The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Advent 2A
Repent! Repent! So John the Baptist proclaims in the wilderness. He proclaims his message in the wilderness, away from the towns. Which, when you think about it, is a little odd. He’s not going through the towns telling the people to repent. He’s not even half-heartedly doing it like the prophet Jonah, who famously only went partway into Nineveh to get them to repent because Jonah didn’t really want the people of Nineveh to repent because he wanted them to get punished.
No, John the Baptist is different – he goes into the wilderness and makes people come to him to hear the call to repentance. He’ll remain in the wilderness with his diet of locusts and wild honey and people will come to hear his message. He will plunge them under cleansing waters to cleanse them of sin. He baptizes with repentance, but someone else is coming who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.
But first, repentance. Repent! He proclaims. What is this repentance?
Let me tell you how disappointed I was when I first learned the Greek word for it: metanoia. See, when I was in undergraduate religion classes, I assumed the Greek word must have meant something philosophical or mystical. But no, metanoia is a Greek word that means “change your mind.” I was flabbergasted. I was appalled. Surely the word for repentance must mean something difficult. Changing your mind was easy!
Oh, dear friends, how delightfully naïve I was.
Over time I have come to understand just how hard it is to change your mind. Our minds are so resistant to change. Our brains from infancy take in all sorts of information from the world around us, cobble together beliefs about the world, beliefs about what is right and wrong, beliefs about ourselves – and the electrified wrinkly organ we call a brain will double-down on those beliefs.
Psychology and social sciences have recognized that our brains are more likely to disregard new information in order to stick with the beliefs we already have. Our brains do not like to change the patterns we have carefully arranged over the years. From infancy we learned about whether we could rely on parents and adults, and whether the world was a safe place. As we get older, we learn what others think of us, what we think of ourselves, who we think we are meant to be. We learn what we think is right and what we think is wrong – and we learn what guilt and shame are.
We learn those things – and sometimes we have to unlearn them.
Those thoughts, those beliefs get so baked in at fundamental levels of our brain that we have a hard time even noticing them, let alone questioning them. We repeat those beliefs and thoughts to ourselves under the surface. When confronted with something new, the brain does not want to change it. It helped us survive so far, so we don’t want to change it, we can’t change it, we refuse to change it.
Repentance, changing our minds, is a lot deeper than what we may have been taught “repentance” is.
For so much of Christianity, repentance has just been “Feel bad about what you’ve done and admit it.” Repentance was first a feeling – feeling bad about yourself – and then it was falling down and asking for mercy from a law-giving and justice-dispensing God. And so often the sins that brought up the most shame and guilt – those feelings that are at the first part of this idea of repentance – those were the sins most in needed of confessing.
And what happens if we feel shame over the wrong thing? Is that what we most need to repent of? How many people through the centuries were told as kids that they had to be “people pleasers” and so anytime they want to set a boundary and say no, then they’re being “bad” and should be ashamed. Or about people who grew up feeling that their bodies were somehow bad: not thin enough, not athletic enough, not attractive enough, and so they feel shame about food or exercise? That kind of shame can become debilitating, and yet if we call people to repentance, the list of sweets and fried foods they ate last week is the top of that list, slamming them into deeper shame.
So the way we focus on sin then means that sin equals a feeling of shame. Sin then just feels “bad” and we don’t want to feel bad, and so we avoid it. We bury it. We avoid talking about it. We don’t want to feel bad. And so we avoid repenting because we don’t want to feel shame or guilt. We’ll keep it at surface level sins, if we must.
Look at who John the Baptist gets mad at: the Pharisees and Sadducees. He gets mad at the religious elites – people who today would be ready and able to list everyone else’s sins but refuse to consider their own, religious elites who do not feel shame or guilt and thus feel that they’ve perfected the art of repentance and never need to repent again. No change for them!
Repentance is not an exercise in shame; repentance is not about avoiding a feeling or burying it. Repentance is not about reinforcing the trauma and pain and unhelpful beliefs that we have carried over the years. Repentance is not rising above the need for repentance.
Repentance is changing our mind. Repentance is being open to change. Repentance is deep change, led by the Holy Spirit.
Once repentance is more than feelings of shame and guilt, we can learn to repent better. To truly change our minds. To open our deepest beliefs in our hearts and our most strongly held beliefs in our minds and to let the Holy Spirit guide us in changing.
Sometimes repentance is letting go of a habit that harms us. Sometimes repentance is letting go of a childhood message that we were terrible for simply existing, even if we’ve held onto that belief in different ways since then.
Sometimes repentance is a radical openness to letting the waters of baptism and the fires of the Holy Spirit soak down deep to set us free, to heal us, to burn away what binds us.
But we have to change our minds – we have to let our minds be changed. We have to be willing to let the Holy Spirit do her work.
In our worship here at All Saints, I’ve exercised the option to include a part of Scripture before the confession. During much of the year, it’s the Summary of the Law from Jesus. During Lent, it’s the Ten Commandments. During Advent, we’ve been using the Beatitudes.
The goal is not figuring out which things I’ve messed up on so I can make sure to confess them lest God accuse me later on. It’s about changing our minds to be conformed more to Christ. Do I value what God values, like peace and justice as Isaiah says? Do I value the ways that give life, that is, the way of Jesus, or do I value something else? Do I cling to beliefs the world taught me – ways that harm myself and others? Do I cling to beliefs that I learned in a vulnerable age, beliefs that berate me and destroy me? Do I cling to beliefs that only the surface level matters, that I am above repentance, that the only repentance needed is someone else’s? We want to let our minds be changed so that our way of life reflects the loving mind of God. Our readings from the Bible, our encounters with the Summary of the Law, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, are calling us to a better repentance. To change our minds to be aligned with Christ. This is a life-long calling of repentance, to be open to change and to be willing to change and to be changed into the mind and heart and love of Christ. Let us repent – let us change our minds. Amen.