Sermons

Toward Repentance

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church March 9, 2003                                           Mark 1:9-15

“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

Margaret Wise Brown’s decades old children’s book reminds us simply and strongly what we already know: we run away. It is our very and most human train to flee and elude, from so many things, from everything. We are prone to wander.

Sometimes the running is pronounced, from a behavior or relationship or a person or even a place. Other times the running is more nuanced, from a feeling or emotion or a choice in life.

And we know this well, as some of the best running we do is when we run from that very reality which produces the running in the first place. That is to say, we begin to sense ourselves running, and we run even from that liberating comprehension.

But in our heart of hearts, in those quiet moments spent, we know.

What do we do with such incredible knowledge? What do we do when we begin to know? What do we do at the point when we discover our running, when we break through the old and are unsure what the new is and where it will take us?

What do we do?

Jesus has just been baptized

by the Baptist. He will enter the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, a story that marks the commencement of this Lenten season.

After the temptation, Jesus emerges, tested and prepared to begin his ministry. And he proclaims, “Repent.” “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

His first words.

And deep in our hearts, we know that he knows. Repent.

Author and humorist Garrison Keillor comments frequently on his religious experience. Recalling the liturgical sensibility of his childhood congregation, Keillor said, “We didn’t have incense, we had cologne. We also didn’t have any statues, although some brethren were less active than others.”

And then this” “I’m not sure I’m in favor of repentance. Sinners are the ones who get the work done. A strong sense of personal guilt is what makes people willing to serve on committees.” The Christian Century, July 5-12, 1995, p. 670.)

He’s probably right, of course. Both committees and guilt are at the heart of what we’re about. Or so it seems.

The Westminster Confession of Faith, which we Presbyterians hold among our theological touchstones, says that by repentance,

“a sinner, out of the sense and sight, not only of the danger, but also of the filthiness and odiousness of his sins, as contrary to the holy nature and righteous law of God, so grieves for, and hates the sins, as to turn from them all unto God.”

There is good news to be found amidst that odiousness and filthiness, to be sure, but we have to work a bit to find it.

For sure repentance echoes the caricature of the crazed zealot at some city street corner with a huge sign intended to terrify us into repentance.

But that all misses the point. It did then. It does now.

The prophet Isaiah said that, “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We sit in darkness, in confusion, in disobedience, in pain, in anxiety, in loneliness, in isolation. This is where we sit. This is who we are, in whatever ways we acknowledge or understand, and in whatever ways we seek to articulate.

So even if we don’t know, can’t know, what we are looking for, we at least recognize the question.

And Jesus emerges, in our worlds, in our lives, in our cities, in our churches, in our hearts, and says simply, “Repent.”

And we listen, because we know it is the truth that he speaks, and we know that he wants us to repent, not for his sake, not for the sake of any cosmic, divine victory, but for the sake of our own spirits and souls, and for the sake of the world.

It is not guilt. It is a gift.

The Second Helvetic Confession, in that very same beloved Presbyterian Book of confessions, reminds us that “by repentance we understand the recovery of a right mind in a sinner awakened…a sincere turning to God and all good…for repentance is a sheer gift of God.”

A sheer gift. A gift freely offered, but a gift we must know we need.

Jesus says “Repent,” and makes the offer, and we seek to receive. Yet even in the receiving, he knows we will fumble and struggle.

The pattern of things, as the late theologian Joseph Sittler reminds, is “rebellion, repentance and return,” a cycle, a rhythm, that Jesus anticipates, that we acknowledge each time we declare anew our need of god’s grace and mercy. (Grace notes and Other Fragments, p. 69)

“Who shall ascent to the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us,” writes Annie Dillard, “There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers and mothers are all dead -- as if innocence had ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comforts of pleasure, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the threat, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.” (Holy the Firm, pp. 56-57)

There is no one but us.

But there is us.

That is the point, of course.

Jesus knows, and we know that he knows. He knows that we run, yet he calls us, calls us to repent and change, and by changing gives us the possibilities and the hopes of making a difference in our own lives, in the lives of those whom we love, our dear ones, and ultimately, in the life of the world.

Repentance, that is to say, is not only deeply personal, but remarkably communal and social.

Jesus calls a group to follow him, after all.

But there is more.

Jesus proclaims the good news of the kingdom, and invites us to do the same, seeking justice and reconciliation and wholeness. Repentance is never individual, or private. But its genesis begins with a single word, spoken to each one of us, a word that we hear in the many places of our lives, a word that cuts like a knife or cascades gently like a breeze.

And we hear, we wake us, or reach out, or last out, and the word is already there, waiting for us. A conversion of the heart, a call to respond with action rather than sentiment.

And from that single word, and all its rhythms and ripples and reverberations, we begin a most beautiful adventure and most excellent journey, toward regeneration and rebirth, toward reconciliation and re-creation, toward renewal and redemption and reformation, and finally, and joyfully, toward resurrection.

Or stated another way—

“If you become a bird and fly away from me, I will be a tree that you come home to.”

Amen.