January 08, 2012
Repent! (and please still come to church…)
By The Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
Morningside Presbyterian Church, Atlanta
Repent! (and please still come to church…)
Mark 1:4-11
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
January 8, 2012
Repent! (and please still come to church…)
Mark 1:4-11
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
January 8, 2012
Well, we have a lot of ground to cover today, what with getting from the river to the table. As I thought about church today it struck me as almost a little bit devious, a little bit of a bait and switch, to race from the font, the joyous occasion of baptism, to the table, the joyous feast of the risen Lord by the route we’re going to take. If it weren’t for Thomas Tallis, we would have gone straight from the victory lap with Isabella and making our promises to her to the river Jordan and John hollering at everyone to repent and be baptized. That’s an abrupt switch of gears. Thanks heavens for Thomas Tallis and our choir for sparing us the indignity of John yelling at us.
You didn’t realize John was yelling at you? Well he is. Can’t you hear him? He’s yelling at you and me both, standing right back there in the middle of the water in the Jordan and telling us to get ready for Jesus. I do wish he’d be quiet.
Don’t you?
It’s all a bit much if you ask me. The camel hair and wild locust shtick is a bit over the top too, for what it’s worth. I get that “branding” is important and “you gotta have a gimmick,” to steal a line from Rose Louise, but frankly, he’s starting to smell bad.
And in addition to starting to smell bad, all his haranguing about repentance is getting old. It’s bad press. It makes people feel bad.
I mean, between us, hasn’t repentance become rather passé?
Here the churches are trying to be fresh, trying to be relevant, for crying out loud, and he won’t quit crying out loud! He’s just over there yelling at us.
I don’t respond well to yelling. And I don’t respond well to being told what to do. And I certainly resent the idea that I need to repent.
Repentance is the stock in trade for revivalist preachers and we are more sophisticated than that here, aren’t we? We’re Presbyterians and Presbyterians don’t repent. We are the elect. We are the frozen chosen. We have prayers of confession and assurances of pardon, within ten seconds of each other, 20 seconds if the liturgist feels like making us squirm. But repentance? Sackcloth and ashes? I don’t think so.
I was driving down Seventh Street in Charlotte, NC the other day and I saw a church I used to pass all the time. They had a banner out front for a new service they’re going to offer. I think it’s by candlelight and they are going to chant or something and the gimmick is there’s no sermon. That’s right, no sermon. The tagline on the banner was “no guilt, just grace.”
That pretty much encapsulates what most of us feel about repentance, doesn’t it? That a preacher or someone perceived to be holier than thou is going to yell at us until we feel bad enough that we decide to become a better person. If I say the word, “repent,” I bet that there are at least ten former Baptists here that will have a flashback to singing “Just As I Am” on continuous loop until someone shoves their neighbor out into the aisle to rededicate her life to Christ so we wrap up and go to brunch. And just so you don’t think I’m picking on the Baptists, my Presbyterian church choir when I was growing up sang in the Crusade and I personally have sat there humming that hymn after listening to the sweetest, kindest hellfire and damnation sermon I’ve ever heard. Is it any wonder that people tend to avoid church when the word “repent” starts getting thrown around?
I’m serious! You start saying the word, “repent,” and people are going to avoid you!
It doesn’t matter that it is a perfectly lovely word. The Greek word for it is metanoia and the Hebrew word is shub and they both translate the same way. They translate as “turn around.”
There’s nothing wrong with turning around, surely? When you recognize you’re on the wrong path and all it’s leading you to is pain and separation, why wouldn’t you want to turn around?
And then there are the times when you want to turn around and you get so turned around you don’t know which way to turn next? That happened to me just the other day. I was going to get a price on new tires and someone had told me about a tire place that was a little cheaper, down near the airport. The problem was when I went down that way, my friend gave me the wrong exit number and well, have you ever gotten off on the wrong exit near the airport? There are lots of different sorts of stores there, stores I’m not accustomed to seeing except on Cheshire Bridge Road. I got nervous and wanted to turn around to get on back on the highway and I made a couple of wrong turn and found myself at a dead end on a rough road with bad tires and I thought to myself, “This is how it’s all going to end. You’re going to have a tire blow-out and you’re going to get out to change it and you’re going to get mugged and your obituary is going to read, “Pastor of Morningside Presbyterian Church found in front of house of ill repute.”
