later, absolved her the third time, and I absolved her over the whole weekend, because I was so concerned that she heard — and she had heard the first one. It was my unbelief. That's as close as I've ever been to the resurrection. It was fabulous. She's walking wounded, all right, but she's walking. That's what you get when you send sinners to do this work — if it had been Christ Jesus, it would all have been gone at once.

I should tell you my favorite story — some of you know it, I've told it a lot, and even Billy Graham's son got hold of this story and has been telling it around, so I've lost it, but it's my story — well, it's not even my story. There was a pastor in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, whose name was Osgard. This is Norwegian royalty — the better your blood in Norway, the more vowels you have in your name, and here he's got four A's — that's a real achievement, four A's in your name. And in Norse mythology, Asgard is the entrance to heaven, so not a bad name for a pastor. He became president of the old Norwegian Lutheran Church.

He was pastor in Eau Claire, and he performed a wedding for a young couple whom he liked, and everything was right, and then he saw something go utterly wrong. The bride finally came to him — she was a beautiful woman, and she was disheveled, her sorrow was evident. And when she came into his office, he said, The Lutheran hymnal has a service for somebody like you. She said, What's that? He said, That's the service of confession and absolution. He didn't give her an alternative — he didn't challenge her, he just said, I have a service for you. And they knelt together. It's just fabulous.

This is what she said. She was a nurse at the hospital in Eau Claire, and she'd had an affair with a doctor, and she'd become pregnant by the doctor. So she went to the doctor and told him, and he arranged with one of his colleagues to abort the fetus. This was 1925. They met at the hospital in the middle of the night and used the surgery, and he performed the abortion, and because everything was done under strict medical procedure, she came out of it with no wounds and no lasting physical damage. But, of course, the doctor couldn't stand her anymore, and so the relationship broke — he was married anyway.

So she confessed to the affair, and she confessed to the abortion, and then she went into a further confession. She said, When my husband invited me out the first time, I liked him, and I thought I should tell him what happened, but I couldn't. And after we had gone together for a while, I thought I should tell him, but I couldn't. And when he proposed to me, I thought I should tell him, but I couldn't. And before the wedding, I wanted more than anything else to tell him, but I couldn't. And we married, and I thought, before we went to bed the first night, I should tell him, but I couldn't. And now, she said, every time he touches me, my skin recoils. I can't stand him. I know I should tell him, but I couldn't.

Oh, Dr. Osgard — a bishop, a true bishop, one of the rarest of all things — stood up, and he put his hands on her head, and he said the absolution. She stood up and said, Well, I suppose I better go home and tell my husband this story. Dr. Osgard said, What story? What story?

Boy, if you ever saw apostolic succession in your whole life, there it is, and it wasn't even close. Fabulous. So he stood with her, and mended the marriage. What story? That's the forgiveness of sins, you see — that's why that word aphiemi is used.

Exactly — to release, to efface. Originally, to release — you're literally taking the face off the accusation, so that the bondage breaks. That's what we're doing in the absolution. Which is why I'm so firmly in favor of setting it up — you preach it, teach it, and then you make it available. I think, for instance — with all of the sexual hijinks, the acrobatics and all the rest of it — these church college dormitories have become like brothels, you can't imagine, in the ELCA. They talk about sexting, they talk about sex, they talk about nights when your roommate doesn't come back to the room, because the room is being used for sexual purposes. This is crazy. And, of course, the church colleges are all in favor — privately, they say publicly, Satan, no, no, no, no, but privately, they don't do anything to discourage this kind of stuff. So you've got all kinds of people who are victims and who are living with it.

I went to Concordia College in Moorhead, from which I graduated — the only Concordia that's not Missouri Synod — and I did something completely countercultural. I preached a sermon in chapel on the Sixth Commandment. And I said, The Sixth Commandment makes a distinction between friendship and marriage. Friendship is a great gift, but you give yourself to a friend in such a way that you're retrievable, because you will have other friends — some friends last a lifetime, not very many, most of your friends are interchangeable. When you give yourself in marriage, you give yourself in such a way that you're irretrievable — you can't get yourself back again. The joy of friendship is you can get yourself back again. The joy of marriage is you can't get yourself back — you've given yourself in a way that you're joined, you become one flesh, inseparable.

