No Time for Regrets (Matthew 3:1-17; 2nd Sunday after Epiphany; January 18, 2015)

No Time for Regrets

Text: Matthew 3:1-17
Liturgical Day: 2nd Sunday after Epiphany
Date: January 18, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I'm pretty sure that most of us didn't notice something that happened last week during Tessa's baptism. I didn't really notice it myself, so I can hardly blame any of you. After all, Tessa was adorable and she seemed thrilled to meet all of us. And I have to say that I've never had a baby react in quite the way she did to the baptism itself. Let's just say it's not that part of my job you have to pay me to do.

During all of that her parents made some pretty serious promises on her behalf. I wonder if you noticed that these are promises that all of you who are baptized have made or had made for you and that you reaffirmed them last Sunday. "Do you, as Christ's body, the church, reaffirm both your rejection of sin and your commitment to Christ?" I asked. You answered, "We do." Well, I assume that you did. Most of you did. Or maybe it was just a few who were really loud.

You reaffirmed three questions that, in one form or another, have been asked of candidates for baptism for a very long time. They lay out the expectations that we have of each other in the Church. We confess Jesus Christ as our Savior, lean with all our weight on Christ's grace, and promise to serve him as Lord together with the whole Church that Christ has opened up for everyone. We don't set up barriers to membership in the Church. We don't just wear the name Christian, we promise to live as Christ has told us. We confess Jesus as our Savior, rather than trusting in our cleverness or hard work or money or anything else, even our own faith.

And before that we promised to enter into a lifetime struggle against "evil, injustice, and oppression," recognizing that these things aren't always so obvious, and may come in attractive forms, forms like comfort, privilege, and security.

But first of all, we affirmed the promise to "renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sins." There's a lot there, in language that most of us are not used to using. What are the "spiritual forces of wickedness"? What connection to they have with "the evil powers of this world"? Those are good questions, and I'll get around to talking about some answers, but not today.

Today in our lesson we have the story of Jesus' testing in the desert and his first sermon which was, as told by Matthew, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." He called those who came to listen to him to repent, or, as the Common English Bible has it, to change their hearts and lives.

It's that word "repent" that has had me fascinated this week. It's a little word, just six letters in English, but it comes loaded. It has a harsh sound to it, a fire and brimstone sound, a hellfire and damnation sound. It's not a word that sits easily with us. We squirm before we even learn what we're supposed to repent of, so sure are we that it's going to be uncomfortable. It's not what we want in a church, otherwise we'd be at a church where the word is more common.

I have a fair idea of what we want. I ask visitors. Sometimes it's awkward to talk to visitors. I usually hesitate. I never say something like, "I'm glad you're visiting with us today." Well, not again. With my memory for faces, I have had the awful experience of someone answering, "I'm not a visitor. I've been a member here for forty years." Yikes. There aren't many pleasant places that conversation can go from there.

Instead, when I see someone I don't recognize, I usually say, "I'm sorry, but I don't recognize you," which is the simple truth.

With those who turn out to be visitors I often follow-up with this question. "What brings you to us this morning?" They usually say something like, "Well, we've lived in Decorah for a few days/weeks/months/years and we're looking for a church. We want to find some place where we'll be comfortable."

I understand. I'm uncomfortable being uncomfortable. I'm more comfortable when I'm comfortable. Comfort is a big deal with me. I like a comfortable chair, comfortable clothes, comfort food and, yes, a comfortable church. So I understand.

When visitors tell me that they're looking for a church where they'll be comfortable, I really hope that we'll be that church, that people, that place. I'd like to think that people would be comfortable here. I know it isn't always the case, but I want it to be. After all, for me and, I suspect for most of you, too, the heart of hospitality is making a guest feel comfortable. I want to be a good host.

But then I read a story in the Bible like the one we just heard and it becomes clear to me that Jesus was not all that interested in making folks feel comfortable. "Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near," is what Jesus preaches. Well, at least that's better than John who calls his congregation "children of snakes." But it's clear that neither of these men had the advantage of the latest evangelism techniques coming out Nashville. They just don't know what they're doing.

We laugh because we're caught between our need to be comfortable and their rather stern demand for repentance. We laugh to relieve our anxiety. Which is a good thing, because we certainly have enough of that.

It's that word: repent. We have images of what it is, images of sinners kneeling in the front of the church weeping---out loud---for their sins. We're not really very emotional people. Well, that's not strictly accurate. We save our emotions for what is important: college football. The rest of the time we like to keep our emotional reserve. "Gee, honey," we say to our spouses, "I love you so much, sometimes it's all I can do to keep from telling you." Our image of repentance just doesn't go with who we are.

