Some may wonder why I have chosen biblical texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures for today's service, which is to honor a Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

I made that choice carefully to make a statement.  For the past two millennia, Christians have been exaggerating the difference between the two religions. For example, it has been frequently preached, even by liberal Christians in this century, that Judaism worships a God who is stern and strict, the jealous and vengeful judge,  while Christians experience a God of sweet love and tender forgiveness and gentle grace.  As though, these were two different Gods.  As though Christianity were more advanced morally than Judaism.

I hope that the reading of Psalm 130 makes it clear today that in the Old Testament,  God is portrayed as seeking our atonement and repentance for our sins.  God is shown to be extending forgiveness and restoration to those who confess their shortcomings. For whatever other differences exist between Christianity and Judaism about the person and work of Jesus Christ ( a dispute which we tend to not want to take sides), at the common core of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a belief that God forgives the penitent wrong doer.  So for me, it is only an accident of history and culture that Yom Kippur is not a Christian holiday.  Theologically, it could be.
Underlying the message of atonement are some presumptions about ultimate reality that bear a closer look.

One is that life isn't divided up into arenas and spheres:  there isn't a difference between your spiritual life (your relationship with God/Truth/Reality),  your social life (what you do with others, how you act) and your inner emotional life (your relationship with yourself, including your self-knowledge).  It's all one life and everything is connected to each other.

The second presumption of the common Jewish Christian tradition is that we will inevitably get all these parts of our life out of balance and out of whack.  We will live not knowing ourselves, thinking that this or that will make us happy, when it will not.  We don't naturally fall into just and fair and equitable relationships with each other.  People hurt each other and are cruel and thoughtless to each other, often without thinking consciously about it, because we thinking about ourselves.  And we live in a state of alienation from God.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we knew what God wanted us to do, and that we wanted to do it and that it would be the right and just thing to do?   Wouldn't it be great if it was automatic that doing the right thing and being happy were always identical.  At any moment, we could know what would be the best thing to do because it would be what would give us the most pleasure.

Of course this isn't so.  What we want to do and what is the right thing to do in regards to others always seem to be out of joint and often at cross purposes.

The great genius of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in both its Jewish and Christian forms, is that it points us to a very simple first step toward getting all these parts of our lives in balance and coordinated. a simple spiritual discipline that lead to heightened self-knowledge, deeper understanding of who we are in the world, and can eventually bring us to a deeper and fuller knowledge of God.  Like most spiritual practices, it sounds deceptively easy to do, but really hard to do in practice.

It is the "path of Atonement."  (Referring to something as a spiritual path always makes it sound so exotic and cool, doesn't it?)  The sacrament of confession doesn't have the same ring, does it?

Our moral tradition presumes that we are, in fact, alienated from God and from each other, and even from ourselves.  This is a given of life.  No matter how hard we try, no matter how carefully we think about ourselves and others, no matter how carefully we try to exclude negative thoughts from our thinking, no matter how much we study and read and think, we will not achieve much more than a temporary state of graceful balance.

Our equivalent of the Zen Masters -- the Desert Fathers of the 5th Century CE -- went out into the wilderness and radically simplified their lives to devote themselves completely to their spiritual development.  What they report is that out there, free from all the distractions of city life, they were still out of balance and still out of synch with God.  They were confronted by temptation, absorbed by their egos, consumed with petty jealousy, tormented by lust, and burdened by pride, just like the people in the cities they left behind.  They were poorer,  hotter, hungrier, dirtier and more thirsty but they were still sinners.

Heck, if that is all you can hope for, I would rather stay here and eat in nice restaurants.
To go to the other extreme, there are among the neo-pagans in our culture, a very simple and not very strict moral code is lifted up.  "Do what you will, but cause no one harm."  Ahh, what a simple code this is: no fasting, no religious duties, no self-denial, full enjoyment of the pleasures of life,  just one simple rule: cause no one harm.

I would imagine that at the end of the day, those who seek to follow that one simple rule find themselves as out of sorts and out of balance as the desert fathers did.  Knowing what is right in a given situation, and overcoming selfish desire to do something is NOT made any easier by having a shorter rulebook.

What we are offered as the only way forward to inner peace, spiritual balance and spiritual growth is the path of atonement.  We are urged to evaluate our lives frequently, see the mistakes that we made, look for the ways that what feels good to us and what is right have gotten out of balance, out of synch.  And where they are out of balance, we are called to recognize it, name it and regret it.  This is confession, repentance and atonement.  If we have gotten on the wrong road, then we need to retrace our steps to find that fork back there where we chose wrong,  and then to choose again.

