St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock

Sunday, May 17, 2009, Sixth Sunday of Easter

The Rev’d Susan Auchincloss

1 John 5:1-5; John15:9-17

For today’s reading go to:http://bible.oremus.org

During World War II, under threat of a German invasion, people in the English countryside proposed to sow confusion among the invaders by mixing up their road signs. They were wrong about the invasion, thank God, but they were right about a need for clear directions. Their tactic springs to mind when I ask myself, “What mission did Jesus pass on to us? Signs point in seemingly opposite directions. We might easily be confused. According to today's readings, the mission is all about love. Yet at other times Jesus proclaimed that it was about repenting. “Repent and believe in the good news,” he says in the first chapter of Mark.

In Luke's Gospel, just before Jesus ascended into heaven he charged his disciples with similar words, “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations.” So which is it? “Love one another as I have loved you,” or “Repent and believe in the good news”? Is it, perhaps, that we do not really understand either commandment – to love or to repent? If we did understand them as Jesus meant them, surely they would point in the same direction. Suppose we had been able to be present with Jesus, day in day out for three years, not only hearing his teachings, but absorbing his tone of voice, the twitch of an eyebrow – all the countless touches that would orient us to life as he lived it. Then when Jesus mentioned repentance we would have grasped his meaning immediately, holistically. When he said 'repent' we would have thrilled to something grand – not a little tin whistle action, such as listing or sins; but a full scale orchestra action with kettle drums and trumpets. You may know J.B. Phillips book, Your God is Too Small. If I am right about repentance as Jesus meant it, Phillips could have written a sequel, Your Faith is Too Small.

Let's think about 'repent'. Who likes to hear, “Repent!”? It signals failure, error, and sin. All too often it evokes shame and guilt. Suppose that was not Jesus' intent at all. Instead, he was trying to put across a whole new concept – in fact, not a concept, but a whole new life, open and radiant, waiting for us to step into it. Repent in the original Greek meant 'reorient yourselves'. We have reduced this commandment to a need to turn inward, to examine and judge our selves, and to amend our lives. Suppose Jesus meant nothing like that?
Two weeks ago I preached about the double nature of our lives. I mentioned the poem by Juan Ramón Jimenéz, “Yo no soy yo – I am not I.” It springs from Jimenez' growing awareness that he lived out of two selves, what we might call a constructed self and an original self. We usually take for granted that the constructed self is all there is to us. Yet it is possible to discover that an eternal self underlies the self of daily interactions. Spiritual writers like to use the analogy of the waves and the sea. We take ourselves to be waves – and we are; yet we are also the sea. Waves come and go; the sea endures, calm and deep. Jesus came to reorient us from the waves to the sea.

Think about our usual understanding of the word repent. Would God have sent Jesus with such a trivial mission, that it amounted to straightening the carrot on a snowman's nose? Would that warrant his suffering and death? Not possibly! Or put it this way. If Christopher Columbus returned from discovering a whole new world, what would he tell about? The leaks in his ships? Not likely! We must not hear Jesus' command to repent and apply it to our constructed self, the self that is melting away. Likewise, we must not believe that Jesus had discovered a whole new life – we could even say a whole new self or world – and then not made it his mission, in fact, his passion, to report his discovery. Repentance deals with something vast and grand. Repentance says leave your preoccupation with your melting-away self; instead, turn, reorient yourself to what is eternal and infinite in you, your life in Christ, your true self, the source of your joy and hope.

I want to anchor what I am saying with a story about a young man named David. You can find it in a book by Rachel Naomi Remen called My Grandfather's Blessings. When he was seventeen David was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. It devastated his self image, and he reacted with fury to the limitations the disease placed on him. He ignored dietary restrictions; he skipped taking his insulin; he was hospitalized for his negligence more than once. Eventually his parents got him to a counselor. After six months of therapy not much had changed, and then one night David had a dream.

In the dream David was sitting in an empty room, open to the sky above, facing a small, stone statue of a Buddha. David had no religious background, but he lived in California, and so the figure was familiar to him. Oddly, this Buddha was a young man. As David sat there a feeling of peace stole over him. The Buddha seemed to be listening intently to something deep within himself, and it affected David.

Suddenly from behind David someone threw a dagger and it buried itself in the Buddha's heart. David felt stunned, betrayed, swept by feelings of despair and anguish. The thought came to him, “Why is life like this?” Then as David watched, so slowly that he did not believe his eyes at first, the statue began to grow. With that conviction peculiar to dreams, David knew that the growth was the Buddha's response to the knife. The face stayed as serene as before, and the knife remained its original size; but the Buddha continued to grow. Gradually the knife became a tiny fly speck on the breast of the massive Buddha. As David watched, he felt a knot release in him, and he woke up in tears.

Repent, if I have it right, says: turn, reorient yourself, from the small to the large, from the passing to the eternal. We spend our energies in our small lives, lives ever in reaction, lives at the mercy of daggers and diagnoses. Repentance, in the usual sense of the word, thrives in the small life; for the small life feeds on judgment. It is bad enough that we judge others, but we judge ourselves, too. We divide ourselves up into the acceptable parts and the unacceptable – what is weak, corrupt, or incompetent. In his small life David had divided himself up that way, and it nearly cost him that life.

The dream showed him another way, another life. I believe this is the life Jesus means for us when he says, “Repent – turn, reorient yourself, to your larger life.” The larger life can only love. It does not judge; it does not divide. In Christian imagery, this is the life of Christ in us, our eternal life. Think back to when Jesus said to his disciples, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." Can you see him growing larger and larger, until the wound in his side and the print of the nails appear no larger than pin points? Repent, join me in this life, he is saying. And repent, when it is understood in this light, points in exactly in the same direction as the command to love. In fact they are one and the same. We have no confusion of sign posts to slow us down. To repent amounts to a command to love.

On a practical note I will just add this. It may seem unfair that Jesus' original disciples could absorb his teachings directly from living contact with him; whereas for us, Jesus' teachings are mediated through the written word, and even then, not by eye witnesses. Our disadvantage is only apparent, however. From its earliest days Christians have practiced a kind of soaking prayer. It goes by various names – centering prayer, meditation, contemplative prayer – but it amounts to sitting in stillness, not thinking, but basking in the all-loving presence of Christ. Practiced faithfully, over time, this kind of prayer brings Christ closer than if Jesus were with us in person. This practice is also our gateway into that larger life – the life that constituted Jesus mission to us and ours to the world. That mission is summed up equally in the words, “Love one another as I have loved you,” and “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”