But repentance doesn't really have that much to do with emotions. The Greek word that repentance translates is metanoia and that simply means, "change of mind," understanding that it doesn't mean simply to change one's opinions, but a fundamental change of the way that we think. It's big; it's just not necessarily emotional.

Carol and I once had kids sometimes had struggles with our kids over their bedtimes. By sometimes I mean every night at bedtime. They would stall and invent reasons to avoid the inevitable and I would get annoyed and say something like, "No more! Go to bed! Now!" And one or the other would say, "Sorry," in a tone that meant that they were anything but. So I gave them both the gift of this recording in their heads that comes out whenever they're dealing with their own children. I would say, "I am not interested in your sorrow. What I am interested in is change!" It turned out, of course, that just because I was interested in change did not mean that change would be forthcoming. But I think this is pretty close to the heart of what repentance means. It has little to do with sorrow and everything to do with change.

One of things that bugs me about what liberals do--especially liberals in the church--is their evident desire to feel badly about this or that particular piece of "evil, injustice, and oppression" in the world. At its worst feeling badly about bad things is little more than a desire to reassure ourselves that we are good people who are capable of feeling badly about bad things, and letting that reassurance become a substitute for actually doing anything to change those things. No, repentance is not about feeling sorry; it's not about observing a moment of guilt; it's about change.

And Jesus suggests as much. Why change? Why repent? Why change our hearts and lives? Because "the kingdom of heaven has come near" or, as our translation put it, "Here comes the kingdom of heaven!" This thing about the kingdom "coming near" is difficult to translate. The verb means "to come near, approach." The verb is in the perfect tense, so, it should be translated, "has come near" or "has approached." But where, exactly is it? It hasn't arrived exactly. Presumably, it's close. It's not here, but it has come near.

Wherever, exactly, the kingdom of heaven is, its nearness has changed our situation. We can no longer act as if our world were the only real thing. God's dream is also a real thing. The reality of God's dream is pressing in on our world. A changed situation calls for a change of mind, a change in how we look at the world, a change in how we act in it. Sorrow may come with that, but it doesn't have to.

We know, for example, that earth's climate, the one we depend on to be able to live here, is threatened by rising levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. We know that eighty percent of the known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. The unknown reserves need to stay unknown. We know that at our current rate, far from leaving our reserves in the ground, we are going to blow through them in just a few decades.

Now, we can feel badly about that. We can regret the choices that we have made. We can feel guilty about our choice of comfort over a better legacy for our children and grandchildren. We can do all of that, but what is really needed is change. The world we are creating is on a collision course with God's dream. It is time to repent.

We live in a much smaller world than our grandparents did. Muslims to them were as often as not called Mohammedans and were little more than characters in Arabian Nights or the nameless hordes in movie epics like the 1935 film "The Crusades," that depicted the Third Crusade pitting Richard I against the Kurdish commander Saladin, played by the well-known Kurdish actor Ian Keith. The clash of civilizations, setting a civilized West against a barbaric East, has been a narrative line in European history, since the Greek historian Herodotus wrote The Histories as propaganda to support Greece in the Greco-Persian Wars.

This story of a civilized West threatened by irrational hordes from the East is twenty-five hundred years old and still going strong. It not only got Greece through the Greco-Persian Wars, and sent Europe to the Crusades, but it gave its support to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, with all the bloodshed and suffering that this story has caused, it enjoys enormous popularity today. We are afraid of Muslims, even though we don't know any, and associate terrorism with Islam even though, before 9/11, the deadliest terrorist in this country was Timothy McVeigh, home-grown, a Christian, and an US Army veteran.

This story is the true blasphemy that reduces our neighbors who bear the image of God to ugly, racist cartoons. Our world is on a collision course with God's dream. It is time to repent.

I've drawn here on rather large canvasses, but I don't need to. A wife's promise to quit drinking or a husband's to quit having affairs may be accompanied by heartfelt tears and deep emotions, but what counts in the end is changed behavior. It's even true of the New Year's Resolutions, most of which are now history; they are a matter of making changes, usually small ones that we stick to and build on.

But whether it's overeating or an overheating world, repentance is nothing more nor less than change. The call to change is uncomfortable enough to hear. It's even more uncomfortable to heed. We can leave regret out of it. There is no time, Jesus says. "The kingdom of heaven as come near."

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