University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Communion Meditation by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Second Sunday of Advent        December 7, 2008

            Mark was the first gospel writer, and he wrote the shortest gospel. Later Luke and Matthew would add Jesus’ birth stories to Mark’s sparse outline, and much later John would add his own theological idiom to the story.  There’s none of that in Mark. Mark begins with just a few words: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  And there, at the beginning of the story Mark tells, is John, described as the forerunner, the baptizer. It is a beginning that is, in many ways, muted and understated.  

            Presbyterian pastor Sam Massey notes that in Minnesota one can literally step across the headwaters of the Mississippi River. It is no more than a tiny stream. “It is amazing to me that a river so mighty can begin in such an inconspicuous way,” says Massey.

Perhaps we have a similar experience as we read the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. The message of Christ has raised up nations and brought them low, launched and defeated armies, started large social movements and destroyed others. Think of all that has been done in the name of Jesus Christ and how inconspicuously [this] Gospel begins…. Here we find none of the thunderous poetry used by John to describe the pre-existent Christ. We dream no dreams and no angels visit with us. Caesar Augustus and Herod seem pretty far away. No excuse here for Christmas trees or mob-ridden malls or long hours putting together services of lessons and carols…. All Mark offers to us is John the Baptist, Martha Stewart's worst nightmare, smelling like a camel and calling people to change their ways.[1]

            All Mark gives us is John, who appears on the Second Sunday of Advent each year like “a locust in the [Christmas] punch bowl,”[2] to disturb our peace and call us to… repentance.  There it is… that uncomfortable word… uncomfortable, at least to me. Maybe it’s because of all those road signs I used to see as a kid on pine trees along rural roads in Florida  – signs that proclaimed, “Repent!” in bright red letters – usually just after I had just punched my kid brother in the back seat.  Perhaps it is because repentance means turning around, changing direction, and I prefer the way things are going. Or maybe it’s because it is a word that I associate with the hellfire-and-brimstone preachers like Gary Birdsong, the Pit Preacher… with whom I seldom have agreed about anything. 

            Truthfully, of course, repentance is part of a healthy rhythm in life – part of the regular reassessment and course-correction that is essential to growth, part of the regret-and-forgiveness continuum essential to any healthy relationship.  But with John the Baptist, there’s more to it than that.  For him, repentance is the key to preparation for the One whose Advent we celebrate in these days. Jon Walton notes,

Repentance seems like such a dour thing to do.  Better for Lent than Advent.  After all, we are having a hard enough time getting into the mood as it is.  Christmas is such a melancholy season, full of memories, some good, some bad. It’s like our nerve-endings have been rubbed with a fingernail file; every slight seems worse, every disappointment more aggravating, every kindness more tender…. But perhaps the discordant notes of our own melancholy and the nagging unhappiness that emerges within us in this season are the measureable indicators of precisely that portion to which John points us, that out-of-synch element that tells us something is profoundly wrong and needs righting.[3]

            Of course, setting things right is not always something we can do alone; reconciliation requires mutuality. Forgiveness is not something we can earn.  It is always a grace. Again, Jon Walton:

Repentance is, in the deepest sense, a decision we make, a direction we face, a preparation we undertake that readies the heart for what God will do.  And yes, sometimes this can make us revisit the journey we have traveled, and assess the times we have lived and our relationships with the people we have touched, but most importantly it is readying the heart for a new direction that regret alone cannot accomplish. Bill Muehl puts it this way, “The purpose of redemptive love, both [divine and human], is not to make [sinners] feel better about the past.  It is to give [them] back [their] future”…. In that sense, repentance is the threshold through which we must walk if we are to enter the future that God has prepared. [4]

            Preacher and biblical scholar Tom Long says, “The repentance John preached is not repudiation of the past; it is more complex than that.  The repentance John preached calls for a [remembering or] revising of the past. It calls us to look behind before we dare to move ahead. It calls us to encounter the past we have lived through but have not fully experienced, the past we have inherited but not fully inhabited, before we enter a future we do not fully comprehend.”[5]  Tom illustrates his point with a story of a business executive on the verge of implementing a shrewd business plan:

The scheme involved temporarily dropping prices below the level of profitability in order to starve a smaller competitor out of the market. Then, with the market to himself, prices and profits could rise. The fact that the competitor was a struggling family-owned business, not really a major factor in the market, but the sole livelihood of a family with three small children, was known to the executive. The plan was technically legal, though, and all competitors are fair game, since business, after all, is business.

