Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12
John the Baptist tells the Pharisees and Sadducees to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” And he baptizes them. He doesn’t require them to repent first to get baptized, but to follow their baptisms with lives of repentance.
He doesn’t mean specifically identifiable penitential actions, but common activities that fit with a penitential attitude. To “bear fruit” suggests positive repentance, life-giving and life-expanding repentance, life-sharing, and benefitting others. Yes, sacrificial, but not self-abnegation; rather, sacrificial rather in terms of investment and cost and risk. And pruning too, as fruit trees are pruned to bear better fruit, so that positive repentance will entail some intentional losses.
Last Sunday I described positive repentance as “the self-giving works of your creativity and the live-giving actions of your imagination. Not punishing yourself but serving others, reconciling, cleansing, sharing, creating examples in your life and in the world of what you imagine may be normal in the life of the world to come.” You offer examples of human activities that you imagine will be normal in the New Jerusalem. You demonstrate human relations as you foresee them when the Kingdom of Heaven has fully come on earth.
It’s okay that these are passing and fragile, and your moral achievements will not last long. Your demonstrations and examples are first-drafts and test-cases; not marble monuments but more like lovely meals that last a couple hours. Not permanent, like the plastic fruit in our parlors of the 1960’s, but fruit that ripens and then is harvested and eaten; or it falls to the ground to drop its seed and make new life, and its genetic code lives on, so that its short and passing life is not wasted but goes on into the future. Just so, God keeps gathering into God’s future satisfaction your passing and fragile actions of positive repentance.
John the Baptist does not offer any concrete examples of positive repentance in St. Matthew’s account. But he does so in St. Luke’s version. He says that if you have two coats, share one with someone who has none, and if you have food, do likewise. Tax collectors, take no more money than what’s appointed, and soldiers, be content with your wages and don’t extort the populace.
Doesn’t seem like much, but the last two examples were counter-cultural, and with wages so tight you would need self-control to resist the opportunities that your little bit of power offered you, and you’d be ridiculed by your officers. The resistance of the world to you is part of your repentance.
Where St. Matthew does offer his concrete examples is in his following chapters, in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, Be merciful. He says, Be peacemakers. Not conflict-avoiders who take no risks, but wade into conflict working peace. He says, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, and that is costly, which feels like penance. He says, Judge not, and if you must judge, then take the log out of your own eye before you judge the speck in your neighbor’s eye, which feels like physical therapy. He says to forgive those who trespass against you, which takes self-control. And he says to pray the Lord’s Prayer, which keeps you dependent on God’s initiative.
I hesitate to hold up concrete examples from people in our congregation, because I will have to pass over some of you. Forgive me ahead of time. But let me mention a few of you.
One of you had a stroke a year ago, and you leveraged your disability into advocacy for the disabled getting full access to our mass transit system. That’s positive repentance.
One of you young mothers responded to the persecution of undocumented immigrants by sacrificing your time to help the mothers and their children that our government is oppressing.
One of you has given her life to the global campaign against man-made climate change and its dire effects especially among the poorer populations of the earth.
One of you is sacrificing his free time to take his turn in serving as our church treasurer, a time-consuming job, a positive penance that others of you have done as well in your own turn. I could give you many more examples.
Don’t depend on only your preacher to hold up such examples. You as a congregation need to recognize these actions and devotions among you. Recognize each other, honor each other, bless each other, encourage each other. Recognize the fruits that the others among you are bearing, and recognize your own fruit as well. Bear fruits that befit repentance, not as single trees but an orchard, shading each other, cross-fertilizing each other, and sheltering the little birds among your branches.
Encouragement is a concrete example from Romans 15. As is also living in harmony. Not in unison, but in harmony, by sharing your different voices with other, and listening to others as you sing, to get yourself in tune with the voices that differ from your own. That requires active hospitality as you welcome other voices into the same space as your own. To welcome each other is positive repentance. You give each other room, not to keep your distance, but for living room for company and hospitality. Just as Christ has welcomed you.
And if I may change the subject slightly, that welcome of Christ, that hospitality of God, is the answer to the problem of why the Lord Jesus takes so long in coming again. If it seems like he’s waiting forever, 2000 years and counting, that’s from the perspective of our own short lifetimes. But that’s no time at all from the perspective of the planet or even of the existence of Homo sapiens. And yet the real point is that God is being hospitable to us in terms of time itself.
Time is one of God’s best creations, and a gift to us, and God keeps giving us time, lots of time, within which we ourselves create, and imagine, and bear fruit. Lots of time to rehearse, lots of time try out things, and try again. We’re all of us moral Thomas Edisons, with one success for 99 failures, and even that one success will soon be out of date, because none of this is forever. The Lord Jesus gives our species lots of time to make our various and passing preparations for his coming again. You are preparing, not for the end of the world, but for the beginning. You are preparing not for your exit but for your entrance. It’s positive repentance when you prepare for the beginning.
Some more concrete examples from Romans: It’s positive repentance to be steadfast in your faith, against the trials and testing of the world, especially the world’s success. For, as I said, the resistance of the world to you is part of your repentance. It’s positive repentance to choose for hope. Not optimism, because things are worse than you know, but right within the negativity, your hope is to welcome God’s initiative and God’s time, no matter how long it seems to take.
It’s positive repentance to choose for joy, especially considering all the evils slung against you that then cling to your memories of your sins. But you despise the shame to choose for the joy.
And it’s positive repentance to choose for love, despite the successful powers of fear and hatred in the world. But that’s why this penitential season comes down to a baby, a baby, “babies, babies everywhere,” to tell you that the greatest of all fruits that befit repentance are the grapes of joy and the apples of love. Those vines and those trees are for the healing of the nations. And your passing joys and your fragile loves are your preparations for the greater harvest still to come.
And so you prepare yourself for not the end but for the beginning. And you prepare yourself by being open to God’s preparing you. That’s why you are here today. The good news is that Christ himself prepares you.
When I was a child, I had asthma. So my mother put in my bedroom a little machine called a vaporizer, with a small tank of water, and in the water she put some Vicks Vaporub, and if I breathed it I could sleep, and as I kept breathing in my sleep it opened me more and more. The Lord Jesus prepares you by his Word and his Spirit, he opens you up, and he makes you able to expand your lungs, both to give you rest and restore your strength for living in the morning.
That’s why you came here today. You want to breathe God’s joy into yourself. And you can be encouraged that even your fragile fruits are planted in the fertile ground of God’s eternal love.
Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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