repent

What Does “Repent!” Really Mean?

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Matthew 3:1-12

It’s unlikely that the folks who show up for church on the first Sunday in December are hoping to be compared to a brood of vipers and warned of “the wrath to come.” But every Second Sunday in Advent, we meet John the Baptist out in the wilderness. What does John have to tell us this year?

John preaches repentance. “Repent” is a word with a lot of baggage. I grew up with cartoon images of scruffy, bearded, street preachers carrying signs saying “Repent!” and maybe, “The end is near!” alluding to God’s eternal judgment and what some folks call “turn or burn” theology. These cartoons made repentance seem like a joke about religious extremism or even delusion. Some hear the word “repent” and think it means you’re supposed to say you’re really, really sorry and you will never do it (whatever it is) again. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s a pretty small part of repentance. I suspect most of us hear the word “repent,” and think, “Okay, now I’m supposed to feel bad about myself.” But here’s the thing: What “repent” really means is turn around. Go in a different direction. David Lose writes, “Repentance, in short, is realizing that God is pointing you one way, that you’ve been traveling another way, and changing course.” Brian McLaren writes “repent means, ’rethink everything,’ or ‘question your assumptions,’ or ‘have a deep turnaround in your thinking and values.’” Rather than a threat, what John is getting at is that what we’re doing isn’t working. It isn’t working, and we deserve something better. Everybody deserves something better. The whole world, the whole creation deserves something better. In order to experience that “something better,” we need to repent; we need to change course.

John doesn’t just say, “Repent!” He says, “Repent! God’s kingdom has come near!” His call to change course is connected to a promise. Something better for everybody is a real possibility. Matthew calls that something the “kingdom of heaven.” Mark and Luke call it the “kingdom of God;” they’re the same thing. What John is announcing is life on earth lived as though God is the ruler of our hearts and minds, a new life that stands in stark contrast to the kingdoms of Caesar and Herod, known for domination, injustice, exploitation, and oppression. This new kingdom, this new life is about God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven. It’s about God’s love and compassion, a better kingdom for everyone.

A chapter later, Jesus speaks these same words at the beginning of his own ministry. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). In the next chapter, he gives us a glimpse of what God’s kingdom looks like in the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor. The meek shall inherit the earth. Love your enemies (Matthew 5-7). So, if we want to be part of this other kingdom, this new life, it means going in that direction, living in that direction. God is pointing us one way, and we’ve been traveling another way. When John says, “Repent,” he means “Move in the direction of God’s love, for ourselves, for others, for our neighbors, for the world.” This change in direction isn’t about punishment; it’s about love because God is love, and you are God’s beloveds. You deserve something better than injustice, oppression, revenge, greed, and the suffering they produce. The whole world deserves something better.

But – “the wrath to come,” and “unquenchable fire”? “You brood of vipers”? Yikes! John isn’t trying to make friends here. Matthew’s John, like any prophet worth his salt, speaks truth to power. Power appears out in the wilderness in the form of the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to be baptized along with everyone else. John warns them that a baptism of repentance really means repentance. It isn’t enough to get dunked in the river. It’s time to walk the walk without relying on some special status as descendants of Abraham to give them a pass.

John then warns that the one who is coming – Jesus – will have “[h]is winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). This punitive and harsh separation isn’t how we experience Jesus in Matthew or elsewhere. What we see instead is inclusion, healing, acceptance, love, but also an unequivocal condemnation of hatred, hypocrisy, and greed. Could it be that John was expecting a different kind of messiah, a scarier messiah? This might explain his confused question from prison several chapters later: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:2-3)

So, what do we need to repent at the close of 2025? So many things are not working for humanity right now. We still try to solve problems with war and violence. Like that ever worked. We still haven’t figured out how to share the earth’s bounty so that everyone can thrive. We still hoard power, wealth, resources, even knowledge. We still believe the next technology will solve all our problems instead of creating more. We’re still terminally tribal, forgetting that diversity is so very obviously God’s plan. We still haven’t figured out that we’re part of creation, part of the natural world, and that our very survival depends on our understanding that and living that truth. We are still driven more by fear than by love.

There’s a lot to repent, right? And repentance isn’t easy. Changing course is never easy. Rob Bell writes starkly and poetically about repentance:
“It will require a death,
a humbling,
a leaving behind of the old mind,
and at the same time it will require an opening up,
loosening our hold,
and letting go,
so that we can receive,
expand,
find,
hear,
see,
and enjoy.”

It will require a death. A humbling. Ouch. Although I suspect most of us know this death, this humbling. Maybe you felt in when you finally gave up a grudge, or a resentment, or an addiction. When you figured out that what you had been doing was creating a hellish reality for yourself and others. When you figured out that things didn’t have to be the way they always have been, and on the other side of letting go of the way things were was freedom, and even joy. As Frederick Buechner writes, “To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road By Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).
Catherine Sider Hamilton, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-advent/commentary-on-matthew-31-12-7
Shannon Kershner, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven Is Near!” December 4, 2016, https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2016/120416.html
David Lose, http://www.davidlose.net/2016/11/advent-2-a-reclaiming-repentance/
Rob Bell, Love Wins (New York: HarperOne, 2011)
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC’s (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973; revised and expanded 1993)

The Word of God Came to a Nobody

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Luke 3:1-6

   After listing seven of the powers that be of the time, Luke concludes with “the Word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.”  Compared with the seven names mentioned just before, John is a nobody.  He’s in the wilderness, where no sensible person wants to be found, so he’s a nobody who’s nowhere.  Yet this is precisely where the Word of God went.  Not Jerusalem, or Athens, or Rome, or any of the other centers of culture and power, but to the margins.  And maybe that’s often where the Word of God shows up: just where we’d least expect it.

