Be Jesus / See Jesus.

Malachi 3:1-4

Philippians 1:3-11

Luke 3:1-6

December 6, 2015

I.

John proclaims “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  This baptism appears to be some kind of prerequisite to being able to see the salvation of God when he comes.  It’s like having to put on your 3-d glasses before you can fully experience the movie.

Repentance is an important word that we have tended to neglect.  The word has suffered from centuries of abuse by religious fanatics.  Countless cartoons have been made of the old, bearded man in the white robe, standing on the street corner with the sign that says, “Repent!  The End Is Near!”  It is a caricature of religion, Christianity in particular, as a doleful downer all about hellfire and damnation.

People generally think that repentance is about some grotesque practice of self-hatred and self-flagellation, in which we morosely punish ourselves for our sins, and if we just suffer enough discomfort, guilt, shame, and pain, we will earn God’s forgiveness.  Which, of course is not what repentance is about at all… but this view has managed to neutralize an important word and practice of the spiritual life.     

In Hebrew, the word for repentance is shuv, which means doing a 180, changing the direction of your life.  It means taking a different path, turning away from a sinful and self-destructive life, away from injustice and violence, away from doing evil, and turning towards God’s law and doing good, creating peace, or shalom.  In Greek, the word is metanoia, which means adopting a new way of thinking and looking at the world, literally a new mind.  It means to see things differently and therefore to act differently.

The fact is that without repentance, that is, without coming to see, think, and act differently, what God is doing in the world will continue to be opaque, invisible, unintelligible nonsense to us.  It will not compute.  It will be undecipherable white noise.  It will be like something happening at some imperceptible range of the spectrum that we are not equipped to receive, like infrared rays, or high frequency sounds.  Without repentance we remain oblivious to God’s saving Presence at work among us, as most people are, especially a lot of religious people.  Without repentance, a religious person, of any faith, is just a terrorist.  

Repentance is a little like a radio.  There are in this room a lot of forms of light that we cannot see, among them are radio waves.  A radio is a technology that allows us to perceive those waves.  Repentance is a spiritual technology that that allows us to perceive that there is something else, something actually very wonderful, going on all around us all the time, but because of the limitations of our senses we don’t know it.  Repentance allows us to see that what is going on all around us is the grace, goodness, beauty, and truth of the God who breathes this whole place into being and declares it very good. 

II.

Last week someone put on Facebook this short video of a baby who was born deaf, but who was getting hearing aids and who was now hearing for the first time.  Here is this whole world of sensory experience that this person had no way to know even existed, to which she is suddenly given access.  And her expressions of amazement and delight were… well, amazing and delightful.

But in our case, spiritually, it is not so much that we need something to be added to us so we can more fully perceive the truth.  What has happened to humans is that we have grown this dense, hard, spiritual exoskeleton — the ego and the personality — that has limited, restricted, shut-down, and distorted our senses.  Which means that repentance means having that shell removed.  We are way more eager to talking about adding something to us than we are to talk about having something removed from us.  But the fact is that, like a growth or a tumor or a cataract or an infection or any other example of something accruing to us that is harming us, if we are to be free it has to be taken off.

That’s why John the Baptizer uses baptism, which is basically a washing practice, to get this across.  We wash something that has become soiled or defiled or stained in some way.  We use water, and sometimes soap or detergent, to separate the extra added stuff we don’t want from the pure thing underneath we’re trying to get clean.

This is the same kind of image used by the prophet Malachi in our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.  He says that repentance is like the way someone might use fire to burn off the impurities in some metal so that the result is more pure, bright, useful, and valuable.  Then he says something a little closer to home, since I don't know if any of you do a lot of work with molten metals.  He says it’s like using bleach, in those days it was fuller’s soap, to get a piece of cloth really clean.

The thing about a process like refining metal is that the metal gets really hot as well.  If we identify with the metal, it is easy to imagine that getting the impurities burned off would be rather painful and traumatic.  We know from cleaning anything that rarely does dirt just slide off like in dish-soap commercials; usually some scrubbing is involved, and scrubbing can be uncomfortable for the one being scrubbed.

Repentance therefore means that in order to see and then walk in the truth of God’s love, we have to lose a lot of gunk that has accrued to us, stuck to us, and been allowed to harden and sink in.  We have to lose a lot of grime and grit that is preventing us from seeing clearly.  We have to lose the crusted shell of emotional and mental protection we have allowed to form around us and even penetrate into our identities and the ways we think and feel.

Metanoia, developing a new mind, means losing the old mind; going in a new direction means not continuing to go in the old direction.

III.

The problem is that we have become quite attached to the old direction and the old mind.  We have become so attached to the old direction and the old mind that we even tend to imagine that they are who we are.  Our perceptions are so truncated, limited, and restricted that it does not occur to us that there is any other way to be.  This is why so many people seem to think that when Christians use the word repentance we mean some kind of self-hatred or self-punishment.  If all we are is little self-centered egos running around, then any attempt to get rid of our self-centeredness amounts to suicide.

This is where faith comes in.  We have to trust in what is normally unseen, which is that there really is more to life than what we have been conditioned to accept.  We have to take the word of people who have made this journey before us and who report that, yes, on the other side of the refiner’s fire, on the other side of repentance, on the other side of a process by which our old, ego-centric, personality-driven selves, with the addictions, habits, fears, rages, and violence that characterized them, are eliminated, there really is something much better inside of us.  We have to trust that beneath our encrusted shell of tight selfishness there really is a pure, bright, open, precious soul of light.

In other words, we have to trust that in Jesus Christ we are meeting our own true selves, as well as the living God incarnate.  The point of repentance is to carefully and thoroughly dissolve away everything in us that is not in conformity to Jesus Christ.  The apostle Paul talks earlier in Philippians about “being of the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.”  Clearly, our thinking, imagining, feeling all has to be purified so that everything in us that is not him is removed.  This means simply becoming truly human, as we were created to be.  It means becoming the real humanity that Jesus himself reveals and embodies, even as he at the same time embodies the love, wisdom, and presence of God.

The church, the gathering of disciples, is a school of repentance.  This does not mean it is a place where we meet to hate and punish ourselves, of course.  Rather, it is where we come to find God’s love in ourselves, in others, and in our world.  It is really a place of ultimate self-love, because we are seeking our true selves, our deepest, realest, and best selves, the selves we are underneath all the lies and defenses we have built around ourselves.  We seek only to let go of that which is killing us, confident in the knowledge that who we really are is underneath all that.

IV.

Repentance is not just about seeing and thinking.  Repentance is not an interior mood.  It is primarily about doing.  We need to get away from the old pattern by which we imagine that we can think our way into acting differently.  Instead we have to embrace a new pattern in which we act our way into thinking differently.  

This is what Paul means when he says that his prayer is that the love of these disciples in Philippi may overflow with knowledge.  Love first, then knowledge.  Love is active and relational.  Love is behavioral and embodied.  Love is about other people.  It is through loving that we come to knowledge and full insight.  We love first, and this changes our way of thinking.  Love is repentance.

It is love for each other that eventually makes us pure and blameless, as indicated by the “harvest of righteousness,” that is, the good actions, strong relationships, and healthy community we produce.  All of this comes through Jesus. 

In order to see Jesus — that is, in order to see the presence of God’s love in the world — we have to be Jesus.  We have to be sharing his love with each other.  Repentance is not a mind-game.  It is not about our opinions.  It is about how well we love each other here and now.  The more we love, the more we see, until we see his coming in full.  Until we see his Day dawning all around us.