 I'm gonna start with a story that some of you have heard me tell before it would have been probably the spring of 1997 and I was driving down East Leonard Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan past St. Alfonso's Catholic Church And I noticed the church as I was driving by and I suddenly had a very strong urge to drive into the parking lot and go to confession and that in itself may not be so surprising to many of you because maybe you too have had that experience of Seeing an icon or seeing a church or something and being Convicted in your heart reminded of the things of God and think you know I really need to make myself right with God and Get back to that sacrament But in this case what made it so unusual was two things First of all, I wasn't a Catholic Secondly, I was the pastor of a Protestant church three blocks away It's so you may wonder Why back in the spring of 97 was a Protestant indeed a Calvinist pastor Why was I having this urge? to Go to confession to a Catholic priest and so I want to explain a little bit about that. It's it's essentially because Confession the sacrament of confession is a biblical doctrine and I was early in my Protestant pastorate and It was difficult to think of something new every week to preach about since Protestants didn't have the Lexionary, you know, they kind of had things pre-packaged for you so I would preach sermon series and I went through different books of the Bible I started with Philippians because the epistle of joy one of my favorite books and then I did some other epistles of Paul and Then I decided to do James and so I was preaching a sermon series through James And I got to James chapter 5 and you can anticipate what I came across And so I was about halfway through the chapter in my sermon series and I came across James 5 14 and following where it says is any among you sick let him call for the elders of the church Let them pray over him anointing with oil the name of the Lord and The prayer of faith will save the sick man and the Lord will raise him up and if he has committed sins He will be forgiven therefore confess your sins to one another and Pray for one another that you may be healed and I prided myself as a Protestant pastor in Always taking the word of God Literally okay, that is at face value as much as possible. Yes I knew there were literary devices and there were symbolic passages and so on but I wanted to live the full word of God Plus I was in a downtown church that nobody cared too much about that's why they had sent me there and There wasn't a lot of oversight and so I could basically do what I wanted and so I was trying to Run my little church according to the New Testament's like get back to the basics odd fontase all that kind of thing Let's New Testament Christianity was what I was trying to implement in downtown Grand Rapids And so we're gonna follow everything just like the Bible says so I got to this passage It says confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed and I thought How is that gonna work? In my little congregation So first I thought well, you know, we have this praise and prayer time during these morning worship service on Sundays May we can pass the mic around and have some confession of sin Nah, that's not gonna work We have small groups, you know, we have small groups that meet, you know, maybe people can confess to one another in Bible studies Nah See we're in a neighborhood where what we used to say is everyone's in everyone else's business, right? Little downtown neighborhood. Everybody knew each other's business So, yeah small groups that wasn't gonna be confidential And so I thought all these different ways and there was no way I could think of that we could practically implement this divine command To confess our sins to one another Okay, I saw all kinds of bad consequences that could happen. I saw that the potential for scandal What if one of the elders, you know? shares in a small group some kind of Secret sin of his You know and then and then a young person hears about this and thinks well if elder so-and-so can do that Why you know I could do that too, you know Or what if what if somebody shares in a group of their sins and they get bad counsel, you know The other people in the Bible study that they're sharing with us is bad. That's not so bad. I do that, too And then you have the blind leaving the blinds, right? So so bad, you know bad counsel scandal Breeds of confidentiality All kinds of problems I could see arising from this So I was very frustrated you see because I was trying to live New Testament Christianity And I could not think of a practical way of obeying what the New Testament was telling me to do even though I was the pastor and I could set the rules and my congregation And then it occurred to me because I had a little bit of familiarity with Catholicism because my dad was a Navy Chaplain and we had grown up with Catholic chaplains and in fact Usually, you know, we use the same chapel on the military base And there would be three masses with one Protestant service sandwiched in between You know, so I go to my Protestant service on on the weekend and see my Catholic friends coming in and going out You know on both sides and So I knew something a little bit about Catholicism, but I knew something about The Catholic sacrament of reconciliation and for one of the first times in my life I was actually a bit envious of Catholicism Because it occurred to me gosh those Catholics have a way of carrying out God's will that I don't