The Second Sunday of Advent

In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God. Amen.

“Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near!

“Repent!”

Being told to repent conjures up images of Westboro Baptist Church, with faces red from screaming, wildly waving signs around proclaiming: “Repent or burn in hell forever!” “God hates the gays!”

In our cultural conscience repentance and hate tend to be woven together. It is often co-opted within the online and social spheres by vitriol, cruelty, and despair.

Perhaps less cruel, but more annoying, are the street preachers - yelling “repent and turn to Christ lest you burn in hell for eternity.”

Repentance here is dripping with threats of damnation.

Repentance may also be accompanied by profound feelings of shame. 

I know I felt incredible amounts of shame as a closeted high schooler who was struggling with his sexuality, in a very conservative Christian tradition. 

Repentance was tied to not merely what I may have done, but also, who I was.

Within the cultural milieu, then, repentance is often associated with cruelty, hate, damnation, self-hate, and shame.

Repentance has a bad wrap.

But I say: MAKE REPENTANCE GREAT AGAIN!

Repentance is fundamentally about being put in the right relationship with God. 

Repentance is about returning to God who is Life itself, and life abundant.

In the Old Testament, the most common Hebrew word for repentance is shuv, meaning “to turn back, to return.” Often, it is used in this context to refer to turning from idolatry (ie Ezek. 14:16) and turning away from injustice & oppression (ie Ezek. 18:30), back to God. 

To repent is to return God to God’s proper place in our life. It is to turn from evil towards Goodness.

In the New Testament, written in Greek, repentance is the word metanoia. Meta- meaning change and noia meaning mind. A change of mind. A change of heart. To change one’s whole self from something towards something.

Both the Hebrew and Greek terms for repentance are orienting terms. We turn away from something, and turn towards God. It is physical! Active! Embodied and lived-out!

Now, the thing we  orient away from is none other than sin.

Another word with a lot of historical, cultural, and perhaps personal, baggage.

Roughly speaking, sin is that which breaks the relationship between us and God, between us and one another and creation and even our selves.

A number of the words from Hebrew flesh out what sin is. Chet means “to miss the mark,” pesha means “transgression or rebellion,” avon means “iniquity, a moral failing.”

Greek, hamartia, like the Hebrew chet, is to miss the mark, to make offense against, to err.

To repent of our sin, then, is to turn away from the habits, actions, beliefs, ways of being, in which we miss the mark, failing morally and spiritually. 

Notably, sin is not merely individual. Sin is also communal. 

God judges and exacts justice on the sins of the nations. It is the nations, the people which constitute a community, a political unit, who must answer for their collective sin, too.

So, repentance orients us away from individual and collective destructive, sinful ways of being towards God, who is constructive, life-giving, merciful. Repentance is active - not merely a few words uttered and then too quickly forgotten.

This is what repentance is. But what does repentance do to us, in this day and age? 

Allegorizing from the Gospel today:

First, repentance invites us to be something new.

Second, repentance humbles us.

Third, repentance purifies us.

First repentance brings who we are and what we have done before God. We seek forgiveness for our faults from God, who is merciful and compassionate. 

And then we go and do differently.

We are someone before we repent. And after repenting, we are invited into becoming who we are meant to be. 

In today’s Gospel, John is baptizing people in water. They go in one way, and come out cleansed, ready, prepared to be different.

To behave differently after repentance demands intentionality. 

We ought to spend time thinking about where we have failed individually - and collectively. Have I hated someone? Have I judged? Have I failed to do the good which God asked me to do in a particular moment?

Upon repenting, our sins are put away. We are freed to be different than we were before.

Unfortunately, I continuously fail after repenting. Maybe for a time I am more cognizant of not judging. Of minding my tongue. Of giving what I can to the needy. But then I fall into old habits. Sin creeps back in.

All the more reason, then, to ponder the second point. Repentance humbles us.

“YOU BROOD OF VIPERS! Bear fruit worthy of repentance!”

John shouts at the Pharisees and Sadducees, who were the ones who held power within the social and religious scope of Israel at this time. John calls them snakes.

We do not typically see ourselves as the antagonist in the scriptures. Pharaoh, Babylon, Nebuchadnezzer, the Pharisees and Sadducees.

We much prefer to see ourselves as the blessed ones, the good ones, the ones doing the right thing.

But there is great danger here. Many of the atrocities of Christian empire have been done with this exact assumption. We need look no further than the Doctrine of Discovery or Manifest Destiny and the genocide of Native Americans for evidence.

But oh how easy, and tantalizing, it is to believe that we are the blessed ones. We are fulfilling God’s purpose on earth. Maybe God even needs us!

But the sobering words of St. John waft in. “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

God doesn’t need us. We need God.

True repentance humbles us because we recognize that we fail to do the good which God demands of us. This is not to induce shame, it is merely a fact. We are, at times, a brood of vipers who ought to be reminded to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

And when this is deeply understood, we are liberated by the chains of our own pretendings of power. We recognize our dependence on God to free us, forgive us, and give us a chance to be who God calls us to be. 

For in the humility of repentance comes the virtues of empathy, and mercy, and compassion. We find ourselves more willing to forgive, to have compassion for one another in the midst of failure. We can live more like Jesus Christ, who is our saviour, redeemer, and God.

Grace upon grace, then, because God knows we need it!

Lastly, St. John declares that one is coming, Jesus, who will “gather the wheat in the barn, but the chaff he will burn with fire.”

Sounds like the good guys, the wheat, go home with Jesus, and the bad guys, the chaff, get burned up in hellfire!

But chaff is the inedible husk of wheat which must be removed before wheat can be made into bread. Chaff is actually a part of wheat.

Repentance, then, is a critical part of this process of removing the chaff from our lives.

Sin is this chaff on our grainy, wheaty lives. Sin builds up walls. Sin is destructive towards relationship. Sin functions by building disconnection between us and God, us and one another. 

Sin puts a thick, husky, chaffy wall between us and the world around us and God.

Repentance removes the chaff. It’s the sloughing of sin which stains and corrupts. Again, in repentance there is liberation, because we are freed to enter right relationship with God’s will in our lives. We are able to be the wheat and make some very fine and delicious bread!

The chaff of sin seems to always grow back on us, though.

And this is why we pray for forgiveness, why we repent, every Sunday before we receive the Eucharist. And this is why we, ideally, repent multiple times a day if we keep the Daily Offices. 

Contrition and repentance are important for our spiritual lives. It purifies us.

Repentance is good for us.

But repentance has a bad wrap in our cultural milieu. It is often co-opted and associated with hate, cruelty, damnation, and shame.

But, repentance is really about restoring right relationship of ourselves to God, and to one another. Repentance means turning away from sin and turning to God. 

Repentance invites us, humbles us, purifies us.

To what end? To bear fruit. To more fully be the light of the world. To more fully care for one another. To more fully carry our crosses and follow Jesus. To more fully become who we are meant to be. To more fully be able to follow our God, who calls us to, as the Prophet Micah proclaims, “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8).

Repentance leads us to a full life.

Amen.