A New Year Confession by Stewart Perry
Happy New Year! 2024 here we come!
I have to admit that the hype around New Year has been losing it’s edge the older I am getting. I’m not ashamed to say that again I was tucked up in bed before midnight. I’m happy to live vicariously through others and their adventures on New Years Eve. Watching the queues being released in Sydney Harbour on breakfast television really didn’t inspire me to think of doing that next year but I loved seeing the energy and excitement as people clambered for the best vantage points.
I do love watching how people and groups behave in different circumstances, at different times of year or at events. I am an unashamed student of human behaviour. It helps me try and interpret the world in a way that I can both try and identify God at work or seek to see a space were God can make a difference.
One of the things that I look out for in human behaviour and culture is the way people embody or reflect elements of a Christian world view or the nature of God without them actually realising it. I think New Year is one of those times.
I think New Year is like a version of “cultural confession”. New Year’s resolutions are, in a way, a process of naming what is broken about our lives, and in a cultural version of repentance we commit to doing better, being better and making a fresh start.
Sounds a lot like confession doesn’t it?
But what happens to most New Year’s resolutions? We quickly fall off the wagon and many of our resolutions just reappear the same time next year.
My workout app on my phone is doing a 66 day challenge because they are telling me that it takes 66 days to form a habit. If I select 3 fitness goals, my phone will remind me and I can log how I go with each of those 3 goals for each of the 66 days. While I have decided that I’m not interested in using that feature of the app and will just stick to it tracking my workouts, it did get me thinking… could and should confession, for us as Jesus’ people, be a habit.
Confession is part of the Anglican pattern of worship, at every Sunday service you’ll find a time of confession. It is, however, easy to skip past or gloss over because of it’s familiarity and it can easily blend in with the other words of the service without us taking on board it’s significance. If it takes 66 days to form a habit, there’s only 52 Sundays in a year so even if we’re in church every single Sunday that’s still not 66. So it makes me wonder if just including a prayer of confession in our services is enough for confession to become a habit.
Sundays can be a reminder of the power and importance of confession but for confession to become a habit I do think it’s something that we need to make part of our whole of life and everyday not just when we turn up for church… and here’s a little tip… you don’t need a priest in front of you or even near year for confession to be valid. At any point day or night, as many times in the same day as feels right, we can literally or metaphorically fall to our knees and come before God, be who we really are, because here’s another tip… God already knows… and be open and honest about who we are and who we are not. Aware of the presence of God we can be challenged by the parts of our life that need attention (in church speak we call that being convicted of our sin) and that leads us towards repentance, which leads us towards transformation.
And as Jesus people we are called to be a people of transformation but for that to happen confession needs to be a continuous and habitual part of our lives.
So let Sunday’s be a reminder but don’t just wait till then and don’t be like the rest of the world and wait for once a year… let confession be an every moment part of our relationship with God through Jesus. It’s not about walking around feeling miserable and guilty, it’s actually the opposite, we walk around free and liberated with space to be transformed.
Happy New Year!