December 9, 2007 – The Second Sunday of Advent
Matthew 3:1-12
Subscribe to the sermon RSS feed
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
The second Sunday in the season of Advent always brings with it a wake-up call. To judge from all the commotion we’ve been hearing about the most appropriate greeting these days, Merry Christmas versus Happy Holidays, it sounds like we Christians have been delivering a wake-up call to our culture. We’re tired and offended, we say, by advertisements and catalogs and sales people who greet us with Happy Holidays instead of just coming out and saying the word, “Christmas!” Political correctness has gone too far, we say, when it not only masks but changes the reason for the season.
But before we get too carried away by our own self-righteous indignation, we should pay attention to our own wake-up call. It comes this morning, and it’s just for us.
Safe to say that John the Baptist wouldn’t hold a job for long at Hallmark. Can you imagine the greeting card he would create? “Brood of vipers!” “A fire is coming!” “The winnowing fork is headed your way!” What a weird way to get ready for the baby Jesus! But there he is, simply appearing in the wilderness just east of Jerusalem, out where the river Jordan empties into the Dead Sea. And he draws quite a crowd.
What gets us about John is the fact that he is so completely, totally out of place, both in his own day and in ours. When he showed up, at the dawn of the 1st Century, he was already a complete anachronism, a total throwback to Old Testament days, in the way he looked and sounded and in his Spartan diet. In fact, he looked and sounded like that fiery Old Testament prophet Elijah, who appeared centuries before John and who also had very sharp and uncompromising messages for the people of his day. Elijah, you may remember, was the prophet who did not die but who was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind. Some people thought that just before the Messiah would came upon the earth, Elijah would return to announce that arrival. And in fact, some thought that John the Baptist was Elijah. He certainly looked the part, stepping as he did out of the depths of history.
And John is wildly out of place in our day as well. Here we are, three weeks before Christmas: rehearsing for our Christmas pageant; our homes are decorated, or getting there; shopping is in full swing; we’re settling into those feelings of good tidings, and all of a sudden, Wham! here comes John to crash the party with his one-word command, Repent!
It looks like we want to prepare for Christmas in our way, but God would have us prepare in quite another.
“Repentance.” It means to turn around and go in the other direction, to change. That’s the dictionary definition; but the word as we experience it in our daily living tends to be multidimensional.
Some people think of repentance as something that just naturally happens to us as we make our way through life. We’re traveling along, our goals established, our values set, when out of the blue we hit a wall that we didn’t see coming, we encounter some experience for which we are unprepared and for which we have no resources. A loved one leaves, the university that we counted on accepting us says “No,” our career crumbles. It’s estimated that throughout 2005, 500,000 Americans went to work in the morning and came home in the afternoon with a pink slip – never saw it coming, had no clue, no way to prepare. Hurricane Katrina blows ashore, and when the storm leaves there’s no way to get life back to normal, because there is no normal. A new normal has to be created.
It happens in some form to every person, an experience that requires a reshaping of our goals, a reforming of the ways we make decisions and cope with life. This is a kind of repenting, of changing, but a very mild form; we adjust to changing circumstances, but we don’t fundamentally change ourselves.
A second kind of repentance is more profound: It happens when something causes us to re-evaluate our lives. We’ll experience a mild form of this in a few weeks, when the old year turns into the new. Some of us will feel the need to take some control, and make some changes. We’ll notice a few extra pounds around the waist and decide to finally start using that gym membership we’ve been paying for for a year, or two. We’ll toss the Marlboros away. We’ll get out a few authentic words of affection to our spouse or partner. We’ll decide to turn over a new leaf, wipe the slate clean, start all over, cut loose from the past. We sing about this kind of repentance, “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”
When Michael Vick was convicted of felony dog-fighting charges, he stood before the news cameras and offered a four-minute apology, a repentance. “I’ve done this, he said, and I pick up the tab for it; but I’m done with it. No more.” (By the way, after Vick’s apology, Esquire magazine interviewed five people – a media trainer, a rabbi, a body language analyst, a crisis counselor and a middle school principal – to get their opinion about the sincerity of Vick’s contrition. Averaging out the scores, they thought Vick’s apology was about 55.8 percent authentic. How would you and I fare, I wonder, if our repenting were to be evaluated by a group of onlookers?)
That kind of repenting, regardless of how it’s judged by others, is closer to the repentance John points us toward, but it still falls short. John is not talking about a mid-course correction forced by external circumstances; he’s not talking about an intentional, conscious repudiation of the past. The repentance John points us toward is more radical that those because it transcends the boundaries of our willpower.
Pastor Richard Jensen, in his book, Touched by the Spirit, puts his finger exactly on John’s type of repentance. “Unfortunately, repentance is often understood as an ‘I can’ experience. ‘I’m sorry for my sins. I can do better, I can please you, God.’ So often we interpret repentance as our way of turning to God. That cannot be. Christianity is not about an individual turning to God. Christianity is about God turning to us.
“In repenting, therefore, we ask the God who has turned toward us, buried us in baptism and raised us to new life, to continue his work of putting us to death. Repentance is an ‘I can’t’ experience. To repent is to volunteer for death. Repentance asks that the death of self which God began to work in us in baptism continue to this day. The repentant person comes before God saying, ‘I can’t do it myself, God. Kill me and give me new life. You buried me in baptism. Bury me again today. Raise me to a new life.’”
Martin Luther struck the same chord nearly 500 years ago when he said, “I cannot, by my own reason or strength, believe in Jesus Christ or come to him. But the Holy Spirit calls me through the good news of the Gospel.” God takes the initiative. We respond, but God always makes the first move. That same truth would inform Luther’s understanding of the daily benefits of our baptism. Each day, he said, we die and rise again in the waters of baptism; each day the old self is drowned so that a new self should arise.
Each day is a new start! Each day a new beginning, not because we wipe the slate clean but because God does! Far from being a once-in-a-lifetime experience, repentance is an ongoing lifestyle of openness to God’s saving, shaping activity that allows us to engage this world in fresh, creative, life-giving ways, to heal the brokenness in our relationships and face the future with a sense of purpose and vitality, to, as John the Baptist put it, “bear fruit.”
This call to repentance, real repentance, allowing God to take our life and remake our life, comes as a shock to the system because it means the death of self, the death of our self-centeredness, our need to control, our desire to run our own lives. But it is a most grace-filled shock.
The late theologian Carl Michalson once wrote about an afternoon at his home when he was wrestling around on the front lawn with his young son. They were playfully tussling and crawling over each other, when suddenly the little boy accidentally caught his dad’s elbow, full in the face. It set him back on his backside, stunned him; it hurt! The little boy was ready to burst into tears, and then he looked into his father’s eyes. Instead of anger, he saw complete love and compassion and concern. And instead of bursting into tears, he burst into laughter. There’s such a fine line. And what he saw in his father’s eyes made all the difference.
Yes, God calls you to repent, and that call is supposed to come as a shock. But look into your heavenly Father’s eyes. And you will find there the only pure, unconditional love and acceptance you can ever know.
Repent. Welcome the death of the old. Rise up to new life. Christ is coming!
Amen.
