Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 22, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
The end of the world is imminent unless we act. At least that’s the premise of many a Hollywood disaster film. Watch enough of these types of movies and you will inevitably come across a scene, in which a disheveled looking man, usually with wild hair is shown standing on a street corner holding or wearing a sign that reads, “Repent.” Of course you can, and perhaps you have, encountered such a person in many US cities, particularly the larger cities. I have.
Usually whenever I see or hear someone call humanity to repent, whether in a movie or real life, I think to myself, “good message, wrong meaning.”
The message is good because in fact, if we are to have a future, humanity must repent. Indeed we must outgrow our current norms of relating to ourselves, one another and the planet, all of which are scientifically, socially and spiritually unsustainable.
However, we’re not likely to grow all that much if, when we hear the call to repent if we recoil with resistance because we think we know what that word means or what Jesus meant in calling people to repent.
For those of us who grew up in another, particularly Christian, faith, to “repent” meant, at the very least to apologize and seek forgiveness, and often, as church historian Roberta Bondi puts, it also meant, “to feel really, really bad about what a sinful person you are.” Enter the guilt trip which has been put to good effect for questionable purposes for as long as anyone can remember and beyond.
Now, its not that people don’t sin. They do. And its not that guilt doesn’t have its place in the spectrum of human experience. Its does. Its just that repentance, as Jesus spoke of it, doesn’t have anything to do with feeling guilty about one’s sins.
We sometimes forget that Jesus was a Jew and thus his religious and spiritual development occurred in the context of his Jewish faith. In the Jewish Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) to repent means “to return” as if from exile. Thus, it can be viewed as an invitation to return home and in the Jewish context, to return home to a life with or in God.
Jesus, and many spiritual leaders throughout history, have understood humanity as estranged or exiled from the fullness of the life we’ve been given. Thus their proclamations and teachings are intended to call people out of exile…to return home, as it were…with home being variously understood as life in God, enlightenment, awareness of one’s true self or alignment with certain values which transcend self-interest.
Those of us who describe our faith journey as one of seeking have some sense of awareness of our estrangement or exile. It shows up as an unmet need, a feeling that there’s something more to life than what we are living, a hunger for depth or meaning, or a drive to serve others or something larger than ourselves.
To the seeker then, the call to repent is not a wagging finger of condemnation, it is first an invitation to come home.
It is difficult to absorb, let alone embody, the teachings of Jesus without an understanding of repentance as an invitation home. Home from our self-imposed exile…our bondage to convention, a.k.a. “the ways of the world” or what Clara Barton called, “the tyranny of precedent.”
The ways of the world, founded upon and charged with preserving individual self-interest over and above all else, tells us there is no other way. Convention conflates tradition with infallibility in defense of oppressive human institutions and systems both religious and secular. The tyranny of precedent rebuilds and reinforces walls along the borders of human diversity, dividing and imprisoning people according to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, socio-economic status, age, ability by which we have learned to judge and predetermine what each is capable or worthy of. More plainly stated we’re talking about life oriented toward the incarnation of me first; father knows best; divide and conquer.
Me first is especially seductive. As infants we experience ourselves as the center of the universe. The world seems to bend to our will. We cry and someone feeds, changes, or soothes us. Eventually, much to our dismay, we develop an awareness that we are not in fact the center of the universe, but that awareness can be short-lived in this world where we are increasingly and along all facets of life seen and treated…objectified, really, as consumers.
So long as we have the means, someone is eager to try and please us by creating and selling us something we want or believe we need. Even absent the means, someone is at the ready to provide those means…”What’s in your wallet?” as Samuel L. Jackson hawking the Capitol One credit card would say. Conditioned to see and be seen first and foremost as a consumer, we risk retreating back into that infantile sense of self as the center of the universe where everything exists to satisfy our personal preferences and everyone, except us, is responsible for our happiness.
