REPENT FOR THE KINGDOM, ADVENT 2, YEAR B. 2024

(SERMON MANUSCRIPT)

Luke 3:1-6

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"

There are not two histories, one profane and one sacred, "juxtaposed" or "closely linked." Rather, there is only one human history, irreversibly assumed by Christ, the Lord of history. His redemptive work embraces all the dimensions of existence and brings them to their fullness. The history of salvation is the very heart of human history.

—Gustavo Gutiérrez

It seems contradictory that on the second Sunday of Advent, the two ideas of peace and repentance are juxtaposed. But, I’d offer that they are both part of the greater whole of the Gospel. No contradiction exists between them at all. There is no way to peace according to A.J. Muste, “Peace is the way.” To make peace every step, however, we must first recognize that we exist within systems and patterns, constructs, and accepted norms that are rooted in things that do not lead to peace. Existentially, we are embedded in social patterns and ideologies that find their source in the lizard brain, the fear-based schematics that human beings have been formed by, mostly outside their knowing, to craft stability (peace) by means that never produce peace. War to end war, violence to end violence, empowering the greedy, thinking that they will be satisfied with their wealth and inevitably care for the poor; all of these ideas have shown us time and time again the myth of progress through power and wealth.

Paul Kingsnorth describes this as “The Myth of Progress,” where the false narrative that human beings started as ignorant savages and are moving through a series of progressive steps in which, at every point, we get more clever, rich, smarter, and healthier. This is used to give unbridled licenses to technology as the vehicle of human flourishing and the good life. He mentions that one of the dangerous things about the story of progress is that “we don’t think it’s a story. We think it’s the truth.” Even with its benefits, technology has too often gotten ahead of us, creating environmental, nuclear, and even existential crises. We develop the capacity to power cities with the atom and simultaneously annihilate them with nuclear bombs, setting the world on edge with enough warheads to destroy the entire globe multiple times over. We see record affluence and simultaneous astounding disparities.

The United States has a higher child poverty rate than many other developed nations. In 2022, the U.S. child poverty rate was 21% (of that 21%, 20% are Black and Hispanic). In Youngstown, our child poverty rate is over 50%. In nations like the United Kingdom, Sweden, and France, it’s less than 10%. The majority of our poor are made up of hard-working minorities. Black Americans are disproportionately affected by poverty, incarceration, and police brutality. The top 1% of earners own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. The U.S. holds some of the highest suicide rates and lowest life expectancy despite spending the most on healthcare. The United States has one of the highest rates of anxiety and depression of any developed nation. Opioid addiction, gun violence, incarceration…the list goes on and on. On a single night in the USA, according to census data from 2023, roughly 653,100 people in the U.S. experienced unsheltered homelessness, up about 12 percent from 2022. We’re one of the most well-fed yet ironically malnourished people. Out of all developed nations, we have one of the highest rates of consumer debt, the highest rate of military spending, the rise of religious nationalism, overwhelming depression and anxiety… we have made this world. It affects us all. And we’ve done it all under the banner of progress. 


In 1963, Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and German Jew who fled the Nazi regime, would go on to issue a sobering diagnosis of the human condition embedded in a technological society;

“The average person feels insecure, lonely, depressed…they are dimly aware that the meaning of life cannot lie in being nothing but a ‘consumer.’ They could not stand the joylessness and meaninglessness of life were it not for the fact that the system offers them innumerable avenues of escape (television to tranquilizers), which permit them to forget that they are losing all that is valuable in life…We are quickly approaching a society governed by bureaucrats who administer a mass-man, well fed, well taken care of, dehumanized and depressed. We produce machines that are like men and men who are like machines. That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism.”

The biggest ache in my heart is how much the church has chaplained and sanctioned power and seemingly blessed the status quo as if it’s God’s ideal. In reality, this is nothing new at all. Out of fear, humankind has always generated malformed visions of maturity. From the beginning, we have attributed broken ideas and actions to god, or the gods. We can’t get out of our own way. But what if there were a people, who gathered every week to acknowledge that? Rowan Williams says something like this: what makes the church unique is that here is a body of people, every week, gathering to confess that reality, that “we can’t get out of our own way.” We are a repentant, confessing people. We pray, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” This is a corporate reality: we have not. How has this happened? Why have we made this world the way it is? Cornel West says, “All of us as human beings have the potential, especially elites in high places, to accommodate ourselves to empire, domination, subjugation, and exploitation." All of us have the potential to accommodate empire!

