Genesis 9: 8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.”
Mark 1: 14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
Over this week, the focus of this message has morphed from whatever I had in mind when I recommended the title you see, “From John to Jesus to Us,” to one I now prefer: “Repentance: It’s not just for Lent anymore.”
And now a story: a young man, we’ll call him Oscar, is driving from his new home in Pittsburgh to his grandparents’ home in the country, for Thanksgiving. He leaves town just a tad late for dinner at 6, because the football game that he was watching with his buddies went into overtime. Thankfully, his car’s new GPS system helps him find the quickest way out of Pittsburgh confusing tangle of winding streets, and around some construction related road closures.
Once on I-76, Oscar’s new GPS tells him to take the 5th exit east, the way most visitors take. But this being his home territory, he knows an obscure forest service road that will cut five miles off his journey. Some of it is even paved. So, when Oscar takes the 4th exit and turns north onto Union Gap Road, his new GPS unit starts saying, “Make the next legal U-turn and return to Eastbound I-76.” He ignores it and hopes that the computerized program will catch on to what he’s doing and adjust its directions. But it keeps saying, “Make the next legal U-turn and return to Eastbound I-76,” all the way down Union Gap Road to the Forest Service road, where he turns right. Now the GPS unit is saying, “Make the next legal U-turn, proceed to Union Gap Road, and turn left.” In other words, go right back the way you came.
His GPS system must be unaware of this obscure Forest Service road, he thinks. But he knows better. It should stop squawking at him once he crosses the bridge a few miles up and hits the paved road to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. After which, he won’t need his GPS anyway. So he turns it off, just when it was about to say, “Road closed two miles ahead,” because that bridge he’s counting on crossing was recently washed out by flooding.
Oscar doesn’t know that. And dusk is turning to darkness.
Speaking of GPS and other digital, computerized thing-a-ma-bobs, let’s say your GPS or your cell phone or your computer starts acting funny, maybe the screen turns all blue or text goes every which way, or it won’t print, and you call customer support. After the answering service prompts you to push 97 different buttons for this condition or that possibility, and you sit on Hold forever, you finally get hold of a real life technician. After you explain the problem, what does he or she usually ask you first? Anyone?
“Did you push the reset button?” Or Restart?
Did you know that there is a reset button for the world, indeed, for all Creation? And that there’s one for us, too? It’s called “grace.” The grace of God.
Now we usually associate God’s grace just with forgiveness of sin. It is that, and more. Paul wrote his disciple Titus to say, in chapter 2: “11 For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. 12 It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”
Grace then is not just a personal fresh start in forgiveness, but a fresh start for the world, beginning with ourselves, our desires and motives, our priorities and possibilities, our character and our conduct. Grace is God pushing the reset button on Creation, beginning with us, restoring us, at least moving us back toward our original factory baptismal condition. That’s what the two Bible passages, one about the rainbow from Genesis 9, and the gospel reading have in common; they are both about God pushing the reset button on Creation, in other words, about God’s grace.
When our computers have picked up too many downloads and temporary files and those “cookies,” so-called, left over from sites we visited before, plus other programs, and those updates and downloads may be working at odds with each other, they need a restart, or a reset to a previous restore point. Christian discipleship also often requires a Restart, a reset, or a return to a previous restore point, because of how easily our hearts, souls and spirits get gummed up, distracted and occupied with needless and conflicting actions and operations.
It’s a condition which our spiritual ancestors called, “sloth,” or, in Latin, “acedia,” also called, “the demon of the noonday sun,” because it’s the spiritual equivalent of the heaviness that comes over us at noon on a hot summer day, lulling us to sleep. Under its spell, we go from a vibrant desire to please God, to wanting most just to be pleasant and to please people. Then we become preoccupied with how to be pleased, by God or others, which leads to, simply, how to have pleasure. The final state, at the spiritual bottom, is, “Pleasure IS God.”
That’s why we need the discipleship reset button pushed, to move us back to our baptismal condition. But just as my computer or my GPS can’t push its own reset button, we cannot restart our own lives of faith, hope and love. We have to surrender to the recreating, resetting hand of God, and place ourselves in the path of his renewing, restoring grace. That’s what this season of Lent is about.
Over the next few weeks of Lent, I’ll speak each Sunday about some aspect of God’s resetting, restarting, recreating grace, under the Lenten Season theme of “Inside Out and Upside Down.” It is so named because whenever God pushes the reset button of grace on a person or his people, it feels like being turned upside down and inside out, because of at least four qualities that exceed our own powers and wisdom: 1) God’s restoring, renewing work is not under our command and control. It is always sovereign, that is, at God’s timing and initiative, by God’s power, for God’s purposes, and so is victorious in any situation.
Secondly, God’s gracious work of restoration is totally, extravagantly unmerited and unearned. It’s about God’s goodness before it is about our own. This extravagant and unilateral gifting of God’s grace we see in the fresh start that God gave Noah and his family, and all creation, even though they shared the same weak and rebellious nature with all who perished in the flood. Likewise, Jesus did not come to First Century Palestine because those people were any more wise or deserving than anyone anywhere else, at any time. It was because of God’s sovereign goodness and mercy for all people, everywhere.
A third feature of God’s work to restart us and restore Creation is that it usually seems counter-intuitive, at least from the point of view of conventional human wisdom. When God pushes our reset buttons, we often experience what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” or like what the robot in the TV series, Lost In Space, often said: “This does not compute!” Like in today’s Gospel reading, when we hear, “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said. ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’”
Wait a minute. What good news could there possibly be with John, God’s man of the hour, imprisoned? How could the kingdom of God be near when its herald, John, is about to die? John himself would go through a time of dismay, confusion and cognitive dissonance, when from his prison cell he later sent a disciple to Jesus with this question: “Are you the One who is supposed to come, or should we wait for another?”