And I began to hunger for that because aside from all the other issues that I mentioned There was something deep and personal going on with myself There were habitual sins in my life that I could not break out of and I wanted healing in my own life and I wasn't getting it and I reflected on this this passage from James and I heard the spirit speaking Confess your sins to one another pray to one another that you may be healed I thought maybe the reason I am not experiencing spiritual healing in my own life is Because I'm not obeying this command from the scriptures to confess sins because I'm too embarrassed And also there's no way to really do it in my context And so this is where the idea arose As I'm driving by saying how fun it's this church, okay Maybe I could sneak in there, you know, I know a couple of the things to say from watching movies Bless me father for I have since other like that, you know Yeah, besides, you know, I thought well, maybe the priest would just talk to me, you know Even if I had confessed to I'm not Catholic, you know, but there's just some things I need to get off my chest So I had this really real longing to fulfill this divine command to confess my sins and to be healed And I couldn't see a way out of my predicament. Well, I'll tell you what I Never could screw up the courage to pull the car over Okay, the ultimate fear that got me was one of my parishioners would see me going in the church I Didn't want to deal with the fallout from that so I never got up the courage to drive into the parking lot and You know come to think of it They probably only had a half hour confessions and it was on probably on Saturday at some time and So there were really wouldn't been a priest there anyway, but did not get the courage to do that But we'll come back to that Question we'll come back a little bit later to my journey how my journey in Protestantism actually led me to an appreciation Of the sacrament of reconciliation But for now, I just want to observe, you know, I had at that time back in 1997 I had this interior urge for liberation and that desire for liberation from bondage is a fundamental human desire and One of the most famous stories about liberation from bondage in all the world literature Is the account of the exodus from Egypt? And we all know that story So well from reading it ourselves from pondering it from the various movie versions that have made Cecil B. DeMille all that Charlton Heston We know how it went Moses went to Egypt to liberate the people of Israel And he announced the plagues and the ten plagues fell on the people of Egypt in dramatic fashion And then Moses led the people out and part of the Red Sea led them out into the wilderness led them out to Mount Sinai Where they received the ten commandments and had freedom of religion and freedom of worship there at the Mount And we all know that basic story and it resonates with us As a story of freedom from human bondage from slavery from oppression It's often seen in terms of economic freedom and it's been the inspiration for countless reform movements in the history of mankind but there is a dimension to the exodus that is usually missed and This is the spiritual warfare dimension of the exodus Because the exodus was not simply about liberating the people of Israel from economic oppression The exodus was about divine combat between the God of Israel and the gods of Egypt and That was written into the very nature of those ten plagues Because if we read about those ten plagues from the perspective of ancient Egyptian religion We see that most of them Strikingly were aimed against one or more of the Egyptian pantheon Let's take the first plague the turning of the Nile to blood That was a ritual slaying of the Egyptian God Hopi Which is their name for the Nile God think about it if you're a if you're a worshiper of the Ohio River And you go down to the Steubenville Marina for your morning prayer And as the sun rises over West Virginia you bow three times to the Ohio. Oh Great Ohio bringer of bounteous goodness to us Refresh thy stores of fish that we may be fed, you know, so you go down and you worship the river What if you go down there one morning and the river has been turned to blood? What are you gonna conclude? Your God has been slain, okay And that's what was the implication for the people of Egypt They go the priests of Hopi go to the banks of the Nile that morning They find that that Hopi is bleeding out okay, so the God of the slaves has Defeated one of their main gods because as you know Egypt is called the gift of the Nile Then a little later we have this plague of frogs Frogs everywhere, right? You know frogs come up out of the Nile. They start proliferating all over the land You've got frogs in the bedroom frogs in the living room frogs in the dining room frogs in the fridge Frogs in the sink frogs in this in the streets frogs in the hospital frogs at the coffee shop. Okay, there we go frogs frogs frogs Well, this is a mockery of the Egyptian goddess I don't want to ask anybody to say that to you loudly, but a Hechid is the Egyptian goddess She was the goddess of fertility and she was portrayed as a woman's body with a frog's head So you can see the theme of fertility there. Okay. Hechid has gone crazy. She's out of control Restrain that woman up in the sky, okay Heck, it's gone mad The god of the slaves is making a fool out of her and this overfertility of the frogs is leading to death and stench and piles of rotting corpses of Frog all over the land. I can't go