So what is the Good News? Well, Good News first creates contrast because it implies that the opposite exists! Bad news (bad ideas) are all around, obviously. They are, in fact, how we got here. The problem is that they’re very subversive and ubiquitous. Thomas Aquinas, “Evil must disguise itself as good.” The devil is the angel of light (right). Deceptive evil walks around looking like a good idea or good news; it’s very convincing. It likes to call itself “the good life,”“national security,” “collateral damage,” “making a living,” or “it’s just business.” Paul called them “the patterns of the world.” Romans 12:2 “2 And do not be conformed to the patterns (the norms, trends, behaviors, and customs) of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (NLT: let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think).

We should not be surprised that many of us have a deep and painful ache by what Christianity has become in our nation.

If evil depends on a “good” disguise, cultural virtue and religion are the best covers of all. The leaders of both religion and empire colluded in the killing of Jesus (Matthew 27:1–2). In Luke’s Gospel, Herod and Pilate just passed Jesus back and forth and affirmed whatever the other one said (Luke 23:12). Christians were forewarned that the highest levels of power can and probably will be co-opted by evil. —Richard Rohr

This is a current reality, but it’s an ancient one too. The collusion of religion and empire. Power has always control through the path of least resistance, and one of the simplest paths is through devotion. The appropriation of religious ideology for the use of domination has been rediscovered and exploited throughout history. Imperialism has made use of this with a diseased theology. To do the work of peacebuilding, we must first acknowledge the role of destructive theologies and mend them. This is our work: “casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:5).

This is the heart of repentance. Repentance is a core reality of being a Christian. It frees us to become what we are in Christ. It is cooperating with God’s grace. It’s a consciousness awake to the Spirit’s action in one’s life and the world. Unfortunately, we usually think of repentance as an event: some striking conversion or experience. In reality, repentance is the ongoing work of the Spirit that permeates the whole of our life! Repentance has been framed as an event, but in reality, it’s an ongoing saturation of God’s actions in our lives that leads us to liberation and becoming. Repentance is not a single act; it is a continuing state.

Let’s talk about what it is not. Repentance is not remorse. It is not negative self-pity or shame. It isn’t negative at all; it’s positive. According to Kalistos Ware, repentance is the recentering of our whole life upon The Trinity (God in communion). It is to look forward in hope. It is not to look downwards at our shortcomings but upwards at God’s love. It is to see (now what we’ve failed to be, but) what by divine grace we can now become…and to act upon what we see. To repent, like the Prodigal Son, is to “come to yourself.” It is holy recollection. To repent is to open our eyes to the light, wake up, and enter sobriety. It is nepsis, the greek term for wakefulness — which is precisely what leads us to watchfulness, a strong theme in Advent. Again, most importantly, repentance is not a single act. It’s a continuing state!

St. Isais of Sketis , “God requires us to go on repenting until our last breath.”

St. Isaac the Syrian, “This life has been given to you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.”

Christian ideas of repentance come from the Greek word “metanoia,” which means “a change of mind.” Ware adds that this is ”a general character of the active life.” If we are frustrated with the state of things like Christian Nationalism and religious accommodation of the status quo, perhaps it is because, for too long, many have reduced repentance to an event and then aimed their energy at proselytizing others.

Curiously though, Luke frames this message of repentance (which both John and Jesus preached) as such, “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance…” Within a few verses, we encounter something like seven rulers and authorities. Why is this? What is Luke trying to communicate? William Stringfellow answers,

“The repentance that John the Baptist (and Jesus) preaches is no private or individualistic effort, but the disposition of a person that is related to the reconciliation (peace) of the whole creation.”