In other words, “Are you going to do like a good Messiah is supposed to, and get me out of here, or was I pointing in the wrong direction when I said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who bears the sins of the world?’” Yet that darkest of hours is precisely when the kingdom of God draws near, and when Jesus and the good news burst upon the scene. Go figure.
Fourthly, the resetting, restarting, recreating work of God’s grace is costly, most of all to God, but often to us as well. It cost Christ his life. But for him to begin his ministry and his message, someone else had to prepare the way, and then get out of the way. So John the Baptist preached at great risk to himself, about the “One mightier than I.” That risk became real with his imprisonment and execution.
Today, I’ll focus most on the first quality of God’s work of restarting or restoring creation: God’s Sovereign power and wisdom, and what that requires of us. Such sovereign power we certainly see in God’s unilateral initiative to make a covenant with Creation after the flood. When God promised that the waters of chaos would never again destroy all life, and made the rainbow his seal of covenant faithfulness to that effect, God did not consult the clouds nor the animals nor even Noah and his family about it. Nor did God enlist their help.
The sovereignty of God and his grace does not negate our roles and responsibilities, though, nor even our freedom nor our power to fight and resist God, to the bitter end, if we like. It does mean, however, that God can use anything, even our resistance, to accomplish his purposes. As friend or foe, we will serve God, even if in spite of ourselves. Like King Herod, having John the Baptist imprisoned for the most cowardly and selfish reasons. God used that to set in motion the ministry of Jesus. What Herod meant for evil, God used for good.
How then do we respond to God’s sovereign power and initiative? What’s our role? Jesus said it succinctly in his first recorded message: “Repent and believe the gospel.”
Repenting and believing the gospel are not two separate actions. They are two sides of the same coin of discipleship, living out the Kingdom of God. To believe in the gospel, we must repent of our false gods and false faiths. To repent of our idols and false faiths, we must believe that there is something, or someone, better and truer to believe in. A life of faith then implies a life of repentance.
If the word, “repent” only brings to mind images of cranky, bearded old, self-styled prophets wearing robes and carrying signs saying, “The end is near,” then our language bank lacks sufficient funds. “Repentance” is a perfectly good word that I would like to rescue from the street preachers I’ve seen around professional sports stadiums who seem to think that by condemning and accusing the perfect strangers passing by, they’re the new Billy Grahams or Apostle Paul’s.
They preached about repentance, too, but with no more rudeness nor malice nor any sense of superiority than the GPS in Oscar’s car telling him to make the next legal U-turn because the data says that the short-cut he’s counting on is actually a dangerous dead end. That makes Repentance no more of an insult or an injury than pushing the reset button on a digital device that’s gotten off track, or setting it back to a previous restore point.
And if we think that repentance is only for big-time crooks and riotously loose-living libertines answering an altar call for Christ for the first time in their lives, with copious tears of remorse, then we’re missing out on a lot of growth and blessing. Repentance is not just an emotion that occurs at a moment of conversion to faith. Repentance is also a stance, an orientation toward God and life, a willing, lifelong journey of ongoing conversion, to ever deeper and more meaningful faith. So, a wise person happily makes a hundred painless little repentances a day, if need be, so as not to risk having to make one truly ginormous and excruciatingly costly repentance after a lifetime. Or not.
Nor is repentance a matter of self-loathing. If we loath ourselves, well, we need to repent of that. Repentance is a way of being in which we are more sure of God’s sovereignty than of our own. It’s a stance of suspicion about our own illusions of self-sufficiency, a stance of trust in God’s all-knowing wisdom and guidance rather than our own, so that we are ever listening and on the look-out for help, direction and mid-course corrections. Repentance is like Oscar stopping his car, dialing through the display of his GPS screen to see why it keeps telling him to go back, instead of just blowing through because he’s so sure that he knows what’s ahead better than his GPS does. Our spiritual GPS is God and His Word.
This last Monday, Becky and I were at the High Desert Museum near Bend, Oregon, on the same day that many families with school age children were there, it being a holiday. As the children got out of the cars, many were bouncing about and skipping, so excited were they to see exhibits of geology, history and live animals.
‘Oh, to be young again,” I thought with some jealousy. Perhaps the most insidious temptation of the Christian life is not so much wild, lewd, degeneracy and crazy-making hedonism (none of which I recommend), but an old, cold respectability, a cynical sense that I have this Christian thing down pat, that’s it no big deal, and there’s no need for growth, so What’s anybody’s excitement all about? That’s sloth, acedia, “the demon of the noonday sun” again.
One might think that pastors, with all the time we spend in the Word and in church work and prayer, are immune from that. Actually, we’re most in danger of it. We can start to handle holy things in routine and mechanical fashion, and just settle for making it from one Sunday to the next until we retire. Perhaps I was starting to get like that before Monday, because I first responded to the enthusiasm of those children at the museum by recalling the words of a Keith Green song, “My eyes are dry, my faith is old; my heart is hard, my prayers are cold,” and “Oh what can be done, with an old heart like mine?”
But being around those eager, excited and antsy children at the museum, and their sheer, unhidden, embarrassment-free excitement when they got to see and touch a turtle, a snake, and a lizard, their awe, wonder and excitement were so contagious that I began to change my tune, from Keith Green’s lament, to a prayer that God would push the reset button on my faith, hope and love, and make me more like them again.
To refresh and renew the Christian life, we must ever and always place ourselves, as John Wesley said, “at the spout where the grace comes out,” and the Sovereign hand of our mysterious God can touch us and restore us. That’s why we have our Lenten season Bible passages and devotional themes and practices, the first of which, every year, are about repentance.
Because Repentance is not just for Lent anymore.