Father knows best (which is is not a dig at fatherhood) is the influence of the dominant, largely paternal past. It built and supports many of the institutions and systems in which we live and which govern our social, political and economic lives. Most of us take these institutions or systems and their forms as a given. They were in place before we were born and, on the surface, they appear to get the job for which they were created, done. Which is why it can seem compelling when appeals to tradition are made in an attempt to legitimize and maintain their dominance in the face of calls for change.
Divide and conquer is a world view that responds to difference with suspicion and fear and thus seeks to generalize then divide people based on some shared trait and then pit them against one another to keep them from banding together to challenge the dominant culture. Its most obvious manifestations are prejudice and scapegoating.
Me first; father knows best; divide and conquer. Allegiance or habituation to these ways of the world is the spiritual exile or estrangement in which most people live and the place from which we are called or invited home through repentance.
Now its one thing to be invited home, its another thing to get there. Directions would help. And, don’t you know, Jesus includes directions right within the word repent.
In the Christian New Testament, written in Greek, repentance carries an additional meaning beyond the invitation home. Here the Greek word for repent, metanoia, means “to go beyond the mind you have.” Thus, according to Jesus scholar, Marcus Borg, “The word “repent” (in the Gospels) combines two meanings: “to return from exile and to think/see anew. It means to return from a condition of estrangement and exile to the presence of God, the Spirit or Source of Life. And it means to acquire a new way of seeing and thinking that goes beyond the conventions of culture.”
The way home, then, is also to repent by breaking our allegiance or habituation to me first, father knows best, and divide and conquer that we might inhabit life anew, that is by seeing and thinking about life differently than we did in exile and living that difference. Jesus added, “And believe in the good news.” Which is to say, trust there is something more than the life you know now. Indeed, trust it is here now, waiting for your arrival…waiting for your embrace.
I’m reminded now of a person who once asked me if it was okay to have John Lennon’s song “Imagine” played at a memorial service. The concern being, as she stated, “You know, that line about imagining no religion.”
But Lennon’s song, like Jesus’ call to repent, is an invitation out of exile, out of the world as we currently inhabit it and “beyond the mind we have”, beyond the horizon of what has been toward a vision of life and the world transformed, as it might be. It is about stepping back and removing the divisive lenses we usually wear. The lens of convention through which we normally see and relate to the world and one another. The lens without which we might actually experience, appreciate and value our interconnectedness.
At its heart repentance is a spiritual discipline we engage both individually and as a community by asking, as we did in our responsive reading, “What if?” and through which we are challenged to grow and live into being the home to which we were called out of exile by asking, “Why not?”
At a ministry workshop I attended recently, the presenter talked about the importance of having a daily spiritual practice. One attendee raised his hand and said something to the effect of, “I hear what you’re saying, but I work all day then I go home to my spouse and two young children…and there’s things to do around the house…and before you know it the evening is gone and its time to go to bed. The presenter nodded in knowing sympathy and then said, “What if preparing dinner was your spiritual practice…or changing a diaper…or doing the dishes?” Why not?
Asking, what if?, helps us imagine a shift or alternative to what is. Why not challenges us toward that shift or alternative. They are questions for the heart and mind to nudge us beyond the limits of me first, father knows best and divide and conquer.
What if and why not are are spiritual questions, not solely for the individual but for institutions, organizations, entire societies. Questions like what if and why not helped end slavery in the United States…led to the ordination of women in various denominations…to women’s suffrage…paved a path for same-sex marriage…and will continue to help advance justice and bring into being the world we are called to seek and make manifest through engagement with the spiritual discipline of repentance.
As a spiritual discipline repentance is an invitation to experience wholeness and embody hope rather than wallow in guilt or shame. When we engage in repentance, we look beyond the world as we know it toward a new way of seeing and being the world.
Let us then accept rather than resist the spiritual call to repent. And in service to and for the benefit of all, make of it a discipline by which we deepen and grow in our faith that we might, in the spirit of our Universalist forbear John Murray, “Go out into the highways and byways. . . give people something of our new vision. Shine our light, however small, in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of (all). Given them, not hell, but hope and courage!” Bid all repent! No Guilt trip required.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
May 22, 2016
by The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
The end of the world is imminent unless we act. At least that’s the premise of many a Hollywood disaster film. Watch enough of these types of movies and you will inevitably come across a scene, in which a disheveled looking man, usually with wild hair is shown standing on a street corner holding or wearing a sign that reads, “Repent.” Of course you can, and perhaps you have, encountered such a person in many US cities, particularly the larger cities. I have.