Our lives will always be becoming unbalanced, by atonement we bring them back into balance.  And in every re-examination, we know ourselves better, and we learn more about what hurts and what helps the people around us, and how the world feels to them. It is by atonement that we actually come to know God.
OK, if atonement is so good for us, then how come I hate is so much?  How come all my confessions sound like that satiric prayer in the newsletter this week:

"Dear God. Notwithstanding the universal opinion of all my friends, that I intend for the very best, it is ironic that what some might think to be mistakes have occurred in the general area of my life.  If so, I am as surprised and dismayed as you are and am deeply, deeply sorry.  Can I get up now?   Amen."

Why do we have the resistance to making confession, to labeling our errors as sins of either omission or commission that we have made?

Some say that it is because we are too proud too convinced of our rectitude, too self-satisfied.  It fits with a stereotype of ourselves that we kind of love -- it is after all, Unitarians who like to tell the joke, which is really a joke on ourselves, that the difference between a Universalist and a Unitarian is that A Universalist believes that God is too good to damn us to Hell, and a Unitarian thinks that we are too good to damn to Hell.

I suspect that we like to make that joke because it is actually not true.  Most of us, like most people in our culture, have the same brittle layer of exaggerated pride over an inner core of personal inadequacy and shame.  In some weird way, it actually makes feel better to say that we are proud and arrogant and convinced of our own rectitude than to admit that most of the time most of us feel mostly awful about ourselves, that we are actually unattractive people who look better and better as we put on more clothes. We are about to found out that we are not that good at our jobs, that we are deeper in debt than anyone knows, and probably meaner to our children than we ever let on.  Those of us who are married generally  suspect that we married better than our spouses did.

Well, it’s no wonder that we don't jump on Yom Kippur and the Day of Atonement with great enthusiasm.  Here's a great idea, let us all sit around and tell each other exactly how pathetic, little, ridiculous and shameful we really are!  That'll be fun!  Then we will have coffee and do lunch.  That'll be a great day!

I met a woman at my intern church, who was by background Jewish.  She was chosen to read prayers on this Sunday, the Sunday that church observed Yom Kippur.  When she came in, she was clearly emotional and I asked her what was up.  She said that Yom Kippur was always hard for her.  Every year, she makes a list of 10 people that she has hurt in her life and she calls them.  The list turns over and is not the same people every year.  But there a few that she calls every year, and every year they hang up on her, because they are not ready to hear her apology and atonement.  Frankly, I would die.

More seriously, many of us have figured out that our heads are filled with "negative self-talk" all ready and that we suffer from "low self esteem."  While these are terms and phrases so common and so current as to be almost cliches, I do not make light of what they describe. Some psychologists have argued that 80% or more of the people in our culture seem to be primarily motivated by their feelings of shame, the sense of being inadequate, not good enough people, people who are worried about their inner lives being found out.  And if I see this among people who are seemingly successful, well-educated and privileged, I imagine it is even more common among the poor, the stigmatized, and the marginalized, all those people who are not confirmed daily by their experiences. So, how on earth can it be a good thing for people who lives are already crippled by shame to sit around dwelling on the mistakes that they have made?

It does all the good in the world.  The great truth of our faith is that confession heals our shame.  As soon as I can name out loud all of my secret shortcomings:  that I am impatient with my children, that I manage my money poorly, that I worry way too much whether people will like me, I am flooded with the sure knowledge that I am not that different than others, that I am not simply the sum of my worst deeds, that however I have erred in the past, I can choose to do differently in the future.

It is as though I am told that God knows each and every one of my secret shames, all that is criminal, and all that is ridiculous and all that is embarrassing about me already and still God gives me ground on which to stand,  and a new day, a new morning to greet.

How is it that confession and sharing heals shame and embarassment?  I don't know, I just know that it does.  And it does over and over and over.

Kids lie awake in the dark at sleepovers and tell their secrets into night and they are healed.

Adults  go to their therapists and unburden their secret fears about themselves and they are healed.

Guys have a couple of beers and oh- so-  casually and ever- so- indirectly confess their shame to each other and they are healed, too.

People confess on chatlines on the internet and on talk radio and in the dark confessionals of Catholic churches and to bartenders and to strangers on the plane and healed, healed, healed; they are all healed of their shame by their confession.

Why?
How? I don't know.
It's in the way we are made;
it's in the way that the Universe works
and All that I can say is Glory! 
Glory to the God who made us this way!
Glory to the God who made the Universe that way!
Glory to the God who made the human heart that heals, and human ears that hear, and human tongues that speak, and human hands that reach out.
Glory to the God of Second chances, and of Third Chances and of Chances without number!
Glory to God who knows our every shortcoming and still holds us upright and sustains us.
Glory to God For God is Just and May be trusted to forgive us our sins, and to heal our every shame and cleanse from us every kind of wrong doing.