Sometimes you get so turned around you need help finding your way out.
Let me tell you another story. I was down here in Atlanta about five years ago with a mission team of kids from the church I served in Charlotte. We were doing a very fine program at Central Presbyterian Church that sought to help us understand some of the realities of urban poverty and to make us a little more aware of the issues of poverty and a little less scared of the folks who were experiencing it. They broke us down in to smaller groups, one adult with 3-4 young people and they sent us on a scavenger hunt. They sent us out to find some pretty normal things, a picture of a Georgia Peach, the names of the statues at the capital building… things we should be able to find without any problem. So we have already established that I have absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever, and my scavenger hunt group got hopelessly lost. And when you are trying to find your way back to Centennial Park downtown and you’re not from here, you can cover a lot of ground very quickly and so my three kids and I were trying to get to a Marta Station, I was trying to teach an object lesson on not making judgments on people based on their life situation, and we weren’t where we were supposed to be. And we stood out. And a very tall, very muscular man about my age came up to me with my kids and said to me, “where are you going?”
“Well, we’ve made a wrong turn,” I replied.
“I can tell,” he said, “you’re an easy target here, you stand out and you’re not safe. I’m going to take you where you need to be, but you have to tell where you’re going.”
I gave him the address and he walked us back.
“Do you live around here?” I tried to make small talk.
“Yes, he said, I stay around here.” We talked a little bit more
As we got closer to the Marta station, I realized that I needed to thank him and I thought like a predictable product of privilege and realized I had almost no money with me. I said,
“I’d like to thank you and at least buy your fare back to where you live, but I just have these Marta passes for the kids and me, I didn’t think to bring any money…”
“I don’t need your money, he said, I just want to get you where you’re safe.”
I felt about that big. I think maybe I needed to repent, to think again, to turn around.
That’s what repentance is, you see, it’s moving to safety. It’s changing course. It’s making a new beginning. It’s realizing your wrong thinking.
The most amazing thing happened there in the Jordan. Jesus got down in the water with us. Jesus got down in the water with us. That used to strike me as odd, that Jesus would come down to Jordan to be baptized. Baptism was a ritual cleansing, you know, for forgiveness of sins, and here Jesus came down and got in the middle of the water with us.
The number one thing that most folks find off-putting about the call to repent is that it just sounds so incredibly judgmental most of the time, particularly when preachers feel compelled to get specific.
Walter and I were talking about the hymns for this Sunday, and I had suggested one in a minor key, and he gently reminded me, “Now for the folks who’ve been traveling, this will be their first time back in church since the 18th of December…”
I thought to myself, what a welcome home! “Good to have you back you bunch of miserable sinners… not rightly sure what you did for new year’s, but now it’s time to REPENT!!!”
But when you realize Jesus is down in the water with us, well, it’s different somehow. When Jesus gets down in the water with us, with all our baggage we’re hauling around, all our mistakes, it means something. When Jesus is swimming around in all the mess of our thinking too highly of ourselves, or treating someone casually sexually, or taking advantage of someone financially, when Jesus is down in the midst of all the snotty things we’ve said about somebody, or maybe some whole groups of people, it changes something. When Jesus gets into the water with us and doesn’t treat us like we’ve failed or done bad things, or even just not done much of anything, but says to us instead, “do this in remembrance of me,” it changes everything.
Then John sounds different somehow.
You know he’s still over there preaching his sermon, but instead of hearing him yelling at me, it sounds more like he’s calling for you and me. Do you hear that?
