Dan and
Claire were married for 8 years, it started out great, but they were drifting
apart. Eventually Claire spoke up, “Hey, this isn’t working.” Dan replied, “I’m
so glad you said something, I’ve felt that way too.” It took a lot of work and
some outside counseling, but things got better.
It had
started to go south for Phil when he had an accident on the job and was given
more painkillers than he needed. Then he used medication he found in her
mother’s medicine cabinet, and he quickly escalated to heroin. His best friends
Jason and Jamal sat him down one day, and told him how his dependency on drugs
had changed who he was—they intervened, and Phil got into an inpatient rehab
place, and afterwards regularly attended NA meetings and, after a few relapses,
kept clean.
Patt and Max were
driving from South Plainfield to New York City, and things didn’t look quite
right, and after a while Max turned to Patt and said, “Hey, Patt, I just saw a
sign for Philly… maybe we should turn around.” And they pulled over, checked
googlemaps, and turned around.
In all these
cases it took some courage to say, “This is wrong” and courage, too, to change.
To turn around—or to put it in biblical terms, to repent.
Let us pray
When I think of repentance—of folk forced
to look at their situation and be stimulated by the Spirit to spontaneous acts
of re-interpretation of the faith, I
think of Jeremiah.
2,700 years ago, the prophet Jeremiah
was assessing the destruction of Jerusalem, walking the rubble and ruin of that
grand city razed by the Babylonians—his city shattered.
And down from
his depths a question arose, “Why?”
“What of the
promises between God and us? What of the covenant made between God and the
people, made between Moses and God?”
And the horrifying
answer came to him, “they broke it! They treated God like a cheated-upon
spouse!”
Imagine that
moment! Struck there by his surroundings, and by his despair, and by a need to
start again—to turn around, to repent.
“Oh, Lord,”
it seems he is saying, “There is no way out. We can’t save ourselves, look around
at our best, blown to bits and blowing away in the wind and ate by the flames
of war!”
And God
responds, “I will provide for you a new covenant. An internal promise, one
sided and sure, beyond breaking—there will be no separation between you and
I this time, because you will know me!”
God turned the people around, and did a new
thing with them!
When I think of
repentance—of folk complacent but called to
something more, moved to a higher ground and higher calling, I think of the folk Jesus calls to
discipleship in John’s Gospel.
1,990 year ago, Jesus calls
it like he sees it.
“The truth will set you free.”
Yet these folk with him believe they’ve always been free, smug
even with Jesus right there, unable to see where they’d fallen short, unable to
see how bound they were.
But Jesus sets before them a Word and a Way—a path to turn
onto and follow onward to the Truth and the Freedom found in being a Disciple
of Jesus Christ, paved, ultimately, in the unearned adoption into God’s
family—reminded that that was
Abraham’s origins as well… just some wandering Aramean who God happened to gift
with relationship—turning him too toward the promised land, turning Abraham too
around, and into the merciful arms of God!
God turned the
people around and did a new thing with them!
When I think of
repentance—when I think of a Repenter par excellence—someone stopped in their
tracks and turned 180 degrees around—I
think of the Apostle Paul.
1,960 years ago, Paul had a problem.
He’d met the Messiah, and it wasn’t who he expected at all!
The Blessed One died on a cursed tree! Non-Jews joining Jesus’ earliest
followers!
He asked, “How is this possible? Aren’t there clear
boundary markers? Isn’t that what makes the world of religion go round? Isn’t
that righteousness in a nut shell?”
No—he finds, God is faithful to ALL people! The
barriers erected, erased, and replaced by God’s love found in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
God turned the
people around and did a new thing with them!
When I think of
repentance—being convicted and convinced by
conscience, following after a new Spiritual insight, wherever it may lead—I think of Luther.
500 years ago, Martin Luther looked back at Scripture and
at the Early Church, and looked carefully at the church around him—and was
convinced something was wrong!
He looked at the penance system that had calcified onto the
church and hand clung to it like some parasite.
He looked at it in horror, realizing the problem was deeper
than the sale of indulgence—get out of purgatory free cards hocked to pay for
St. Peter’s Basilica back in Rome.
Luther noted:
-How the penance system was warping not only his faith
life, but the collective life of the Church writ large.
-How it seemed designed to obscure the Grace God promises
us,
-designed to ignore that we are adopted children of God,
and to pull at people’s hearts in order to make God’s law
again an external thing.
And to this he wrote up 95 points of debate, beginning:
“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” in Matthew
4:17, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
And the
journey that followed the posting of the 95 theses involved:
-sanctifying and splitting,
-a Christian re-thinking of sex and celibacy and the
spirituality of work,
-a popularization of scripture reading and child rearing,
-new ways of taking care of the poor among us, engaging
with secular power, and finding God where we would least expect God to show up.
God turned the
people around and did a new thing with them!
And, just as God wasn’t done with folk 2,700 years ago, or
1,900 some years ago, or 500 years ago… I want you to know God continues to
call us to a life of repentance, of turning around, moving from complacency to
Christ follower, righteous re-interpretation of the faith, digging down through
the layers of our own missteps to recover the grace that is always, already,
there!
God is always
turning us around and always doing a new thing with us!
A+A
