The Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
On a college sports trip to South
Carolina, my youngest son sent me a text with a photograph of a store-front
church in a gritty strip-mall. “Church of the End-Time Harvest” proclaimed the
sign over the door. There were sheaves of grain that looked rather like flames
all around the bottom of the sign, and in the windows stood cardboard with the
words “Repent or Perish!” in big letters. “What kind of a church is this, Mom?” sniggered my son in his text,
contempt toward organized religion oozing even through cyberspace. It’s not
surprising that Christianity—and repentance—have gotten a bad reputation for
many in our country, with such larger-than-life threats as their most public
face.
If you google “repent” on the
computer, one of the first things to come up are images of the Westboro Baptist
Church, that cult-like hate-group that pickets the funerals of veterans, Jews,
and LGBT persons. In one video that I watched, Westboro members stand as
closed-faced as unsmiling statues as they sing a parody of the Beatles’ song,
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday God warned you,” they
intone with gravity, “but you keep on sinning, so you are going to pay.” Repent
or perish, indeed!
Barbara Brown Taylor describes these kinds of
churches as operating like courts of law. [1]They
are places where sin and sinners are loudly denounced, and punishments are
eagerly doled out to fit the crimes. These court-like churches single out
scapegoats for punishment, and the scapegoats are always people who are
different, people who don’t look like the righteous accusers, people who don’t
fit into their black and white worldview. It is always the “other” who needs to
repent, always the “other” who needs to change. The “righteous” rule-followers never
seem to have to see things differently, change their viewpoint, or do any of
the work to repair the world’s brokenness.
While the secular world turns away in
horror from the dismal displays of hatred and judgment found in the “law court
churches,” mainline Christians like us hang our heads and look at our feet, reacting
with embarrassment to any mention of
sin or any demands for repentance.
“Advent is about quiet and preparation,
not sin and repentance,” we promise. “We are waiting for God’s love, for the
joy of Christmas. We’re Episcopalians—we love everybody. We’re not like those
other bad Christians, so don’t scoff at Christianity. Come to our church!” we
beg. “You’ll see. No talk of repenting here!”
Taylor calls churches like ours,
“clinic churches,” “where sin-sick patients receive sympathetic care for the
disease they all share.”[2] We sigh together: “Oh well, we are all
sinners. God loves us, and there’s not much use in dwelling on what goes wrong.
We’re caught in huge systems of sin, and all we can do is to come to church on
Sunday and say the confession, be forgiven, and then drift back out into the
real world.” The clinic-type churches
have no use for repentance, because repentance demands that we take
responsibility for what is wrong in the world and do something about it.
So we go along pretty calmly all year
until the second Sunday of Advent, this day when John the Baptist bursts out of
the lectionary in his scratchy camel’s hair cloak, with locust legs sticking
out of his mouth. He tromps right into our nice staid liturgy, right into our self-complacent
shoulder-shrugging and cries: “Repent,
you brood of vipers! … Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!” John
sounds just like the folks from Westboro Baptist Church, warning us about the
coming of a Jesus who is going to weed out and burn the chaff, inaugurating
what sure sounds like that church of the “end-time harvest!”
Are we wrong, then? Are the
condemning churches the ones who are following the Scriptures? Do we really
have to repent or perish in flame? I believe that we do have to repent, but we
can’t just take the word at face value—or use it like the folks from Westboro.
As a matter of fact, one scholar has said that the English word “repent” is the
worst translation in the whole New Testament.[3]
Our English word comes from the Latin root meaning “to be sorry again.” We
usually understand it to mean that we are supposed to tell God that we are
sorry for the wrongs that we have done, to regret the rules that we have
broken. The act of repenting is in this sense an act made up of words and makes
it seem as if repentance is just a fancy, churchy term for asking forgiveness:
“I’m sorry, God, for not speaking to
you all week. I’ll be sure to pray next week…. I’m sorry, God, for passing up
that homeless guy shivering out in the cold without even looking him in the
eye. I’ll speak to him next time, I promise, and I’ll even bring him some food.
I’m sorry, God, for yelling at my kids. I’ll keep my temper tomorrow …”
For prophets like John the Baptist,
however, repentance means something different indeed. The Hebrew word
translated as repent actually means “to turn,” both physically and metaphorically.
“Turn and amend your ways,” the Hebrew prophets cry. “Don’t keep on going down
the same old path. Stop and turn to follow God’s way.” The Greek word that
Matthew uses in today’s Gospel is also an active word, better translated “change your thinking and acting.” It is
more than just using words to admit your mistakes. It is, as Craig Dykstra
defines it, “a turning from the self to God as the source of our … sustenance.”[4]
Repentance is a reorientation of our
whole being, a letting go of our attempts to direct our own lives and putting
ourselves entirely in God’s hands. In turning, “we give up everything that
tells us who we are, what is expected of us, what the rewards and punishments
will be of acting and thinking in certain ways, and let ourselves be remade
from top to bottom.”[5] It’s
the opposite of what the people from Westboro Baptist are doing.
The “fruit” of this repentance, the
fruit that saves us, the fruit that John the Baptist asks us to bear, is not
some action that we take on our own, nor is it some halo that sets us apart
from all the sinners out there. It is the radical freedom to be myself, the
self that God created and that God sustains, the self that will go forth in
directions that I could never imagine while I was trying to control and do
everything.[6]
Repentance opens us to prayer, and prayer leads us to service, and service
prepares the way for the Kingdom of God that John and Jesus proclaim. It’s like
that “shoot of Jesse” that all of our readings mention today. It is the divine
generative power that makes the dead wood and sawed off trunks of our lives
sprout in a new direction, filled with new life unlike what had been there
before. What bountiful fruit that is, indeed!
How hard it is, though, to let go.
The Pharisees and Sadducees that John wants to shake up with his harsh words in
our Gospel reading have to let go of the privileged position that they feel
belongs to them as “the chosen children of Abraham.” As for me, I find myself constantly
needing to let go of the perfectionism through which I try to control life and
myself and God. What do you need to let go of in your soul this Advent? Of what
do you need to “repent?”
In thinking about repentance, I
couldn’t help but think of Nelson Mandela, who died this week. His life sliced
open by the evils of apartheid like a tree chopped down in its prime, the bare stump
that was left of him spent 27 years in prison. But he didn’t come out of that
prison hating and condemning others. He didn’t come out sighing that truth
wasn’t worth fighting for, either. He came out serving his neighbor and his
country with what seems to us an amazing freedom of soul. I think that he must
have done the hard work of repentance in the solitude of his cell. He must have
learned to let God reorient who he thought he was, granting him the Christian
freedom that no jail cell can hold, that no system of hatred can oppress. “I’m
not a saint,” Mandela once said, “unless a saint is a sinner who keeps on
trying.”
Letting go, turning all of our
conceptions of self and world entirely over to God’s crazy mystery, is about as
difficult a spiritual act as it gets. Luckily for us, we don’t have to do our
repenting alone in our prisons. We have the community of Christ’s Body, the Church,
a loving community of fellow sinners who can nudge us and support us as we
turn, and turn, and turn again toward God’s Kingdom.
Canticle of the Turning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QeTmRCpW4
Canticle of the Turning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9QeTmRCpW4
No comments:
Post a Comment