Paul N. Walker 12/6/15 Christ Church Luke 3 “Jesus Wields The Sword”
I was with a retired clergyman this past week. He talked about finding a book that his mother had given him for his college graduation 50 years ago. It was called “Peace of Mind”. He found it when he was cleaning out some shelves and realized that he had never read the book his mother had given him all those years ago. He got a little choked up as he read the inscription – something like, “To my dear Son on his graduation from college. May this book be a help and a guide as your navigate your way in the world.” Apparently it was a popular and profound book at the time. After all, who doesn’t want peace of mind?
So the clergyman decided to read the book given to him by his dear old mom. He said, “I discovered that it was the biggest piece of malarkey I’d ever read! I should have known by the quote on the back cover, which said something about “the human being‘s infinite capacity for self-improvement.” This retired clergyman was wise enough, and more importantly, old enough to know from personal experience we tend to get worse rather than better. I know that the older I get I am quicker to judge, shorter on patience, and more dedicated to my own comfort.
If you don’t think this is true for you, I’ve got a quick experiment. I’ll say two different names and see how quick to judge you are. Name #1: Donald Trump. Name #2: Hilary Clinton. If either of those didn’t do it, I’m sure there are plenty of other names right below the surface that will elicit spontaneous judgment, or anger, or some other unseemly reaction.
I remember going to a Walker family reunion on the Eastern Shore just after our oldest daughter was born. We named her Hilary (one “l”) after Christie’s father, whom we loved very much. Hilary is now 24, so this was about the time when Hillary Clinton was bursting on the national scene. My old cousin Dew, in her 80’s then, lit up when she saw our baby. “How lovely! What is her name?” When we told her, she scowled and said, “You’ve ruined her life forever with that terrible name!” Thanks, Cousin Dew.
I love the great cartoon of a forlorn looking guy going into a bookstore. On one side of the store is a huge section titled “Self-Help”. On the other side of the store is a section titled “Beyond Help”. The poor guy stumbles over to the Beyond Help section, head drooping, eyes downcast.
Human beings may not be able to self-help very well, but thankfully we are not beyond help, although we may sometimes feel like it. Knowing our need for help is the beginning of real help. Where do you need help today? You may have some sort of acute need for help. You may be in the grip of a more chronic issue. You might feel like your life has come together very nicely right now, but there is still this “emptiness inside and you’d do anything to fill it in.” (Dave Matthews) I hope you may be the one person here to whom none of this applies. But I’ll be in my office on Tuesday when you need me.
This universal human need for help is what drives people out to see John the Baptist, the powerful preacher of repentance we read about in our gospel text this morning. It says that he “went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” He was wildly popular. Another account says that “all of Jerusalem” went out to the wilderness to be baptized by him.
Not most of Jerusalem, but all of Jerusalem, underscoring our shared need for help.
The people of Jerusalem flocked to John the Baptist for help, and they were given a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The question I want to ask this morning is this: what does our need for help have to do with a baptism of repentance? What is the connection between help and repentance?
We might start by asking what repentance actually is. Repentance has very little to do with wearing a sack cloth hair shirt, the garment favored by ascetics and those wishing to feel the pain of their sin. I did discover a company in England that sells hair shirts. Their website advertises “a traditional sack cloth hair shirt with belt and metal buckle.” Availability: in stock. Regular Price: $100. But don’t fret! It’s on sale for the Christmas season for only $69! You can email the link to a friend or be the first to review this product. I’m not kidding.
Repentance is not about applying painful punishment to yourself. You may remember the 1986 movie called “The Mission”, starring Robert DeNiro. He plays a former mercenary soldier, Rodrigo, who has shot and killed his own brother. Wracked with guilt and sorrow, as a penance for his sinful acts, joins a small group of missionaries who work with the Guarini Indians high above the falls of the Amazon – a location that could only be reached by scaling the dangerous waterfall.
Rodrigo does not just climb the falls, but instead loads ALL of the paraphernalia of his former life as a soldier and mercenary into a huge net bag, which he then ties to himself so that he must drag the heavy equipment of his former life with him during the climb to his new life in the mission.In Rodrigo’s mind the painful difficulty of lugging the heavy reminders of his past as he undergoes the dangerous climb up the waterfalls, is a necessary penance – a burden no one else can bear for him. This is what repentance means to him.
The biblical understanding of repentance, however, is not some kind of self-inflicted remorse or punishment. You may have heard that the Greek word itself – metanoia – simply means to turn away or to change one’s mind. Although remorse or felt contrition may accompany repentance, there is no emotion at all connected with the strict definition of repentance. I think the most helpful way to describe repentance is honesty. By being honest about your self, your life, your failings, your need for help, you are in the realm of repentance.
Not that simply being honest makes repentance any more palatable. It may be easier to put on a hair shirt, in fact. But honesty is what is needed. John the Baptist might have sung the 1978 Billy Joel song called Honesty. “Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue. Honesty is hardly every heard, but mostly what I need from you.” When it comes to true repentance, honesty really is the best policy.
That’s true, but human beings aren’t very good at following policies. That’s why there are self-help and beyond help sections in life. People generally repent, change their minds about the way they are living, only when they can no longer live the way they are living. Pain or guilt or need drives us to seek help, the help that is found in repentance. As the profound 12 step saying goes, “people only change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” To answer our question about the connection between repentance and help, it is clear that our help is in our repentance.
But our help is not found in repentance for repentance’s sake. Repentance is the recognition that though we cannot help ourselves, we can be helped by someone else. We can be helped by the One to whom John the Baptist points – Jesus Christ. He alone can free us from our burden of sin.
Let’s return to The Mission. For Rodrigo its not just the act of killing his brother that is “a sin”, but his entire being, the inward man he is, weighed down by way he lived his life as a mercenary, a womanizer, a killer. He thinks the arduous act of penance is payment for what he has done wrong and might make things right in his life.Rodrigo’s physical burden is really an outward manifestation of his inward condition – he is dragging his inner self up the falls, on an impossible mission.It is a depiction of what we all DO –we drag the burden of our broken, sinful self with us.
In the film, Rodrigo is forgiven, but it’s not the climb, the act of penance that makes him clean. The heavy burden he carries– the sin – is literally cut away and dropped from him by someone else, by someone totally innocent, one of the Guarini Indians. It is not the climb or carrying the burden that frees him but a free gift from an innocent man. As the bag tumbles down the mountain, and plunges into the falls, all Rodrigo can do is fall on his knees, and laugh and cry.
Jesus Christ is your help. Jesus wields the sword for you. He alone, the only innocent one, cuts away the burden you’ve been needlessly hauling around. All you can fall on your knees, laugh and cry, and maybe even find some peace of mind.
I’ll close with a true story about a man who carried his burden until he was 90 years old. He was a hard man, with no belief in God. When he was 90 years old, he told his son, who was a Christian, that he had repented and turned to God. His son was happy but shocked and asked, “Why, Dad? Why now?” His father replied, “I just couldn’t live with the guilt of my life anymore. And there was nowhere else to go with it except Jesus Christ.” Amen.