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Sermon Notes - December 4-5, 2009
"Repentance and the Road Back to God"
The Eighteeth Weekend after Pentecost
The great American wag, Ambrose Bierce, nearly one-hundred years ago, defined a road this way: “A strip of land along which we may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is too futile to go.” Our lives are often like those roads, so we look for exits—escape routes. But being on a different road isn’t simply the answer. Anyone who’s ever been on the wrong road can tell you that; it might be smooth and happy going, but it will never get you where you need to be. That’s the message we’re confronted with this second week of Advent, and the reality we need to confront every day of our lives.
If you’ve ever worked on or paid even a little attention to a new road coming through a place, you’ve noticed that soil and rock, trees and sometimes even parts of mountains, have to be removed—cleared out of the way. It’s no quick or easy project, it’s a long haul. Long ago, God spoke these words through the prophet Malachi: I will send my messenger and he will clear the path for a road before me … then the Savior, for whom you wait, will come to his temple quickly. The Lord wasn’t speaking simply about clearing land but about removing the obstacles in our hearts and minds and souls that block his work in the world: the dead soil of selfishness, the stubborn rocks of pride and arrogance, the trees towering above deep-running roots of resentment, the molehills we’ve made into mountains. God’s pushing of all that rubble away means an upheaval, but a necessary one. So Malachi says, Who can endure that day of his coming? It will be like the intense heat that separates metals and gives you pure ore … like the stinging work of lye that deep-cleans cloth. It hurts. God’s coming means change—he won’t put up with the ways we use and abuse each other, no matter how deeply they’re established in our selves and societies. He wants us off the road to ruin and on the road of repentance—God’s path that leads to life’s destination.
There’s that word—repentance—that was at the center of John’s work. It’s one of those religious words we’re so familiar with that it often has little meaning or force, but it’s really earth-shaking. It means change, and we know how we all like that … change of heart, change of mind, change of direction; turning off the wrong road and returning to the right one. John was the road-clearer saying “things have to change” because the Savior is about to begin his work of saving this world and turning it right-side up again. The rubble has to be cleared away so that we can see Jesus as the road, the truth, and the life that he is. John’s voice reverberated in the desert, declaring that valleys needed to be filled, mountains and hills brought down, the crooked made straight and direct, the rough and uneven places made level so that everyone living will see the salvation of God. God’s road of salvation means upheaval of the wrong ways we have things and want them to be. Shocked at John’s message, the people asked then, “What should we do?” His answer was simple: If you have extra, share with those who have none. Be honest in your dealings with others. Don’t seek prosperity at the expense of other peoples’ lives…. One is coming after me who has been anointed by the Holy Spirit; he will harvest what is good and discard what is useless.
And so we’re told, John continued to proclaim “the good news” to people. Interesting, because we usually think of repentance as “bad news”—giving up the wrong things we’ve grown comfortable with and deep-down actually like, and that’s precisely why it is “good news.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer got it so right when he said that we often become indifferent to the message of God coming into our world, taking only the pleasant and agreeable and forgetting the serious aspect that the God of the world lays claim to us … it’s not only glad tidings but first of all frightening news. Why? Because it means a drastic turnaround from the road of destruction to the road of salvation. It’s what Paul wrote about in Romans 2: ‘Because of your hard and unchanging heart, you are storing up punishment for yourself on the day of God’s judgment, but don’t you know that it is God’s kindness leading you to the change of repentance?’ It’s because of God’s immense kindness that he sent his Son into the world, as we heard earlier, ‘so that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ … so that you may abound in love and live with wisdom and insight, so that you may pursue what is the best in life, so that you may live in what’s pure and not stumble on the road.’ The Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner captured so well this aspect we usually miss by giving this definition: To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, “I’m sorry,” than to the future and saying “Wow!”
(Story of elder and stairwell). God opened up an escape route, an exit, for each one of us through Jesus’ rough road to the hill of his death and his road of resurrection to newness of life. It didn’t exist just long ago, but is open still. His road of salvation, the road of God turning and changing us through the Holy Spirit is the only way out—the only escape route from what traps us in life that truly takes us where we need to be.
Being a Christian means that we have been baptized into a life of repentance and forgiveness. God is always at work on us through his Holy Spirit—we have barriers that need to be cleared away. That’s why we confess our sins to God with each other. It’s supposed to be much more than just speaking words, but looking at our lives and acknowledging those wrong roads we’re traveling on. Are our wrong roads leading to weariness, futility, and road-rage? It’s time to give up and change course. “We can choose to be selfish or selfless; to burn with lust or love; to defend our power or dismantle it” (Johann Christoph Arnold). Let’s not paint a wall that’s crumbling and needs to come down, let’s not hold onto what needs to be pushed aside. Let us lay bare the rubble of our lives before the Lord and let him work on clearing it, so that our hearts might be cleansed and that we might be restored to the amazing joy of salvation once again. Let’s look at the path that leads to Christ’s altar of grace, where our Lord comes to us saying, Take this bread—my Body—and be strengthened for your journey on the road of repentance. Take this cup—my Blood—and be restored to the joy of salvation you’ve forgotten about. Be forgiven, be renewed, and travel down my road of salvation and life.
God grant us to travel through Christ on the road that leads back to God, the road that leads to our true home. So we pray: Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the road of your only-begotten Son, so that by his coming among us in grace, we may be enabled to serve you in love—Amen.