|
|
Good
Words
|
|
 Sermon
05/02/10
The Repentance That Leads to Life ~ by
Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
Fifth Sunday after Easter, Open and Affirming
Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Revelation 21:1-7; John 13:34-35; Acts 11:1-18
“Where
there is no vision, the people perish,” the proverb says
(Proverbs 29:18 KJV). Visions
and dreams play a life-giving role in the Bible. They are gifts from God that flow
continuously from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the new heaven and
new earth in Revelation. Our
dreams of yearning are met by dreams of instruction. Our human heart dreams of
unconditional love, we dream of serenity, we dream of a way through
the suffering we face, and God offers us visions of how to fulfill
those yearnings.
God
has a dream, too. God’s
yearning is that all the lands of earth will one day live in peace,
that all the poor and hurting on earth will receive mercy, that all creation will return to the
harmony of Eden.
Jesus
had a dream. He envisioned a
world living by the law of love. He gave his followers the new
commandment that they should love one another in the same way that he
loved them. In other words, we
are meant not just to love one another, but to love one another in a
way that is distinctly different from the way people usually
love. Ours is to be a love
that puts all others ahead of ourselves—a love that is willing
to lay its life down, and not just for family or closest friends, but
even for strangers, even for neighbors we disagree with, even for
enemies.
The
book of Acts shows that Christ’s followers had to change in
order to obey this commandment fully.
Their hearts and minds were stuck in an old dream, which was
more like a nightmare. Like
us, they had learned through their culture and religion that some
people deserve to be excluded.
When the elders in the mother church in Jerusalem heard that
Peter had crossed the line and eaten with Gentiles, and worse,
brought them into Christ’s fold, they criticized Peter for it
and challenged him to justify it.
Then
Peter told them about his strange dream where he was presented with
foods he had been taught were against God’s law. A voice told him to take and eat,
explaining, “What God has made clean, you must not call
profane.” He told of
the Gentiles who came to him afterwards who had been instructed in
their own dream to listen to his message. As they did, the Holy Spirit came
upon the Gentiles, giving them the same gifts the Jerusalem church
had received at Pentecost, and Peter realized that the meaning of
these dreams was that “God shows no partiality” (Acts
10:34), that God wants all to be included. When the Jerusalem church heard
this, they finally accepted how wide their love had to be to match
the love of Christ. They
praised God because God’s dream was so much greater than
anything they had dared hope.
The story in Acts ends with a strange
statement. The people in the
Jerusalem church say, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles
the repentance that leads to life.” What is strange about this is that
there was no talk of repentance in Peter’s recounting of what
happened. There was no
confession of sin, no hint of guilt or shame about past
mistakes.
This is a problem of translation. The word repentance has
connotations that the original Greek word does not. It is the word metanoia, which means
literally a change of heart and mind.
What the Jerusalem church said was, ‘God has given even
these people we excluded the change of heart and mind that leads to
new life.’
That
reading makes sense because this whole story is about changing heart
and mind. Peter’s dream
changed his, the Gentiles’ dream changed theirs, and the story
itself changes the Jerusalem church’s. The story assures us that God is
offering to open our heart and mind to the Holy Spirit’s vision,
and to turn us from old feelings and thoughts that have restricted
our love to the unconditional wideness of Christ’s love. This is a gift that God freely
offers. We accept it when we
choose to make God’s dream our own, when we turn our will and
life over to the Spirit’s direction, when we make following
Christ’s way the motivation and creating God’s realm on
earth the goal of what we do.
God
offers us the gift of the repentance that leads to life so that we
will use its power to fulfill God’s dream for the earth. That dream is in part for us as
individuals, but the dominant vision of the scriptures is of the new
earth John of Patmos saw where peace and
mercy rule all lands. Those
who say that religion should not have anything to do with politics miss
the essence of God’s dream.
It is all about community.
How we go about shaping our community is called politics.
Right
now in Thetford we face a political
situation that could drive our community farther away from
God’s dream, or it could help us move toward the fulfillment of
God’s realm on earth.
The outcome will be decided in part by whether we have the metanoia that instills in us the vision and power
of Christ-like love.
As
you may have read on the front page of the Valley News or seen on the
television news, the Thetford Select Board
decided to trap and kill beavers that are causing damage to Godfrey
Road. This generated an
uprising of protest, especially at the schools, and led the Select
Board to postpone any action until after a hearing at the Thetford Center Community Building this Tuesday,
May 4th, at 7:00 PM.
We
face two challenges if we want to act in this situation in a way
consistent with God’s dream for the earth. The first challenge is to practice
the politics of love, as opposed to the politics of fear or
hate. If you are a nature
lover, can you love the people who have chosen to kill the beavers
even as you try to stop them?
Or if you are an avid hunter and trapper, can you love the
people who want to save them at all costs? If you support the Select
Board’s decision for the quickest and least costly solution,
can you love those who have created trouble for them? Or if you oppose the Select
Board’s decision and want to find a nonviolent solution, can
you respect and treat the Select Board members with love even as you
oppose them? Or if you really
could care less about beavers and town politics, can you still extend
your compassion to those who are all worked up about this?
