The Beginning of a Turn--December 17, 2024

The Beginning of a Turn--December 17, 2024

"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, 'The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit'." [Mark 1:4-8]

Nobody "decides" to be loved.

You can't. It's not your choice.

If you are loved, it is a reality entirely out of your control, and depends on the choice of the one doing the loving--the "Lov-ER", so to speak.

But what can--and does--happen, and with some regularity on this planet in fact, is that people realize that they are beloved. Now that is a thing. And, I suppose, you could also say that once you realize you are beloved by someone, you do get to decide what you will do about that reality. Will you allow yourself to be loved, or will you run from it? Will you return the love, or will it go unrequited? Will you allow love to shape you (because love, like the river that carved the Grand Canyon will shape you in its likeness over time), or will you harden your heart? These are open questions, but to be clear, they are responses to finding yourself beloved, not conditions for acquiring that love.

The same is true with being forgiven, honestly--and this is a point about which we seem to be rather confused. You can't "decide" to be forgiven. It is, like being loved, a condition that one receives. Someone else does the forgiving (or not). Someone else decides not to weaponize the past and hold it against you anymore. But you cannot choose to be forgiven any more than you can choose to be found "not guilty" by the judge in court. It is a status that is given by someone else's choice--the real question is how you will respond to the gift of being forgiven. You can act like it is true, and allow the burying of hatchets (and the shovels that buried those hatchets, too) to restore the relationship you once had. You can decide to walk away, never to darken the other person's doorstep again. You can decide to stay bent in on yourself as though the forgiveness had not been extended. You can act like you never did anything wrong and never needed forgiveness in the first place. Those are all possible options, I suppose--but notice that among all of them, they are all responses (or non-responses, in some cases) to being forgiven, not conditions one must fulfill in order to "win" or "earn" or "deserve" forgiveness.

And, as with finding yourself beloved, you can choose whether or not to allow the reality of being forgiven to shape you--to allow it to leave its mark on you like the wind carving the hills in the Painted Desert. And that is indeed your choice--to be turned in the direction of the forgiver, or to hold on to your damned pride (and I mean that literally), dig your heels in, and turn away from the free gift of a new beginning. You may choose not to "like" the fact of being forgiven, and you may choose to continue doing the terrible things that broke relationship in the first place. But you cannot decide to be forgiven--that can only be given to you.

We need to be clear about all of those things to rightly understand the message of John, who prepares us for the coming of Jesus.  We need to be clear that being forgiven, like being loved, comes first, if we are going to understand what John the Baptizer was all about. When Mark the Gospel-writer summarizes John's project, he says John came on the scene "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." And that could sound very much like John imagined that if you prayed the right prayer, or said you were sorry enough, or did enough good deeds to prove your contrition along with his Jordan River Dunking ceremony, you would be forgiven. It could sound like John's offer was that if you participated in his water ritual and then promised God that you would be a good little Gallant instead of a naughty ol' Goofus, then you would acquire forgiveness.

This would be a mistake.

I say that, not only because the nature of forgiveness itself is that, like being loved, it is someone else's choice to love you, not your choice to "be loved," but also because the deeper Biblical concept we translate as "repentance" has more to do with a change of mind and a new way of thinking, seeing, and responding to the world than it does with saying you are sorry, or feeling guilty, or walking up to the altar at church. "Repenting," at least as the Greek word was used in the first-century AD, looks more like a change of allegiance, a rearranging of priorities, or a change of mindset based on new information, rather than a matter of feeling "guilty enough" for sins or earning brownie points to get in good with the Divine.

So, rather than imagining that John the Baptizer's message boiled down to, "If you want to convince God to grant you forgiveness in the future, come out into the river with me and you will procure it for yourself," it's much more like John was saying, "Are you ready to decide to live in response to what God has already decided about you? Good--then let this be the moment you remember as the time you quit being defined by the old orientation of your life, and let this water be an object lesson for you of the way forgiveness shapes you like erosion carves rock." It was the beginning of a turn--a turning toward the direction of the Forgiver rather than being further bent in on oneself. But John, who was never one to be impressed by empty ritual, certainly wasn't saying that if you did his little aquatic ceremony, that you could earn something that can only be given to you in the first place.

That means, in the end, that preparing for Jesus' entry into our lives is less about trying to make ourselves look good in order to impress the Messiah when he comes (as though he couldn't see our present messes!), and more about whether we will decide to see the world as Jesus would have us... whether we will see ourselves as Jesus would have us... whether we will see our priorities and choices, our actions and words, through the same lens of love that Jesus does. There is a cost, to be sure, to taking John up on his offer of repentance--the cost of the old orientation in exchange for the new. There is a loss, you could say, but it is a loss like the lumpy jagged boulders that are smoothed out and transformed by the shape of the wind over eons, until they are works of art in stone in the desert. What is lost is only what was not the shape of the wind.

I am reminded of a lyric from Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot, who sings as in a prayer, "Oh Erosion--Spirit, fall like rain on my thirsty soul... Erosion, Oh sweet Erosion, break me and make me whole." Such a prayer is what repentance looks like--a choice to let Love shape us into Love's own likeness, a turning toward the One who has already done the forgiving, a daring to see the world from the vantage point of finding yourself forgiven and to act like it is true. Like the old hymn goes, "Love to the loveless shown... that they might lovely be."

To prepare for Jesus' entry onto the scene in our own lives is not about trying to show enough effort to win the status of being forgiven or being loved. It is to make the choice to see the world and ourselves as Jesus teaches us to see it, to give our allegiance to Jesus' way in the world rather than our own, to let his Spirit shape us like the wind and the rain and the river shaping rocks. That's what John was getting people riled up in the desert about, and that is what his witness calls us to on this day, too.

Hear this now, then: you are beloved. You are forgiven. You cannot do a thing about it, neither to make it happen or undo it. Being loved and forgiven is not your choice--it is God's, who does the loving and the forgiving.

The only question that remains, then, is--how will you respond to God's choice to love and forgive you? And dare we let the Spirit shape us in the direction of such Love, like the boulders yield to take the shape of the wind?

Lord Jesus, we dare to believe what you say about us. We dare to pledge our allegiance to you and to your Reign. We dare to let your Holy Wind, your Divine Breath, shape us according to your love.