Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser
Church #4
Repent and Follow Me (Jesus)
1/26/20 Epiphany 3A
In this
series of sermons about how we are the church and what the church is about, I
want to take a Sunday to talk about our own relationships with God. - which
includes Creator, Jesus and Holy Spirit, because these are the 3 aspects/
persons/ parts of God. There isn’t an
Old Testament God and a New Testament God - God is God. We experience God in different ways, and we
talk of God in different functions - its all God.
Last week I
talked about how important it is for each of us in the church (the called out
gathering of people who follow Christ) to know how to listen and respond to the
nudges of the Spirit, so that as a church we can do the same, and the winds of
the Holy Spirit be the power that fills our sails and leads us where God wants
us to go. The whole church can’t respond
to God unless each of us in it are responding to God. Jesus says 2 things to us: ‘without me you
can do nothing’; and ‘with God all things are possible’. Its only as the fullness of God abides in us
and guides us on that the written scriptures speak to us in our inner
selves; that a “nice talk” I give on
Sundays becomes God’s word to us today, that our encounters with other people
become holy encounters, and that our prayers go past the ceilings.
This week’s
Scripture we just heard records the first things Jesus said when he started his
ministry. Matthew so crafted his telling of the Jesus story that Jesus’ opening
words define so much of what he says later.
See, in the first 3 chapters, Jesus is born, and then we jump to the
adult start of his ministry; John the Baptist preaches about him, and he shows
up to be baptized; then immediately is compelled by the Spirit out into the
desert to do what amounts to a vision quest, where he fasts and is formed in
his call and understanding, defeats the temptations of shortcuts, and
re-emerges with his first proclamation ready:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is come near.”
Then he begins to call some
disciples around him to teach them, and he says his second words to some local
fishermen:
“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”
Jesus himself prepared in the desert
then began his ministry, and when he begins to speak he also tells people to
prepare and begin their ministries. Repent, realize the reality
of God’s worldview & realize our lives need to be reoriented; and then follow
- which will also include spreading the word. We start with our personal encounter with
God, and follow Jesus out into our called works..
‘Repent’ is an interesting word.
It sounds kind of old fashioned and reminds us of the old tent
preachers. Some modern synonyms are: feel remorse for, regret,
be sorry for, rue, reproach oneself for, be ashamed of, feel contrite about,
wish that one had not done something. An
example of this kind of ‘Repent’ is like when I realized that
venting my frustration & anger on the person who first answers the
telephone when I call about a mistake on my bill, is unproductive - they are
probably not the person who can make changes anyway. So I repented of that behavior, and still
frustrated in my heart, spoke reasonably with that first person, asking them to
help me with this problem. It works
better that way. And its turned out to
be true in so many other encounters - when we attack, they put up their fists
back.
The
Greek word for repent is ‘metanoia,’ which literally means “to see afterwards.”
It’s about seeing that we’re on the wrong track, and turning, changing,
re-engineering, re-imagining; it’s about a broader or new understanding that
changes the way we perceive our actions, and changing because of it. It often includes that remorse and regret
that we spent time and energy in a wrong-headed way.
Jesus
put HIS call to repent in the context of acknowledging God’s existence, and how God’s definition of what
is true and good for us is ultimately the best.
I mean, God created it all, right?
Jesus calls people to repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the
very realm of God, is here now. Its time
is now; acknowledge God and realize how that changes things. When we accept and admit that God’s point of
view is the right way, all the things we thought we understood move and
fall into a new big picture.
OOOHHH! So THAT’S what’s going
on! So THAT’s what it’s all about! Everything refocuses, falls into place in a
new way. And our first response is, Oh
no, I’ve had it all wrong - I’ve been living in a false understanding. The scales fall off, a new ultimate love
reorients us - and we feel that we repent of what I’ve been about, and now step
into God’s reality, like going from balck and white to color perhaps, or going
from 2 dimensional to 3 dimensional.
