josephholubsermons


 

December 6, 2009  Advent 2
Luke 3:1-14

Repentance As A Way of Life!    

Last Sunday we began a new church year.   This past year was the Year of Mark as most of our gospel readings came from the gospel of Mark.  This year is the Year of Luke and most of our gospel readings will come from Luke.  Each gospel is unique, and each gospel writer tells the story of Jesus from the perspective of his communities' experience of Jesus; what Jesus had come to mean for them.  Of course, the gospels have many things in common, but they also have significant differences and Jesus came to mean something different for each community, and those differences are reflected  in the way each gospel writer tells his story.

One thing all the gospels have in common is John the Baptist, but even the way they present John is different.    Luke is the only gospel that begins the story of John the Baptist with,  “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, when Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and when Lysanias was ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood and Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John…”

Luke's point is simple.  In listing a virtual "Who's Who" of first century politics and religion, Luke is saying the task of announcing Jesus did not go to a politician or a religious figurehead.  Luke is telling us that his community was experiencing something in Jesus that transcended politics and transcended organized religion.

No, Luke is clear by the way he fashions his gospel that "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar", “The word... came to John... in the wilderness.”  Who was John?  John was certainly, at best, way out there on the margins of organized religion and certainly outside of orthodox religion. He was a Jewish mystic and social prophet, who lived off the land and traveled the countryside preaching a impassioned message that challenged people to change.  He preached a message of repentance.  But what is repentance?  We need to pause right here because I think it is possible we might have some wrong notions about repentance.  I think repentance is one of the most misunderstood words in our faith, and I want to reclaim the word and place it  in a positive context.

It has been my experience, growing up in a Lutheran context, that repentance has been understood and practiced in primarily two ways:  For some, it is a kind of self-disparaging groveling before God confessing what terrible people they are.  Many Lutherans have elevated this practice to an art form habitually emphasizing their lack of worth and moral depravity. The other functional definition of repentance I have experienced is that repentance is seen as a kind of ritualized and rehearsed "I'm sorry."  

It's analogous to something that happened to me at a big box store in Denver.  I was walking around the end of an aisle when two young children came racing and screaming around the corner and crashed right into me.  No harm done, but their Mother, who was pushing a cart not far behind, became upset at her children, and she stopped them in their tracks and said, "What do you say to the man?"   The children got this rather perplexed look on their faces as if they were thinking, ("What are you talking about Mom? Whatever did we do?")   Mother firmly held her ground and sternly repeated, "What do you say to the man?"  It was then their facial expressions changed  as if a light bulb went on and they were thinking, ("Oh yes, we get it!  We know this routine.  We screwed up and we are supposed to say,")  and then out came the audible words "We're sorry, mister."  And then, in the blink of an eye, off the children went racing and screaming down the aisle!  I had to wonder how many more times that scenario repeated itself that day. 

What I have observed is that these two kinds of so-called repentance make little difference; don't lead to any real transformation; don't affect any real change.  Negative self-disparagement rarely leads to positive transformation, it only makes one feel worse about oneself.  A polite, ritualized "I'm sorry" is an easy way to appease one's conscience and maintain the status quo and move on with life with nothing substantially changed.   A friend of mine likes to say, "Heck, even Al Capone was usually in church on Sundays to receive the sacrament of the forgiveness of his sins." 

But there is a  totally different biblical picture of repentance; a totally different way to see repentance.  It is not repentance as a self-disparaging ritual I perform - but rather an affirming life to be lived; a way of life.  I'll explain.   What the word repentance literally means is to "turn"; or "to turn around and move a new direction"; or "to adopt a new mind-set and new heart-set."

By the way Luke positions the story of John the Baptist in his gospel, it is as if he is calling upon both the political order and the religious order to "repent"; that is to turn around, to move a new direction, to adopt a new mindset and new heart set - to move in the direction of the kingdom of God; that is the way God desires for the world to be and the way the world would be if God were sitting in the seats of power and not the Caesar's and Caiaphas's.  

The diverse crowd that was gathered around John was beginning to get it.  Their response was not one of groveling and there were no polite apologies.  There response was "What then shall we do?"*   You see, that's the language of transformation; *that's the language of change; *that's the language of new direction; *that's the first step towards a new mind-set and new heart-set.

