Voices is good for confession. It’s obscure enough that you can (probably) confess nearly anything and word wouldn’t get out. Happy are we.

Our big confessions are of course not the organist we’re sleeping with or the money we’re embezzling, but the kind of thing Snapper is confessing here, our idolatries.

Sleeping with the organist or embezzling money would be obvious sins to get us fired. These are smaller things. The larger things are as Snapper, and Hugen and CS Lewis confess are the permissible sins. We want to be famous, wealthy, successful or at least seen as such. We want to gossip about Joel Osteen and his “little group”. We’d like to use Jesus to make us famous and important. We’re right there with James, John and their mother but together with them we demur at Jesus’ answer to them.

Good Friday (or maybe really Maundy Thursday, but liturgically illiterate are we too) is a good day to expose frauds and to see the real deal splayed naked for our mockery. The way of the cross never looks right, even from the perspective of Jesus in the garden. Surely there must be a plan B that will get the job done at a lower cost.

We, unlike Jesus get backed into Good Friday. To our shame most of the crosses we take up are the ones we were unable to avoid.

Fortunately for us, the gospel is about Jesus’ work for us, not the other way round, no matter what we may think. He takes up the cross we deserve, and gives us the life we don’t. This may shame us, but my prayer is that it makes us grateful.

We keep trying to take up little silver crosses, hoping that a little silver Jesus will get busy giving us what we want. We buy books from those who say they can tell us how to do it, with a little religious help from Jesus of course.

To our good fortune and our misery, however, tonight we will rehearse the story and learn the truth. We’ll suppress it with all of the trickiness of our hearts, only to have it pop up on us again, like it always does.

I suppose being a Calvinist means we’re given grace we cannot refuse. I really don’t know how that is supposed to work, I only know that when it does work I am grateful that it has.

The gift sits and sits and sits while I try everything to make it unnecessary. It is too often when I realize that I am in way over my head, that I finally, reluctantly, receive the gift to my joy. I find that I wish I had taken it first and that it has been my folly to ignore it and rely on my own resources. After I feel stronger, better, more self-assured, I go back to my pattern of ignoring, resenting, resisting the gift. Wash, Rinse, Spin, Repeat.

So tonight we will gather with the faithful who have burned through all of their good ideas, their resources, their petty means of making life work. Tonight we hear the bad news about our stubborn resolve to hijack the world and our abysmal failure at running it only to once again see the naked, bloody gift that brings us peace.