Do you hear him? It sounds like he’s saying, “It’s this way… it’s this way, friends. Come this way…”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
Repent! (and please still come to church…)
Mark 1:4-11
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
January 8, 2012
Repent! (and please still come to church…)
Mark 1:4-11
Morningside Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Baron Mullis
January 8, 2012
Well, we have a lot of ground to cover today, what with getting from the river to the table. As I thought about church today it struck me as almost a little bit devious, a little bit of a bait and switch, to race from the font, the joyous occasion of baptism, to the table, the joyous feast of the risen Lord by the route we’re going to take. If it weren’t for Thomas Tallis, we would have gone straight from the victory lap with Isabella and making our promises to her to the river Jordan and John hollering at everyone to repent and be baptized. That’s an abrupt switch of gears. Thanks heavens for Thomas Tallis and our choir for sparing us the indignity of John yelling at us.
You didn’t realize John was yelling at you? Well he is. Can’t you hear him? He’s yelling at you and me both, standing right back there in the middle of the water in the Jordan and telling us to get ready for Jesus. I do wish he’d be quiet.
Don’t you?
It’s all a bit much if you ask me. The camel hair and wild locust shtick is a bit over the top too, for what it’s worth. I get that “branding” is important and “you gotta have a gimmick,” to steal a line from Rose Louise, but frankly, he’s starting to smell bad.
And in addition to starting to smell bad, all his haranguing about repentance is getting old. It’s bad press. It makes people feel bad.
I mean, between us, hasn’t repentance become rather passé?
Here the churches are trying to be fresh, trying to be relevant, for crying out loud, and he won’t quit crying out loud! He’s just over there yelling at us.
I don’t respond well to yelling. And I don’t respond well to being told what to do. And I certainly resent the idea that I need to repent.
Repentance is the stock in trade for revivalist preachers and we are more sophisticated than that here, aren’t we? We’re Presbyterians and Presbyterians don’t repent. We are the elect. We are the frozen chosen. We have prayers of confession and assurances of pardon, within ten seconds of each other, 20 seconds if the liturgist feels like making us squirm. But repentance? Sackcloth and ashes? I don’t think so.
I was driving down Seventh Street in Charlotte, NC the other day and I saw a church I used to pass all the time. They had a banner out front for a new service they’re going to offer. I think it’s by candlelight and they are going to chant or something and the gimmick is there’s no sermon. That’s right, no sermon. The tagline on the banner was “no guilt, just grace.”
That pretty much encapsulates what most of us feel about repentance, doesn’t it? That a preacher or someone perceived to be holier than thou is going to yell at us until we feel bad enough that we decide to become a better person. If I say the word, “repent,” I bet that there are at least ten former Baptists here that will have a flashback to singing “Just As I Am” on continuous loop until someone shoves their neighbor out into the aisle to rededicate her life to Christ so we wrap up and go to brunch. And just so you don’t think I’m picking on the Baptists, my Presbyterian church choir when I was growing up sang in the Crusade and I personally have sat there humming that hymn after listening to the sweetest, kindest hellfire and damnation sermon I’ve ever heard. Is it any wonder that people tend to avoid church when the word “repent” starts getting thrown around?
I’m serious! You start saying the word, “repent,” and people are going to avoid you!
It doesn’t matter that it is a perfectly lovely word. The Greek word for it is metanoia and the Hebrew word is shub and they both translate the same way. They translate as “turn around.”
There’s nothing wrong with turning around, surely? When you recognize you’re on the wrong path and all it’s leading you to is pain and separation, why wouldn’t you want to turn around?
And then there are the times when you want to turn around and you get so turned around you don’t know which way to turn next? That happened to me just the other day. I was going to get a price on new tires and someone had told me about a tire place that was a little cheaper, down near the airport. The problem was when I went down that way, my friend gave me the wrong exit number and well, have you ever gotten off on the wrong exit near the airport? There are lots of different sorts of stores there, stores I’m not accustomed to seeing except on Cheshire Bridge Road. I got nervous and wanted to turn around to get on back on the highway and I made a couple of wrong turn and found myself at a dead end on a rough road with bad tires and I thought to myself, “This is how it’s all going to end. You’re going to have a tire blow-out and you’re going to get out to change it and you’re going to get mugged and your obituary is going to read, “Pastor of Morningside Presbyterian Church found in front of house of ill repute.”
