Sermon – March 7, 2010: Repent
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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