Turn Around

Turn Around

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

December 4, 2016

Scripture: Matthew 4:1-12

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I imagine we’ve all seen it, or at least we’ve seen a caricature of it. A rather disheveled looking man, perhaps with long uncombed hair and a scraggly beard, standing on a street corner and holding up a sign. The sign reads: “Repent! The End is Near!” The theology behind that sign, I guess, is that in order to be saved at the end of the world we have to repent now. Whether you accept that theology or not, it certainly is undeniable that repenting has long been a big deal with Christians. Unfortunately, it has become a big deal mostly with Christians of a very conservative bent with whom I have significant theological disagreements, but it’s been a big deal with other kinds of Christians too. One source I looked up on line says that the word repent appears 74 times in the New International Version translation of the Bible that we use here. That’s a lot of times for one otherwise rather obscure word. Repentance is indeed a central Christian concept.

We were talking about repenting last Monday at the clergy lectionary group I attend in Seattle. Bobbi Dykema, whom many of you know from the times she has covered for me here, piped in. She said the lines of the Matthew passage for today about repentance reminded her of a line from a Leonard Cohen song: “When they said repent, repent, I wonder what they meant.” I don’t actually recommend that song to you because at least one line in it is quite obscene, but that line took the words right out of my mouth. Or at least it took the question right out of my head. Just what does repent mean anyway? Why has our faith made such a big deal out of it? Well, whatever repent may mean, I can tell you one thing that I used to think it meant that it doesn’t mean. I used to think it meant feel bad about something you’ve done that’s wrong or something that’s right that you haven’t done. I thought it meant feel guilty about what a horrible person you are. I thought it meant confess what a louse you are. That, folks, is definitely not what repent means. It just flat doesn’t.

That it doesn’t mean feel guilty is in some ways good news. It’s certainly no fun going around feeling guilty all the time. That’s not an abundant way to live, and it’s hard (for me at least) to imagine that our God of love wants God’s people going around feeling guilty all the time. The problem is that there’s a bit of bad news in discovering what repent really means too. See, what repent really means turns out to be a good deal harder to do than just feeling guilty about what a terrible person you are. The best definition I’ve found of what the Greek word used the New Testament that usually gets translated as repent is “have a fundamental change in thinking that leads to a fundamental change of behavior or way of living.”

When I found that definition of repent I said “Ouch!” Fundamental change in thinking? Fundamental change of behavior or way of living? Do the people who call us to repent really know what they’re calling us to do? Do they know they are calling us to fundamental transformation? Do they what fundamental means? Our word fundamental comes in part from a Latin word that means depth. Fundamental means in depth. It is the opposite of superficial. It is the opposite of easy. To repent is to transform the most basic parts of our thinking. To repent is to transform just about everything we do. It is to make radical changes in how we live. Ouch! That sounds really hard. It sounds like something I don’t much want to do. My guess is that you don’t much want to do it either.

We may not much want to do it, but the Gospel’s call to repent is still there. We heard it in our reading from Matthew this morning. It’s the first word in John the Baptist’s call to the people: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” He calls the Sadducees and Pharisees who come to him to “produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” I take him to mean show in how you live that you have repented. Transform your thinking, then transform your lives. John’s message, including his call to repentance, became Jesus’ message, or at least part of Jesus’ message. We can make fun of slightly off kilter people holding signs on street corners, although having compassion for them would be more Christian of us. What we can’t do as Christians is ignore the Gospel’s call to us to repent.

So let me offer you a phrase that gets at what repentance really is, a phrase that might make it a bit easier to deal with. That phrase is “turn around.” To repent is to turn around. That’s really what the Greek word the Gospels use literally means. Turn around. That’s God’s call to us. That’s Jesus’ call to us.

Now, to turn around involves a couple of different things. It means first of all turning away from something. Then it means turning to something else. Jesus’ call to repentance is a call to us to turn around, to turn from something and turn to something else. So to understand what repentance means for us we must understand what Jesus calls us to turn from and what he calls us to turn to.

I’ll start with what we’re called to turn to. That’s actually the easier part of repentance to understand. Jesus’ call to repentance is a call to turn toward God and God’s ways. It is a call to turn to the ways of love, peace, hope, joy, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation. God calls each and every one of us to turn to those things, to that way of thinking and living. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that living that way is easy. Often it isn’t. I mean, it cost Jesus his life. Still, it is at least fairly easy to specify those things we are called to turn to.

Understanding what we’re called to turn from is, I think, harder, at least when it comes to specifics. In general terms we are called to turn from the ways of the world. We are called to turn from the things that are the opposite of the things we are to turn toward. That means we are to turn from the ways of hate, violence, despair, indifference, judgment, and conflicted separation. That’s easy enough to understand. Where it gets hard is when we try to discern precisely what it means in our own lives. Exactly what that I think or do am I supposed to turn from? Who am I supposed to love? Who am I supposed to forgive? For whom am I supposed to have compassion? Those are questions we all face most every day. Often finding the answers is hard. More often we find the answer and don’t like it. Well, we may not like it, but we’re still called to do it. That’s what repentance is all about.

Here’s another bit of good news. As hard as we may find it to repent, we can do it because we know that God is always with us, calling us, prodding us, but most importantly holding us and forgiving us as we struggle with the task of repentance. So the Gospel’s call to us today and every day is to turn around. To turn from the sinful ways we have learned and to the blessed ways of God. In this Advent season, as we await Christ’s birth, let’s listen to that call. Let’s turn around. Amen.