Rejoice! Repent!
Sermon delivered at University Church on December 15, 2024
Good morning, Church. It is mid-December, and we are firmly in the holiday season. You probably only have one more week of work or school left, you might be watching the new Holiday movies on Hallmark and Netflix, and your holiday playlist is probably on loop. Christmas magic is in the air. The Lectionary texts that have been appointed for this Sunday are also filled with good holiday cheer:
- Zephaniah 3:15 — The LORD has taken away the judgments against you; God has turned away your enemies. The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.
- Isaiah 12:2 — Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and will not be afraid, for the LORD is my strength and my might.”
- Philippians 4:7 — And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
It’s a good week to have “Joy” as the Advent theme. But suddenly, amidst all the rejoicing, in crashes an ornery and bombastic man, with a long scraggly beard, camel’s hair tunic, and locust breath. So let us hear the words of John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 3, verses 3–17.
Oh dear. I confess I found myself very appreciative of John’s barging into the Lectionary for this week. By this time in the holiday, the mood tends to get a little…saccharine…for me and I’m in need of some salt to cut through that sweetness. And John, he’s a salty one. While the prophets and angels call out, “rejoice!” John shouts “repent!” for the Lord is coming. And yet, the passage says, his exhortations about cleansing fire and axes coming for the fruit trees are good news.
The call to repentance doesn’t sound like “Good News,” especially because, as people of faith, we spend a lot of our time trying our best to be righteous. And I think everyone feels pretty righteous most of the time; I think everyone here can confidently say “I’m a good person.” As Christians, we also know that we are an imperfect people and we try to pay attention to those times when we come up short of our own ideals; but that’s balanced out by other good deeds which reload our righteousness reserves; I’m sure everyone here made some donations on Giving Tuesday, like all good people do.
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That feeling of righteousness can be a way to cope with being a world that doesn’t seem to conform to the same morals and ideals that we do. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling little more righteous in this season. Like most of you, I have theories about why the election went the way it did and specific prescriptions for our leaders moving forward. The state of the US, and other places in the world saddens and enrages me — I also have very specific opinions about why things are the way they are and what some solutions would be. I can find articles from the NY Times, Mother Jones, Jacobin, or any number of podcasts that back me up. And the best part is, that in the age of social media I can share those articles and podcast episodes, just so everyone knows how correct I am in my assessments and the ideals that I uphold. And all the righteous ones can gather together in this virtual space to affirm each other’s beliefs, connect each other to even more media, and commiserate around the state of a doomed world.
There’s an element of righteousness that is performative, and I mean that in the sense that it needs an audience of peers. Now, there are good reasons for that performance — that’s how we find the people who share our particular views and values and the spaces in which we can be nurtured and affirmed. But, if we lean too much into that performance we lose sight of what true righteousness is. Leaning too far into performative righteousness can actually be a barrier, a stumbling block, to right relationship — with each other and with God. According to our friend John, righteousness is not about having good beliefs, it is about good actions. It is not enough to have a particular theology, ethic, or analytical framework — we have to be in right relationship with others and act on that every day. Performative righteousness can become an instrument of vanity, and vanity serves to separate us from each other; constantly performing our righteousness can be an obstruction to compassion, to empathy, and to relationship. Worse, it enforces an idea that there is a distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous — those who are worthy of us and those who are not. Those who are worthy of God’s favor, and those who are not
The publicly righteous, in John’s time, were very focused on this performance of correct behavior and belief because they thought that was how they were going to recognize the Messiah and how the Messiah was going to recognize them. They were on the lookout for a warrior king who would restore the nation of Israel to power and glory. So, it was very important that the Messiah-king recognize his righteous subjects, and that those subjects wouldn’t miss the Messiah’s rise to power. But instead of a king, God came as a helpless infant, born to a poor family in a backwater town of occupied Palestine who grew up to be a carpenter. No one saw that coming, not even John the Baptist; there is no evidence in the Scriptures that John knew that the Messiah was his cousin until the day Jesus asked to be baptized. We serve a God of many things, but not of vanity. We praise a God who shows up in many ways, none of them expected.
