Sermon for Sunday, March 7, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Repent

Isaiah 55: 1-9; 1 Corinthians 10: 1-13: 1; Luke 13: 1-9

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a city, but you know in cities you run into

unusual people. There are so many more people there that the percentage of the

population who are going to be kooks produces a few examples, and they are out on the

streets doing things like blowing a whistle and doing a little dance and offering gestures of

worship to skyscrapers, or accosting you with wacky political pamphlets, or stuff like that.

The most famous type of urban oddball is the religious nut. We know him from cartoons.

He’s got a bushy beard and long hair and is wearing something that looks like a nightshirt

and is carrying a sign with one big word on it. What’s the word? “Repent.”

See, that gives us an association with being told to repent which suggests that

repenting is the advice of someone who may not be quite right. Or, again, we associate

the call to repentance with fire-and-brimstone preachers, with a hortatory style which is

fervent and dramatic, and perhaps not too profound. Just as with the free-range would-be

prophet, there’s the suggestion that the person issuing the call to repent is angry or

impatient with us, with hardly any hint of human sympathy. I think we make up these

images of people telling us to repent to discredit the idea of repentance. We like to think

that the call to repentance comes from some margin of society, from some misanthrope

who doesn’t fit into the world the way it is, that urgent appeals to repent are the province of

people who find an odd role to play in public life, Johnny-One-Notes who don’t have any

answer for the ills of the world but to tell us that we have to change.

So we don’t change, and we have a a better conscience about not changing if we link

the call to change the direction of our life with aggressive and belligerent religious nuts who

don’t look like their presumed spiritual superiority is doing them much good. We don’t

change the way we’re going, we don’t change our priorities, we don’t change the things on

which we count for our peace of mind; we keep going in the same tracks we’ve been

traveling in all this time.

Sometimes we have another way of disarming repentance. We ignore that it means

turning around to embrace the God we’ve been ignoring, and we tell ourselves that

repentance is regret. We pretend that repenting has something to do with feeling bad

about the person we’ve been, or the choice we’ve made, or whatever it might be. We

reduce repentance to an emotion, instead of recognizing it as a decisive action. We think, if

we are moved by our bad conscience to confess, that we have repented. We are forgiven

at that point, as if that is all that matters, and we return to the path we’ve been on, the path

we’ve beaten of self-absorption, cautious self-reliance, and small hopes.

I don’t want to downplay seeking forgiveness or being forgiven. The promise of

Isaiah is that God will abundantly pardon. However, feeling sorry and sincerely saying

one’s sorry are not repentance. Repentance is going back to God, to live by God’s

guidance and in the comfort of God’s provision. The reason the question of forgiveness is

linked to the idea of repentance is the awful possibility that God won’t have you back, that

you’ve squandered God’s good will, that your chance to live with God is forfeit. No, no,

Isaiah tells you, and Jesus tells you, too. No; God wants you back, and God will cover

your sins with divine love, and put away the judgment and penalty that you deserve, and

forget the stains you bring to your return as a prodigal. It is the returning which is repentance,

it is the leaving behind not only one’s wrong deeds and shameful realities, but abandoning

the path away from God which one has traveled. It’s starting life on a new basis, a basis of

complete trust in God and an earnest effort to treat everyone else in the world the way God

says people should be treated. The huge thing about repentance is thinking a lot less

about ourselves, absorbed as we should be in God and in loving others, and thinking a lot

less about ourselves is the great obstacle.

We can’t help but think about ourselves a lot. At its most basic this is a survival

mechanism. We watch out for ourselves just like every other creature. That makes it

second nature for us to approach life thinking about risks and rewards: risks to us, and

rewards for us.

Too, when we are the children that Jesus insists everyone should be like in order to

enter the kingdom of God, we are always looking forward to being bigger and less

dependent on some big person to care for us. We want to spread our wings, we want to

be trusted to decide things for ourselves, we want to run our own life. Care involves

constraint and we grow impatient with limits, and we seek at least partially to end to our

reliance on someone bigger and older who loves us.

That’s second nature, too. In terms of the needs and appetites of our physical

selves we have a tendency to be self-seeking, and in terms of the needs and appetites of

our spirits we tend to be self-seeking. This doesn’t always counter the will of God for us,

but it is easy to see how near we always are to the condition of sin, which is the

circumstance of asserting our own will over that of our Maker.

Isaiah diagnoses this in a way we can understand. “Why do you spend your labor

for that which doesn’t satisfy?”, Isaiah asks. In a consumer-driven economy, in which we all

count on accumulating things we don’t need, we know the ennui and bad conscience of

having a lot of stuff. Not that we aren’t satisfied with some of it, some of the time, and not

that every possession is a bad thing–but if we look at the cupboards and closets and

shelves and think, “Is that what I’ve amounted to, a big public sale someday when I’m

gone?” then it doesn’t seem like much. Of course, we probably know better than to think of

ourselves as the sum of the stuff we’ve acquired.