To
love like Christ is the first part of the challenge, but love needs
vision in order to find a solution that promotes God’s
dream. If we have the
repentance that leads to life, if we have the change of heart and
mind, then we will see things that other people do not see. We will see loving, nonviolent solutions
to problems where others see only violent ones. We will see how we can resolve this
beaver controversy in such a way that the town draws closer together,
rather than becomes more polarized.
We will find a solution that saves the beavers from suffering
and dying, but just as importantly, saves the town from inflicting
suffering and from killing, which is a fate worse than death in the
eyes of Christ-like love.
Michael
Nagler’s superb book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future,
tells a story about Nagler’s
spiritual teacher, Eknath Easwaran.
One day Easwaran and a spiritually
enlightened friend were walking through a village bazaar in
India. They came upon a
villager with a caged bear.
The cage was so tight that the bear could hardly turn
around. Easwaran
and his friend saw the suffering crying out in the bear’s
eyes. They did not speak about
it, but later in the day Easwaran went to
call on his friend and found him trembling with rage. His friend burst out,
“I’m going to take my gun to the bazaar. I’m going to set that bear
free and shoot anyone who tries to stop me.”
Easwaran stalled him, saying,
“Wait…let me see what I can do.”
He
went to the owner of the bear to try to reason with him. He learned that the man did not
want to have such a small cage—he just couldn’t afford a
bigger one. So Easwaran went off to the village carpenter. He explained the situation and
convinced him to give him a good deal on a cage. Then he went back to his friend and
said, “Suppose we could get a better cage built for a
reasonable price, and the owner agreed to use it, would you put up
the money?”
His
friend said, “Gladly, but the owner will never agree.”
Easwaran said, “He already
has.” (p 60f)
Michael
Nagler points out that Easwaran
was just as angry as his friend.
He felt just as strongly that the bear must be helped. I don’t know why he chose the
solution he did, why he could not buy the bear and free it, but his
relatively enlightened friend was so caught up in his anger that the
only solution he could see was violence. Easwaran
was able to have a vision of a nonviolent solution and transform the
energy of his anger into the energy of positive action. Metanoia
enabled him to extend love to the man who was causing his rage, as
well as to the bear who needed his
help.
The
test of our Christ-like love is whether we can clear our vision of
blinding visceral, violent responses so that we see more creatively,
and transform our negative emotions into constructive loving action.
Our
beaver crisis may seem like a small thing compared to global crises,
but what we practice in small things will be what we do in big
things. What we practice on
tempests in teapots is what we will do when it is not beavers but
terrorists or Iranian presidents or Israelis and Palestinians that we
confront. The repentance that
leads to life is a turning of our hearts and minds that we need to
practice in every situation where we catch ourselves having less than
unconditional love, or vision blinded by our roiled up emotions. The more we practice metanoia, the more deeply ingrained in us will be
Christ’s way, so that when the biggest challenges of our lives
come, we will have trained ourselves to respond with the Holy
Spirit’s vision and Christ-like love.
We
have the chance this week to fulfill the most ancient dream in the
universe, the dream that God had in creating the Garden of Eden, the
dream with which all human community began, the dream the angels sang
at Christ’s birth of peace on earth, good will toward all. The dream of harmony in creation
fell at its first temptation, but it has remained the dearest dream
of the human heart. This was
the same dream that Jesus had, that Peter had, that John of Patmos had, that Martin
Luther King Jr. had. This same
dream moved our church twelve years ago to become Open and Affirming,
a dream that we continued to live as we worked toward the freedom to
marry for all, a dream that we make real every time we prove our
openness and willingness to affirm all who come through these doors.
It
is a great thing to be able to claim God’s dream as our own,
and an even greater thing to let it claim us, to let it drive us to a
love that marks us as a culture of Christ-like nonviolence within our
society’s culture of violence.
Let us join together in prayer now, practicing the metanoia, the turning of our heart and mind
entirely to God, that will allow us to dream a new way of being in
the challenges we face. Let us
pray in silence…
Our Great Dreams Are
Gifts from God
tune: Ives (PH#425)
7.7.7.7.D.
texts: Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-7; John 13:34-35
Our great dreams are gifts from God,
Adam’s sleep and Eden’s sod,
Dreams of love, home, garden, farm,
All needs met, all safe from harm.
Jesus dreamed God’s love obeyed,
Through our love, the earth remade,
Through our love, God’s dream made known:
Care for all life as our own.
Peter dreamed God’s loving grace
Holding all in one embrace,
Spirit’s power to recreate
Filling all who turn from hate.
John of Patmos dreamed the birth
Of new heaven and new earth,
God, a love that wipes our eyes,
Life, a spring that never dies.
Martin Luther King’s great dream
Saw love join hands, heal, redeem,
Set oppression’s captives free,
Shape God’s just community.
Let us turn from fear’s nightmare,
Let us choose God’s dream and dare
Live our lives as Christ commands
Till our love makes new all lands.
ã
2010 Thomas Cary Kinder
return to the top of page
return
to Past Sermons Archive
|