through all of them Let's talk about what are two more The plague of darkness near the end Okay, three days of darkness so dark it could be felt it says What the the head of the Egyptian pantheon the head of the Egyptian Divine hierarchy was Amon Ray the Sun God Okay, what is the meaning of three days of darkness when you worship the Sun God? Well, it's probable that like many ancient peoples The Egyptians believe that when you died your spirit Hovered around your body for a while and you were in a limit a liminal state where you could be resuscitated But most ancient people believed after three days you were completely dead, you know, I'll ability crystal Not just slightly dead, but he's completely dead You know what I'm talking about So after three days, he's all dead. Okay, not just partly dead, but all dead completely dead So the three days of darkness is the ritual slaying of Amon Ray the Sun God And then the last plague the plague on the firstborn targets Pharaoh himself and his first and his His firstborn son his heir because both the Pharaoh and his heir were considered divinities So in that final plague it was the death of yet another divinity the heir to the throne So the plagues and the exodus were liberation from the gods of Egypt an often Overlooked verse exes 1212 the Lord says concerning the Passover I will pass through the land of Egypt that night and I will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt both man and Beast and on all the gods of Egypt. I will execute judgments. I am the Lord and the Passover was not just a Meal Initiating a covenant relationship with God, which it was But it was more than that. It was a spiritual warfare meal The Passover marked the transition from their bondage to Egypt and its gods to their liberation under the one true God and They had to mark the doors of their households with the sign of the Lord the God of Israel and Thus associate themselves with the God of Israel and if they did not associate themselves with him through the blood of the lamb They came under the judgment of the false gods as the angel of death moved through the land So the exodus is about spiritual warfare It's liberation from the demons Because Egypt was a demon haunted land and The people of God were being liberated from that oppression not just physical liberation, but spiritual liberation not just economic freedom but freedom of worship and freedom of faith and So it went Moses led them out of the land of Egypt led them to Mount Sinai and They're established laws for them and among these laws is one Of particular affection for me, and that's the law of Jubilee Leviticus 25 By God's providence it happens to be the chapter that I did my doctoral dissertation on I'll spare you some of the nitty-gritty on that But in any event the year of Jubilee was essentially intended by God and by Moses to Perpetuate the freedom of the exodus So this is a great thing. We've been liberated from the gods of Egypt. We've been liberated from Pharaoh We have economic and spiritual freedom. We're going into our own land, but what are we gonna do? To ensure that we don't slide back into slavery Well, Moses ordains through divine inspiration Leviticus 25 every 50 years We're gonna blow the trumpet throughout the land and proclaim liberty to the land and all slaves are gonna be set free and all Families are gonna be reunited and all family land is gonna be returned and we're just gonna pass that big Reset button on Hall of Society, and it's all gonna go back to that state of freedom Okay, that was the vision of the Jubilee year So the Jubilee year was tied very much to the idea of exodus the year of Jubilee was the Perpetuation through all time of the exodus principle that principle of liberations that we'd never slide back into slavery Unfortunately, Israel didn't practice Jubilee We find out And they did slide back into slavery of many sorts both economic slavery And they even began to enslave themselves once more to the gods of the nations who are false gods And in fact just demons they began to worship the the demon god Kimosh and the demon god molek and the demonic god Baal And they would act actually sacrifice their children in offering to these divinities as well as perform other Immoral rituals in the worship of these Supernatural beings And because of that the prophets came and the prophets promised that in the future there would be a new exodus Not led by Moses but led by the son of David And so we have all through the prophets this theme that many of you know about that We call the theme of the new or the second exodus a classic example comes from the from the book of Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 11 a passage that we read in the Liturgy of the Hours on Christmas Day, it's so significant and Isaiah 11 verses 10 to 16 are all about the new exodus that God is going to lead one day through the Through the branch that will rise from the stump of Jesse from the house of David So it says in Isaiah 11 verse 10 in that day the root of Jesse shall stand as an ensign to the peoples Him shall the nation seek and his dwellings shall be glorious In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time To recover the remnant which is left of his people from Assyria from Egypt from Pathros from Ethiopia from Elam from Shinar from Hamath and from the coastlands of the sea So a second time he's gonna extend his hand. Well, when was the first time he extended his hand? It's a reference to the extension of the staff of Moses over the Red Sea to