To the crowds John essentially said, turn your life around and align yourself with the kingdom of God in which the economic playing field is leveled and empowerment of those who have less or little than you is paramount - even to the point of getting personally involved with someone who has less than you.  "If you have two coats, share one with someone who has none."

To the tax collectors who represented a corrupt and unjust system of collaboration between religious and political authority he essentially said, turn your life around and play fairly with honesty to respect the humanity and dignity of others.

To the soldiers who represented Roman authority and power he essentially said, turn you life around and in contrast to the Kingdom of Caesar that misused authority as leverage against others for personal gain and politically legitimized extortion, live by the ways of the kingdom of God that uses power and authority to lift people up. 

In the final analysis, John the Baptist functions in Luke's gospel like a Master of Ceremonies introducing the one coming after him - Jesus - the one who embodies the kingdom of God - whose very life reflects the love and grace of God.  By having John announce Jesus, Luke is tipping his readers off that something extraordinary is experienced in Jesus; something that transcends anything else they have ever experienced - beyond politics and beyond religion as they knew up until then. 

I have always been intrigued  by Jesus' invitations to follow him in the gospels.  He pretty much just says, "Follow me."  He doesn't say, "believe thus and such doctrine, and then come and follow me."  He doesn't say, "Clean up your moral act and then come and follow me."  He doesn't say "get the right attitude and then come and follow me."  He doesn't say "join the right political party and then come follow me."  He simply says, "Follow me." 

To "follow Jesus", you see,  is to "repent" in the most positive sense of its meaning, because following Jesus requires a turning of one's life and moving a new direction - in the direction that Jesus leads.   And of course, the question is, "Where does Jesus lead?"  It has been my personal experience and my conviction that Jesus leads me ever more deeply, everyday, into new expressions and new dimensions and new experiences of God's boundless grace and love.  It has also been my experience that the more I follow the more I see how life in Jesus transcends everything political and religious I have ever known. 

In the last few years especially, I have lived within an uncomfortable tension; two forces each tugging at me from different directions.  It's the tension created between institutionalized religion, and the direction it pulls me -- and Jesus, and the direction he leads me.  Jesus does not lead me into the confines of institutionalized religion.   Most of the time he leads me in the opposite direction.  I say that knowing that I place myself at risk because in many ways because I am an ordained pastor, for many I represent institutionalized religion.   

Institutionalized religion's greatest desire is to protect itself and survive, and it usually does what it needs to do to survive and it turns inward.  Jesus' greatest desire with every breath he drew and every step he took was to give himself totally away in love-symbolized by the cross that stands before us. 

Institutionalized religion, by its very nature, locks us into a world of enormous divisions and  conflicting camps.  It separates the world into true believers and heretics; the clean from the unclean,  the acceptable from the unacceptable, in the in-group form the left-behind,  the good from the bad.   But yet when I follow Jesus, I experience him crossing over and transcending every religious, political, social and economic barrier of his time in order to embrace, with love and grace, the humanity living on the other side of rigidly drawn boundaries. 

Institutionalized religion almost always ends up placing a copyright on grace as it seeks to exert control over grace by making itself its only mediator; and it only distributes grace under conditions of strict control.  And then I follow Jesus, and I experience him loving lavishly and spreading grace around excessively, with abandon, especially to those people and places that religion has excluded.  

Jesus freed himself from the constraints of religion to explore, embody and live his live with grace beyond restraint. It's along that road that Jesus invites us to follow - one step at a time! 

I think the first steps of following are the hardest because there are so many things in my heart and in my head that would hold me back.  And, if I waited for my heart to feel good and my head to be convinced, I would never take the first step.  So it's right then and there, at the beginning of the road, that faith takes the shape of my feet.  Even though my head and my heart are reluctant, I can believe with my feet, and in spite of my unsure head and my fearful heart I can take the first step and begin to follow Jesus on this road of amazing grace, just one small step at a time, because small steps, especially at the beginning,  are the biggest steps I can take.

But  somewhere along the way of following, I will discover to my joy that my heart and my head are catching up with my feet, and I am being transformed, and that the grace of God is being set free in this world again; only this time taking the shape of my life.  And if enough of us together move our feet in the direction that Jesus leads, we become his living communal body in the world; his virtual hands and feet on fire with God's love, joining him in God's work of grace. 

And that gives me hope that we never need become an institution that imprisons and restricts the grace of God, but a living community that sets God's grace free - with many little steps at a time - and by joining together maybe even some big leaps!   Amen.