Mark 1:1-8Advent 2: December 7, 2014

The Rev. John Forman

“Somewhere,” writes Annie Dillard, “Somewhere, and I can’t find where, I read

about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know

about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’

‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’1”

Dillard tells this story to illustrate a natural human response to the discovery of

new layers of reality; the holy curiosity that God implants in every human heart. To

have never encountered God leaves a person in relatively innocent ignorance, but

once we stumble upon the Divine Mystery, we must somehow deal with it.

Advent is a perfect time to ponder how we would answer the hunter’s question.

By proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, John the

Baptizer has drawn our attention to a deep layer of God’s creation. We could ask

John, “Why did you tell us?” The question is not simple to answer. There may be

no greater mystery than the riddle of sin, repentance and salvation. And the fullest

response to the question is generated from what has been called the abyss of

God’s mercy. So how do we answer the question? What do we tell ourselves?

What do we tell others?

There are churches that have stopped talking about sin and repentance entirely.

Others offer fairly domesticated versions of these notions intended mostly to be

inoffensive. Some churches and more than a few televangelists talk about sin and

repentance in ways that have plenty of teeth because they are based on fear rather

than on love. I don’t see how any of these are “the beginning of the good news of

Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Now, there are some intensely complex and rich

theologies that unpack the good news rather brilliantly, but are not useful for those

seeking to deal with their first experiences of a Holy Curiosity. I’ll be happy to

introduce you to some of those another time, but for now, let me just offer a few

streamlined and open-ended considerations intended to invite further explorations

of the mystery.

1 Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; An American Childhood. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1990.

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Last Sunday, we talked about waiting for Christ, emptied and yet alert. Today,

we hear the summons of John the Baptizer. John’s summons is the message we

have been staying emptied and alert to hear. The message of John, the son of our

matron saint, Elizabeth. John, the wild man who appeared in the wilderness

proclaiming; summoning us, that is, to a life of faith. John beckons us to a life lived

as though the promises of Christ are actually coming into being; to live as though

God’s dreams for all of creation are actually being realized and that those dreams

will someday come into full expression.

Advent is not an empty stretch of time before something else happens. Advent

is a time pregnant with new life in all of us; a time for the quiet growth of a life

already given that will show up in our ordinary day-to-day lives. That means that

acts of repentance are no longer acts of preparation for the arrival of God’s

kingdom, but acts of response to God’s presence now; acts of consent that allow

God’s dreams to take root in human hearts and to be realized in human life.

But before we can recover a sense of repentance that is neither overly simplistic

nor unhelpfully dense, we have to recover the nuanced sense of sin that scripture

teaches. I know…here it comes, right? The scolding, the shame, the finger-

wagging…well, I think you deserve better than that. In fact, regaining a more life-

affirming understanding of sin and repentance may be our best hope.

A good many Christians think of sin primarily as individual disobedience or

specific individual behaviors. The Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican side of

the house tends toward a different perspective. We see sin as a movement of free

will by which we, God’s created, reject or separate ourselves from God, our

Creator. Our own acts of separation contradict the very essence of our nature.

In Hebrew, there are about a dozen different words used to describe these

separations. Three are most common in Hebrew scripture: avon, usually translated

as “iniquity,” is connected to the intentional, self-serving twisting of God’s will.

Another, pesha, is frequently translated as “transgression” and it implies a spiteful

revolt against God. Both imply individual misdeeds, but also include collective

transgressions. The third word is chata’ah, which means “missing the point.” This is

the word used most often by far. This is also the word carried over from Hebrew to

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Greek when Christian scripture was finally written. The Greek word also refers to

“missing the mark.” The emphasis is not on specific human misdeeds, but on

states of separation from God. For Jews, the fruitful response has tended to be a

return to Torah, to God’s instruction.

For Anglicans and other Christians, the response is similar with one notable

difference: from our perspective, Jesus is the incarnation—the embodiment—of

Torah. The deepest good news of Jesus Christ is not what Jesus said or what is

said about Jesus—the good news is Jesus. Jesus Christ is himself the Gospel, so

that returning to Christ again and again is the Christian way of safety—our salvation

—from sin.

Sin came along after God had declared everything created to be good. As a

result, sin must feed like a parasite on that which God made good. Food and drink,

for example, are good and to enjoy them with gratitude can be a holy act. But to

privilege food and drink over God is to make idols of them. Sex is also a gift from

the Divine, but when the desire to possess another person, effectively denying their

humanity, when that selfish desire replaces the expression of mutual love, the

impulse misses the point. Money and other material belongings can be gratefully

held and used for the betterment of the world, but when the gathering of temporal

things replaces the love of eternal things, we have missed the point. Anger is a

natural emotion that signals when a boundary has been crossed. But if retribution,

self-destructive behavior or uncontrolled hatred take over our hearts, minds and

actions, then we have given to our wrath what rightfully belongs to God.

I think you can see where I’m going, so let me just add that we can also become

obsessed with avoiding food, sex, money or our emotions. Or we can become

distracted by obsessions over what other people are doing or have. If we allow any

of these obsessions to take the place of God in our hearts, minds and actions, then

we miss the mark.

Guilt is often the recognition that we have in some way missed the mark,

collectively or individually. To wallow in guilt is sinful. Think of guilt, instead, as an

alarm. We can consciously or unconsciously choose to fill a void with food, sex or

material things, or with our personal emotions, our own self-importance or judging

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others. Choosing any of these to fill a hole that only God can fill is choosing a

substitute. We miss the point. And healthy guilt can be the notification that we have

chosen a substitute for God.

God does not punish us for sinning. Sin hurts because choosing a substitute

over God goes against our essential nature. Our choices hurt when they separate

us from that which loves us more than we can possibly imagine. Our choices hurt

when they separate us from that which we are hardwired to love more than

anything else. To repent is to act to restore right relationship with God. Christian

repentance is not simply a statement or condition of regret, but an action.

Episcopalians, in particular, acknowledge the act of repentance in three places

specifically related to the baptism that John proclaimed: first, in the actual

sacrament of baptism, we ask candidates whether they “turn to Jesus.” In parts of

the early church, the candidates physically turned eastward toward the altar that

represented the light of Christ, an action stilled practiced in the Orthodox church. In

the renewal of baptismal vows and in one version of the reconciliation of a penitent,

we ask people to declare their intent to turn again to Christ. Both are ritual,

sacramental actions that refocus the human will and heart so that God can restore

them to their baptismal state.

In that state, every baptized person is a missionary in a wilderness of some sort

and God’s command to Isaiah from our first reading becomes a command to us all:

“Comfort, O comfort my people.” So come to this altar to be filled with the presence

of the Risen Christ. When you leave, carry that presence out and empty yourself in

service to the suffering Christ in others. And when you miss the point, as we all will,

do not sit down in self-recrimination or denial, but return to God and consent again

to be transformed. Live as though God has chosen you to embody the Gospel and

when something else begins to replace that Gospel in your actions, return to God

and consent again to be God’s vessels and tools of transformation. Telling people

about God and sin is fine—showing people about God and sin by living the Gospel

is what it means to be baptized with the Holy Spirit.

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