St Andrews – Jan. 25, 2015
Thank you St. Andrews for receiving Alla and I into your fellowship with such warmth and grace. We so appreciate your fellowship, your mission, your worship and the good sermons we hear week after week. You are blest with two exceptional priests. And where else could a couple with a Russian Orthodox and Baptist background find a home?
Thank you, BJ, for your friendship and this invitation. There once was a canon precluding those not ordained in the EC from delivering sermons, but this was amended during the 1907 Convention. Some clergy actually left the church over that amendment, probably in fear that a Baptist would infiltrate. This is understandable because Baptist ministers are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Especially when the gospel reading for the day is about repentance.
St. Andrews member Dr. Joe Graves, who also grew up Baptist, can confirm what I’m about to tell you. We heard more sermons on repenting of sins than we had potluck dinners, and we had a million of those. And the sermons were usually the turn or burn variety.
Baptists wanted people to repent of particularly pernicious personal sins. These included such darkness as dancing, drinking, playing cards, going to the movies and smoking, outside of tobacco states like NC, of course. When we were teens, we were to repent of something called fornication, though our SS teachers didn’t want to tell us what that was. We were also to avoid mixed bathing.
Mixed bathing, for those of you under 50 and without the baggage, meant boys and girls in the same swimming pool at the same time, not the same bathtub.
It was all influenced by Puritanism, you see, which is that form of Christianity that frets night and day over the possibility that someone, somewhere, somehow, might be having a good time. Thankfully, when I was in college, someone introduced me to Fundamentalists Anonymous.
This myopic moralism into which I was baptized by total immersion, was not what John and Jesus had in mind. Jesus didn’t say repent because you’re going to hell. He said repent because the kingdom of God has come and that’s GOOD news: that’s right, good news.
Repent in Greek is metanoia. It means a change of perspective; a clearer understanding that shapes the direction of your life.
One does not have to feel guilty, sad or angry to repent, nor does one have to come forward at a Billy Graham crusade, though we’re going to keep singing Just As I Am until you do.
To repent is to perceive a reality about which we had been unaware, what we had been unable to see about the purpose of God at work in our world and our place in that.
A friend told me about a neighbor who put out a sign that advertised free Baptist puppies. A week later, the friend dropped by to see if any were unclaimed, but noted that the sign now read free Episcopalian puppies. He said to the neighbor, I thought you had Baptist puppies. I did, said the neighbor, but now they’ve opened their eyes.
Repentance is opening our eyes to a new reality: the kingdom of God that has invaded our conflicted world, so that we are moved to place our trust there.
Hear the words again: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and trust in the good news.
Somehow, we came to think that the rule and reign of God depended on our efforts. But here, Jesus is not telling us that if we’ll get busy doing the right things, the kingdom of God will come about. Rather, the gospel is an announcement of a movement already taking place. Jesus isn’t launching a business plan or kick-starter program to start a new non-profit for God.
The kingdom of God has already come near in Jesus; the final chapter of our metanarrative has already been written in his resurrection, whether we believe it or not; whether we repent or not; whether we jump in or not. It’s good news because this is the one thing in our world we can’t screw up. We simply cannot derail the kingdom. We don’t need to do less for God, we simply need to trust more.
This is why we sing: The strife is o’er, the battle done; The victory of life is won; The song of triumph has begun: Alleluia!
But let’s keep it 100, as Larry Wilmore says: 100% real. The good news of a counter-cultural kingdom is proclaimed in a world of counter-claims about real power. So it’s not easy to understand or to trust this gospel. There’s too much bad news in plain sight to easily believe good news by faith. What truth is really worthy of our trust, I mean other than Fox News, of course?
In 1996, a very young candidate named Hamish Nixon ran for the New Zealand Parliament. His campaign slogan was, and I’m not making this up, Nixon—The name you can trust. After his defeat, Nixon spoke to a reporter, saying, I can’t understand why people laugh when I talk about the need for trust and integrity in politics. It’s as if they know something I don’t. (Karl Shaw, The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics, p. 125)
When I read the gospels, I get the sense that Jesus knows something I don’t, especially about the nature of power; that Jesus can see something about the principalities and powers of this world that I do not perceive. Maybe the cartoon is right—confidence is what you have before you understand the situation.
Jesus seems to think that worldly powers have a pull on us we do not discern; that we are caught in their gravitational power; blue moons orbiting collapsing worlds. And Jesus wants to set us free from those powers—powers that dominate and violate by their very nature, regardless of whether they are aristocratic, democratic, autocratic, theocratic, plutocratic, technocratic, or some other idiosyncratic. They cannot be trusted.
Yet we keep flirting and dancing with power. We are drawn to it like moths to flame, and burned by it when we are dragged into unjust wars; when greed collapses our economy; when the power of medicine becomes big business instead of healing; and when those appointed to protect us, oppress and use us.
This is the nature of power whose favorite tool is violence. It enslaves and is not worthy of our trust.
A little girl was visiting her grandmother in west Texas, where she saw one of those prairie sunsets for the first time. Not the kind you see peeking out from behind trees or mountains, but the kind you see from the very curvature of the earth, all the way over to the early evening stars in the east. The colors were as vivid as a Blue Ridge Mountain Fall, cloud and sky blazing with oranges, reds, lavenders and yellows.
Of course the grandmother, being very religious, made sure that her granddaughter knew that The Almighty has painted that sunset. The little girl nodded and smiled and said, And God did it left-handed, too. And how would you know that, asked the grandmother? Because, we learned in Sunday School that Jesus is sitting on God’s right hand.
Hang with me here. That’s actually pretty good. In antiquity, the right hand position was the position of power; the power to rule and destroy. Martin Luther spoke of God’s power revealed in Jesus as left-handed power; a power that looks like weakness.
In our OT reading today, the king and citizens of Nineveh repent of their violence and then God repents of using right-handed power to destroy the city, choosing the power of forgiveness instead.
The incarnation was an act of left-handed power; Jesus emptying himself and taking on the form of a servant. The right-handed response was Herod’s killing of the innocents.
Jesus on the cross looks to the world like failure, but is the most powerful act of love we have known. And the Roman response to the spread of this peaceful religion was sometimes unspeakable persecution—raw right-handed power.
The movie Selma shows this juxtaposition on the Pettis Bridge. It looked like a lopsided conflict, with horses, batons, axe handles, tire irons, guns and angry people eager to use them on one side; and men, women, children, preachers, and old people armed with bags and bibles on the other.
…The meeting of two kinds of power; two kinds of trust on display; two very different perceptions of reality and of God. And there was violence…
After the horror, the segregationists, full of their heady wine, thought they had won yet again. But they were blinded by their power; deceived in their misplaced trust. For a greater power was opening the eyes of a nation on the verge of repentance.
The Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow not because protestors bloodied their segregationist enemies, but because their blood was shed in a powerful witness of left-handed power. King didn’t choose this non-violent path because he was out-gunned or afraid. Rather, he trusted in a greater power to be at work if he chose the way of Jesus. It was a well-placed trust then. And it still is. Repentance beckons!
As establishment Christians we have been too at ease with right-handed power because it so often served our privilege… even though we know in our faithful bones that this power is corrupted and still corrupts and is unworthy of our trust. Repentance beckons us.
Now is the time to reclaim our trust in the peaceable kingdom—a kingdom that may not seem powerful at times, but is indeed the only power that sets us free; the only power that can build community; that can strengthen families; that can reconcile race; that can heal us, body, mind and spirit in this life and the next; the only power that ultimately sets the word aright. This is the good news.
So let our hearts continue to sing in praise:
Come, thou long expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.
Israel's strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.