Yom Kippur: A Day of Atonement

I went with a friend to Yom Kippur services today. It was my first Yom Kippur prayer service, though not my first worship with a synagogue. My friend explained it to me as the "Jewish Good Friday."

This Reformed Jewish worship was filled with petitions of repentance and pleas for God's mercy. Admonitions from the prophets calling Israel to a truer service to God were read. Individual confession was made by reading in silence two pages of internal self-reflection. We confessed our failure to love, failure to serve justice, and failure to live with Truth. Sexual immorality, not feeding the hungry, twisting the truth to fit our agendas--all of it was confessed and given to God.

And we heard the pronouncement: God forgives you out of his steadfast love and his unending patience.

There's many places I could go with this and our parallels with the Christian faith. But what I think is so striking about this Festival worship is its pertinence to our social condition now. Our systems are crumbling about us, and we need to repent. Our self-support puffed us up to think the bottom could never fall out, but it is. And instead of pushing blame, we need to look inside of ourselves to see how we are all entangled in this mess, and how repentance is the only true path to a better future.

Imagine if Wall Street participated in a collective repentance. Imagine if Congess passed a bill that said, "We're sorry." Imagine if the President held a press conference and apologized.

Imagine if we turned to the person we cut off in the Starbucks line and said, "My bad." And to our spouses, and to our children, and to our neighbors, and even to our Home Owners Associations. One big day to say, "We messed it all up, and we commit ourselves to pursuing God's path."

Would the stock market level off if we did? Would bipartisanship get a chance if we did? Would families speak lovingly instead of yell harshly if we did?

This focus on repentance makes it even more important that we, as the church, focus on the very first words of Jesus after his baptism: "Repent, for the time is at hand."

Today, millions of persons across the world will apologize to God and await forgiveness. May their pardon permeate everything, and may creation move a step further to wholeness, to Shalom.