Second Sunday of Advent

December 10, 2006

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 3:1-6)

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,

and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,

and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see

the salvation of God.’”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Repent! Repent! This is the heart of John’s prophetic message at the outset of Jesus’ ministry. Repent. Repentance is an unavoidable aspect of the Christian life, but we do our best. It’s nobody’s favorite theme; it’s not popular. Those who made repentance the central theme in their message—whether John, or Jesus, or the Old Testament prophets—lived relatively short, persecuted lives. Repentance, the word “repentance” literally means to change direction. The Greek word is metanoia, to change from going this way to going this way. Repentance is not “I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry” is an apology. And “I’m sorry” is a very good thing to do, and it may be an aspect of repentance. But it is not repentance. Repentance is a reorientation of life, and it doesn’t come easy. The reason it doesn’t come easy is because it can be very costly. Repentance is something that happens to us more than it is something done by us.

Repentance paves the way for God’s salvation. It creates a new state of affairs that could not have been imagined before. Repentance doesn’t come easy, and the reason is because it is very costly. We become invested over the course of our lives in a variety of things, and that’s all well and good. We’re invested in all kinds of things, good, bad, and indifferent things, and we do so according to the orientation that we have in life. Repentance is a change to our orientation in life and, therefore, it threatens our investments with change, perhaps radical change.

We have many investments in life. We have, for example, material investments, such as money, possessions, a car, a house, a lifestyle. We have professional investments: we have ambitions and goals, ethical standards. We have domestic investments: home, family, a partner, the way the toilet paper should go on the roll. We have spiritual investments: we have ideals, a world view, we have values. We have political investments: involvement, point of view, status. We have psychological investments: our self-imagine and what gives us meaning. And these investments are all tangled up with each other, such that our political investments are related to our material investments, and our professional investments are related to our spiritual investments, and our domestic investments are related to the whole business. So when repentance comes, it brings a reevaluation of that whole business; and, therefore, it is scary, and it is costly. It is why the prophets did not live very long. “Let’s see. We could repent . . . or we could kill that guy. Let’s kill that guy.”

Human nature is such that repentance is never easy. It usually requires some kind of disturbance in one’s life. And John the Baptist was one of those who hastened the process; he was a disturber of the peace. Repent! I want you to notice how very democratic and egalitarian this repentance is. It is not as though some people need to repent and others don’t. It’s not as though some are classified as having to repent more than others, according to John. The call to repentance is extended to everyone.

Now, later, when Jesus comes down to see John, John says, “Behold the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.” And Jesus asks John to baptize him, and John says,” No, no, no, no. You should baptize me.” Do you see how this baptism into repentance is for everyone, including the great prophet of repentance and Christ Jesus himself? Repentance is not for everyone only insofar as people see no need for it and resist it; and for them—and for them almost exclusively—John and Jesus reserve words of severe judgment. “You need to repent, and I don’t” is not the message we get in scripture, not even from John, or Jesus. Because repentance threatens our investments, our material, psychological, political, and professional investments, it’s not something we generally wake up one morning and decide to do.

It usually requires a disturbance, a shaking-up. Reality hits us in such a way that we wonder if we’ve been seeing things properly. We wonder whether I am who or what I thought I was. “I wonder whether the world works the way I thought it did.” “I wonder whether things are the way I thought they were.” And so repentance begins with something that jars us into wondering, “Is it really so?” “What is really going on?” Examples of this are often dramatic: a death, a birth, an accident, a big loss or failure, a dramatic encounter or experience. It can be, however, a quieter and less dramatic affair.

I don’t know how many of you know of Gordon Lightfoot, but he’s a favorite singer/songwriter/artist of mine. He wrote a number of songs that Elvis Presley made famous. But one that Elvis did not make famous, and one of my favorites that Gordon Lightfoot has sung, is a song called “Black Day in July.” And it is a song about the race riots that were sweeping the urban centers of our country back in the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, and it’s a song about a day in July when the race riots broke in Detroit. And the race riots, of course, were a dramatic event. But he sings in one verse, in one particular verse, about a person’s encounter with the race riots, who wasn’t involved in them but just reads about them in the newspaper, casually. And the line goes,

You read your morning paper,

and you drink your cup of tea,

and you wonder, just in passing,

is it him or is it me?