Repentance is for something far beyond personal penitence. It far transcends any private, individualistic concern. This has something to do with realms and kingdoms. It is how the Kingdom of God comes on earth. Matthew chapter four, “v17. From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” The Kingdom comes by way of repentance. And the Kingdom is the realm, the reign and rule of God. It is “the range of God’s effective will, where what God wants done is done” (Dallas Willard). It’s the Lord’s prayer: thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. It is “the life of Christ on earth” (Thomas Merton). Merton goes on,

“The Christian must have the courage to follow Christ…must dare to be like Christ: they must dare to follow conscience even in unpopular causes. They must, if necessary, be able to disagree with the majority…according to the Gospel and teaching of Christ, even when others do not understand why they are acting this way.”

The Kingdom is what we are to “seek first” and always, no matter what. The Kingdom comes by taking captive “every thought and idea to the knowledge and obedience of Christ.” This is the process of repentance. Is it personal? Absolutely. Does it remain personal? Absolutely not. This is why Luke mentions “Tiberius, Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiaphas.” John’s message, the message of repentance, is a concrete warning to the rulers of this world! It’s a clear message that signals the arrival (the advent) of Christ and His Kingdom. It communicates and affirms these words by Stanley Hauerwas, “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”

When we speak of repentance, we’re speaking of salvation, and salvation is never, ever, a private affair. When Luke gives the names of rulers and political leaders,

“He repeatedly places his narrative in the context of Roman and Jewish political history. Furthermore…his Gospel implies that all of human history - not just in Israel, but throughout the world - is the context (of salvation)… The meaning of the word ‘salvation’ both in the New Testament and in the common usage of the time, is much fuller than we often imagine. Salvation means healing, liberation, freedom from the bondage of sin, promise of eternal life, and several nuances of each of these themes. Thus, to say that Jesus is ‘Savior’ means that he frees the people from all evil, including sin, eternal death, disease, oppression, and exploitation. If we do not see all of this as yet, it is because the work of Jesus has not been completed - the reign of God has not yet come to its full fruition.” —Justo González

Leonardo Boff says of salvation, “Because it is situated in the historical process, we may speak of this theological element (salvation) present in economic, political, and social material.” This is what some of the churches we’ve known have missed out on. Salvation is for the cosmos, the entire created universe, encompassing all of existence! Many Christians confuse salvation with justification, and because of this, they limit both to God’s forgiveness and admission into heaven (González). This is what we mean by “pie in the sky” christianity. A fuller understanding of theology sees how it’s framed by Luke— within the context of history. It comes during “the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee…” But notice how Luke finishes our text from this morning with the words of Isaiah, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Every valley of injustice shall be raised. Every mountain of excess and elitism, of centralized power and accumulated acquisition shall be lowered. He’s going to send the rich away empty (our Bishop says) so that they can come back hungry. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God! That’s salvation!

This is radically political! How so? Luke spends the entire first three chapters building out every political power and authority, mapping out when and where they ruled. Then, in the very next chapter, he reveals who rules them: “4:5 Then the devil took him up and revealed to him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. 6 “I will give you the glory of these kingdoms and authority over them,” the devil said, “because they are mine to give to anyone I please.” What’s wild is that Jesus doesn’t argue that!

Many churches I know have wasted their time reducing salvation to an event, a private affair. Their critique has gone after low-hanging fruit. They pick their soapboxes strategically. They isolate and reduce sin to the convenient targets of cultural scapegoats. They conveniently hone in on personal sin, individualized sin, personal naughtiness, and lean heavily into punitive theology, shame, and guilt. Richard Rohr calls this “second level” evil that ignores foundational evil, systemic evil, structural evil. He writes,

“We are mostly wasting our time unless we also critique the other levels (of evil). History will never change by such a ‘one-shot-at-a-time’ approach. The underlying agreements are still in place. There is no point in telling a teenage girl she should not be vain or a young boy he should not be greedy - when we all admire and agree upon these very things as a culture.” - Richard Rohr

