Luke 3:1-9; Malachi 3:1-4

Sometimes I swear I’ll never understand people. Take for instance the people of Judea and Jerusalem in the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius. That’s roughly 2000 years ago. They go an incredibly long ways, in the desert, to listen to a man tell them how bad they are. And do they get mad and stone him? No they smile and simper and say, “Isn’t he just the cutest thing?” and they try to get their picture taken with him. Sometimes I swear I’ll never understand people.

You can’t get away with preaching like that! John calls his audience a brood of vipers. How’d you like it if I said that to you? Thought so. Why would anybody go out of their way to be insulted and told how wrong they are? What’s wrong with those people?

And it’s not just the insults, it’s the words:
       “Baptism ...
       of repentance ...
       for the forgiveness ...
       of sins.”

Eight words and four of them have to be defined. Before I’m well started into the sermon your eyes are going to glaze over. Here they are slapped with all this “in language,” churchy jargon, complicated vocabulary. Well, actually it’s harder for us than for them. If they hang around for a few minutes they’ll see John perform a baptism, so they should be able to figure that word out. And their whole religion is about sin and getting forgiven, getting free of it all. So maybe the real sticky word for them is “repentance.” Funny thing is, I think the real sticky word for us is repentance, too. So even though repentance isn’t a very Christmassy word in our culture, we need to talk about it. I will try to avoid calling you a brood of vipers. And this sermon is going to be in two parts, because I think repentance has two stages. We’ll visit the first stage of repentance today. Second stage next week.

Thanksgiving Day, on our way to my brother’s house in Olympia, we took the wrong exit. Fortunately we discovered it almost at once, did a U-turn, which took us into a parking garage, put the car into reverse, aimed in a new direction, drove around and around and finally got onto the right street. We only lost about fifteen minutes! That’s multiple repenting. We had to repent from the wrong exit, and we had to repent from the parking garage.

Some folks say repenting is just feeling sorry, but that ain’t so. We could have driven on and on and on, feeling sorrier and sorrier and sorrier, but no matter how sorry we felt, we wouldn’t have gotten any turkey and dressing. If the road you’re on isn’t getting you there, then any other road, no matter how strange, has a better chance of success.

That’s what John is getting at. If your life isn’t working, the only way to fix it is to change, try something else, turn onto a new road, try a new direction. Change yourself, change your direction, turn yourself around, repent.

And then John quotes an old prophecy from the book of Isaiah. God is building a road to come to us, smashing down hills and filling in gullies. And we need to get out our own road graders and shovels and asphalt melters and start helping. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make God’s highway straight and smooth. “Repent!” John says. “Turn yourselves around. Get ready for God to come.”

Now the highway construction image comes because that old prophet, hundreds of years even before John the Baptist, that ancient prophet has just found out that people living in exile will get to go home. So he imagines God building a road that will get them back to their homes, back where they belong.

And we can understand repenting if we use that road image. Repentance comes after we discover we took the wrong exit. Repentance comes when we suddenly realize we’re a long way from home and getting farther every minute. Repentance comes when we say to ourselves, “This road isn’t getting me anywhere. I’ve gotta get off this road. How can I find my way home?”

We’ve all got road stories, and maybe we can tell them to each other during coffee hour. Maybe we can even give a prize to the person who traveled the longest distance on the wrong road. I’ll tell you, I got on the wrong train in Taiwan one time, and it took miles and miles before I even discovered it. And after I did discover the problem, it didn’t help that I couldn’t speak Chinese, and no one around could speak English. It took a lot of repenting to get me back where I was supposed to be!

From a Christian perspective, the first stage of repenting, Big Repentance, comes when we realize our whole life has been following the wrong road. Our life is oriented on the wrong goal. We’ve pledged allegiance to the wrong flag. For many of us it is the road of selfishness. Our life is oriented on satisfying our desires. We’ve pledge allegiance to the great God ME. We’ve love the wrong person, and that person is ME.  Me, My, Mine! But then our vision clears. Our heart is changed. We fall in love with someone else, and that person is Jesus Christ. We have a new image of who we are. We have a new image of Whose ... we are. We don’t belong to ourselves anymore. We belong to Christ. We pledge our allegiance to Christ. We completely re-orient our lives, away from self and the worship of me, and toward Christ. And when we used to ask, “What’s in it for me,” now we ask, “What will make me more like Him? What will be more likely to make God’s Kingdom grow?” That’s what repentance is for many of us: away from allegiance to self, and toward allegiance to Christ.

For the New Testament writers, such as Luke, repentance meant that they realized that law-keeping wasn’t working. All their life they had been trying to get better and better at doing what the law commanded. Their allegiance was to God’s Law, and they sang hymns to the Law, like Psalm 19:

       “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul,
       the decrees of the LORD are sure, making the simple wise,...
       they are more valuable than gold, they are sweeter than honey ...”

