"Repentance Begins at Home"
March 5, 2006: First Sunday in Lent, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
Mark 1:9-15:
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." And the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Luke 6:37-42:
Jesus said to his disciples, "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you—a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap—for the measure you give will be the measure you get back." He also told them a parable: "Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye."
May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.
Sermon:
So, I've been thinking a lot about sin lately. That's not so unusual, I suppose, given that we're here at the beginning of another Lenten season. I mean, that's what we're supposed to do during Lent, isn't it? Think about sin, consider the consequences of sin in our lives, confess our sin? Traditionally, Lent has been a season of penitence, a time to reflect on the various ways we have fallen short of God's intentions for our lives, and of repentance, choosing to turn again toward God, to walk closer to Christ. Even in our progressive theological setting, this is still pretty much my understanding of Lent. Someone in our last Deacons meeting put it very well, as we were reflecting together on the meaning of the season. She said, "Lent is a time to take inventory of our lives, and to be intentional about choosing a better way."
Which is great, if you believe in sin, which many in more mainstream and conservative Christian circles think liberal churches like ours don't. Because we reject substitutionary atonement—the idea that Jesus had to die on the cross as a blood sacrifice for our sins in order to appease an angry God—and because we refuse to go along with the crowd and label homosexuality an "inherently disordered," i.e. sinful state.—and because we choose live in the hurly-burly of the world we believe God created good, rather than withdraw from it in fear... and well, for lots of reasons, many in the wider church think we don't believe in sin at all.
And in their defense, we sometimes act like we don't. We complain about being asked to begin our worship each Sunday with a prayer of confession. It's such a downer. I mean, we're all pretty good people—that's why we're in church, right? And don't ask me to come on Ash Wednesday. It's way too depressing. And Good Friday? Positively morbid! We're just not as comfortable talking about sin. We tend to leave that to our sisters and brothers in the thou-shalt-not branches of Christianity. Sin, the Ten Commandments, seemingly the entire Hebrew Bible and many of the Epistles—they're welcome to it, we may say; after all, they seem to enjoy it so much more. They can have sin, and we'll take love and grace and Jesus—on one of his good days.
Talking about sin makes us that uncomfortable on any number of levels. Socially, folks in the NPR classes don't want to talk about sin because we're afraid we'll sound low-rent, as though one mention of sin and we might as well take up snake-handling and NASCAR. Sin simply isn't done in our circles. Intellectually, we've been trained by the liberal academy to be open-minded and give any idea a hearing—which is good—but sometimes we let ourselves become so open-minded that our brains fall out completely—which is bad. We can let the most hurtful, unhelpful, unhealthy ideas go unchallenged for fear of seeming, well, parochial? Spiritually, so many of us have been labeled sinners ourselves by other communities of faith—because we are liberal or divorced or had an abortion or are gay or women or simply because we ask too many questions—that we are gun-shy around the whole topic now.
But as much as we may want it to, sin isn't going anywhere. Sin may not be done in our circles, but it gets done, alright, in all circles—high, low, left, right, and center. Creation may indeed be grounded in God's goodness, as we believe, but to say that all is sweetness and light in the world is not only a gross misstatement but does a grave injustice to the suffering of countless persons. Suffering is real, not only because we are frail creatures, heir to a thousand physical, mental, and emotional complaints and subject to the vicissitudes of nature, but because we are in fact faulty, as in, at fault. We make bad choices, unhealthy choices, harmful choices—lots of them, over and over again—choices that increase not only our suffering but the suffering of others. And this is sin.
You see, just because our more conservative Christian siblings like to talk about sin doesn't mean they alone get to define it. Myself, I look more to Jesus than Jerry Falwell to help me do that in my life. And apparently Jesus looked to the prophet Isaiah, for it's there in Isaiah 61 that Jesus found the words to describe the heart of his own ministry: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free" (Luke 4:18).
Jesus believed the bad news of sin is poverty, physical and spiritual. The good news is abundance. The bad news is captivity in body, mind, or spirit, slavery. The good news is release. The bad news is blindness to the reality of sin, the power of grace, and the possibility of transformation. The good news is sight, and what's more, vision. The bad news is whole systems of oppression that oppress even the people doing the oppressing. The good news is freedom, real, honest-to-God freedom.
As I said last week, borrowing an image from the prophet Amos, this Jesus is the plumb line I use to discern what is impoverishing, enslaving, blinding, and oppressive—that is, sinful—in our private and public lives in the world. And fortunately for me as a preacher, there seems to be no shortage of sin these days. You already are familiar with some of my favorite targets: the war in Iraq, a war I firmly believe has been "conceived in deception, pursued in arrogance," and is "destined to undermine the moral credibility of our nation," as The Rev. John Thomas, our president and general minister in the United Church of Christ put it so succinctly at a rally for peace last fall; public policy that is more concerned with the welfare of corporations than with the "least of these" our brothers and sisters—the poor, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner among us; homophobia and heterosexism, two sides of the same counterfeit coin used to demonize a few in order to preserve the privilege of many; and, more personally, the modern American addiction to the myth of self-sufficiency that blinds us to our interdependence in families, communities, nations, even ecosystems; and our long reluctance to embrace the hard work of justice, forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace as a way of life commended to us by Jesus himself.
