Unfortunately, I’m still learning that lesson as far as my computer goes. I avoid pushing the dreaded “restart” button at all costs. You see, I can't restart it in the morning. When I arrive at work, my head is full of all the things that I want get done. I sit down at my computer ready to go. If I restart the thing, I’ll have to waste time waiting around for everything to load back up. I’m much too impatient for that.
I can't do it in the middle of the day, either. After lunch, I’m almost always feeling behind. Even worse, I’m angry at the sluggishness with which the machine is now obeying my commands. The last thing I want to do is to push a button that will start a long, drawn-out update. There might be new options from which to choose, new interfaces to deal with. No, no, no! I don’t have the heart to deal with them right now.
I certainly can't restart the computer at the end of the day! By then, I want to go home. I don’t want to sit around and babysit the shutting down of my pokey machine. I have so many windows pulled up on the computer by this time that it will take forever to close them all. And I don’t want to risk losing something that I forgot to save. I don’t have the energy to take risks. Not now.
Well, you know how it goes. Day after day, I keep pushing my machine to keep going. All the litter of cyberspace keeps crowding into the nooks and crannies of my computer’s memory. “Cookies,” advertisements, advice from Microsoft, hundreds of pieces of data that I can’t see or understand … they all fill my hard-drive little by little. Pretty soon, my computer is paralyzed. It can’t “hear” my requests. I have no choice. A serious reset is required. I have to shut it down for awhile. I probably even have to delete things, to clean out the system, before I can begin again.
At this point, we might say that my computer needs to "repent” That's right—repent! If we think that repentance is an unpleasant, churchy term for asking forgiveness, then my comment doesn’t make sense. But Matthew and John the Baptist mean something different than "forgiveness" when they talk about repentance.
The Greek word translated as "repentance" in today’s Gospel means “reset,” or “re-order.” Repentance is a reorientation of our whole being, a letting-go of our attempts to direct our own lives. It requires changing direction. It asks us to put ourselves entirely in God’s hands. In repenting, “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 … [We] let ourselves be remade from top to bottom.”[1]
I hate to admit it, but my resistance to resetting my computer is undoubtedly reflected in my spiritual life, as well. Repentance, like pushing that restart button, demands time, risk, letting go of rigid plans, accepting a new interface with the world. It requires digging out all of the distorting messages that the world pours into me day after day: the slippery lies of advertisers, the distracting sleight of hand of politicians, the twisted reality of social media. Repentance is deep and difficult work. It’s not something that any of us really want to do, even when we know deep-down that we need it desperately.
That’s why God sends us prophets, people whose outrageous words or deeds capture our attention. Prophets don't come to foretell the future. They come to help us to change the future through repentance. In the Hebrew scriptures, we have prophets like Isaiah, who stripped off all his clothes and wandered around naked to get people’s attention. We have Jeremiah, who walked around with a cattle-yoke on his shoulders. There's scandalous Hosea, who married a prostitute and named their daughter “Unloved.” In the New Testament, we have John the Baptist. He wore strange clothes, ate locusts, and threatened hellfire and destruction. We even have Jesus as a prophet. In prophetic mode, Jesus threw fits of anger in the Temple and turned over the money changer's tables. He told strange parables that strip us of our worn perspectives. Even today, we have prophets like sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg. Remember her? As a teenager, she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and assailed us with her frowning condemnation-- all to push us into saving action for our planet. We need the outrageous prophets of the past and the present to help us to clear out our jumbled thoughts and to see in a new way.
There is a big push these days for increasing “mindfulness” in our lives. It's definitely something that I need to work on. I've been trying to live each moment more prayerfully, paying attention to the tiny glimpses of the divine. That’s really what any prayer requires, isn’t it? Listening, paying attention to what God is saying and doing in the world? What makes prayer and mindfulness difficult is our tendency to get distracted, to fail to see. Theologian Craig Dykstra points out that's because we leave out the step of repentance. Repentance comes before prayer. We have to let go of our own rigid understandings before we can notice what God is doing and saying. I can’t see God in my neighbor while I am busy judging him, lining him up next to my own categories of right and wrong. I can’t see God around me while I am wrapped tightly in a blanket of fear. Without repentance, without a reset, we risk missing the Beloved Kingdom that Jesus is ushering into the world.
I’d like to do a better job heeding John the Baptist’s call to repentance this Advent. Each morning, perhaps I can push the reset button on my control needs, as well as the restart button on my computer. Perhaps I can clean out the world’s false distractions from my mind, as well as the cyber-trash from my recycle bin.
What do you need to let go of in your soul this Advent in order to see and hear God’s dream for the world? Of what do you need to “repent?”
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