part it so that they could be liberated So a second time God is going to perform that and it says when we drop down to verse 11 Excuse me to verse 15 of this passage in Isaiah 11 The Lord will utterly destroy the tongue of the sea of Egypt and will wave his hand over The river Euphrates with his scorching wind and smite it into seven channels that men may cross dry shot So there's our theme of the crossing through the sea and there will be a highway from Assyria For the remnant which is left of his people as there was for Israel when they came up from the land of Egypt So this is one of the most striking of the passages from the prophets that promise this new exodus experience But it wasn't just a new exodus that the prophets spoke of they also spoke of a new year of Jubilee And so another famous passage that's familiar to many of us Isaiah 61 Verses one and two the spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me To bring good tidings good news the gospel to the poor He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty to the captives The opening of the prison to those who are bound and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor So what's going on in this beautiful passage? Well We have an Isaiah many of what we call servant songs right these beautiful prophetic poems that speak about the mysterious servant of the Lord Unfortunately, Isaiah doesn't tell us much explicitly about who this character is and so we have to piece it all together by clues By clues we can piece together that he's a royal figure that he's a figure that stands in the tradition of David and That he's got a prophetic role and a precy role But here this Servant song is special because it's in the first person the servant of the Lord Isaiah servant is actually speaking and here He speaks about being anointed to preach the poor and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor And the language that Isaiah uses in Hebrew. He's actually using rare words from Leviticus 25 Harking back to that ancient passage that ancient law of the year of liberation every 50 years and In the mouth of the coming servant of the Lord He's saying that the servant of the Lord will come to proclaim the definitive year of jubilee To restore that liberation that was gained in the Exodus Now what happened after Isaiah? Isaiah is writing in the 700s, BC Well these this prophecy of course was not immediately realized and For hundreds of years the people of Israel languished waiting for the coming servant of whom Isaiah spoke while they sat there languishing different Traditions and different movements arose in among the people of Israel Some of them we know from the pages of the New Testament like the Sadduceean movement and the Phariseic movement One of the movements that arose it's not mentioned by name in the New Testament is the movement of the Essenes This was a holiness movement given to practicing celibacy and asceticism Who took seriously the promise of the prophets that a new covenant was coming and in fact They organize themselves into a new covenant community Even prior to the coming of the servant of the Lord that they saw predicted in the pages of Isaiah This group these Essenes these are of course the ones who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls Which is essentially the fragmentary remains of their library at their main monastery on the northwest shores of the Dead Sea and These Essenes these pious Israelites who show up in the pages of the gospels and you can recognize them if you know about them If you know what to look for for example when Jesus sends Peter and John into Jerusalem to get ready for the Passover he tells them to look for a man doing what? Carrying a jar of water, right and we never think very much about that But let's think about that for a moment. Did men carry water in the ancient world? Nah, that was women's work, right? So who among the Jews were would be men that would carry water? Well only men who didn't have any women folk to do their women's work for them And there was only one branch of Judaism that practiced celibacy lived in male celibate community And that was the Essenes and they had a quarter of Jerusalem where celibate male Essenes would live And so when Jesus says go into Jerusalem find this man. He's talking about an Essenes So anyway, these Essenes these pious Israelites pondered the words of the prophets And it occurred to them as they reflected on the texts That you know what Israel's biggest problem was not foreign oppressors They pondered the histories First and second Samuel first and second Kings and thought you know what the Philistines weren't the real issue were they? The Persians weren't the real issue were they the Babylonians weren't the real issue the Moabites the Ammonites the Edomites Those weren't the real issue What was the real issue? We could not break out of sin And these foreign oppressors that came against us who were they representing? They were representing Beelzebul Okay, the prince of darkness Whom God used to punish us because we could not break out of our sin So they began to ponder the words of the prophet Isaiah That spoke about the coming servant the Lord who had announced a Jubilee That would liberate the people of Israel and they said to themselves, you know what? This Jubilee of the servant of the Lord that's going to come is Not going to be first of all about the Romans or the Greeks or some other foreign oppressor This Jubilee that is to come is going to liberate us not from monetary debt