Church, when authorities, presidents, and politicians can be vain, greedy, exploitative, cruel, dominating, verbally and physically abusive, but all for the sake of the country…when Christians vouch for and even elevate leaders whose words and actions consistently contradict central and basic Christian ethics - but all for the sake of political interests or economic gain…there is no point at all in talking about morality to your teenagers. You have lost your integrity. You have lost your witness. Your cosigning is your exit. When you elevate characters of pride and arrogance, habitual self-glorification, who refuse to acknowledge mistakes, your cosigning is your exit. When you elevate and endorse characters who exhibit consistent patterns of lying, bearing false witness, greed and materialism, obsessions with wealth, luxury, and status, who lack humility and openly boast, who spew contempt for others, your cosigning is your exit. When you elevate and endorse characters who boast of sexual misconduct, the objectification of women, spout vindictiveness, openly mock and belittle others, and refuse to love and respect, your cosigning is your exit. When you elevate and endorse characters who constantly stoke fear and division, manipulate cultural tensions for political gain, malign the Immigrant, and vilify refugees, who refuse to denounce White Supremacy and environmental neglect, who ignore the stewardship of creation, emit constant cruelty and callousness, who lack empathy for the poor and marginalized, who celebrate force and violence rather than peacemaking, your cosigning is your exit. When you endorse and elevate characters who manipulate the Faith through blasphemous displays, holding a Bible for a photo-op after forcefully clearing peaceful protesters, this is not just false Christianity: this is anti-Christ. When Christians enthusiastically endorse this, all for the desire of some perceived end, there is no point at all, in any condition, to talk about Christlikeness, ethics, or morality. The underlying endorsement has been made. The foundational sins have been affirmed. There is no point at all. This is the idolatry of power: encouraging a cult of personality made manifest chiefly through an utter lack of repentance. This is the absence of genuine confession and moral accountability.

To be clear, all voting for any single candidate is a concession. All political engagement is compromised. But when you elevate, vouch for, enthusiastically endorse, and idealize characters and personas set in direct opposition to the very basics of our faith: repentance and humility, you miss Jesus entirely! Luke wants to talk about salvation - in context! Salvation in context to Pilate, Philip, and Herod! And finally, Jesus adds his own descriptor to Herod. Like John, Jesus is not afraid of political power. He does not capitulate or find ways to corroborate with politicians who lack humility and repentance. He has no desire to collaborate with the devil when offered the kingdoms of this world. Rather, he boldly declares, when Herod is threatening his life, “Go tell that fox (the destroyer of the vineyard, Israel), ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’”

There is no point in telling our teenagers anything of ethics and morality when ethics and morality are so easily bypassed for the sake of political power and control. You’ve just shown your hand. When we can tolerate government and corporate cruelty, corruption, and greed, domination, and subjugation, all for the sake of perceived security or control, there is no point in telling our teenagers to be upright, trustworthy, ethical, or compassionate. There is no point in telling our young people to be kind, mindful, respectful, decent, ‘do the right thing when nobody’s looking’ type of folks, when we honor and celebrate cut-throat business culture and men and women who have clawed their way to financial accumulation. There is no point in telling our young people to be nonviolent when we are so willing to accept and sacralize national violence: violence en masse.

Dr. King knew this. In his well-known 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnamm” that contributed to him becoming one of the most hated men in America before his assassination, he stated,

“My experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

And so, I call upon us all: be a people of repentance. Repent, not out of guilt or shame or sorrow, but out of joy and possibility. “This life has been given to you for repentance. Do not waste it on other things.” Repent because God’s Kingdom is at hand, it’s coming. Jesus is coming! This is advent! Let go of any attachment to false visions of the good life. Don’t settle for Satan’s kingdom. Repentance leads to salvation from Pilate and Herod - not by and through them. Salvation comes in spite of them. Repent for God’s Kingdom! It’s the only way.

Advent is the arrival of the God we’ve been waiting on. Repentance is our arrival to what God’s been waiting on. God is waiting on us to respond to his will on earth. Time is merely God’s gift for us to experience change, to reimagine and rethink. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. This is how we join in the work of salvation, God’s work in time and space. For there are not two histories, one profane and one sacred… Rather, there is only one human history, irreversibly assumed by Christ, the Lord of history. His redemptive work embraces all the dimensions of existence and brings them to their fullness. The history of salvation is the very heart of human history. (Gutiérrez)

Amen.