Confessing sins to plants

You may have read about a recent chapel service at Union Theology Seminary at which the students prayed to a group of plants confessing how they had sinned against the plants. As people heard about this the seminary posted on their Twitter account "Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?"

I ate a salad for lunch on Wednesday so I guess I could have confessed to them that I might have eaten some of their cousins. But, if I did that I would probably have had to confess to some cows about the hamburger I had for lunch yesterday. There is no telling how much penance I would have to do to appease the hogs with all the bacon I eat!

Scripture is clear that if one does not worship the Creator one will worship creation. The apostle Paul in Romans 1 writes that "although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man - and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things."

John wrote that "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9)." He goes on to write, "If anyone sins we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." Our Advocate is not some oak tree in the middle of a forest or a dandelion growing in our back yard. Our Advocate is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and it is God alone who can forgive sins. Praying to and worshiping anything other than God is paganism.

If we want to know what is wrong with many of our churches we need to look no further than this example. Churches across our nation are being led by individuals who have seminary degrees from institutions that have forsaken the Scriptures for man-made philosophies and secular worldviews. They stand in the pulpits denying the truths of the Bible and spreading the fables they have been taught to unsuspecting listeners.

This is not a recent problem. Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught at Union for a short time in 1939. Even then he was shocked at the liberalism of the students and wrote they "are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanist phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level." He remembered the students laughing at a lecture about sin and forgiveness. Bonhoeffer decided to leave Union to return to Germany to resist the Nazis where he would later be executed for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler. One can only wonder what he would have thought about this recent chapel service.

As I was listening to a radio program this morning this chapel service was discussed. The hosts spent a good while making fun of this seminary and pointing out, as laymen, how wrong it was to seek forgiveness from plants. I had to laugh at some of their comments, but this really is no laughing matter. At least, it shouldn't be to anyone who cares about the church and the Kingdom of God. If the men and women who are preparing to lead the church are not taught to worship the one true God and to respect the authority of the Scriptures, what hope is there for the church and for those people for whom Christ died to save?