But from the debt of sin and this Jubilee that's going to come is going to liberate us from the power of Beelzebul And so they wrote a document that we found among the Dead Sea Scrolls That scholars call 11 Q. Melchizedek 11 because it was found in the 11th Cave Q because it was found at Qumran the site where this monastery was and Melchizedek because it's about a messianic figure whom they called Melchizedek the king priest And this is part of what the document said. It says in the latter days Excuse me in the latter days The people of God will be the inheritance of Melchizedek Who will return to them what is rightfully theirs? He will proclaim to them Jubilee thereby releasing them from the debt of all their sins For this is the time decreed for the year of Melchizedek's favor In that day he Melchizedek will deliver them from the power of Belial and from the power of all the spirits that are predestined to come and this is a first century BC text that precedes the coming of our Lord By at least a half a century or more And so when we go into the Gospels and we see for example in the Gospel Luke that famous passage in Luke 4 Where our Lord goes into the synagogue of Nazareth And it was brought to him as is was the custom the book of the prophet Isaiah And he opens up that book and he finds Isaiah 61 and he begins to read in Luke 4 18 The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to sit at liberty Those who are oppressed to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and as we know our Lord closed the book gave it back to the Attendant sat down all the eyes of the synagogue were fixed on him now I never understood this growing up. He sits down and I thought oh that means he's not gonna give a homily Like what's going on here? You know he reads for the book and it just sits down like okay I'm not gonna preach What I failed to realize is for the Jews they sat down to preach So when he sits down after reading from the prophetic scroll that means this is the beginning of his sermon And he gives a dramatic pause right until all the eyes of the synagogue are on him waiting for him to begin His sermon and how does he begin his sermon today? This scripture is fulfilled in your hearing Brothers and fathers that was like Lighting a match and throwing it on to a pile of gasoline soaked rags Because you have one of the major groups of Jews is going around saying hey Any time now Melchizedek is gonna return and proclaim the eschatological jubilee So you're like one in four Jews is part of that movement And here comes this teacher from Nazareth sits down Reads the very part of Isaiah that the Essenes had used in their own prophecies in their own documents Say I am the fulfillment Well, what's he gonna do okay is he gonna march down and kick out the Romans and Establish his own government a socialist revolution redistribution of property Redistribution of wealth is that what he's gonna do is get March down to Jerusalem with his band of warriors and implement this It's not what we find in the gospel Luke You know what the next thing we find him doing is The next prick if he is He encounters a man possessed by a demon in the synagogue He starts screaming. What have you to do with us Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are the holy one of God And what does Jesus do? Rebuked him saying be silent and come out of him And when the demon had thrown him down in the midst he came out of him having done him no harm He liberates people from the power of Belial This is exactly what the Essenes had promised and anticipated and what happens of Just in the next chapter in the very next chapter after performing other exorcisms Casting out and liberating people from the power of demon Four men come burying a man on a paralytic and they can't get to him so they dig through the roof They lower the man down. We know the story. Well, and what does he say to the paralytic? Man your sins are forgiving you Who is this that even forgives sins who can liberate from the demon and who can liberate from the power of sin? This is a mysterious man But he's fulfilling what was expected by those pious Israelites who had pondered the message of the prophets and the true meaning of the historical books So this is the ministry of our Lord. Yes, it's a ministry of liberation. Did he proclaim the eschatological jubilee? Yes But it wasn't a political jubilee It was freedom from Satan and it was freedom from sin. Well, how is that relevant to us? That was 2,000 years ago that a Lord had his ministry. How does this continue? Years ago, I'm very much indebted to dr. Han for pointing out to me a principle that has radically Enriched my reading of scripture In that principle is this The power of christ manifested in his signs in the gospels Is still available to us through the sacraments of the church I want to give credit where credits do Okay So that was dr. Han that pointed this out to me But the signs lead to the sacraments the signs lead to the sacraments and when we grasp that truth We begin to make sense out of scripture For example, we're all familiar with that famous passage in john 1412 Truly truly, I say to you he who believes in me will also do the works that I do and greater works than these Will he do because I go out to the father Ever ponder what are these greater works that we're going to do? You know, are we going to raise three people from the dead at once? Yeah You know 500 exorcisms simultaneously, you know, what are we going to do to top jesus? Okay What are we going to