They had been in love with the law, and it wasn’t working. They had been in love with the law, and they were miserable. Repentance put them on the new road of grace. Repentance gave them the royal law, the law of liberty: Love God, love your neighbor. Everything else was just nit-picking. They gave their allegiance to Jesus Christ, and he gave them the freedom they’d never had. They fell in love with a Person and not a book, and their lives were filled with joy.

And now maybe I do understand those people who went out to hear John bawl them out. Maybe they were so miserable they’d do anything to get off the road they were on. Maybe they were so desperate they’d put up with insults and hard definitions, in hope they might hear the words of grace that would set them free. Maybe they knew they were on the wrong road, and they needed help to find the way home.

Now if you were baptized as an infant, this repentance stuff may be hard to take. You can’t remember a time when you were on the wrong road. If you became a Christian at the age of thirteen, it’s hard now to remember what you were repenting from. You got off the wrong road so early you’ve forgotten it. Once Jesus suggested that the one who is forgiven little, loves little. So what happens when we meet a person who became a Christian as an adult, out of a desperate and depraved life? People like that are scary to us, because they tend to love so extravagantly. These are the kind of people who would poor costly perfume on Jesus’s head, and bathe his feet with their tears. They are scary to us who haven’t had to work hard at repenting.

And yet I believe that even Christians still need to repent. I believe that even churches need to repent. What if we find out that home is in a different place than we Christians thought? What if we find out The Church took the wrong road? What if God is traveling a different road than the one we expected?
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Once there was a seeker who lived in a broad, broad valley. In the valley there were many towns and cities. This seeker was good and kind, only wanting to serve God and to help others. But all around in the cities and towns of the valley there was fighting and jealousy, greed and unkindness. People were always trying to have things their own way -- they never seemed to think of others. They didn't care about anyone but themselves. They certainly didn't care about God. It was a horrible place to live -- cruel and uncaring. The seeker looked around in despair. How could a person ever find God and serve God here? Surely God could never be found in this place, where people were so bad. But where could the seeker find God? Lifting up eyes from the noise and the smoke of the valley, the seeker could see some high mountains -- their tops were in the clouds. They looked beautiful and peaceful. That looked like just the kind of place where you could find God. Up there so high in the sky, where everything was quiet and lovely. “That's where I'll go,” said the seeker, “that's where God will be. And I can live close to God and all will be well.”

So began the journey. The seeker walked all across the valley, through the towns and cities -- and the things seen along the way -- people being cruel to each other and hurting each other -- made the seeker even more sure that this was the right thing. “I must get away from all this to find peace with God!”

The seeker began to climb up the mountains. It was a long hard climb, but at every step the seeker felt happier,  getting closer and closer to God. About halfway up the mountain the seeker met someone coming down the path. They stopped and greeted each other. "Where are you going" asked the seeker. "I'm going down the mountain to the valley," answered the other. "You don't want to do that. They are a terrible lot of people down there, cruel, thoughtless, selfish, godless. I'm going up the mountain where it is peaceful and beautiful so that I can find God and live with God." But the other person was determined, and after they had talked a while, went on down the path. The seeker thought sadly, “Why would anyone want to leave this mountain to go among such people?”

Finally -- the mountaintop. The air was clear, the view was wonderful. It felt truly heavenly. Up there was a small hut.  Out of the hut came an old, old man. Could this be God? Greeting him very politely,  the seeker said, "I've come to look for God." “Oh, dear,” said the old man. I'm afraid God doesn't live here. God was here not long ago, though. In fact I'm sure you must have passed God as you came up the mountain path. God was going down the mountain to live among the men and women in the valley." Suddenly the seeker knew who the traveller was. The seeker had come all this way to find God, but hadn't recognised God when they met.

"But why was God going down the mountain to the valley? It is such a wicked place -- with everyone fighting, everyone miserable, everyone cruel and selfish.”

"Don't you see?” said the old man. "That is just why God needs to be there -- where people really need God’s help. That is what God has always done -- gone to where people are in need. Many years ago, God went to a village called Bethlehem, to live among poor people who were sad and lonely, at war with each other, and that is what God still does today."

The seeker thought about what the old man had said, and then turned round, and went back down the track, back down into the valley -- to find God and help God with in this loving work, in the place where the work needed to be done. And they say that the seeker did find God, and did help God, and maybe just a few people learned to love each other a bit more because of it.

I think that’s what the first stage of repentance is all about. The sudden realization that we’re on the wrong road, that God is going another direction, that home is in another direction. And it’s the decision, “I won’t go another step on this wrong road. I have to turn away and go where God is going.”

That’s what repentance is all about. And that’s what our faith is all about. We are pilgrims on a new road, following God, going home.

(Comments to Don at crestnch@televar.com.)
Creston Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Creston, WA, USA