Text: Mark 1:14-20, Jonah 3:1-5,10
Over the last year our routines, our work, our families, our vacations… so many parts of our lives were unexpectedly turned upside down and inside out.
Including our church.
One of my mentors often reminds me that church is often the place that we go to escape the change that happens in the world. It has often been one of the only stable places we can turn.
Churches are notorious for being stubborn and afraid to try new things…
After all, we’ve never done it that way before.
But this year, we had to.
We had to adapt.
We had to change with the circumstances.
We had to embrace a new way of being together and being the church.
We had to repent and believe the good news.
The Greek word we translate into “repent” is metanoia.
It is a reorientation.
Turning around.
Changing our thoughts and our actions.
And in scriptures, we are called to repentance, transformation, when we encounter a new understanding of reality… God’s reality.
Well, we’ve certainly had to do that this year.
In light of the reality of a deadly virus, we reoriented ourselves.
We embraced new practices like online worship and small groups and studies.
But we also noticed some things about our church that honestly, we should have changed a long time ago, but we were too stuck in old ways to do it.
One example of this is how our church, like a lot of churches, can get stuck in cliques and groups.
You notice it at coffee time when people tend to sit down with the same group of people every week.
It’s who we know, who we are comfortable with.
But sometimes that means that a new friend to our church is left out.
Now, if I had come down to Faith Hall between services, and mixed up all of the seating arrangements, ya’ll would have revolted on me.
But when worship moved online, we began to host our Zoom coffee time and our breakout rooms got randomly assigned.
No one gets left out and anyone who wants to stay gets to “sit at a table” with different folks each week.
In the process, we’ve made new friends, learned more about each other, and I think our church is stronger as a result.
That is repentance in action.
A new understanding of who we are and new practices that help us to be more faithful to who God is calling us to be.
As we seek to follow the star and align our lives more closely to God, let’s take a deeper look at how repentance plays a role.
Today, we have two different scriptures that help us to embrace what that means. One is an example of how we turn from actions that have separated us from God. The other is how we might turn towards God’s call in our lives.
Let’s start with Jonah.
One of our more traditional ways of speaking about repentance is naming and confessing our sins.
I have to admit that every time I hear the word “repent” I picture someone standing on a street corner holding up a sign.
And, honestly, that’s kind of what Jonah did!
In the Message translation, God’s instructions come to Jonah: “Preach to them. They’re in a bad way and I can’t ignore it any longer.” (3:1-2)
So Jonah walked for three days through the city telling them the end was near…. “In forty days you will be destroyed.”
Notice, Jonah doesn’t tell them to repent.
But his words help the people of this city see reality in a new way.
They recognize their evil and their sin and they turn from it.
The entire community repents, turns around, reorients themselves to God’s preferred future.
They have no promises of mercy, no hope of restoration.
But confronted with reality, they realize they simply cannot go on a moment longer the way they had been living.
They turn from their ways in a moment of repentance.
Over the last year, there have been a number of moments when we have experienced this kind of clarity and need for repentance.
From the death of a black man on a street in Minneapolis, to raging wildfires perpetuated by climate change, to the brazen display of Christian nationalism in the insurrection a few weeks ago, we have been confronted with images that lead us to cry out… this is not who we want to be.
We may disagree about what concrete actions and policy changes need to happen, but our lives have been collectively reoriented, altered, as we have realized there are systemic and interpersonal realities we must turn from.
I think back to the story of the Ninevites who saw their impending doom.
They recognized just how far their lives and their actions were from what God intended for them and they did something about it.
Whenever we are confronted with reality, a new reality, a different reality, we have the opportunity to hold our lives up to the measure of God’s intentions for us.
If what we discover leads us to change our thoughts or actions, that is repentance.
But there is another piece of this story that is important.
God repents.
When God sees how the people have claimed a new reality, how they have truly turned from evil, the divine mind is changed.
God turns from calamity and destruction to mercy and grace.
God experiences metanoia, too.
In our gospel reading from Mark, we find Jesus himself as the street corner preacher, calling everyone he encounters to repent and believe in the good news.
He is not pointing out their faults or their lack of faith. He is not calling them to turn from something that was bad or evil, but calling them towards a new reality, a Kingdom reality.
His words reach Simon and Andrew, James and John, simple fishermen who drop their nets and leave their jobs and their families.
But as Thomas Long, a preacher and professor at Candler School of Theology claims, “Jesus disrupts [their reality] not to destroy but to renew.” He notes how their roles as brothers and sons become transformed into new relationships in God’s family and how even their work becomes a part of how they serve the Kingdom. “Their past has not been obliterated; it has been transformed by Jesus’ call to follow.”
In the light of Christ, they see themselves in a new light and the potential of who they could be.
I have watched over these last years how the people of Immanuel have heard this call and have turned towards God, using their gifts and strengths to serve the Kingdom.
The ways that you have come to understand that church is not simply a place where you find comfort and the familiar, but where you hear the call to become more of what God believes you can be.
I think about the young woman in our church who felt the tug to make blankets for our homeless neighbors.
Or about our knitters who made prayer squares… which we have also shared with essential workers at our local care centers.
I think about men and women in our church who have built sets for VBS that have helped our children to grow closer to Jesus.
And about those who give their time on Sunday mornings in the AV booth to make sure that we remain connected to God and one another.
Or those who manage our finances, or lead us in music, or make sure the food pantry is filled.
And I think about the countless stories you have shared with me about how you are finding new ways to live out your faith in your work place, in your homes.
Repentance is not simply turning from our past and our failures, but it is also about turning toward who God has created you to become and the Kingdom reality that God is bringing to bear upon this earth.
It is, as our first National Youth Poet Laureate said on Wednesday at the inauguration, the remembrance that we are “not broken, but unfinished.”
That there is more to do, more to experience, more ways to serve, that there is a fullness that awaits us if we simply could repent.
Turn around.
Turn towards God.
Change our hearts and our actions.
To allow ourselves to be transformed.
May it be so.
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