Usually whenever I see or hear someone call humanity to repent, whether in a movie or real life, I think to myself, “good message, wrong meaning.”
The message is good because in fact, if we are to have a future, humanity must repent. Indeed we must outgrow our current norms of relating to ourselves, one another and the planet, all of which are scientifically, socially and spiritually unsustainable.
However, we’re not likely to grow all that much if, when we hear the call to repent if we recoil with resistance because we think we know what that word means or what Jesus meant in calling people to repent.
For those of us who grew up in another, particularly Christian, faith, to “repent” meant, at the very least to apologize and seek forgiveness, and often, as church historian Roberta Bondi puts, it also meant, “to feel really, really bad about what a sinful person you are.” Enter the guilt trip which has been put to good effect for questionable purposes for as long as anyone can remember and beyond.
Now, its not that people don’t sin. They do. And its not that guilt doesn’t have its place in the spectrum of human experience. Its does. Its just that repentance, as Jesus spoke of it, doesn’t have anything to do with feeling guilty about one’s sins.
We sometimes forget that Jesus was a Jew and thus his religious and spiritual development occurred in the context of his Jewish faith. In the Jewish Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) to repent means “to return” as if from exile. Thus, it can be viewed as an invitation to return home and in the Jewish context, to return home to a life with or in God.
Jesus, and many spiritual leaders throughout history, have understood humanity as estranged or exiled from the fullness of the life we’ve been given. Thus their proclamations and teachings are intended to call people out of exile…to return home, as it were…with home being variously understood as life in God, enlightenment, awareness of one’s true self or alignment with certain values which transcend self-interest.
Those of us who describe our faith journey as one of seeking have some sense of awareness of our estrangement or exile. It shows up as an unmet need, a feeling that there’s something more to life than what we are living, a hunger for depth or meaning, or a drive to serve others or something larger than ourselves.
To the seeker then, the call to repent is not a wagging finger of condemnation, it is first an invitation to come home.
It is difficult to absorb, let alone embody, the teachings of Jesus without an understanding of repentance as an invitation home. Home from our self-imposed exile…our bondage to convention, a.k.a. “the ways of the world” or what Clara Barton called, “the tyranny of precedent.”
The ways of the world, founded upon and charged with preserving individual self-interest over and above all else, tells us there is no other way. Convention conflates tradition with infallibility in defense of oppressive human institutions and systems both religious and secular. The tyranny of precedent rebuilds and reinforces walls along the borders of human diversity, dividing and imprisoning people according to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, socio-economic status, age, ability by which we have learned to judge and predetermine what each is capable or worthy of. More plainly stated we’re talking about life oriented toward the incarnation of me first; father knows best; divide and conquer.
Me first is especially seductive. As infants we experience ourselves as the center of the universe. The world seems to bend to our will. We cry and someone feeds, changes, or soothes us. Eventually, much to our dismay, we develop an awareness that we are not in fact the center of the universe, but that awareness can be short-lived in this world where we are increasingly and along all facets of life seen and treated…objectified, really, as consumers.
So long as we have the means, someone is eager to try and please us by creating and selling us something we want or believe we need. Even absent the means, someone is at the ready to provide those means…”What’s in your wallet?” as Samuel L. Jackson hawking the Capitol One credit card would say. Conditioned to see and be seen first and foremost as a consumer, we risk retreating back into that infantile sense of self as the center of the universe where everything exists to satisfy our personal preferences and everyone, except us, is responsible for our happiness.
