The Gift of Repentance

Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Isaiah, 10:33-11:9, Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent

I think that each generation has a crisis that defines them Actually most generations have a multitude of crises. For people my age, 9-11 was decisive, but we were adults in our early 20s. We analyzed, criticized, pointed fingers with the rest of the adult world we were growing into.

I’d venture to say that for people my age, a critical moment of our childhood was in January 1986 when millions of school children gathered around televisions sets to watch the first public school teacher fly into outer space.

As you know, Christa McAuliff and the rest of the crew of the Challenger never made it. The Challenger exploded in the first few minutes of take off, leaving this eight-year old, and other eight-year olds at the time, forming a critique of technology’s limits because of what we witnessed, because of the fear it caused us.

For my mother, it was the death of John Kennedy. She remembers crying in her cafeteria when she heard the news. And yet for others, in the year before that event, what was going on south of Florida, in Cuba, that shaped the tenor of their fear. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war, literally, to our back door. A new crisis was born in the lives of Americans.

Some of you remember this time. Some of you were children. Some of you feared for your children. The future, undoubtedly, seemed a fragile hope.

It was this fear that prompted the songwriters Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker to write a peace hymn, which became a beloved Christmas song. You probably know it “Said the night wind to the little lamb ‘Do you see what I see?”. This song has been recorded by over 100 different artists.

If you know it well, you likely have the cool crooning of Bing Crosby in your mind, singing one of the most familiar recordings of the song—a version that, ironically, was recorded on the day Kennedy was assassinated.

But as many times as it’s been reinterpreted and recorded, it has at its core an unwavering message: “I am amazed that people think they know the song” said the song’s author Noel Regney, “and not know it was a prayer for peace.”

But more than the images it evokes of shepherd boys and night winds and mighty kings, we are left with a question: do you? Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? Do you know what I know?

Do you?

Do you see the possibility of predators protecting their prey? Of coal companies healing the mountains? Of people actually restraining their consumptive habits? Do you see the possibility of Christians transforming their good intentions into radical acts of faith?

Do you see what God sees?

Do you see the possibility of living without shame? Of bedding down your envy with your potential? Do you see the possibility of living in peace, with yourself?

It’s a sweet, perhaps too sweet, vision, isn’t it?

So it is with questions like this that we cross the threshold into the season of Advent. And like honey dripping off a prophet’s lip we encounter, not a polite invitation, but an urgent demand.

Prepare. Get ready to see what God sees because you’re going to see God. It’s all going to be clear.

Those things you’ve hidden from yourself, you’re gonna see them.

Those things you’ve denied about yourself or the world around you, you’re gonna have to deal with them.

The potential you’ve neglected, the purpose you’ve pushed aside, the blind eye you’ve given to the world’s misery—all of it is going to be crystal clear to you…and where will you be then?

What will you construct to protect yourself when you’re seeing what God’s seeing?

Do you really think you’ll be spared this new sight?

Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?

[pause]

Now I don’t know if this was the most effective way for John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of Jesus. Generally, fear tactics have initial success but don’t really give long term payoffs. But who am I to judge his PR skills? We have to assume that his audience was receptive, at least in part, because their spirits longed for such an invitation, albeit a scary one.

Though, honestly, I can appreciate the invitation to prepare. It assumes some measure of time involved, a process, an orderly sequence of events.

But while we often say that John’s message is about preparation, if we look closely at the text, he does not say “prepare”. The author of Matthew describes this wild-eyed prophet by quoting Isaiah saying this is the one Isaiah spoke about, a “voice of one crying out I the wilderness; ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

No, John himself does not say "prepare." John says "repent."

That’s a whole another thing, in our minds.

Preparation probably means you know what to expect.

Repentance means anything could happen.

Preparing is logical.

Repenting is messy.

Repentance is not something we think of when we enter into Advent. And it is here that I think we have let the consumer calendar overshadow the church’s calendar. The commercials will tell you that Christmas celebration begins around Thanksgiving, or earlier.

But the church reminds us that to get to that celebration (which begins on Christmas) we move through Advent. A time of waiting. Of preparing our hearts. It is not a time of making orderly lists of gifts, but entering the messy tangle of repentance.

Which is probably what John would say is the best way to prepare ourselves. Like the saying “honesty is the best policy”, John the Baptist tells us “repentance is the best preparation.”

But there is a problem, I think. Most of us don’t like the word repentance. As I forced myself to encounter my hangups about repentance this is what I came up with in some of my writing earlier this week: “Repentance seems like an unobtainable demand , and I am set up for failure. There will always be something I did wrong. Hearing about repentance beats me over the head with my mistakes and constantly reminds me of how unworthy I am.”

What do you think of when you hear the word “repentance”?

How would you feel if someone demand you to repent?

Kathleen Norris writes about helping young children in a parochial school encounter the Psalms by having them write some of their own. One honest little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In his poem he talked about how his father would often yell at him, and his response to this, in the poem, was to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, I shouldn’t have done that.’”

“’My messy house’ explains it all,” Norris reflects. “If that boy had been[a young monk] in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (A Vocabulary of Faith, 70).

The line of God’s relationship to humanity as seen in scripture from the Garden of Eden on is a dynamic relationship, of God knowing we are more than our messy houses: God making creation good, God being disappointed, God encouraging, God being disappointed, God praising humanity…God being disappointed.

And then as if God knew nothing else to do, God- because of love- came to us.

and bedded down in our messy house.

God probably came in anticipation. God probably had some questions: Will they see me? Will they be prepared for me? Will they repent of those things that keep them from really seeing me? Will they start to see within themselves what I have always known, always heard, always seen?

And—like that honey dripping off the lips of the prophet-- the sticky invitation (slash) demand comes, telling us how to prepare. How to make ourselves ready for the divine and the human to dwell together, without consuming each other, without overpowering, or exploiting.

Prepare for God to lay down with your troubled soul with the gift of repentance.

Repent, not so you are ashamed of what keeps you bound

but to free you so you can begin to see what God sees in you.

Repent, not so you are constantly reminded of how unworthy or wicked you are but

repent

so you can encounter God’s insurmountable love for the world.

[pause]

It would be arrogant to believe that we will see entirely with God’s eyes.

But it would be denying the miracle of the incarnation to believe that we can’t, in some small way, with some small hint of clarity, look for what God sees and hopes for in this world.

And you—can you begin to see what God sees in you?

If not, receive God’s gift.
Prepare.
Repent.
And see.