So I preached this in chapel. I knew what I was doing — I knew the Sixth Commandment had not been preached in that chapel forever, and I knew the faculty would be upset, and I knew the feminists would go bananas, which is exactly what happened, and I knew all kinds of stuff. But I wasn't prepared for what happened with the students. I spent the whole afternoon hearing confessions from coeds, one after another, and they all said the same thing: My boyfriend was my boyfriend, and I thought so much of him, and he wanted sex, and I thought, all right. And so we made love, and now I can't stand the sight of him. I don't want him near me. I cannot take it anymore. And they were just sick unto death of what they'd done — it was full-blown repentance. Here they are, students at the college of the church, with a religion department, and nobody in the school knew the burden they were carrying. I could have been absolving for a couple of days there, because they were so burdened.

So when I saw that, I started insisting that students who wanted me — of course they can go to anybody to get married, a judge, anybody else — I say to them, If you want me to marry you, you have to go to confession and absolution first. I won't marry you without that. I don't care if you go to somebody else — just so long as the person knows what he or she is doing, and you make sure that you are absolved, because if you begin a marriage in the brokenness of serial relationships, the marriage will fail. But if you begin the marriage in the forgiveness of sins, if you begin the marriage in Christ Jesus, he will mend it, and you're free. And I found out, when I started doing that, that I didn't get to have as many weddings, but the students wanted the absolution.

So I think there are ways like this that you can make absolution a regular part of your pastoral care, and once that happens, it creates an appetite for itself — people start seeking it. I get calls regularly — You want to go have coffee? Sure. And when we get together, I hear — when people start packing around, you know, Do you still do what you used to do? Would you mind? It's part of it. It's ordinary pastoral care.

Oh, that's ordinary pastoral care — that's extraordinary, ordinary pastoral care. There's hardly any of it left.

But that's soul-curing in the deepest sense — you're dealing with people in their conscience, dealing with their sense of themselves. You didn't see your — you made me to know wisdom.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, is that ever great, yeah. So the value of confession and absolution in the parish is that you ritualize, in confession and absolution, what is almost unbearable personally — almost unbearable personally. You set up a service that's printed, so that people already know the end of the service when they're at the beginning, and that fact enables them to break the code — it enables them to tell the truth. So they know, when they begin to confess, that you are not going to withdraw and say, Uh-uh, not you. They know at the beginning what you're going to say at the end. And when you've served the congregation faithfully in absolution, they know that you're predisposed to the absolution from the start, and that you love Christ Jesus for what he's done for you and for them. So they know you're trustworthy with what has been torturing them.

So when you steward confession and absolution faithfully, you discover that there are all kinds of people you're unaware of who are living on it — who are holding fast. They're going to confession and absolution with stuff they could never bring to you directly, and they're going to confession and absolution with stuff they couldn't tell their wives or their husbands. They're taking it to confession and absolution because they know the end — they know they're going to be absolved. And while you might get suspicious of that as encouraging insincerity, in fact it does exactly the opposite. The freedom to confess is the freedom to tell the truth, and because I know that I can tell it, I'll tell the whole thing. I won't hide, I'll acknowledge — and then you're in business. Once people know the public absolution for what it is, they'll start wondering about private absolution, and then you can set something up. If you start without that, they'll just think you're a crazy liturgical reformer, and there's no use for you.

Could you share a little bit about your thoughts regarding the pastor's family — his wife, or even adult children who may still live at home — and confession and absolution for them?

We were talking about this a little bit earlier. A layperson cannot use the full absolution, which is dependent on the office, but a layperson can declare forgiveness on personal terms. A layperson cannot say, In his name and in his stead, I forgive you your sins, but a layperson can say, Your sins are forgiven, for Jesus' sake. And that's important, because living in a congregation, you live in the context of the communion of saints, and there are people — not many, but some — who are trustworthy, to whom the pastor's wife can go.

I'm real reluctant about the strain — a husband and a wife, when you put two sinners together, belly to belly, for a lifetime, you're playing with terrible odds, and if you add to the burden intimate, secret knowledge, you're tipping it in favor of disaster. I don't like that. I'm real hesitant about that, because I've seen too much — people expecting too much of one another, and telling things they can't handle. Love is possessive. If I think of my wife with another man, I go wild, I can't stand it. Tolstoy used to say, No man has ever lived till he's thought of the possibility of his wife's adultery, which will give you a pretty good idea about Tolstoy. I know people who have survived that, but there's a kind of hardness in them that's just not — it's like, well, some cultures treat defecation and intercourse as similarly unspeakable.

Would you ever have a pastor's wife, or their adult children who still live at home with their father as pastor, seek out another pastor?