Sometimes you get so turned around you need help finding your way out.
Let me tell you another story. I was down here in Atlanta about five years ago with a mission team of kids from the church I served in Charlotte. We were doing a very fine program at Central Presbyterian Church that sought to help us understand some of the realities of urban poverty and to make us a little more aware of the issues of poverty and a little less scared of the folks who were experiencing it. They broke us down in to smaller groups, one adult with 3-4 young people and they sent us on a scavenger hunt. They sent us out to find some pretty normal things, a picture of a Georgia Peach, the names of the statues at the capital building… things we should be able to find without any problem. So we have already established that I have absolutely no sense of direction whatsoever, and my scavenger hunt group got hopelessly lost. And when you are trying to find your way back to Centennial Park downtown and you’re not from here, you can cover a lot of ground very quickly and so my three kids and I were trying to get to a Marta Station, I was trying to teach an object lesson on not making judgments on people based on their life situation, and we weren’t where we were supposed to be. And we stood out. And a very tall, very muscular man about my age came up to me with my kids and said to me, “where are you going?”
“Well, we’ve made a wrong turn,” I replied.
“I can tell,” he said, “you’re an easy target here, you stand out and you’re not safe. I’m going to take you where you need to be, but you have to tell where you’re going.”
I gave him the address and he walked us back.
“Do you live around here?” I tried to make small talk.
“Yes, he said, I stay around here.” We talked a little bit more
As we got closer to the Marta station, I realized that I needed to thank him and I thought like a predictable product of privilege and realized I had almost no money with me. I said,
“I’d like to thank you and at least buy your fare back to where you live, but I just have these Marta passes for the kids and me, I didn’t think to bring any money…”
“I don’t need your money, he said, I just want to get you where you’re safe.”
I felt about that big. I think maybe I needed to repent, to think again, to turn around.
That’s what repentance is, you see, it’s moving to safety. It’s changing course. It’s making a new beginning. It’s realizing your wrong thinking.
The most amazing thing happened there in the Jordan. Jesus got down in the water with us. Jesus got down in the water with us. That used to strike me as odd, that Jesus would come down to Jordan to be baptized. Baptism was a ritual cleansing, you know, for forgiveness of sins, and here Jesus came down and got in the middle of the water with us.
The number one thing that most folks find off-putting about the call to repent is that it just sounds so incredibly judgmental most of the time, particularly when preachers feel compelled to get specific.
Walter and I were talking about the hymns for this Sunday, and I had suggested one in a minor key, and he gently reminded me, “Now for the folks who’ve been traveling, this will be their first time back in church since the 18th of December…”
I thought to myself, what a welcome home! “Good to have you back you bunch of miserable sinners… not rightly sure what you did for new year’s, but now it’s time to REPENT!!!”
But when you realize Jesus is down in the water with us, well, it’s different somehow. When Jesus gets down in the water with us, with all our baggage we’re hauling around, all our mistakes, it means something. When Jesus is swimming around in all the mess of our thinking too highly of ourselves, or treating someone casually sexually, or taking advantage of someone financially, when Jesus is down in the midst of all the snotty things we’ve said about somebody, or maybe some whole groups of people, it changes something. When Jesus gets into the water with us and doesn’t treat us like we’ve failed or done bad things, or even just not done much of anything, but says to us instead, “do this in remembrance of me,” it changes everything.
Then John sounds different somehow.
You know he’s still over there preaching his sermon, but instead of hearing him yelling at me, it sounds more like he’s calling for you and me. Do you hear that?
Do you hear him? It sounds like he’s saying, “It’s this way… it’s this way, friends. Come this way…”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
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