Father knows best (which is is not a dig at fatherhood) is the influence of the dominant, largely paternal past. It built and supports many of the institutions and systems in which we live and which govern our social, political and economic lives. Most of us take these institutions or systems and their forms as a given. They were in place before we were born and, on the surface, they appear to get the job for which they were created, done. Which is why it can seem compelling when appeals to tradition are made in an attempt to legitimize and maintain their dominance in the face of calls for change.
Divide and conquer is a world view that responds to difference with suspicion and fear and thus seeks to generalize then divide people based on some shared trait and then pit them against one another to keep them from banding together to challenge the dominant culture. Its most obvious manifestations are prejudice and scapegoating.
Me first; father knows best; divide and conquer. Allegiance or habituation to these ways of the world is the spiritual exile or estrangement in which most people live and the place from which we are called or invited home through repentance.
Now its one thing to be invited home, its another thing to get there. Directions would help. And, don’t you know, Jesus includes directions right within the word repent.
In the Christian New Testament, written in Greek, repentance carries an additional meaning beyond the invitation home. Here the Greek word for repent, metanoia, means “to go beyond the mind you have.” Thus, according to Jesus scholar, Marcus Borg, “The word “repent” (in the Gospels) combines two meanings: “to return from exile and to think/see anew. It means to return from a condition of estrangement and exile to the presence of God, the Spirit or Source of Life. And it means to acquire a new way of seeing and thinking that goes beyond the conventions of culture.”
The way home, then, is also to repent by breaking our allegiance or habituation to me first, father knows best, and divide and conquer that we might inhabit life anew, that is by seeing and thinking about life differently than we did in exile and living that difference. Jesus added, “And believe in the good news.” Which is to say, trust there is something more than the life you know now. Indeed, trust it is here now, waiting for your arrival…waiting for your embrace.
I’m reminded now of a person who once asked me if it was okay to have John Lennon’s song “Imagine” played at a memorial service. The concern being, as she stated, “You know, that line about imagining no religion.”
But Lennon’s song, like Jesus’ call to repent, is an invitation out of exile, out of the world as we currently inhabit it and “beyond the mind we have”, beyond the horizon of what has been toward a vision of life and the world transformed, as it might be. It is about stepping back and removing the divisive lenses we usually wear. The lens of convention through which we normally see and relate to the world and one another. The lens without which we might actually experience, appreciate and value our interconnectedness.
At its heart repentance is a spiritual discipline we engage both individually and as a community by asking, as we did in our responsive reading, “What if?” and through which we are challenged to grow and live into being the home to which we were called out of exile by asking, “Why not?”
At a ministry workshop I attended recently, the presenter talked about the importance of having a daily spiritual practice. One attendee raised his hand and said something to the effect of, “I hear what you’re saying, but I work all day then I go home to my spouse and two young children…and there’s things to do around the house…and before you know it the evening is gone and its time to go to bed. The presenter nodded in knowing sympathy and then said, “What if preparing dinner was your spiritual practice…or changing a diaper…or doing the dishes?” Why not?
Asking, what if?, helps us imagine a shift or alternative to what is. Why not challenges us toward that shift or alternative. They are questions for the heart and mind to nudge us beyond the limits of me first, father knows best and divide and conquer.
What if and why not are are spiritual questions, not solely for the individual but for institutions, organizations, entire societies. Questions like what if and why not helped end slavery in the United States…led to the ordination of women in various denominations…to women’s suffrage…paved a path for same-sex marriage…and will continue to help advance justice and bring into being the world we are called to seek and make manifest through engagement with the spiritual discipline of repentance.
As a spiritual discipline repentance is an invitation to experience wholeness and embody hope rather than wallow in guilt or shame. When we engage in repentance, we look beyond the world as we know it toward a new way of seeing and being the world.
Let us then accept rather than resist the spiritual call to repent. And in service to and for the benefit of all, make of it a discipline by which we deepen and grow in our faith that we might, in the spirit of our Universalist forbear John Murray, “Go out into the highways and byways. . . give people something of our new vision. Shine our light, however small, in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of (all). Given them, not hell, but hope and courage!” Bid all repent! No Guilt trip required.
Amen and Blessed Be
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