Note: I delivered this sermon extemporaneously. The text printed here is a lightly edited AI generated transcript taken from the church's video of the serivce.
John the Baptist is one of those characters who always grabs our attention at this time of year. It is one of the funny things, one of those moments where we sense a little bit of tension between the biblical stories that we read during the leadup to Christmas and the way in which we celebrate Christmas as a culture that while we fill our lives with presents, festive occasions, parties, food, and decorations, we get the wildest, craziest prophet anywhere in the New Testament preaching to us and calling us and inviting us to open ourselves to what God might be doing in our world and in our lives.
John's physical appearance is the stuff of legend. He's wearing the wild clothes, the camel's hair. He's got the leather belt around his waist. He's eating locusts and wild honey.
But above all, his message strikes like an arrow to the heart of the people.
It's simple really.
“Repent. Repent. The kingdom of God has come near.”
We read these words every year during the Advent season. And today, I think it's worth pausing for a moment and to think about what that even means.
What does it mean to repent, to be a people of repentance?
Frankly, we talk about that throughout the year, offering prayers of repentance, acts of repentance throughout our life as Christians.
What does it mean?
What did the people who were drawn to John's message, the people who were coming away from civilization and into the wilderness where he was working and preaching?
What did they understand his message to be?
I think one of the classic ways we're schooled to understand repentance is as an invitation to stop doing the things that we know are wrong. And that's certainly a part of what we're talking about here.
You know, you're doing something, but you keep doing it.
You know it's not right. You're cooking the books, you're telling lies, you know, in your heart, I’ve got to stop doing this stuff.
So, yeah, part of John’s message is “Stop doing those things that you know are hurting people and that you know are wrong!”
But as we dig into John's message and as we kind of look at our lives a little bit, well, obviously if you're doing something wrong, stop doing it. But I think there's something else going on in John's proclamation of repentance.
It seems to me that while we've all willingly done the wrong thing at different times in our lives, most of the trouble we find ourselves in is caused when we've perhaps even stepped out with good intentions but just ended up in a mess. Or we tried something and it didn't work and we were just so stubborn about it, we just kept doing it and we dug ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole.
You know the word in scripture that we translate as sin comes from comes from the Greek and its roots are actually in the practice of archery, in shooting arrows, and in that context the word that we translate as sin means to miss the mark.
It's the archer shooting the arrow and missing the bullseye. And I think that's very evocative and very interesting as we think about what this message of repentance might mean for us because no archer except for the most insane archer would stand up there and say, "I'm deliberately not going to make the best shot possible."
Of course not. Right? They keep trying and they shoot and they miss.
They miss the mark.
Now, a good archer at that point will make the corrections, right?
Did I not judge for the wind? Did I not have the right angle? They will make the correction so their next shot is better.
The foolish archer would say, "I'm going to do the exact same thing I did last time." And they would continue to miss the mark.
Now, I've never been an archer, but I've recently become obsessed with the old video game Angry Birds.
Have any of you ever played that game before?
This has been my little moment of zen. I know some of you do Wordle and you like to stimulate your mind by expanding your vocabulary.
I like throwing angry birds at pigs.
Angry Birds is a puzzle game.
This will sound crazy if you’ve never played the game, but the goal of Angry Birds is to sling shot birds at structures in which there are pigs.
You're trying to knock down the structure and wipe out the pigs.
All right? It's a very, very sensible game.
There are two ways you can play it. One is to get all the pigs. You get to move on to the next level if you get all the pigs.
Or you can try to accumulate the most points to get a three star win and then you move on and try to accumulate as many stars as you can.
I've noticed something in my behavior as I play that game. In the effort to score the most points, I will sit there and repeatedly do the exact same thing, throwing the exact same bird to the exact same spot, expecting a different result, and I will do it repeatedly, obsessively.
It's not healthy. Dana probably wants to take away every device in the house that has this game on it.
But I will sit there, why am I not scoring the point?
Why am I doing the exact same thing expecting a different result?
Then finally, sense and reason take over and I think maybe I have to try a different approach.
Throw this bird over here instead of over here. And you know what?
Almost inevitably within one or two tries with that new perspective, there will be a breakthrough and I'll score the points and get the stars and move on.
I'm convinced that playing Angry Birds is not the only area in our lives where we demonstrate such behavior.
We don't set out to do the wrong thing, but our stubbornness gets the best of us. And even as we are trying to do something, maybe even trying to do something good and positive and uplifting, we keep doing the same thing in the same way, expecting a different result, and we get nowhere with it.
So what if we were to understand repentance as, in addition to stop doing the things that we know are wrong, as an openness to the way in which God might be showing us a better way and a better pattern for doing the things that we'd like to do that will yield the results that we'd like to accomplish.
We talk about making a positive difference in our community.
We talk about being an open and inclusive church.
We talk about living our lives centered in God's goodness and God's grace.
But if we keep doing the exact same things that we've been doing, are we really going to get there?
Are we going to make progress in that regard?
Or do we need to say, "No, I've missed the mark. I want to be open to the correction that I need to hit the mark to accomplish the good and positive things, the holy things that God has set before me.”
John came into the wilderness and said, "Repent. The kingdom of God is near."
I don't think his only goal was to shame people into not doing what they knew was wrong.
I think that there might be something about playing Angry Birds that helps us understand John the Baptist's message a little bit more clearly.
God is present in our midst, moving and guiding and leading us forward.
Are we willing to be humbled, to open our hearts and minds to changing the behaviors and attitudes that have blinded us or led us astray from the path that God would set before us.
Maybe that's what repentance can mean for us today.
Maybe God is calling us to make the corrections to throw the birds at the pigs in a different way, to make the changes that God wills for us so that we might experience the transformation of life and community and heart and mind that God's grace makes possible.
And if we do that, we will truly be a people of Good News.
Thanks be to God for this Good News today. Amen.
Image: Eyck, Jan van, 1390-1440. John the Baptist, Ghent Altarpiece, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the C Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.
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