All of which begs the question: Just where do I get off? Who am I to judge? After all, Jesus himself said, "Do not judge. Do not condemn." It's right there in our reading for today. What are we to make of that? By standing up here and saying aloud, "Oh yeah, that over there, that's sin, sure enough," am I not doing just what I accuse those more conservative Christians of doing—being judgmental—only from the other side of the political and theological spectrum? By speaking out against ways of believing and behaving I feel are contrary to the will of God, am I not in danger of becoming a fundamentalist liberal, some kind of Bizarro progressive Pat Robertson?
I do think it's an important question, and a very real danger. Bully pulpits do tend to breed bullies, and the temptation to turn the exercise of good judgment into an exercise in being judgmental is ever-present. So how do we avoid that? I mean, Jesus gets to judge because, well, he's Jesus, the Christ whose whole life is centered in the mind of God. He's the teacher. But how do we disciples decide? In our relationships, in our work, in our faith, in our lives as individuals and communities, we've got to make decisions every day about how to live. Where do we get off? Where do we draw the line between what is truly righteous and what is simply self-righteous?
I think there's a clue right there. In this passage from Luke's Gospel, I believe Jesus isn't so much warning us against exercising any judgment at all—I mean, honestly, we wouldn't get very far in life not making any judgments, would we?—but he's lifting up the very real risk of becoming sinfully self-righteous when we do. His teacherly words serve to call us on the carpet, reminding us not to think too highly of ourselves; after all, we are only disciples, only learners on the Way. The ink on our license to criticize others isn't even dry yet. Still largely blind and blinking like newborns in the new light of Christ, we would do well to watch our step, lest we stumble into that pit. But that doesn't mean we should remain paralyzed by fear. Again, what does Jesus say, but "everyone who is fully qualified" will be able to exercise good judgment "like the teacher"?
And how does that happen? How do we get so qualified? Well, "first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye." What qualifies us to name sin as sin? It's our willingness to confess our failings first and freely, to repent of our own particular sins before, during, and after engaging the rest of the world in a dialogue about theirs. In this Lenten season, we are reminded that proper penitence begins at home.
Look at the example of Jesus. In the Gospel According to Mark, and Matthew, and Luke, before Jesus begins his public ministry, he endures a period of fasting and prayer and, some say, temptation, or at perhaps better, testing. In Mark's version, after Jesus is baptized by John in the river Jordan, where he receives and claims his identity as beloved child of God, but before he preaches a single word, he spends intentional time in the wilderness in the company of beasts and angels, and spirits, both holy and unholy, testing and being tested by his relationship with God. Then, and only then, does Jesus begin to preach a word to the world about God's judgment—and God's grace: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."
Time and again throughout his ministry, when his own spirit was exhausted, when he was faced with big decisions, Jesus would seek out a place apart to examine his heart, to pray for discernment, and to ask for strength. Remember him in the garden at Gethsemane, where we will find him in forty days or so, down on his knees, praying, with anxious sweat falling like great drops of blood, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me..." For Jesus—even for Jesus, it seems—penitence, self-examination, inventory and intentionality, began at home. And then he got up, went out, and confronted sin, even the sin of the cross.
Now, I am not Jesus, and neither are you. But we are called to follow in his footsteps, even when his way is unpopular or embarrassing or difficult to discern; even when the path seems to twist and turn unpredictably; even when the directions we thought we understood yesterday just don't make any sense today and we stumble and fall and are left exposed to righteous judgment ourselves. It's then and there, early and often, that we must make our confession, that we are not the teacher, that our will is not God's will, that in our brokenness we continue to wound our lives, the lives of others, and the life of the world. And then we can choose again. We can get up again, go on, and confront sin—our sin, all sin—as best we may, confident of God's intention to bring all of creation into line with God's Easter vision of justice, peace, and compassion and trusting in God's grace to bring us along for the ride. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lent.
This morning, I want to lift up for you two particular acts of public confession that I believe model this way of intentionally living in the tension between humble self-examination and bold prophetic critique. The first comes from an individual reflecting on a personal decision close to home. The other is a corporate confession in a much more public setting half a world away. But both are instructive for us as we contemplate sin and the Lenten season before us.
The Rev. Donna Schaper is an ordained minister in our United Church of Christ. She currently serves as pastor of Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, but she is a longtime friend of New Haven. In the February 19 edition of the Hartford Courant, Donna writes a piece about the need to protect a woman's right to choose how to govern her own body, including the right to choose a safe and legal abortion. And she does it in a remarkable way.