   This isn’t our first introduction to John in Luke’s gospel.  Mary’s cousin Elizabeth is miraculously pregnant beyond the normal years of childbearing.  When Mary visits Elizabeth with the news of her own miraculous pregnancy, Elizabeth’s child, John, does a cartwheel in the womb.  From the beginning, Luke’s gospel tells us that God is working to change the world through the weak and small – babies and barren women and unwed teenage mothers and wild-eyed prophets and itinerant preachers and executed criminals.  During Advent, we look not to Christmas but beyond, to the time when God’s work on this earth will be completed.  We just have to look around to know God isn’t done yet.  John reminds us that even today, God continues to work through unlikely characters to announce God’s good news of shalom, the Hebrew word that includes not only peace but justice, healing, love, and hope. 

   When you’re a minister, you end up telling your “faith journey” over and over, in seminary and to ordination and church calling committees and so on. When I tell my story, I always mention Bill Anderson.  I’d quit going to church in college.  My father’s rule was, “As long as I go to church, you go to church.”  That pretty much guaranteed that my sister, brother, and I would quit going to church when we moved away from home.  Even more than an expression of adolescent rebellion, however, it seemed to me that Christianity was all about who was getting into heaven and who was not.  I found this focus absurdly speculative, but even worse, it is mostly used to divide people, to manipulate people, to create insiders and outsiders; not to heal or bring people together. 

   When my older daughter was four, out of the blue she announced that she wanted to go to Sunday school.  I think she’d figured out that Sunday school was a chance to play with other kids one more day of the week, with the bonus that she could wear her Mary Janes.  I’d been raised Presbyterian, and a little church near the Marin County suburb where I lived at the time was the closest Presbyterian church.  I figured I could take her to church once, she’d get it out of her system and that would be that.  Sunday school was before the worship service and I wasn’t willing to leave my 4-year-old while I headed for a nearby coffee shop, so I stuck around for adult ed., which was held at the same time.  Adult ed. was a series on exploring things the church could do to help change the world.  That, by itself, was a surprise, but the guy who set the hook and reeled me in was Bill Anderson.  He was older than my dad, and he said Christianity was a social reform movement, a way to change the world – this world – to make it more just, more loving, more peaceful, more like God intends it.  Today I’d say, yes, it is that and so much more, but back then I’d never heard it put that way and it was exactly what I needed to hear. 

   During World War II Bill had been a military engineer who led troops onto Omaha Beach the day before D-Day.  His company was to secure the beaches to the extent possible before the actual invasion.  Bill wouldn’t talk about that day.  He’d get just so far into the story and then stop.  But it wasn’t Omaha Beach that caused him “to grow up fast and hard,” as he put it.  What really changed his life was being part of the military team that liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 and 1946.  It spurred him into the work of resettling refugees, which he did on and off, including after the Vietnam War.  He also served as a Witness for Peace in Nicaragua.  He went on three walks for peace in the Soviet Union, making connections with ordinary people who wanted peace and did not want to continue living under the threat of nuclear annihilation just because the Tiberiuses and Pilates and Herods of the world couldn’t let go of a grudge.

   Luke’s outrageous claim is that the “Word of the Lord” comes to a nobody named John in that no-place called the wilderness, and that this is more important than all the important people and events of the day.  And what is truly startling is that this is still possible.  Bill Anderson was a nobody in the grand scheme of things.  And yet, during the eighth year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, while George Deukmejian was governor of California, and Diane Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco, the word of God came to Bill Anderson in Larkspur, California, who shared it with me.  Bill would be the last person to describe himself as a prophet.  When I’d tell him that he was largely responsible for the path that led me to ministry, he’d say, “Don’t blame me!” 

   Unlike John, Bill wouldn’t have used the word, “repentance” to describe what we’re supposed to do in response to God’s love.  But repentance, as loaded a word as that is, is exactly what Bill Anderson lived and preached, although he would claim he never “preached” at all.  To repent means to turn around.  It means quit going the direction you’ve been going.  John is saying, “Stop doing the things that sew hatred and strife and injustice; stop moving away from God’s shalom; turn around and move toward it.”  Bill Anderson lived and taught this for everyone to see.  He lived the good news that God loves everybody, not just some of us; that a loving God wants shalom for everybody; and the way we are to respond is to pitch in where we can.  In other words, we are to repent. 

   God is still working through the nobodies in the nowheres of our congregations, neighborhoods, and communities.  I hear God’s word of shalom, regularly, from many people; in what they say, and in what they do, which is often so much louder than words. 

   Frederick Buechner wrote, “Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.  Amen, and come, Lord Jesus.” 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.