Watch and Return
Advent II
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.’ ”
Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Matthew 3:1-12
This Advent, like all Advents, we are encouraged to wait and watch. Whether we are waiting for Christmas, the holiday, or watching for Jesus, is up to us.
Many Jews in Jesus’ time were waiting for the Messiah to come. While they were busy waiting, they were interrupted by this mangy but undeniably charismatic fellow named John. “Which John is this?” the people might have asked, if they’re like the people here in Vermont. “Oh, that’s so-and-so’s son, he married so-and-so’s sister,” or maybe by what they do, “Oh, that’s Nancy, she used to be a teacher at the academy and had about three dozen cows by the pond.” So who is this John? Is he a son of Zebedee? Is he an Iscariot? While Luke tells us his parents are Elizabeth and Zechariah, the people didn’t know him as “John, son of Zechariah.” They knew him as that wild, confrontational, but strangely wise man who spent a ton of time in the Jordan River. “Oh yeah, that’s John…he baptizes.”
Why the Jordan? The Jordan was the threshold of transformation. The original boundary into the Promised Land, it was at least a 20 mile walk from Jerusalem, just off the road to Jericho. John spent a lot of time bringing people into those waters to get ready, because he was watching and waiting for the Messiah too. While his baptisms were in some way no different than his people’s normal purity rituals to prepare to enter the presence of God in the Temple, he was preparing them for another message that John himself did not even fully realize: the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ, would enter into the temple of your very heart to dwell there. If your house isn’t ready for God to show up, is your heart?
If you want to watch and wait for this coming Messiah into the heart, you need to pay attention to your own actions, your own orientation, your own lack of faith, and reorient and return to God. In other words, “Repent!” (Try putting that on your family Christmas card and see how many you get back.)
What we might mean by “repentance from sin” is obviously too much ground to cover in one single sermon. Someone asked me that just the other day, what is sin? And what are the sins? We know the “seven deadly sins” to repent of—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth. We know sometimes it’s described as “missing the mark.” We also know there are layers to sin, like the idea of “original sin,” or the inherent distance between our nature and God’s nature. Sometimes sin is described as our deviation from the will of God. In philosophical terms, some describe sin and evil as not even things in and of themselves, but an absence, where God is not, or where the divine is twisted, bent away—hold that thought.
Something I’ve become a bigger believer in is that we humans do not thrive on an anti-vision, but thrive when we are drawn towards the positive presence of God. If sin is fundamentally an absence of God, it is not sustainable to be driven by “avoiding an absence” of God as it is to be driven towards the fullness of his presence. Those might sound like they’re the same thing, but they’re crucially different. I know I have been caught into the trap of focusing on an anti-vision, and I know so many Christians have, because it’s one of the most common ways our spiritual pride takes hold: “Look at all the sin out there in the world, isn’t it awful? I’m glad I don’t do that.” It is a basic comedy of life that we so often think about sin in sinful ways. As some like Thomas Merton would talk about, there is a sweet spot of just how much to be aware of the devil, and it’s neither too little nor too much.
So as we think about sin, and how we need to pay attention and repent of it—and it’s absolutely insidious and Christ calls us to be scrupulous on noticing it, like the log in our eye—it’s also important that we are not only anti-sin, but even more called by and towards the presence of the love of God in Jesus Christ, who, yes, defeated sin, but not for sin’s sake, but for God’s sake and yours. Our primary focus should not be on an anti-vision, but the vision of the kingdom that Jesus has in store for us.
This is actually what John the Baptist himself taught while he was calling people to repent. His holiday card would not have been just “Repent and Happy Hannukah,” but, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”1
So what does this mean for us in practical terms of our repentance? We can start by remembering what the Hebrew sense of repent was. Even though the gospels were translated in Greek in the word metanoia that many of us know as “change your mind,” the sense of repentance that came from the Hebrew scriptures is one that is really embedded in a sense of return. The focus is less on avoiding sin, but returning fully, with one’s whole heart and mind and with full obedience in your actions, to God.
So when we repent of our sins, we say, “God, I want to come back to your direction. I want to do things your way again. I just tried my way for the three hundred thousandth time…but now I really want to listen to you.”
