The Community Confesses Darkness and Failed Justice

We stumble at noon as in the twilight

The voice turns to we. We wait for justice and there is none, for salvation that is far. We grope like the blind; we stumble in daylight. We growl like bears and moan like doves. Our transgressions are with us; we know our iniquities: denying the Lord, turning from God, oppressive and rebellious speech, uttering wrong from the heart. Justice is turned back; righteousness stands at a distance; truth has fallen in the street, and honesty cannot enter. Who departed from evil made themselves a prey.

Confession is communal and specific. Grief-sounds of bear and dove are allowed. This unit does not silence lament, blame sufferers as a class, demand cheerful compliance, or let confession erase what perpetrators still owe. Truth fallen in the public road is a civic as well as a spiritual emergency.

Noon-darkness is the horror: there is light, and still they cannot walk. A warranted life is to join this we without hunting a them, to pick truth up from the street, and to notice that in such a city the person who leaves evil becomes the next meal unless God acts.