Just as the arrangements were nearly in place, the executive was called back to his hometown for the funeral of a cousin.  During the graveside service, as the man sat under the funeral tent which was stretched over the family plot, his eye fell upon the gravestone of his grandmother, who had died when he was only a boy. Inscribed on her stone were words from the Book of Proverbs: “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.”

“The teaching of kindness…” The words seemed to be written in fire as they burned in his heart.  He had read them many times before on nostalgic visits to the cemetery, but now they leapt from the past into his life. He did not merely recall his grandmother; he was confronted by her memory, judged by the commitments he vaguely knew she held, but had not considered to have any claim on his life.  It was a strange and disturbing experience, and he returned to his city with no will to destroy, but to seek somehow to know and live “the teaching of kindness.”

Repentance calls us “to encounter the past we have lived through but have not fully experienced, the past we have inherited but not fully inhabited, before we enter a future we do not fully comprehend.”  To remember or revise the past… to claim our story within that story and to remember it as we reshape our future… that is repentance.

            What about you? What is there in your story that needs remembering to help you reshape your future?  Words learned, perhaps from a parent or grandparent, about how you were to treat others… or lessons from a school playground about basic fairness… or family examples from your own home about love, forgiveness and grace. Or maybe you remember simply your better childhood self, when, though more vulnerable, you were also more tender and trusting and free, back before you gave in to cynicism and bitterness and constructed those protective layers.  What will you do with the remembering that will help you repent, that is, to shape differently the days ahead?  Or maybe in looking back you remember instead some example of harshness… or prejudice… or some lesson about the priority of looking out for yourself… or about the need always to be cautious and careful… examples or lessons you may need to revise and set aside in order for you to repent… that is, to shape a wiser, more faithful future.

            What about us as a people?  What lies in our collective history as a nation…or as a church… that we ought to remember?  A stress on the common good, perhaps… leaders who challenged us to sacrifice and solidarity in times of testing and struggle… or Scripture’s clear call to faithfulness, to forgiveness, to compassion and justice.  In remembering those moments, those people, those words, are we not reminded of our best selves and challenged to repent… that is, to live as more faithful, compassionate, and wise stewards of our inheritance?  Or perhaps we remember a history of poor choices… or of tyranny and prejudice and injustice, and the church’s complicity in the same … not because we were inherently bad, but because we seemed too often to attend to our fears rather than to our faith... and perhaps we see there a need to revise that history through repentance in our own time… repentance that might lead us to be boldly courageous and faithful in the time we have left. 

            Like the business executive standing at his grandmother’s grave, individually and collectively we all need moments when we see that past and our place in it clearly, and find there a reminder of what our future can and should be.  Like him, we need in such moments to be called to repentance.  And who better to do so here in Advent, than that wild guy with the tumbleweed hairdo and camel-skin coat known as John the Baptist?  Says Tom Long,

John wears the clothing of an old prophet, embodies the history of God’s people, in order to proclaim that all that God has done before, which we did not fully see, all that God has said in our memory, which we did not fully believe, has pointed to this moment, to the coming of the Messiah.[6]

For our blindness to His coming, and for our distrust that He will come again, for our reliance only on our own constructs of security, and for our unwillingness to trust the future that God is preparing, this strange prophet calls us to repent. To repent!  It’s an uncomfortable word, because revisiting and revising our past is an uncomfortable task, whether we are peering into our personal histories or staring into our collective rear-view mirror as God’s people.  But if it turns us toward a brighter and better future, to the bountiful abundance of God’s grace, to the love from which our love for one another is born, then maybe repentance is not such a bad thing.  And in that sense, maybe Frederick Buechner had it right years ago when he said, “To repent is to come to your senses… True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”[7]