In a recent
sermon I made the observation that at its heart, repentance is an act of
community. Afterward, one person asked to hear more about that.
So…
It has been
my perception, as a life-long resident of the Bible Belt, that the word repentance
conjures up images of sinners who, having felt busted, now declare tearful
regret for the “bad things” they have said, done, and thought. And they confess
publicly in order to legitimize a claim to God’s forgiveness – i.e. so that they
“go to heaven when they die.”
I know that
this generalization oversimplifies things for many of us, and it is simply wrong
for others of us. Nonetheless, I do think that for a majority of people inside
and outside the Church – whether they actually buy it or not – this serves as a
kind of default definition of repentance in the same way that Michelangelo’s rendering
of The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel serves as a default image of God (a big European guy with flowing beard, surrounded by
adoring, naked angels).
Taken to its
extreme, this self-centered view of repentance says that we are, at the core of
our being, utterly unclean, depraved, and deserving of eternal punishment just
for having been born. Such repentance amounts to little more than sequestering
ourselves on a narrow path of right doctrine and works righteousness while we
wait to die. And on that path, we not only deny the inalienable, God-imaged
holiness within us, we also allow ourselves to deny that same holiness in
others. Willful blindness to the sacred in God’s creation tends to allow us to
justify naming and judging the sins and shortcomings of others. Claiming
exclusive right to righteousness, we think nothing of sacrificing heretics and
infidels. When we decide that we own Jesus, we forsake him.
Do you see
the tragic, indeed the destructive irony? Selfish “repentance” casts us deeper
into the sin we thought we had confessed and abandoned.
Genuine repentance
does not pull us away from the world, from its painful challenges and
realities. Repentance casts us headlong into the world to live lives of grace.
And we live those gracious lives not just alongside the poor, the sick, the
lonely, and the brokenhearted, but we live humbly, joyously, and even
gratefully alongside people of different faiths, people of no faith, those we
find easy to love and those we take self-righteous delight in fearing or even
hating.
Yes,
repentance involves turning from the behaviors and attitudes that distort the image
of God within us, and such turning necessarily places us back on the wide and
winding path of all humanity to shine as ones made of Holy Light, and to
recognize that Light in all peoples and places. To repent is to turn toward a
life in which we seek, with intention and discipline, to be available to God
who reconciles, redeems, and renews – God who actively works in, through, and
on behalf of the ancient and ever-unfolding community we call Creation.
As we move
from the Christmas season toward the season of Lent, may repentance take you on
a journey beyond the “boundaries and securities of home [so that you may] be alive
to what [you] had never imagined before.”*
*(John Philip Newell, The Rebirthing of God:
Christianity’s Struggle for a New Beginning, Christian Journeys/Skylight
Paths, 2014. p. 45.)
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