What of achievements rather than acquisitions? What about status, place,

responsibility, respect? Again, there are lots of things people make of themselves which

are sound foundations for pride. It doesn’t make sense to think that God would want to

check all human ambitions, especially when so many people choose to do things which are

constructive. Not every attainment, however, is satisfying. We’re always a little

disappointed to read those interviews with celebrities in which they say “the awards, the

glamour–none of it means anything. All I want is to be with the people I love.” Easy for

them to say, we think. But we also realize that most of what the world tells us is that, if

wealth or fame or power won’t make us happy, nothing will. If the big shot in our field

confides in the press that he takes no great pleasure in being on top, everything we

sacrifice to follow his lead begins to seem a disheartening burden.

There’s an alternative. We are not obliged to go on living the way we usually do,

pursuing our narrow ends. We don’t have to set our heart on being lifted from low spirits by

the promise of that trip to which we’ve looked forward, or that new item we’ve wanted.

Things and time will fade, and on some level our ability to enjoy them will falter, but we’re

not condemned to that as the whole story of who we are. We are spiritual beings, with our

origin in heaven, and we are loved by God as God’s children. There is a wonderful life

available in the company of God, if only we could trust God enough to turn to God.

What’s the alternative? “The wages of sin is death” is the old line from the King

James Bible, and I think we always hear it as if it were grimly pronounced by one of those

religious nuts whose caricature we carry around to help us avoid unpleasant truths. But if we

think of sin as distance from God, and indifference to God, then what else is that going to get

a mortal but death? Death seems like it’s everyone’s payoff, anyway. Things which don’t

satisfy, which consume our strength and our effort, and then, when our strength and effort are

gone, death–that’s the Bible’s image of a world walking away from God.

That’s how Paul urges repentance in his letter. He uses the Israelites in the

wilderness, being led to the Promised Land by Moses, as an example for his new

Christians. Theirs was a story of having been delivered from slavery and into hope for a

new life in a new world, but they couldn’t hold onto hope and trust and they went wrong in

various ways and they ended up never getting to the Promised Land. They went wrong

instead of going right, and that was that. Paul uses them as an example of the dangers of

going away from God’s path, and it’s worth noticing that those dangers include people who

complain a lot along with the sexually immoral.

Jesus also takes the question of judgment befalling persons–the apparently wellknown

deaths in his day of demonstrators or insurrectionists, people who died in the

brewing conflict between unhappy Jews and their political masters–to make the point that

they weren’t any worse than anyone, no more deserving of death. All of you, Jesus tells

people, have to turn away from the ways of this world and toward God’s priorities if you

want to live. You don’t have to do something notorious to forfeit the abundant life God has

for you. You can just stay in the rut you are in, instead of turning your life around in the

direction of reliance on God, and service to God.

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Sermon for Sunday, February 21, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg

Lips and Heart

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11; Romans 10: 8b-13; Luke 4: 1-13

Classical Greek theater employed masks. The hero would come out with a heroic

face mask worn over the actor’s own face, and the comedy relief actor would wear a mask

with an appropriately humorous look. This was such a well-known feature of life that the

word for someone wearing a mask to represent a character became a synonym for anyone

who was “two-faced”, or who gave the world one appearance while being someone else

entirely. The word was “hypocrite”, and it’s a word that Jesus used more than once in

warning his religious opponents about false religion.

We need to distinguish hypocrisy from lying and both from providing false

information. A person can give inaccurate information due to being misinformed or due to a

misunderstanding. That can have bad consequences but it is done in good faith.

Lying is deliberately conveying something untrue. There’s a moral cost to the

person who lies, and there’s the social cost of communication becoming unreliable.

However, there are times when a lie may be the lesser of two evils, and at least in those

instances the act of lying doesn’t harm a person’s soul. The familiar example of misleading

a homicidal madman away from his intended victim by pointing in the direction opposite the

one by which his quarry has fled is an example of a deliberate untruth which would do the

soul more good than scrupulous truthfulness would.

Hypocrisy involves deception but it is more than a variety of lying. The conscious

concealment of a person’s genuine nature behind a false front compromises one’s own

integrity more completely than merely misinforming does. A lie may be occasional or

opportunistic, but hypocrisy is continual. A lie may violate the need for truth between

persons, but hypocrisy violates the need to be true to oneself.

There is a spiritual issue here that the ancient world understood which has gotten

obscured though the centuries. People have to be who they say they are, and that need

for congruity, which is what psychologists call it because psychologists have rediscovered

this fact–that need for congruity is so strong that either people will remain outwardly kind

and inwardly selfish and have psychological symptoms from the stress, or they’ll resolve it

either by becoming more kind in their soul or by failing to maintain the appearance of

kindness on the outside. It’s simply too much of a strain to be one person and present

oneself as another. Integrity, reliably being the person one has established oneself as

being, has more than social importance. It is vital to individuals to feel that they are in

possession of their integrity, which has to do with being one reasonably reliable person,

and not a divided soul.

All of this morning’s scriptures relate to the identity between a person and what a

person says. They understand individuality as a narrative, as congruity between the story a

person knows and forms about himself or herself, and who they are. When Jesus accuses

his religious opponents of being mask-wearing play-actors, he is doing more than

exposing their insincerity. He is recognizing as a spiritual malaise their failure to be the

persons of God they pose as being. He is not just expressing indignation, he is making a

diagnosis.

