“Comfort and Joy…and Repentance?”

Mark 1:1-8

Pastor Melanie Hammond Clark

December 4, 2011

Comfort and joy.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want during Advent. Just give me a little comfort and joy.

But the lectionary text gives me John the Baptist, clothed in camel’s hair, eating locusts and honey, and preaching repentance. In fact, unlike the other gospels, in the gospel of Mark there is no manger, no Mary and Joseph, no little baby Jesus, no heavenly host of angels, no starlit night or stunned shepherds, no wise men or anything approaching the beauty of the light shining in the darkness from the beginning of time.

Honestly, if Mark were the only gospel, marketing people would have a much harder time selling Christmas. Imagine if all Hallmark had to work with was a picture of John the Baptist, all wild-eyed and fiery, perched on a rock preaching in the desert. You’d find this image on the front of your card and open it to read, “Repent! Merry Christmas.”

Repent?! That’s the beginning of the good news? Where’s my comfort and joy?

Well, believe it or not, repentance truly is the beginning of the good news for us. We just don’t know it. Images of street corner zealots with signs that say “Repent. The end is near”, coupled with TV preachers who manipulate desperate souls and destroy all Christian credibility, make us run as fast and far as we can from their loaded language. It frightens us. It doesn’t invite us into God’s presence but scares us away.

And it is no wonder. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out: “The way most of us were taught it, repentance means owning up to how rotten you are. It means saying out loud, if only in the auditorium of your own soul, that you are selfish, sinful, a deeply defective human being who grieves the heart of God, and that you are very, very sorry about it. It means dumping all your pride on the ground and stomping on it, since pride – as in ego, arrogance, vainglory – is the root of so much evil.”

But then, Taylor asks, what if repentance isn’t really as we were taught? What if it isn’t really what we have culturally gleaned it to be? “What if the main thing most of us need to repent of is not our arrogance – but our disillusionment in what we can expect from life? Our lack of confidence that things can ever really change… that we will never change… that no matter what we say or do, we are stuck forever in the mess we have made of our lives, or the mess someone else has made of them, but in any case there is no hope for us, no beginning again, no chance for new life.” (Journal for Preachers, Advent 1997, p. 16-17)

Do you know that you can begin again? Do you know that it is safe to turn around, that God’s face longs to see yours, that our God invented the miracle of starting over?

I don’t know about you, but for me, considered in that light, repentance holds the deepest, truest promise of comfort and joy I could receive. It tells me that I am not stuck with myself. That my failures or fears don’t have to define me. It means I can turn my face toward God and be received with gladness and grace. That God will not shun my ugly thoughts, my broken spirit, or my resentful heart, but will receive and heal them and make of me something more beautiful, strong, and true.

And yet, if I don’t repent, if I don’t turn around and look toward God, I am left to my own self. I am lost in my own denial. I am robbed of the comfort and joy of the God who loves me.

The comfort and joy of the God who loves me … could this be where we stumble? Could this be where we are tripped up? If we don’t know that God loves us, of course we won’t repent, of course we won’t choose to turn around and face God. I certainly wouldn’t.

Healthy, true repentance, that is of the Holy Spirit, begins with the felt knowledge that we are loved by God. We are treasured, longed for, cherished children of God. If we cannot find ourselves in these words, then it makes sense for us to start our process of repentance with the reality of our distrust. Perhaps we need the space to prepare the way with the daily prayer that we might know ourselves as beloved, that our God might reach down into our disappointment and self-doubt and create in us a space for Christ’s love – Christ’s love that is unlike any human love in its totality and unconditionality and its ability to bring life from death… in this life and the next.

Repentance will always sound like bad news to us if God sounds like bad news to us. God came in Christ to share the good news that God is love, that God has overcome the world, and longs to overcome our fears. Repentance – that we can stop running away and are safe to turn around and face God and face the truth of our lives with hope – is the deepest comfort and joy I know. That I have One who receives me, who welcomes every part of me, and who will not harm but truly heal me – that brings powerful purpose to my days, and there is no greater message to share with you at Christmas than the invitation to prepare your hearts to receive this power, not once and for all, but every single day of your life.

It is the power of this love, it is the purpose of the Holy Spirit living in me, that fuels hope that is real, comfort that brings courage, and joy that is born of pain redeemed and life made new.

So maybe when John the Baptist calls you to prepare the way of the Lord this Advent, just maybe, you will choose not to shut off his call to repentance. Maybe you will choose to seek to un-learn some bad religion, to un-empower some un-helpful voices, to let God un-do the work of darkness that has made you fearful of the Light.

Be tenacious. Be persevering. Do not settle for anything less than the love of God. That is how repentance will become your comfort and joy and your path to life. For then, whenever you turn around, you will see the welcoming face of God, and you can trust that your turning, however difficult, is a turning toward home.

This Advent season, may you turn around. May you face the truth of your life within the truth of God’s love. May you know this deepest comfort… this deepest joy. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.