2nd Sunday of Advent: December 9, 2012

 2nd Sunday of Advent: December 9, 2012

Luke 3:1-6

PREACHER: Pastor Paul Cannon

 Repent All Ye Sinners

 Repent all ye sinners!  The end is near! If you don’t repent, bad stuff is gonna happen to you!…oooooooh. We all know that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21^st, 2012.  So there’s that to be frightened of.  Then there was that one guy who predicted the end of the world back in May of 2011 and again in October. That preacher wasn’t wrong.  God is just late! If I can excuse myself for being late to a few meetings here and there I’m sure we can all excuse the Almighty showing up late for the apocalypse! There’s a lot of planning involved!  Anyways, you had better all repent right now … or else!

You all look very skeptical.

Isn’t that the sort of thing you think of when you hear that word – repent? Don’t we all automatically imagine the loud cries of the doomsayers?  Isn’t that what we’ve been conditioned to think of repentance as?  Turning from our sins so that we can make ourselves into holier people?  At least, that’s the kind of thing that most people hear when the word “repent” is thrown around.  We think of somebody giving a warning, or threatening us in some way, as if to say “You had better repent, or bad things are going to happen to you.”

Our text today speaks of John the Baptist who went about the region of Jordan declaring a “Baptism of Repentance.”  I want us to start thinking about repentance in the same sort of context that John the Baptist spoke in – that is –in the context of Advent.  John the Baptist spoke of repentance in the context of a Savior coming into a broken world – a world where sinners like you and me have tried and failed miserably time and time again, to be the people God created us to be. John the Baptist spoke of repentance in terms of hope for a salvation that we haven’t earned – not fear of salvation that we have to earn.

John is telling his followers that Emmanuel is coming.  The Savior is on his way!  His message is a message of hope.  He’s telling the people to repent because something amazing is about to happen and we all get to be a part of it!

Go ahead and take out your “Celebrate” inserts – that’s the one with the readings on it.  And I want you all to read with me what it says there under the Gospel section. Let’s all read the quoted verses together, starting where it says “The voice” in verse 4: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Does that sound like a threat?  Luke is using this verse to say that the road to God isn’t just going to be for the spiritually fit anymore.  It’s not just for those who can climb spiritual mountains. So When I read those verses, I hear good news.  “All flesh shall see the salvation of God,” Luke quotes.  Remember those huge mountains of sin that stood between you and God?  Those are gonna be bulldozed for you.  And those potholes that caused you to stumble and sin?  They are gonna be filled in.  And those windy crooked paths of following religious laws?  Well those paths are going to be made straight.

The journey to God isn’t going to be about rule following anymore.  It’s not about self-righteousness.  It’s about God coming to change you.  If fact, the word for repentance in Greek – metanoia (can you say that with me?) – really just means change.  A change of mind, a change of heart, a change of being.  And so, when the text says that John went about the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of “repentance,” he’s really proclaiming a baptism of change. In baptism, God doesn’t ask you if you want if you want to live a different way, he’s going about the work of changing you.  Making you new and different.

I want to leave you with a short story about what I think this means in real life.  At the congregation where I interned in Seminary, there was a young couple who had just joined the church.  Eric and Becky.  And these two had just had this cute little pudgy baby boy whom they named Brody.  And so, as you might expect, they started looking into getting Brody baptized when they joined the church. And at some point during this process, Eric started asking his mother about his own baptism because he had never heard any stories about it.

And as it turned out, Eric’s mother had never actually had him baptized as a baby. Though he had grown up assuming that he had been baptized like everybody else.  So he and Becky decided that he wanted to get baptized on the same day that they were going to baptize their son Brody.

I sat down with Eric one day – we actually went out to Applebee’s – and we talked about what baptism was all about, and during that conversation, I asked him about his faith and what it meant to him.  And to be honest, he had the same sort of look on his face as my confirmation students did after I assigned them “I Believe” essays – Deer in the headlights. It as if he had never tried to speak his beliefs out loud.

And so the day came for Eric and Brody to be baptized, and they went ahead and sprinkled some water on Brody and held him up for everybody to see.  Then came Eric’s turn.  He knelt down in front of the font, had cold clear water poured on his forehead, and was baptized alongside his son.  Weeks later he described the experience, and he said that when he knelt down and as the water was being poured over him, he felt an electricity in the air – or as he called it “a buzzing.” 

Call it what you will, but we called it the Holy Spirit.  And in that moment, something changed inside of him.  In the following weeks, you could really see that he really was a different person.  He started stepping up in church and taking leadership roles.  He opened up more in the congregation. He just had a different presence about him.

And a few months later, our head pastor, Pastor Deb, asked Eric – Yes, the very same deer-in-the-headlights-Eric, the very same guy who would have failed his “I Believe” essay – Deb asked him if he would like to describe his experience of baptism not just to his family, not to the church, but to the entire synod at their yearly gathering. 

Now, here was a guy who was uncomfortable talking about his faith to me – one-on-one at Applebee’s. It doesn’t get more relaxed than Applebee’s. If it had been the old Eric, I think he would have looked at Pastor Deb like most of you would look at me if I asked you to speak at a Synod Gathering – like get real Pastor.  But this new Eric – this changed/repented Eric – agreed to share his story in front of a couple hundred pastors and church leaders.

Brothers and sisters in Christ – that’s what repentance looks like.  It looks like change. And not the kind of change that we do, but the kind of change that God does to us.  It’s the kind of change that happens in our bones – at the very deepest levels of who we are.  It’s the kind of change that could come only from God.

As we prepare for the birth of Christ during this season of Advent, God is busy changing you.  That’s what repentance is really about – not merely changing your behaviors, but allowing yourself to be totally changed – down to your very bones – by the living God.  This God is preparing a new way for you to encounter the new-born king. He is bull dozing the mountains and filling in the valleys.  He’s straightening out the crooked roads and filling in the potholes.  When God is done changing you, encountering Jesus will be as easy as walking down a sidewalk, or holding a newborn baby in your arms or splashing cold clear water on your face. 

So go I say! Allow yourself to be totally changed by the living God. Repent all ye sinners!

Amen.