![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/peace-and-righteousness-meet.jpg?1513018851)
Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens Church
Schenectady New York
December 10, 2017
the Second Sunday in Advent
Readings: Mark 1: 1-8
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
I
When we say the word “repentance,” often we picture some depressing sort of self-punishment. But it isn’t always that way.
I remember him so well, tall, skinny, a young man whose every movement was a little stiff. L__ had run away from home at sixteen; he had left his family in a dying mill town in Connecticut, left the parents who couldn’t understand why he never smiled…. He never smiled.
He was a boy in search of an identity, and he had run all the way to New York City, to the Lower East Side, not far from the Bowery. I don’t know what his condition was when they found him, but he had been welcomed in by a community of people trying to follow the teachings of Jesus, radical Roman Catholics who served the poorest of the poor, and chose to live among them. And they let L__ stay with them, made him go to school, put him to work helping out around their community. They gave him a new kind of family, Monica and Tom did. Someday I hope I can introduce you to Monica and Tom.
I didn’t meet him till some years later, now he was in his mid-twenties. The Catholic Worker folks must have helped him go to college… he had graduated from some place called St. John’s. But now he was back, living with Monica and Tom again, working for nothing but room and board, helping run a soup kitchen. He had moved to an area near his birth family, and was able to have a little contact with them, however awkwardly or painfully. I was there when he met them one day. Repentance? Not like we think of it. But L__ had become, in his way, a new person, a new creation. His parents still didn’t understand him. But he was living his dream.
Repentance: it isn’t about beating your breast; it is about starting over in the most amazing positive ways. It is about getting a whole new life from God. Fresh, vulnerable, painfully wonderfully new life.
When I knew L__ , we lived in an old former convent building, there in Waterbury Connecticut. A Catholic Worker House, we had no meetings except in a crisis, or to talk about important issues of the day. For all intents and purposes, this meant that Monica, the only practical one in the place, was in charge. It was a genuine and intentional faith community, even without any bureaucracy. As we sat and talked one day, L__ said to me: “I love living in community, because the others make me more than I am by myself. Alone, I am incomplete. But living with these people, I’ve learned to laugh…I still don’t smile much. I still can’t tell a joke. But they have taught me how to laugh, when they’re funny.”
II.
There are many ways to start a story, and many ways to start a life of faith. In the gospel stories about Jesus, each of the gospels starts a different way. But one of them starts, not with a birth, nor even the songs of angels. Mark’s gospel starts the story of Jesus with a lone voice calling. It’s the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The story of Jesus begins with a strange and mysterious soul who stands by a river, inviting any who will listen to turn their lives around, challenging them to see the world in a new way, daring them to make God’s paths straight.
John the baptizer stands by the Jordan, clothed in camel hair, John the baptizer who lives off the land, surviving on locusts and wild honey… And what is he shouting out?
We translate it repentance. The Greek word we translate as repentance would be better translated “getting a new mind”. Bob Marley, in “Redemption Song” has a phrase that catches the meaning of metanoia better than our traditional religious language, that old phrase “Repentance from sin.” No, try this one. “…Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” said Marley. “None of them gonna stop the times…. Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom.....” The message from John the Baptizer on the edge of the Jordan river is a challenge to emancipate our hearts and minds, a message of forgiveness, for all who want to start life over on the terms of God’s justice and peace. Real repentance is about getting a fresh start.
John the baptizer is such a peculiar character. But there is something so moving in his good news, something so powerful in his challenge.
The God this voice is proclaiming is a God capable of bringing down mountains and lifting up valleys. And not the mountains and valleys of creation. This God can bring down the human-made mountains of power, and lift up those who walk in the valley of oppression and unfairness and bitter despair.
III.
The good news of Jesus begins with a voice crying out. Somebody has to be the first. Somebody has to take the risk. Then some others need to step forward and respond. Somebody has to sing a song of truth and justice—and then a whole bunch of other people need to dare to sing back in response- sing and pray and act, sing for our lives.
You and I live in troubled and troubling times. We live in times when hatred seems to keep growing in power. We live in times when an authoritarian tone seems to be taking hold in our nation. We live in times when poor folks, black folk, native American people, women, immigrants, trans people, all are regularly disrespected and violated.
In such a time, in such a season, all of us are called together to a place of some discomfort, called out of our settled paths to come out to the wilderness, to hear a voice cry out. And what does it cry?
In North Carolina where I lived for five years, I met the Reverend William Barber, a remarkable black preacher who was president of the NAACP there. In a difficult time in that state, his “Moral Monday” movement united feminists working for full reproductive rights, with Black students concerned about the repression of voting rights, with LGBTQ activists concerned for their basic human rights, with teachers worried about fair education funding for their students.
In recent days, Rev. Barber and many other faith leaders, women and men, have come together to announce a new national campaign for moral renewal. They are picking up on the initiatives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the year when he was assassinated.
Here are a few of the principles that guide this campaign. The organizers write:
We are rooted in a moral analysis based on our deepest religious and constitutional values that demand justice for all. Moral revival is necessary to save the heart and soul of our democracy. (1)
We are committed to lifting up and deepening the leadership of those most affected by systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation and to building unity across lines of division. (2)
We believe in the dismantling of unjust criminalization systems that exploit poor communities and communities of color and the transformation of the “War Economy” into a “Peace Economy” that values all humanity. (3)
We believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation ever to exist. Blaming the poor and claiming that the United States does not have an abundance of resources to overcome poverty are false narratives used to perpetuate economic exploitation, exclusion, and deep inequality. (5)
We recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally and spiritually. Poverty and economic equality cannot be understood apart from a society built on white supremacy. (6)
There’s more where that starts…. Just look online under “Poor People’s Campaign.”*
IV.
The psalmist envisions a day in God’s future when what we all long for in our best souls will come to pass: Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.
I love those words, and, like you, I long for the day when justice and peace will embrace, will kiss. We have a long way to go! What we long for is not just any justice, not just any one’s peace—but the kind of loving and merciful and compassionate justice, especially for the least powerful, the most excluded—God’s kind of justice.
And the peace we need? It is not the false peace of those who try to convince us that everything is ok, while practicing violent repression.
God’s kind of peace is relational peace that says everyone, every woman man and child has dignity, and deserves love from us, as we deserve it too. It is the sort of inward peace rooted in God that gives people of faith the courage to take a stand, even put their lives on the line. It is the kind of world peace—deep peace-- that can only happen when everybody gets heard, everybody gets their human rights respected, everybody’s body is their own, not property; everybody has enough….
There is still a voice calling us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. There is still a voice insisting on the possibility of a society where righteousness and peace will kiss. In the wilderness of these crazy days a voice is saying there’s a God who is capable of healing a people. It’s saying something about getting ourselves a new mind, a new heart, a new hope. It is whispering something of a new day for God’s children, it’s singing out a new creation just beginning to be born out of the ash heap of the old.
The voice is crying out: “Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together…”
As we light these little candles on these cold days of December let us remember what they mean. Let us emancipate our minds from despair, and from the ways of war. We refuse to sacrifice our hope. We refuse to stop working for peace. For we are fellow-travelers with Jesus. And that’s what it means.
*https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/index.php/fundamental-principles/
Artwork: Love and Faithfulness Meet, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56328 [retrieved December 11, 2017].