Repentance, as John describes it, is the act of intentionally turning away from the performance of righteousness and reorienting ourselves to right relationship with each other and God; this is crucial to preparing for the Messiah. When the crowd asks “what should we do?” John does not tell them to go sacrifice 10 bulls in front of the temple, he doesn’t tell them to sell everything they own and live an as an ascetic, and he doesn’t tell them to organize an armed resistance to the Roman Empire. He says, “If you have extra resources, give the extra away to those who need them.” To the tax collectors, he says “don’t charge more than is owed so you can skim off the top.” To the soldiers, he says “don’t threaten and blackmail people.” TBH, these seem like pretty low bars. They’re so low, in fact, that no one will probably notice. No one is going to give you a cookie for donating your extra clothes to Goodwill or for not blackmailing someone else. And that’s maybe the point, because righteous should never be an instrument of vanity. Repentance, then, is a discipline of humility. And humility, by definition, is not performative. Humility cuts off those un-fruitful parts of ourselves that serve only our own egos and throws it into the cleansing fire. Vain righteousness will prevent us from recognizing God incarnate. Humility allows us to recognize where God is showing up and at work in the world.
As many of you know, I’m a consultant for congregations and I help them think about how to promote their facilities as community resources. My organization is secular, which means we are not limited to particular faith traditions and my job is to help any congregation that works with us seek new community partners. In the early fall, I began working with a congregation that is Polish Catholic — so, even more conservative than the Roman Catholics — in a small city in Indiana. One of the first questions I asked them was which of their ministries were central to their identity and really reflected their values. Their answer, the crisis pregnancy center that they support. Now, if you don’t know what a crisis pregnancy center is, it is a place that counsels pregnant women to carry their pregnancies to term even if they do not want to have a child. And if you know anything about me, you know that this is about as far as you can get from what I would describe God’s work. But because I want to keep my job, I kept working with them.
And as I continued to talk with this church, I realized that these are some of the sweetest people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. They love their parish, they’re a very tight-knit group that takes the duty to care for their members seriously and joyfully. I also learned that one of the ways they carry out their anti-abortion ideal is by running a baby supply pantry that is now one of the most significant resources for families in their county. They operate this pantry because they ardently believe that income and socio-economic status should never be a barrier to raising healthy children. And when they said that, I had to take a moment internally and go, “huh.” Because, while they would probably not describe it this way, this conservative Catholic parish is playing a role in a larger movement for reproductive justice, which I would define as not just the right to choose to have children, but also the right to nurture the children you have. And because I’m over here donating to abortion funds, making phone calls to legislators about access to healthcare, and signing petitions to protect my right to choose, I don’t have the bandwidth to dedicate to the work of helping those who have children to access the resources they need to provide a safe and nurturing home. I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that a Catholic church was doing the Lord’s work, but I had closed myself to that possibility because how could that be if they didn’t share my particular politics on bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. As John says, “God is able from these stones, to raise up children of Abraham.”
Now, I am not going to go so far as to say that I am rethinking my politics and theology on the subject, I’m pretty clear and convicted, but that moment of realization that in some way my and this parish’s values intersected that was a glimpse of possibility. It was a tiny speck of hope, no bigger than a mustard seed, that maybe God is still at work in Indiana. That maybe we’re not as divided as the media and politicians tell us that we are. And that maybe, just maybe, transformation is on the horizon. But I’ve gotta be open to whatever ways that will happen and whatever form Divine Love might take. All we really do know is that Christ is coming and that we’re not going to be able to predict when and where. I think I can say, with a bit of certainty, that salvation is not going to come from political parties or politicians, it’s not going to come from the nonprofit industrial complex, and it’s not going to come from big media outlets, no matter what the politics of those outlets are. And that, that is Good News — that we don’t have to wait for big dramatic shifts we have no control over, and that God is not limited to those who share our views.
So rejoice, Church! For our God subverts all expectations. Rejoice! For we don’t have to perform to be worthy of our savior’s favor. Again, I say rejoice! For Christ continues to show up in the world. And, as John says, Repent! So that we can recognize divine love and liberation in whatever form it takes.
In the silence of the next few moments, I invite you to release your grip on your righteous identity just a little bit, and imagine what opportunities for hope, peace, and joy that might make possible.