Baptists have scrupled about saying what you really believe more than most

Christians. We don’t make the repeating of creeds part of our worship because we want to

avoid putting words in someone else’s mouth that might be at odds with what they really

believe on the inside. We take it for granted that recitations of religious beliefs must reflect

the inner person.

That works two ways. For Baptists, who are an independent and individualistic

crowd, we usually think of it as making sure we don’t say things we don’t believe. We don’t

want to suffer the disjunction between our true selves and our outward selves which Jesus

criticized in the Pharisees who challenged him. One way the identity between person and

what the person says about himself or herself works is that the words have to conform to

the heart, to the soul.

The other thing that happens is that the soul conforms to the words. We teach little

ones to say their prayers, to recite The Twenty-Third Psalm, and things like that, with no fear

of imposing on their souls. Instead we are deliberately shaping their souls to the stories of

the faith. That’s the logic of the offering of “first fruits” from the Book of Deuteronomy. The

member of the Chosen People who comes to be part of the ritual isn’t only asked to bring

the best produce from the farm as a gesture of thanks to God. More importantly, he is

asked to recite a story about who the Chosen People are and how God delivered them to

this sustaining land, and to claim that story as his own. “I was a wandering Aramaean…” he

says and identifies with every stage of his people’s history down to the present day. It’s

not “his ancestors” or his “predecessors” who crossed the Red Sea or who accepted the

law at Sinai–it’s him. He conforms himself, his essential, inner self, to the story of how God

has rescued, how God has set free and blessed.

When Paul is writing to the church at Rome he is defending his acceptance of non

Jews as fellow Christians in every way. How the Jewish Messiah became the Savior of

the whole world is still being worked out in Paul’s lifetime, and Paul’s approach, which is

trusting and generous, eventually prevails. In the part of the letter from which we read this

morning Paul is contrasting finding life with God by obeying the law with finding life with God

by faith in what God has done. He quotes the Old Testament, the passage about where

God’s requirements really reside, from when Moses challenges Israel to agree to the

covenant. God’s requirements really reside in you, in your heart and in your mouth. This,

again, is the old assumption of the identity of what one says and who one is.

This emphasis on the individual claiming for himself or herself–just as the person in

the first-fruits offering claimed an identity for himself or herself–suits Paul’s purpose.

Whoever owns the story of Jesus Christ as Lord can say so. That’s the authentic identity

that person possesses. It’s not a matter of birth or any outward mark. It’s a matter of who

they are inside, and that is discovered by their say-so.

We still take it for granted that we get to the reality of a person by asking. In a court

of law a shrewd attorney can manipulate what a person gets to say from the witness stand,

and a reporter can pick and choose and shape comments in a story, so sometimes it’s not

accurate. But those are exceptions, and those often are intentional distortions. People are

examined face-to-face to establish their worthiness to teach, their fitness to preach, their right

to practice. It may not be prudent business but it still is an ideal that a man’s word is his

bond, and that’s because a man’s word, we expect, is who he is.

The power of what is said, the importance of the words a person speaks from his or

her own mouth, is shown in the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The question

of Jesus’ integrity, of whether or not he wholeheartedly and completely will be God’s

person, is a dialogue. Jesus’ being true to himself is revealed in his responses to

temptations. He is defining himself by everything he says, because that’s the power of

language. He has a self-understanding that rests on the religious traditions of his ancestors

and on the sense of calling he has, and that’s the story which is opposed to the alternate

scenarios offered as temptations.

Notice that the first two temptations are rebuffed by Jesus’ quoting scripture. That

makes it appear as though quoting scripture is what answers every question. So then the

tempter couches the next alternative in scriptures. It goes from Jesus quoting scripture,

from saying “I won’t do it because it is written…” to Satan saying “you can have it this way

because it is written….” This third time, Jesus responds by saying, “It is said…” and he says

what is said. It may not be scripture but those are the words which answer for who Jesus is

and who Jesus will be, and that’s that. What a person chooses to say for himself is who he

really is, and who he really is determines what he will say. There is no play-acting here,

there is only being true.

What have you got to say for yourself? What words do you choose to have in your

mouth about who you are, about what you believe down deep? How are you conformed

to the Christian person God has called you to be? What examples, what parables, what

teachings inform your story of yourself?

It was in the context of seeking to be true to God that David wrote Psalm 19 and

extolled the wonderful gift of God’s revelation of the law, which permits a person to strive to

be Godly. David knew, however, that even with that he could go wrong. David knew that

even conscientious adherence to religious principles weren’t enough. That’s why David

concluded the psalm with this prayer, which we ought always to pray as persons whose

souls will reflect the things we will say, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of

my heart be acceptable in thy sight, my rock and my redeemer.”

To read sermons from past years, hit the “View All” link beneath the “This Week’s Sermon”

button, and then hit the “Archives” link in the sentence at the top of the page presenting

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