Instead of fighting fire with fire and hurling epithets at abortion opponents like pipe bombs through a clinic window, Donna begins courageously with confession, her confession that she had an abortion nineteen years ago, an act she understands to have been murder. She said, "I think the quarrel about when life begins is disrespectful to the fetus. I know I murdered the life within me. I could have loved that life but chose not to." It was an agonizing decision to make, she writes, choosing to end one life on behalf of other life, the life of her family. "I was terribly troubled. I was in a double bind. I prayed and anguished. Then I made a choice. Adults make choices." Though she does not say so explicitly, one suspects that Donna believes she and God will share a long talk and a lot of tears over her choice when the time comes.
But this personal confession does not keep Donna from making her point that women deserve to have their right to choose protected, and to have their choices, even the troubling ones, respected as the sort of agonizing decisions adults make every day in the real world; in fact, I think her critical self-reflection lends authority to her arguments. She knows the heartache of abortion firsthand. She has had to live with the weight of her sin for nineteen years—for what else is murder but sin? But in a world where an AIDS epidemic in Africa and throughout the developing world is met by our government with politically motivated abstinence-only sex education and not even a condom, she still believes that "abortion that is legal, safe and rare is the best policy conceivable for men and women and for mature, moral sexuality." I applaud Donna's humility and her witness.
My second example of penitence that begins at home comes from an entirely different setting, from Porto Alegre, Brazil, where last week the World Council of Churches completed its 9th Assembly. Over the course of ten days, representatives of 340 churches, denominations, and church fellowships from over one hundred countries, representing a truly mind-boggling diversity of Christian history, belief, and practice, met together to seek unity even while acknowledging the vast differences of opinion that separate them on a whole host of thorny issues. Honestly, politically, it's hardly the place to air anyone's dirty laundry, much less one's own.
But in the midst of that unbelievably rich and complicated, and I don't doubt, fragile meeting, the United States Conference of the World Council was led by God's Holy Spirit to name sin sin—beginning with their own, our own. Here is their letter to general body:
"Grace to you and peace from God the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As leaders from the World Council of Churches member communions in the United States we greet the delegates to the 9thAssembly with joy and gratitude for your partnership in the Gospel in the years since we were last in Harare. During those years you have been constant in your love for us. We remember in particular the ways you embraced us with compassion in the days following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina just months ago. Your pastoral words, your gifts, and your prayers sustained us, reminding us that we were not alone but were joined in the Body of Christ to a community of deep encouragement and consolation. Even now you have welcomed us at this Assembly with rich hospitality. Know that we are profoundly grateful.
"Yet we acknowledge as well that we are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation. Following the terrorist attacks you sent "living letters" inviting us into a deeper solidarity with those who suffer daily from violence around the world. But our country responded by seeking to reclaim a privileged and secure place in the world, raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors. Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests. Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous. We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights. We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war; we acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name; we confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war. Lord, have mercy.
"The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests, and wetlands that sustain us, even the air we breathe continue to be violated, and global warming goes unchecked while we allow God's creation to veer toward destruction. Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge its complicity and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends. We consume without replenishing; we grasp finite resources as if they are private possessions; our uncontrolled appetites devour more and more of the earth's gifts. We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to call our nation to global responsibility for the creation, that we ourselves are complicit in a culture of consumption that diminishes the earth. Christ, have mercy.
"The vast majority of the peoples of the earth live in crushing poverty. The starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the treatable diseases that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim features of global economic injustice we have too often failed to acknowledge or confront. Our nation enjoys enormous wealth, yet we cling to our possessions rather than share. We have failed to embody the covenant of life to which our God calls us; hurricane Katrina revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract. As a nation we have refused to confront the racism that exists in our own communities and the racism that infects our policies around the world. We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to call our nation to seek just economic structures so that sharing by all will mean scarcity for none. In the face of the earth's poverty, our wealth condemns us. Lord, have mercy.
"Sisters and brothers in the ecumenical community, we come to you in this Assembly grateful for hospitality we don't deserve, for companionship we haven't earned, for an embrace we don't merit. In the hope that is promised in Christ and thankful for people of faith in our own country who have sustained our yearning for peace, we come to you seeking to be partners in the search for unity and justice. From a place seduced by the lure of empire we come to you in penitence, eager for grace, grace sufficient to transform spirits grown weary from the violence, degradation, and poverty our nation has sown, grace sufficient to transform spirits grown heavy with guilt, grace sufficient to transform the world. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Amen."
The theme of the Assembly was, "God, in your grace, transform the world." May that prayer be ours as we enter this holy season of Lent, determined to take honest inventory of our lives as individuals and communities; to confess our poverty, our captivity, our blindness, and our oppression—our sin; and to renew our intention to follow in the way of Jesus, the way that leads to the cross of sin, to be sure, but through it and beyond it, as well, to the miracle of an Easter resurrection. Christ is the sign, trustworthy and true, that God desires to share that new life with us and with all God's beloved children, a life of abundance, release, vision, and true freedom. That is salvation. Lent is the road we walk from here to there. God, in your grace, transform the world... and begin with us.