do to to trump the miracles of the son of god? Okay, well none of those things really But when we read the gospel of john Don't we see our lord encouraging the people not to become fixated on physical signs? Doesn't he criticize them when they become too attached? Yeah, to the physically miraculous Why is that? It's because the signs that he's performing among the people point to deeper realities To point to miracles of the supernatural order Miracles that are eventually fulfilled in the sacraments of the church as father gargoyle grange Says in the in the three conversions of the spiritual life. He makes this comment He says even the raising of the dead to life the miracle by which a corpse is reanimated with its natural life Is almost nothing In comparison with the resurrection of a soul Which has been lying spiritually dead in sin And now has been raised to the essentially supernatural life of grace And where is it? That a soul is resurrected to the life of grace well one case is baptism And then in the case of post-baptism mortal sin the confessional So here one of the greatest dominican theologians of the church Is telling us look the miracles that occur in the sacraments are far beyond and indeed incomparable to any kind of miracle of the natural order And yet if you announce Hey anybody that's got a terminal illness Saturday we're gonna have a special event I pastor john I'm gonna heal anybody with a serious disease. Okay. Well that generates excitement Okay, we all want to come and want to see miracles of the physical order, right? And I don't Disparage that that's wonderful But if we had the eyes of faith, we would see that that saturday confessional time For a half hour before the vigil I hope it's more than that and you're all parishes. Okay That that is truly far and beyond You know removing tumors and fixing broken legs and curing chronic conditions What goes on in that quiet closet? On a saturday afternoon With the beam of sunlight coming through the clear story windows up there, you know, and you could see the dust Floating down Wow, there's a lot of dust in st. peters So you shuffle along Another 30 seconds another minute Going forward in line Doesn't look very exciting heading into a closet Taking a step every two minutes, right? But if we had the eyes of faith, we would realize that miracles of a supernatural order were taking place in that confessional The sacraments are the participation in god's great signs that he performed the wonders he performed in history We all know this concerning baptism At every easter vigil the one non-negotiable reading from The seven from the old testament, you know, oh, we don't want this to take too long. Okay Can't sit there for all seven readings So we'll chop them down to the canonically mandated three, you know But we can't miss which one It's the exodus reading Crossing of the red sea right you can't miss that because that connects so profoundly to baptism Because the sacraments take us into the story How does the meaning of the crossing of the red sea become personally relevant to you joe smith Here at easter 2017. Okay coming into the catholic church How does that event become relevant to you through the sacrament when you're dunked into the waters You are experiencing the crossing of the red sea You are experiencing liberation moving from the demon haunted world of egypt Okay into the glorious freedom of the children of god and into his covenant So baptism is our participation in the great sign that god worked At the cross in the red sea, but we know that the exodus wasn't just about physical liberation It was about spiritual liberation. It was spiritual warfare. And that's why part of the reason why Baptism is Exorcistic and so a rite of exorcism is incorporated into the ritual of baptism Because baptism doesn't doesn't just wash away sin in a passive sense But it actively liberates us from the power of the devil And the theology of the sacrament of reconciliation Builds on the theology of baptism We can think of reconciliation as a kind of second baptism Which renews the liberation that we accomplished when we crossed the red sea at the baptismal font and Since the sacrament of reconciliation is intended by god To perpetuate the liberation that is gained in us Gained for us by our crossing through the waters We can draw a strong analogy between the confessional and the year of jubilee Excuse me The year of jubilee finds its fulfillment In this great sacrament Confession is the new jubilee year And that's why it makes so much sense that pope frances has placed a revival Of the sacrament of reconciliation at the center of this extraordinary jubilee year of mercy Because the sacrament is that perpetuation of jubilee theme every time we begin to sin It'll slide back into slavery to the evil one In the course of our lives after baptism We have this second baptism to which we may have recourse And I saw this in a dramatic way years and years before I actually entered the catholic church And I want to go back now to what I mentioned before about my experience as a Protestant pastor so many years before I never did gather up the courage as I mentioned to go into st. Alphons's church But there was another development in my ministry. I was working in a excuse me Holy spirit bless my throat. Amen. Okay I was doing ministry in an urban neighborhood In downtown Grand Rapids full of all the characteristic Signs of urban blight that we become so familiar with rampant drug use Poverty welfare dependency See me broken families