Absolutely — close by, absolutely, trustworthy. I would watch it, I wouldn't send them to just anybody. But, you know, for instance, you guys can trust one another, you do trust one another, and in a situation like that, I'd say for sure. But if you've got somebody who's measuring you and testing you, I would never send my family to somebody like that, because he's going to jump on the confession and use it. I come from the old culture, as you clearly recognize, and my confidence in the elderly is strong. When I have had difficulties like this, I have gone to elderly people whom I've known, and I've never had trouble — I've gotten the help I've needed without some kind of inappropriate aftermath, and there's such tenderness and such love that you just rejoice in it. You may know, for instance, an older person from a neighboring congregation — there are some women who have really great gifts at this, and they are oftentimes people who have had a hard time, who have been softened by the Holy Spirit through bitter experience.

I always love to tell about this — one of my students was a pastor in Eastern North Dakota, and they were starting to teach plumbing courses in the schools — you know, they were going to teach sex — and, of course, what you get is studies in coupling, you don't get anything that has to do with faith, and they're proud of it. It's like teaching something disengendered. So he saw this happening, and he knew an old couple in his congregation who were free — I mean, the old man couldn't keep his hands off of her, and she loved it. So he had them come and teach the Sixth Commandment to his confirmands, and he said it was like an epiphany, because the kids had heard their parents fight, and they'd seen some of the trouble at home, but here was an old couple sitting holding hands. And one of the things they told the kids was that before they had intercourse, they always said grace — it was just part of their life together. And the old woman said, Yeah, he really has to say a lot of grace now — she starts joking. And the kids had never seen anything like that, where these two old people were just free as the birds, singing with joy, receiving one another. It was about as positive as it could possibly be.

Well, the aftermath of it was that the boys recognized somebody they could talk to, in ways they were having big trouble talking to their dads, and the girls recognized somebody they could talk to as well. Traditionally, aunts have been the ones girls have talked to, but now there was an old woman in the parish they knew would not condemn them. So the boys were going in the front door to talk to the old man, the girls were going in the back door to talk to the old woman, and those two became the chief sexual counselors in that little town. They were pretty soon going to marriages of couples they'd helped, and for them it was just about the sweetest vocation they could think of. It was a very small thing that turned out to be explosive in its implications. Think of a randy old couple like that — good Lord's got use for them.

A question about despair, depression, and absolution, and talking with people who struggle with suicidal ideation, desire for death, over months and years of time — and very often there's a huge reluctance to avail themselves of the benefit of hearing the absolution. And the refrain is, The moment I hear the absolution, I again want to die. And wanting to die is not particularly healthy or spiritually a good setting. What do you recommend for people who are in such a state of despair that they don't experience a word of absolution as a time of new beginning, new life, new hope? Do you still recommend that they do it, or would you want another approach in this state of wanting to die — I couldn't even hear the absolution. Well, that's how I deal with it — I don't know.

Oh, I love the question — I give thanks for the question. I hear what you're doing with those people in your question, and I hear their confidence in you, and what they've told you, and I think that's magnificent. What I hear is this — as I was talking about this afternoon earlier — they've heard the Law so powerfully that it has silenced the good word, they have heard your sins so powerfully that they can't hear are forgiven, and so absolution has turned into an indictment. There are several possibilities. God indeed tempts no one to sin, but we pray in this petition that the devil, the world, and our sinful self will not deceive us, and so lead us into unbelief, despair, and other great and shameful sin. When a person can't hear the absolution, they're in the grip of a power that's bigger than they are, and to try to imagine a voluntary release — it's not going to happen.

But look at this: they have talked. They have said out loud the unspeakable word. They've acknowledged it in the presence of God, and you, and you. And so, given that fact, it's like Jesus said — they're not far from the kingdom. These are people right on the edge, and, like Luther said, I nearly died of despair until I found out how close to grace despair is. They're on the reverse side of the coin, and look at this — on the reverse side of the coin, they've reached around the other side, and they've named it to you, which is an act of desperation and courage, fortitude, and faith. So the question for the absolver becomes a question of appropriate ways to speak the absolution.

Here are some examples of what I mean. I was telling you this morning about my friend Paul Smith, the Latvian psychologist who was a professor at Luther, who dealt with schizophrenics. He was convinced that when a person can't hear it, the community has been called to multiply the speakers. So he would arrange for people to call and to stop by, to drop in, and to say, just a quiet word, at church: Christ Jesus will never fail you. And that proved to be just about irresistible for a lot of people, because it was multiplied. Maybe that's it — that they need more gracious speakers than they're hearing. If you weren't a gracious speaker, they wouldn't be speaking to you. So you multiply witness. And because we're in a community here, in Doxology, in the ministry and in our congregations — in you, as a member of the church who has been called to your vocation — because we're in a community, we can go beyond putting people back on themselves. The community can call them beyond themselves by giving itself, just by being there.

I have several cousins who are schizophrenic, and my sister as well.

