Advent 2
December 6, 2009

Repent
by Anne Le Bas

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius
Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother
Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis."

I wonder how many of you had mentally switched off by this point in the
Gospel I just read. Trachonitis, Abilene, Lysanius, Annas, , . It's probably
just as well that we stand up to hear the Gospel or we might have all fallen
asleep by the end of that first sentence - and it was just one, very long,
sentence.

What could Luke be thinking of by bogging down his story in all these
details? Why not just cut to the chase, get on with the tale?
But Luke's not daft, and he's not a bad storyteller either. It's just that
we are hearing this story 1900 and something years too late. If we'd been
among his first readers, the people he was writing for, we'd have got his
point, and it was an explosive one.

So, who are all these people? Well, he starts with the big one. The Emperor
Tiberius. Ruler of most of the known world. A nasty piece of work.
Bad-tempered, paranoid - not someone who looked kindly on challenge, but
very, very powerful. Then there's Pontius Pilate - we've all heard of him.
The governor who later sentenced Jesus to death, literally washing his hands
of him, a man who was always prepared to put political convenience before
integrity. They were the Roman rulers. Next Luke tells us about the local
Jewish rulers - puppet kings given their power by Rome. Herod, his brother
Philip, and Lysanius had the area sewn up between them. Finally he tells us
about the religious leaders. Annas and Caiphas, high priests of the Temple
in Jerusalem. 

In other words this is a list of just about anyone who was anyone - the
people whose opinions mattered, the A list celebrities, those you needed to
get on your side if you wanted to get anything done. But having impressed us
with this "who's who" of the first century, how does Luke end this long
sentence? "In the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius.and all the rest.
the word of God" he says, "came to John, son of Zechariah, in the
wilderness." 

John, in the wilderness. 

The Word of God comes to him, not to the big-wigs, the people who could make
things happen, but to an eccentric, unkempt oddity living in the middle of
nowhere, the back of beyond.

It almost seems like a bad joke after all that build up. Why on earth would
God entrust to him the most important message the world could ever hear,
that the Messiah is coming? We'd be forgiven for thinking that what God
really needed was a good PR person to take his publicity machine in hand.

But, it is to John that this message comes, someone who is far from the
centre of power. And that is how it was always going to have to be. Because
John announces the arrival of the kingdom of God, and there is no way that
kingdom could sit within the power structures of the day. God's kingdom  is
a place where the mighty are put down from their seats and the humble and
meek are exalted, where the poor are fed and the rich sent empty away, sings
Mary when she hears that she is expecting the child who will bring this
about. How could those who are rich and mighty pass on such a message? For
Tiberius, or Herod or the high priests to announce such a kingdom would be
like turkeys voting for Christmas. Some of them, at least, might have had
their hearts in the right places - let's be generous to them - they might
have wanted the world to be a better place, but not if it meant losing their
privileged place in it.  

And that is perhaps the important point. We like the idea of a saviour. We
want solutions to the problems we face. We want to sort out broken
relationships, lose weight, be more organised, be kinder, more patient, but
if that involves radical change, discomfort, sacrifice or cost we very
easily throw in the towel, because we also want to be able to carry on with
business as usual. We might be prepared to bolt on something extra - buy a
book, go on a course, get a gadget that promises to help us out, but we
don't want to let go of what we already have. Almost always that means we
sabotage the change we want before we've even started.

The message of John, though, is that when God gets to work there will be
things that will have to be given up in order that the world can find the
new wholeness he wants for it, his love and peace and healing.

That's why he calls people to repentance. Repentance is not a popular word -
it sounds like hair shirts and misery. But when the Bible talks about
repentance, that's not what it has in mind at all. Repentance doesn't mean
making yourself feel wretched and worthless. It literally means to change
your mind. Metanoia is the Greek word - noia means mind. Repentance is about
changing the way you think, what you expect, what you assume, what you
value.  It's not about sitting in the gloom; it's about searching for the
light.

In the Old Testament reading the prophet Baruch speaks to the battered city
of Jerusalem, destroyed when its people were taken into exile in Babylon.
Jerusalem will be restored. God will bring its people home. But they will
also have a part to play in this new thing he is doing.  "Take off the
garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem," he says. Only then will
its people be able to "put on the beauty of the glory from God, the robe of
righteousness, the diadem of the glory of the everlasting". Their society
won't be healed simply by coming home and going back to business as usual.
There are things they have to take off - that garment of affliction - if
they are to put on their new identity, a city that deserves the name he
gives it "Righteous Peace, Godly Glory". 

This coming week sees one of the most important international meetings of
our age, the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen. I know that there are
many different opinions on Climate Change, and that the science is hard for
lay people to understand and to evaluate. But the vast majority of
scientists believe there is hard evidence that it is happening, and that,
unchecked, it could have absolutely devastating effects on the living
conditions on earth and absolutely devastating effects on all of us as a
result.

Development agencies like Christian Aid are already reporting the effects of
climate change on some of the poorest of the world's people. As ever, they
suffer first and most. Those who have eked out an existence on marginal land
are now finding that more frequent droughts make it impossible to survive,
or more frequent flooding washes their land away or poisons it with salty
sea water. They need to move, but where can they go? If they move into
neighbouring areas they are met with hostility by those who are only
marginally better off- that is part of what the conflict in Darfur has been
about. If they try to go further afield they come up against the barriers of
a rich world scared of a flood of what they call economic migrants - though
it might more accurately be called "people desperate to find a way of
providing for their families." I've printed out some copies of an article
from the Church Times  - they are at the back - if you'd like to know more.
The essential thing is, though, that climate change is something that will
effect us all, sooner or later. It isn't just about saving the polar bear,
but about justice. If we don't respond soon enough and thoroughly enough
there won't just be environmental catastrophe but social catastrophe as
well. 

The trouble is that there's no way of combating climate that doesn't involve
discomfort, inconvenience, expense, maybe even real sacrifice of what we see
as our right to live our lives as we want to. Low-energy lightbulbs, as we
found out this year when we installed them in the church, have a way of
turning out to be low light light bulbs too! The technology's just not there
yet. We had to compromise in the end, or no one would be able to see
anything, but it was a salutary lesson in the cost and inconvenience of
trying to do the right thing. 

A major source of greenhouse gases is transport - cars, lorries, buses as
well as planes and boats- but we have grown used to the idea that we can go
where we want and have goods brought to us from wherever we want too. It's
hard work asking, "is my journey really necessary?" "Do I really need that
thing that has been brought half-way across the world to me?" These may seem
small things, but we struggle to accept even these minor limitations to our
lifestyle. Tackling global warming requires changes we just don't want to
make. 

This may not be the sermon you expected to hear when I began. What does
climate change have to do with that ancient story of the coming of the
Messiah to the people of Israel, and the strange prophet John who announced
it?

It has everything to do with it. John called people to be ready for a new
world, a world  which couldn't coexist with the power structures of his day.
It couldn't be "business as usual" .  The kingdom of God was always going to
challenge and confront that world of Tiberius, Herod, Annas and Caiphas. If
we are going to see God's kingdom, God's peace, God's justice in our world
we have to see the ways in which it challenges the powers that control us
too - powers "out there", but also the powers "in here" - greed, apathy and
the fear that we will lose our place in the world. We can't expect it to
"business as usual" for us either. Repent, says John to us, just as he did
to those crowds by the river Jordan. Change your minds. Change your lives.
There is no other way for "all flesh to see the salvation of God", for all
of us to know the peace and wholeness he wants for his children.
Amen

(Comments to Anne at annelebas@DSL.PIPEX.COM.)