This is the story of the Israelites throughout the Old Testament, forgetting all that God had done for them, wanting to worship what they wanted to worship and when they wanted to worship, deciding to do things their way and according to their will, and eventually, returning to obey not just to avoid evil, but because they knew that true goodness was in fully returning to God in obedience. At its heart, obedience means coherence; obedience is the quality of wood that lets it be shaped into beautiful and useful furniture. Or to use Jeremiah’s language, obedience is what makes clay moldable by the Potter.2
So as we are watching and praying this Advent season, notice and return from the ways in which you are really concerned with your own will and way of doing things. Don’t be obsessed with sin or make it big enough that we start to forget that Jesus Christ defeated sin, but also, notice. Because sin thrives on us not noticing at all. We usually don’t notice getting sucked into the logic of sin in the stories that enable our pride, our greed, our lust, our envy, and so on.
Of course, it’s not enough to just notice sin, to really repent of it. Just like you wouldn’t say to a neighbor, “Hey, I didn’t realize I was really treating you unfairly, and, well, I’m gonna keep doing that, but aren’t you glad I realized it?” That’s easy to see in terms of a person-to-person interaction. Sometimes we forget that God is also a person. It would be just as ridiculous to imagine praying, “God I know I’m insulting you and going against your will every day, and I’m gonna keep doing it, but hey, at least I noticed.” Unfortunately for our willfulness, once we start noticing, we have to also do. But fortunately for us, God in his everlasting mercy keeps giving us chance after chance to fully return.
To put it all in a metaphor, since our Vermont snow and cold has arrived, I am grateful that I get to make my annual sermon illustration of cross-country skiing.
Skiing and Christian discipleship have a few things in common. They are not something that you do once, but are ongoing processes. Really, they are living relationships. Skiing is an ongoing relationship between you, your skis, and the earth, and Christianity is an ongoing relationship between you, your life, and Jesus Christ. Just like putting on your skis and driving to the center already starts you in the process of skiing, there is a way that when we say “yes” to Jesus that we have already begun one level of repenting of our sin. To be on the slopes and in a relationship with God at all—what all of us do when we are in church simply by showing up—is to say, “God, I want to learn from you, for I know you are God and I am not.”
In the discipleship of skiing, you find just how fun and pleasurable it is to learn the rhythms and patterns, just as we learn the rhythms and patterns of a life in God. It takes a long time to master both (which I never will). It takes a long time just to learn the right form, to discipline and structure yourself. And even if you’ve been doing it a long time, if you’re not paying attention, you can easily start doing bad habits, you get tired, your form slips, and then you fall, you run into someone, you get hurt. Now am I talking about skiing, or sinning?
New skiers and new Christians (and I’ve been both) are in a wonderful spot because we notice everything. We’re open to learning. We’re not good and we know we’re not, we’re just humbled and happy to be there. It’s very obvious we’re not good. But the problem is after a little time passes and you get just good enough that you think you can’t get hurt, that you know what you’re doing, and you stop noticing all the bad habits you’ve picked up. You get a little arrogant, a little hubristic, and think you can’t mess up, and (as I remember thinking this at the top of one hill last year) that’s exactly when you get hurt. Fundamentally, it’s because you stopped paying attention. Am I talking about skiing, or sinning?
Bad form in skiing gets us away from gliding up and down safely and beautifully. If you watch the Olympics this year, you will notice that they aren’t just doing whatever they want to do, but they have learned how to do things the way that obey the laws of nature; there are just certain things that work and don’t work. This is sort of the way it is with sin and the laws of our spiritual nature. The seven deadly sins are telling us that there are just certain things that, if we do them, are really not the right ways to live; rest assured, many have tried them.
But there is no gold medal Christian. All of us have something to work on. And the older mature skiers I see on the slopes are like the mature Christians I know who are no longer trying so hard to win races. They’re just doing it because they love it. They’re doing it because they’re able to. They’re doing it because it’s beautiful to be in a relationship with God. We still avoid sins because that’s how we prevent injuring other people and ourselves. It’s also how we actually enjoy skiing. And if you practice skiing long enough, eventually, you might even suddenly have moments where you’re like, “Oh… this is actually what it’s supposed to feel like.”
I think it’s the same with Christianity. Christian spiritual formation can take a long time. It can take a long time for us to have just glimpses of the kingdom, “Oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.” This is what makes repentance not like going to the dentist, but like going home.
So this Advent, as we watch, pray, and repent, let us notice where we are losing form. Let us return fully to the one who fully turned himself towards us, who died and bled to that we might fully know and trust that his love is the most beautiful place to be. Repent and return, for he is so, so near. Amen.
Matthew 3:2
Jeremiah 18