Black Day in July

There, the quiet beginning of repentance, not because the violence had impacted him personally, but because the possibility of a whole new point of view touched him. And Lightfoot doesn’t say what happened. He leaves it open as a possibility for everyone who opens the morning paper.

These moments of truth come to all of us, a challenge to see things differently and, deep-down, we know that it is such a moment for us. The truth is at the door of our hearts, the truth, not about them, but about me in relation to them. Such moments are the proverbial ghosts to our Ebenezer Scrooge; they are John-the-Baptist moments.

So why would we open ourselves up to such radical transformation? Why not just stick to your point of view that got you this far? Why risk the unforeseeable cost of repentance? Because, in a sense, far more important than a comfortable life, repentance is good for us, and it is good for the world. Truth is always provisional in our case. Truth is always provisional in our case. And I don’t care what truth you’ve got, Bible, pope, tradition, your gut, your reason, your common sense, experts, studies or degrees.

Einstein said—I know I have quoted Einstein a lot lately, but he did say this—“There is no objective point in the universe to which we can attain from which to measure.” “There is no point in the universe, no objective point in the universe, to which we can attain from which to measure.” That’s physics. But it has spiritual ramifications.

There’s no better example I can think of than the medieval church versus Galileo. Galileo, of course, was a professor of physics at the University of Pisa. And he was convinced by the work of Copernicus that, “Hmm, I think maybe the earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around.” Well, the church didn’t like that, and he ended up going to trial before the Inquisition. Now, the church had investments—right? —big investments in keeping the sun revolving around the earth. It had to do with being at the center and holding power. “The center of God’s universe is this earth, and on this earth there is Rome. And in Rome it’s St. Peter’s, and in the midst of St. Peter’s it’s the Pope. And that is the truth.”

But an earth that is not the center of the universe throws the whole equation off. And so Galileo was given a choice: recant or burn at the stake. The church claimed every authority against Galileo in this trial: scripture, reason, revelation, you name it. Galileo recanted, with his fingers crossed. But we all know that he was right. Repentance doesn’t happen by force, but by the truth breaking through into the heart.

Luke tells us the story today of John the Baptist in a very interesting way. Listen to how he prefaces the ministry of John the Baptist. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilot was governor of Judea, and Herod was the ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea . . . .” He introduces the description of John the Baptist with a description first of the imperial power and the chain of command. So in that context this weird little man, John the Baptist, appears in the wilderness, in the middle of nowhere, saying “Repent,” and announcing another kind of kingdom. And the contrast is incredible: Caesar, the emperor—John the Baptist. The first, the emperor; the empire is based on force and the extension of power. The second is based on repentance. The first kind of kingdom emanates from a center of power, and the other remains unfixed, claims no power over another, and trusts a center other than its own.

So why give up what we might have to give up to repent? Because it’s about being reoriented to the way things are and not the way we wish things were. It’s about dealing with the real world, the real us, and the real God. It’s about letting God in. John said, “Repentance prepares the way of the Lord, makes his paths straight, it makes the hills level, and the valleys planed out.”

He’s talking about building a road or a highway. And the Romans were the best road builders in the world, at that time. And they built those roads in order to move their massive armies and then to be able to establish trade and commerce. They did so to extend their empire, their power, and their influence. But John takes that image of road building, and he says, ”Repentance is road building of another kind; not to extend power and influence from one’s own center, but to let go of power and influence and to make way for God to come.

So why be open to repentance when it is so costly? Because of God; because when God comes, everything changes. When God comes, the miraculous may happen. When God comes, the future opens up to possibilities that no one could imagine or predict. Repentance is the way by which God comes to you, to me, to us, and to the world.

And one last thing. Good-old Martin Luther—in that same 16th Century as Galileo—started a reformation by tacking 95 propositions to a church door. And the first one went something like this: “When scripture tells us to repent, what it means is not a one-time event, but a whole life that becomes one of repentance, continually.”

Wouldn’t that be something!