In the Name of the Living God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Malacy and I have recently been working on building good conversation skills. I’ll just say it’s one of our many relational resolutions for 2017.
Earlier in the week she, innocently, started up a conversation by asking me what the topic was for this sermon. I told her, “I think I’d like to tackle repentance.” Without missing a beat, she wrinkled her brow and said politely, “Well, that’s cheerful.” So much for resolutions!
So, here we go: I’ll do my best to present this cheerfully, because what I have to share is good news indeed!
In the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Jesus is clear: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
The first thing of substance I’d like to suggest in this little homily is this: all of us need desperately to experience what the Prayer Book calls “true repentance” (don’t be afraid; stick with me).
And the second thing of substance I’d like to say is that most of us have absolutely no clue what that really involves.
For example (and I’d bet the farm on this one), if I asked you to take out a piece of paper and write down what you thought repentance meant, you’d probably repeat something you heard before (or said to someone else before), and it would go like this:
• To repent means to turn around or away from something
• Or you might say that to repent means to change directions
Now, I’m not going to admonish you, if you think that’s what it really boils down to.
But I am going to suggest to you that these sort of definitions share a common – even disastrous – flaw. And they will leave you empty in the end.
And they’re partially disastrous and flawed because they are mistakenly rooted in the mind, as if repentance was simply an intellectual matter of changing the mind. For example, today I don’t care much for brussels sprouts, but when I’m dieting, surely I’ll choose them, because they are good for me. Just change the mind, they say; just change directions, they say.
And we have several thousand years of flawed philosophy partially to blame. It began with the Greeks; they mistakenly believed right action flowed from knowledge. And it’s only gone downhill from there. John Maynard Keens, the famous twentieth century British economist, once told reporters: “When the facts change, I change my mind.”
Really? Bologna! It simply isn’t true! And I’ll prove it.
Last night I knew I shouldn’t have enjoyed that second helping of dessert – I mean, I had the knowledge and the facts, right? But I sure managed to slice that cake and enjoy every last bite! Archbishop Cranmer warned us well: “what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”
True repentance is not an intellectual change of mind. True repentance is a spiritual change of heart – a heart with the renewed power to love and be loved. Don’t be afraid of the word – repentance is life-giving.
There is a painting by William Holman Hunt, a famous and fabulous nineteenth century English painter, hanging above a side altar at Keble College, Oxford (a copy hangs at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London). The title of it is The Light of the World.
The painting features Jesus in the dark of night holding a bright lantern as He approaches an old wooden door, overgrown with ivy and weeds, deep in a rather scary forest. It is clear from the rusty hinges that the door has actually never been opened. It is also abundantly clear the figure of Christ is asking permission to enter. And, curiously, the door has no handle on the outside.
There is a bright light around the head of Christ, which symbolizes the light of love and salvation, and the door, you see, represents the human heart, which cannot be opened from the outside. It can only be opened from the inside.
The inscription under the copy at St. Paul’s, in London, reads, “The saviour of the world is alive and will dwell in the hearts of those who admit him.”
True repentance – the kind of which our Saviour speaks – begins not in the mind, but first by opening the door to our hearts so that the power to love and be loved is renewed.
As a friend of mind says so well, “Repentance is the handle on the door to God’s love” (Fitzsimmons Allison). Yes, that’s it.
Until you – until I – get in touch with the Forgiving Father, who interrupts all the excuses and all the pain, and pours the love and forgiveness in, we’ll never know what repentance is all about.
We think repentance is all about us. No, it’s all about Him! See; it’s getting better now, don’t you see?
The Victorian author, Mary Ann Evans – known best to us, of course, by her pen name, George Eliot – wrote, among many other things, a fictional series called Scenes From Clerical Life. It was actually her first work of fiction; it was published in 1857. In the section of the book, called “Janet’s Repentance,” we meet Janet, a battered wife, with a dark secret, who becomes an alcoholic to dull the pain of her life.
And Janet tells us, “I had no faith; I only felt utterly wretched, under the power of habits and dispositions which had wrought hideous evil.”
Later on, in chapter four, Janet meets the local vicar, who introduces her to a loving, living and forgiving Saviour named Jesus of Nazareth. Brilliantly, the gentle vicar tells Janet:
Christ invites us to come to him and find rest. He asks us to cling to him, to lean on him; he does not command us to walk alone without stumbling. He does not tell us, as our fellow men do, that we must first merit his love. He neither condemns nor reproaches us for the past – the only bid is to come to Him that we may have life. Once we feel our helplessness and that way and go to the Saviour, desiring to be free from the power as well as the punishment of sin, we are no longer left to our own strength…and we breathe the pure free air that gives us health, and strength and gladness.
“That is what I want,” said Janet. Don’t you want it, too? I do.
Only from that blessed place of true freedom can a heart be changed. And out of a changed heart – not a changed mind – comes true repentance, amendment of life and the grace and consolation of His Holy Spirit.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Charleston D. Wilson
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
3rd Sunday after Epiphany
22 January 2017