It is a
dark and foggy night and you are driving along following the red tail lights of
an unknown car in front of you. Suddenly a strangely dressed man appears on the
road frantically waving a stop sign and saying, “Turn around,
you are going the wrong way!”
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. 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. 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, 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. Now that 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.
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 are 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.
