2 Advent B
The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart
St. Alban’s Episcopal Church
Brentwood, CA
12/8/96
Mark 1:1-8
Imagine
that you’ve spent the evening at a friend’s house somewhere East of Byron. When
you leave to come home you discover that it is a dark and foggy night, so you
get in your car and drive along, carefully following those little yellow dots
that show where the middle of the highway is. You have been driving for quite a
while, and your spouse sitting next to you, is complaining that things don’t
look right, shouldn’t there have been a turn back there, etc. You mutter back
something about back seat drivers and continue on. Now you are making a little
better time, because there is a car in front of you, at least there are those
two red lights to follow. You know nothing of the person driving that car, or
where they are headed, but at least there is someone to follow. Then, suddenly
you see a strangely dressed man standing in the road holding a stop sign and
waving and jumping up and down to get your attention. With hesitation, you stop
and role the window down just a little. “Turn around! You are going the wrong
way!” he says. You look confused. “Turn around! If you keep going this way you
will hurt yourself or someone else,” he repeats. “But I’m being careful” you
respond. “Turn around! The lights you are following belong to a drunk who could
lead you off the road, who will lead you only to death!” he states with great
drama. “Who are you and why should I trust you?” you ask. “Turn around” he
keeps saying. Finally he brings out a bucket of water and pours it over your
windshield. To your surprise, it is no longer foggy outside. What you had
thought was fog, was really all the dirt on your own windshield. As you can see
outside you realize that you are very far from home, you have no idea how many
hours you were going the wrong direction, and it dawns on you that you are
totally lost. You also notice that the car you were following is about to go
off into a ditch. You turn to the man beside you to thank him and ask him how
to get home. “Follow that one over there,” he says as he points to a light in
the distance. As you pull away you ask your spouse “Who was that?” “Oh, I think
he was a workman preparing the road, making the highway in this desert
straight.”
John
the baptizer proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Repentance, what is repentance? The word is a translation of metanoia, a Greek
word that means to know again in a new way, be transformed, to turn around.
When someone calls for repentance they are telling you to turn around, to turn
around because you are going in the wrong direction, to turn around so that you
can see things in a new way. Baptism of repentance would be a baptism that
provides one an opportunity to see things in a new way.
How
much of our lives we spend as if we were wandering lost in the fog. We have no
sense of where we are going, we don’t see the dangers ahead, and sometimes we
follow something or someone without knowing where it will lead. How many of us
wake up one morning and begin to question what we are doing with our lives. We
follow a path set before us, school, marriage, job, whatever, without thinking
about whether it leads to where we really want to go. Perhaps we seek wealth,
money for its own sake, without thinking about why we should be trying to get
rich, and then we find, once we have some money, that we still feel empty
inside. Perhaps it is power that you followed after. Perhaps it was the dream
of your own home and that fantasy middle class life. Once you have achieved it,
then what?
Maybe
you have a gone down a road of addiction to alcohol, or drugs and one day you
woke up to realize that this road leads nowhere. Maybe you idealized someone
and followed them until you found that you had lost your own sense of identity.
Any time we make anything more important than God, more important than loving
God and our neighbors, we are going in the wrong direction and sooner or latter
will find ourselves lost and at a dead end. When we discover we have gone the wrong way there is only
one thing to do, turn around. To
repent, to turn around, means to acknowledge that we have been going the wrong
way, to acknowledge that we have done things we shouldn’t have done and not
done things we should have. To
repent of our sins means to open our eyes and acknowledge the mistakes we have
made, to see ourselves in a new way, to acknowledge that we are lost, to turn
around and to follow the one for whom John was preparing, to follow the true
light that can lead us home.
Advent
is a season with two themes. The first is the joyful anticipation of the birth
of Christ, the incarnation of our Lord. The second is the preparing for the second
coming of Christ. Both involve a sense of preparation, of self study so that we
are ready to receive the incredible grace that God bestowed upon the earth on
the first Christmas. We need to prepare to be able to let in just how much God
loves us. We need to be prepared to open our hearts and receive the gift of
love that is the Christ child.
How
do we prepare? By opening our eyes and hearts, by washing away the dirt of our
past that keeps us from seeing the truth, by repenting and letting ourselves be
transformed, so that when we see the true light we are ready to follow Christ
home.
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