Oh
- I thought I WAS going north, but now that I see the whole map, I reset my
course to the real north. Oh - I thought THESE were the right goals and
values, but they’re NOT!! So now I will
follow God’s input about goals and values.
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
In
my experience, this isn’t a one-time deal, a one-time conversion. I know there
are people whose first experience of God is an eye-opener of large
magnitude. In my life, and I’d guess
even in theirs, this awakening to God’s truth actually keeps happening again
and again. I haven’t been able to take
in the enormity of what the realm of heaven is about except bit by bit; and
each time it happens that I comprehend a little more, I have to readjust and
tweak my living yet again. Maybe saints
get it all at once - I sure haven’t. Oh
- so THAT’s what that story might mean!
Oh - Jesus was really saying something more than I got! The more I live and the more I experience,
the more I know about different people and different ways, the more I know
about my inner self - - then the more I see in the Bible and faith. Oh...my picture, my worldview, has been so
limited - I need to enlarge my scope and let more of this understanding in, and
let the Holy Spirit heal me... or guide me…
or increase my love… So maybe
this blends into the “following” that Jesus called us to - keep following me,
keep learning of me, keep walking in the ways I show.
Now
those early disciples Jesus called had the good fortune to have the actual
Jesus there to talk to and walk with - and the Scriptures picture them as not
always “getting” what he said even then!
So even those folks whose names we know as “The 12” kept growing as they
followed, kept maturing in their faith and understanding. And eventually they followed Jesus as well in
doing the work of ministry themselves, and spreading the word.
What
we have is the written Scriptures that teach of what it’s like to follow God,
to follow Jesus; and we have God’s Spirit to quicken those words and make them
alive for us. We the Bible, a library of
books and letters and writings and stories about how people have lived and
grown with God. A good question in this
21st century is, how well do we know it?
Spending time in Scripture and in prayer is how we spend time with Jesus. Scripture that we’re familiar with gives the
Holy Spirit a way to nudge us, lead us, direct us, and teach us. The Bible
isn’t an easy book - it was penned by faithful people in different cultures and
different centuries. It doesn’t spell
out definitions and outline a belief structure.
It’s mainly stories of how people encountered God and lived with God,
how they understood God and themselves and the world. Sometimes the truth it tells is oblique,
needing us to sit with it and ponder it. Many of the older stories were
distilled over years of oral tradition into stories that are packed with
meaning.
Many
church folks haven’t read the stories since we were children in Sunday
School. Or thought about them as
adults.. with adult brains...with adult experiences and questions...or worked
to hear what they mean in our own era.
Or what they mean for our own lives. Back in the day when the game
Trivial Pursuit was popular, a Bible Trivia game came out in the same format,
asking factoids of Bible stories. Yeah,
it’s fun to know the answers to those kinds of things, but that’s not the same
as assimilating the teachings into our life in 2020. But it’s a place to start. Like studying English or history or science,
where there’s a certain amount of knowledge to lay down before one can work
with it, really understand it, and use it.
Its not different with faith.
SO
- I have a little easy Bible quiz for us today... mainly those factoids. Let’s play.
Power
Point Quiz
So
how’d we do?
Whatever
our level of Bible knowledge, there’s more in this library that will grow our
faith. Knowledge of the Bible, even at
the factoid level, is falling off generation by generation. The stories and phrases used to be a part of
general knowledge, and writers could quote things or make allusions to stories,
and their audience knew what they were talking about. Not so anymore.
How
would we like to read the Bible through together? I thought that might be a good way to
encourage us to dig in again as adults - and to get started, if we’re
younger. I’ve looked at a whole bunch of
“Read the Bible in 1 Year” plans available online, and haven’t found one that
feels like fun. So I’ve started
designing The Jamesville Bible Reading Plan, which I think will get the
storyline and hold some interest -
although to be honest, some of the books can get tedious. I thought this might be a good discipline to
start observing in Lent, and will be presenting the Jamesville Bible Reading
Plan in the next weeks. It’s a good way
start working on our encounters with God, our relationships with God. Tell me what you think, OK? AMEN.
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