I was witnessing all that And you probably know where you've got all those things going on There is heavy spiritual warfare involved as well, especially with the drug trade I had recovering addicts in my church And they would tell me stories sometime about when they were in the throes of addiction And the crack cocaine would speak to them The drug would talk to them and tell them things to do and draw them over to it Give other kinds of commands. That's not a natural phenomena Medicine is not supposed to speak to you If what's illegally illegally procured So Can you imagine seminary hadn't prepared me for this Was anyone shocked Can you imagine that the seminary didn't have a course in spiritual warfare Or deliverance ministry That we weren't even talked how to recognize when you've got spiritual a supernatural phenomena going on How to distinguish that from other kinds of things that it could be confused with So here I am Okay, but it that's several years in the Protestant seminary No, no courses that I took were any have helped me at all Okay My major was in Greek exegesis Okay When somebody's manifesting supernaturally You can't exegy to passage at them. It's just not that effective I see that your head is spinning around hold there I'll tell you what a greek word means Just not all that helpful Luckily for me. I got in contact with a friend He became a friend Who had been involved in deliverance ministry since the 70s And when he heard the the predicament I was going through basically Many of the persons who who came to my church Were having kind of non natural manifestations in various ways in their lives And all the traditional counseling methods that I had been trained in and pastoral counseling We're not touching it at all. We're completely ineffective And I didn't know how to handle the the weirdness. Okay Of what was going on. So he said, why don't you take these people out to me? I have experience in working in this area and I can help them So I began to take my parishioners out to this friend of mine outside of town And uh, he told me that he was going to help to deliver people from any kind of spiritual oppression that they might have And so I was curious about this. So I didn't know what to expect I you know, I was thinking you know, it's going to be like the movies, right? Gonna walk in are we gonna You know have to hold somebody down. Are they gonna thrash around while he casts out You know demons by by a word of power You know, so I didn't know what to expect. I was a little bit nervous and I had a little bit trepidation But in my first session where I brought a parishioner out to my friend who was involved in deliverance ministry It was really a rather calm and nonchalant. We went in we had had something to drink some soft drinks and relax for a moment and Had a little conversation. So he got to know us and you know Who the parishioner was etc And after the pleasantries were over we got down to work and we went over to a table And my friend will call him Howard Howard prayed and he prayed to bind any demons that were present at that time any demons that were present in the person or In the area not to manifest themselves And after praying that prayer He pulled out a three-ring binder. Okay, very thick one In which he had hundreds of pages and page protectors And he opened it up and turned it around so it was oriented to the person who was being delivered and pushed it over to them And he began to move his hand down the page and point to One sin after another that he had listed in this binder Okay This whole binder was a composition of all the sins that he had ever found listed in the bible That he encountered in his personal experience organized in seven different categories So put that and he go down the list and say have you ever committed this have you ever done that? And every time he came across something that the delivery Had committed. He said okay confess and renounce confess and renounce So the person would audibly say I confess that I have done this in my life, you know Give some of the specifics and I renounce this and I accept Christ's forgiveness And so on we would go and this is about a two-hour process to work through that binder Okay, you've done this. Have you done that confess and renounce confess and renounce Well, what does that sound like to you? Okay in hindsight? Right It's a general confession That's what he was taking them through okay a non sacramental general confession And I was really curious about this. So anyway, so the sessions would wrap up and I noticed remarkable difference In these parishioners that I took out To go through this so much that I thought you know what I want to go through this So I did it with him, you know and went through this This kind of non sacramental General confession and I experienced a great spiritual liberation through that process process What was going on there? Well, I asked my friend Howard, you know, how did you get into this? You know, how did you adopt this methodology? And he told me a little bit of background story. He said, you know, John back in the 70s when I first got into the deliverance ministry We did power encounters Power encounters was our Protestant lingo For what we would as cathets recognize as a classic exorcism You know the kind where the demon manifests and you get the supernatural phenomena like the speaking in different tongues and the supernatural strength, etc And then you drive them out by force through the name of Jesus And he explained that they they did