The Second Sunday of Advent, Year A, 2010

Matthew 3:1-12

The Rev. Ronald N. Johnson

The message of the prophet, John the Baptist, is clear.  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Repentance is the theme of this Second Sunday in Advent.  As we await the Messiah’s coming, our Old Testament reading from Isaiah reminds us, as it did last week, that the Messiah, when he comes in glory, will bring this world into a state of everlasting peace.  Isaiah’s imagry is magnificent.  The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, led by a little child, and our world will be at peace.  Isaiah also reminds us that before the peace comes the judgment.  In Advent, we cannot escape the theme of accountability, nor should we want to.

Matthew’s gospel is even more to the point.  “You brood of vipers!” Matthew quotes John as having said to the Pharisees and Sadducees, who were coming to him for baptism.  “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these very stones to raise up children to Abraham.”  John the Baptist had a way with words, and he let nothing get in the way of telling things like they were.  You know that his boldness cost him his life, but I think that John would tell us that life is a small thing now in comparison to the eternal life awaiting the redeemed.

Advent is the season of waiting on God, but more than that it is a season for getting personally ready to meet God face to face.  If we are going to stand before Jesus as judge and present our lives to him as evidence of our love and our loyalty to him, should we not examine the way that we have lived and are living our lives?  We have no claim on God.  We can’t say to God, ‘You owe us because Jesus died for us,” any more than the Pharisees and Sadducees could say to God, “You owe us because we are the children of Abraham.”  We can only say to God, “We love you, as you have told us we must love. We love you totally, with heart soul, mind  and might, and we have tried to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.”

You see, love is the standard that our God gives us and it is the standard by which God’s son, our savior measures us. There is no other standard.  If love is then our measure, if the scales of love are for us also the scales of justice, then how have we balanced things?  Is the life we’ve lived an acceptable offering to God the Father?  How well have we loved God and neighbor? 

When you answer that, you can answer the question, “What repentance is necessary?”  What does repentance really mean?  Is it to be sorry?  Is it to have regret?  You know, I never really understood what Eric Segal meant, in his novel, Love Story, when he said, “Love means never having to say you are sorry,” until I realized that if you are really doing the loving thing, rarely will you have any need to say “I’m sorry.”  What is the repentance that John the Baptist called for?  It is not being sorry for what you’ve done; it is not having regret that you have offended your God and your neighbor.  Repentance is about changing things.  Repentance is turning away from things that are wrong, from things that grieve our God and starting off again heading in the right direction.  Repentance is turning from wrong to right, and doing right.  Repentance is about turning from a pathological and inappropriate love of self so that you balance respect for self with true concern for others.  Ultimately, repentance is acting out your love of God by the way you live your life. If my actions do not match my words, no one is impressed and especially not God.

So Advent, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is essentially a time for measuring ourselves as lovers.  Where we fall down, we need to shape up.  Where we struggle, there we need to reach deep and find the courage to do what we know is right.  Advent encourages us to realize that we may not be able to always completely undo the mistakes of the past, but we can always avoid repeating them in the future. So, Advent should be a time for taking a spiritual inventory of our lives.  We should pray, “Show me how I offend you, Father, and how I act in un-loving ways to others; and, give me courage to change the things that I can change and the ability to love myself enough to accept those things about me that I cannot change.”  Only when we do this can we have the peace in our hearts offered us in Christ, a true peace that does surpass all understanding.  Amen.