Could you talk something about the connection between baptism and confession and absolution?

Oh, for sure. You are baptized into Christ Jesus, baptized into his death and resurrection. You bear in your body a death like his, and in the end you will be raised with him, just as you are now being raised with him through his word. So one of the things he gives you to sustain you in that relationship is a neighbor. You're not alone against your sins. Sin works through deception, isolation. So, as Luther says, when you're baptized, you're placed on the belly of your mother, the Church, and there's a community that incorporates you and sustains you. And in that community, we bear one another's sins — we bear them negatively, in that we can't get far enough away from them, but we bear them positively too, in that we know a sinner when we see one, and we have a pretty good idea what's going on, and we bear with one another.

In that context, you can confess. Nobody's going to be surprised. Nobody's going to say, You're kidding — or, like one of my friends, the first time he heard a confession, said, You what? No. But you can — confession becomes an opportunity. You're joined, you have a neighbor, and that neighbor is the pastor — good; your pastor, better still; hey, a pastor to whom you trust, a brother from the collegium, or another to whom you can go — and in that way it's part of the daily dying and rising. You are under the power of the Holy Spirit, who is convicting you of your sins, and so he gathers you together with neighbors who hear your confession and say, Be at peace. Who can say, Christ is for you. And that becomes part of your daily rising.

I mean, it can be as rich as that. I don't ever confess all my sins to my wife — she knows I'm a sinner, and she knows it better than most, but I never tell her the whole story. There are some things that would be a burden to her, and that would be crucifying her unnecessarily. So when my eyes linger — that doesn't happen so much as it once did — but when my eyes linger on the bottom of a pretty girl, I don't go and confess to her, I don't say, Golly — that doesn't help her, and it doesn't help me either. So there are some things you don't say, but your wife is the one to whom you can speak. To live together in the forgiveness of sins is a beautiful thing.

My wife and I have been married forty-seven years. If she ever told everything she's got on me, it would be all over. But she loves me, by some incredible twist of fate, and I love her, and we speak the word to one another. We have devotions every morning, and we sing hymns together, and we pray together, and I hear her prayers. If I were the good Lord, I would surrender immediately. It's just gorgeous — her preoccupation with our grandchildren, she's just head over heels, she can't resist, and neither can I. When we pray for our grandchildren — we have two grandchildren who are unbelievers, never been baptized — yesterday morning, before I left, she started praying for those two girls, and it was just love cascading. You know them, Christ Jesus, she said, and you can help them, and we can use some help, because we can't get through. You can do it. Well, you know, there — you're being ministered to, and you're being cared for, and that's just fabulous.

So to live together in the confession of sins, with no illusions — we have always gone to sauna, that's one of the things, almost always. We go to sauna on Wednesday night, and sometimes on Saturday night, and we sit in there together — we're old, and we don't much care anymore, and we live out in the woods, so we're Adam and Eve out in our sauna. It's so fabulous, she's just gorgeous. But we sit together in the forgiveness of sins — that's just embodied in the relationship, and she's preaching all the time to me, like that, without opening her mouth, which I think is the best way possible.

And yet our Lord speaks of joy — where is that drawn from, now, in the text?

You are a word man — you have been called and ordained by and for the word, and so the word has become an agency in you. It has become the subject of your verbs, and is the active agent at work in your ministry. So for me, the joy of the text is being immersed in it, living in it. When I was a young pastor, I did full-dress exegesis of every text in the lectionary. I was determined that I would hear it, and I still have two big shoeboxes full of note cards that I took while I was interpreting the text. And I started a habit then of reading the biblical text through — the Old Testament four times a year, and the New Testament five times a year, and the Psalms every day. So I've come to know many of the psalms by heart, just from being immersed in them. Not that I'm a model of anything, but that level of immersion in the text was necessary to me, and it's been my deepest joy as a pastor.

So my habits are these: I start Tuesday morning with a text, and I start reading it. I know the text, I've worked on it, I've been in the text, but still the text comes up strange. I read it till that happens — I just keep pushing it till, finally, it refuses to be pushed anymore, and it comes back and starts interpreting me. That's when I know I'm on pay ground. That's so much fun — that's just intriguing beyond any kind of measure, and I love that. And then — I would read the text in the morning, and I'd read Luther in the afternoon. That's been my life's work. I've taught Luther all over the place, and I still read Luther, because Luther is a wonderful companion to the text. He hears the text in an entirely different way, and that's the joy — you have a companion. You're not alone. And Luther's got comments on nearly every text ever written, and some that weren't. So it's just fun.

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; praise him, all creatures here below; praise him above, ye heavenly host; praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.