that for several years and the problem with that methodology was it was very traumatic As you can imagine as exorcisms are it's traumatic for the person being delivered It's traumatic for those who are involved in deliverance ministry And so they were trying to look for something Something that was safer and something that was Less dangerous as it were and they began to find that if they had Individuals make a thorough confession of sin That those individuals often attained A higher degree of liberation and they maintained it longer than if they underwent the classic power encounter Wow, I thought to myself that is very interesting And it did not occur to me at the time But a few years later when I was on the campus of the university of Notre Dame And I was face-to-face with the Catholic Church in a very existential way for The first time in my life and I began to actually consider whether I become Catholic too This all came back to me and my memories in Protestant deliverance ministry and what I had learned from my friend Howard Suddenly struck me and it occurred to me the confessional is spiritual warfare The confessional is an act of liberation And that's why for my for myself in my process of conversion to the Catholic faith Confession was never an issue Okay for many Protestants that it is, you know the papacy and Mary and the confessional You know and so my Catholic friends as I was in the process of coming into the church They go, you know, are you getting ready? You know, are you like? Yeah, yeah, I'm getting accustomed to these I'm headed out. You know, I'm gonna cross the tie where I'm coming over, you know Just trying to get accustomed to these different things How's the papacy going? Well, you know, there's some questions on the papacy, you know, let's talk about that You know, how's Mary going? Well, I got some questions about Mary, you know, so they would explain to Mary How's confession going? No problems there No problems. I got that down. Okay That's liberation ministry. That's deliverance. That's what that all about. Okay I understand that one See other things So after I would become Catholic I found my personal experiences confirmed in a striking way By various authors including Father Gabriel Amorth Who may be familiar to many of you The former chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome So let me read you some quotes from Father Amorth He writes in his book an exorcist tells a story many times I have written that Satan is much more enraged when we take souls away from him through confession than when we take away bodies through exorcism Again, he writes in his second volume exorcist more stories He answers a question from a reader who writes in with the following statement The reader writes my pastor claims that the best exorcism is a confession Father Amorth writes in reply. He is right It is the most direct means to fight Satan Because it is the sacrament that tears souls from the demon's grasp Strengthens against sin Unites us more closely to God and helps to conform our souls increasingly to the divine will I advise frequent confession possibly weekly to all victims of evil activities Finally just quickly He writes again an exorcist more stories in my experience a good general confession Which I always recommend as a starting point In conjunction with an intense life of prayer and grace is usually sufficient to end the affliction So let's wrap this up tonight in this extraordinary Jubilee year of mercy I want to Second what Pope Francis is calling us to to recognize the sacrament of reconciliation as the fulfillment of the ancient jubilee year As the act of liberation from spiritual bondage an act of freedom from the devils And I want to encourage us too among our people To encourage the revival of the great spiritual tradition of the general confession The general confession was recommended by many saints including st. Francis to sales and st. Ignatius of Loyola Persons of our own time like father Amorth And yet what I find among the young people even here at franciscan university. They've never heard such a thing When I say general confession they mean they think oh, does that is that when like the priest chaplain like Upsols everybody before they go into battle No, that's general absolution Okay, a general confession Okay, and many of them need a general confession and we periodically need a general confession It's part of the Ignatian retreat tradition, etc How good it would be if this was revived and our people knew about this because there are many that that could use that that Opportunity the sacrament to make a great stride forward into their growth in holiness In this this year of Reconciliation this year of mercy. I just want to reiterate A call to all of us that I often share with my students I tell them look if you want vague grace make vague confessions But if you want specific concrete grace To overcome what you're actually dealing with Make specific concrete confessions Okay When we name the name of the illness when we reveal the soul to our confessor The more accurately the more specifically we can open up and really say What the need is The more we are available to the healing mercy of god that flows in to liberate us From those handholds that satan has in our life you know There's been a call in the past 30 or 40 years By many who say that modern man demands a theology of liberation I agree We do need liberation theology And i'll give it to you The sacrament of reconciliation is the best liberation theology amen