Second Sunday of Advent Sermon

“Repentance” isn’t a word we use much. It’s familiar enough. We have a basic concept of what it means. But you probably rarely use it or hear it directed towards you. And if you did, I suspect it has something of a negative, religious connotation – that God, or the church, is calling you out for something. Now, to be clear, from a Biblical perspective, repentance is an acknowledgement that – yep – you are doing something wrong and you really ought to stop it and to start doing otherwise. And let me also be clear: the “wrong” we do is more often a kind of inactivity rather than something actively bad. Like we say in the weekly confession: “we have sinned against you…by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” But here’s where our negative connotation of repentance gets off track: It’s not about being told off and being forced to change. When a true spirit of repentance takes root, something has snapped inside you: “I need to change course now” – and to have the wherewithal to make it happen. Which is why repentance isn’t something we very often do. It’s typically really hard to change the way we live, no matter how appealing that change would be. I look at our family and the number of times we’ve sat down together to lay out new chore lists. We’re great at making the list. But we’re terrible at following through with it. Everyone wants clean showers and scrubbed toilets, but nobody wants to do it. And we don’t really have to. There’s nothing about dirty grout that gets in the way of washing your hair. And what’s true of household chores is just as true in every aspect of our lives. There’s an ideal of how we’d like to live – in relationships, as consumers, as citizens, as Christians. But experience has taught us that no matter how inspired we may momentarily be, odds are, nothing’s gonna change. Because (if we’re being honest) we don’t really believe it matters whether we change or not. If it’s good enough for today, it’s good enough for tomorrow. Now don’t think I’m endorsing this behavior. I’m just giving voice to what most of us would agree is the reality of how we live. There’s a term for this, actually: stasis. When talking about human nature, “stasis” refers to our tendency and preference always to keep the status quo. And make no mistake: we will resist anything and anyone who tries to disrupt it. Why? Because it’s what we know, which means it’s what we trust, even if “it” is something fairly lousy. So how do we change? What is the magical formula that allows us to overcome stasis and to have the courage and resolve to begin living differently? I think it’s a combination of things: First, it is choosing to keep before us what the ideal actually is. What is it we want? Who would we rather be? And I think this is one of the chief values in coming to church regularly. If church is doing what it should do, when we come here, we should keep encountering a vision of what the Kingdom of God is all about: love, compassion, forgiveness, humility, generosity, justice – all those things Jesus proclaimed. So the first element of repentance is (what you might call) “moral clarity” – conviction of what a better world, and our better role in it, would actually look like. The second element we usually need if we’re going to repent – if we’re going to get kick-started out of our lethargy and stasis – is for something in our circumstances to shift, for some condition to change that now pushes our “ideal” into a necessity. When that happens, we can often find within us the impetus and the courage to do what we’ve wanted all along. When does the shower finally get a deep cleaning? When overnight company’s about to show up! Obviously! Or on a more serious level, what does it take for a woman, finally, to have the courage to leave an abusive husband? When he starts beating the children. She might endure her own suffering endlessly, but not when the children become his targets. So first, we have to be clear on what the “truly better” thing is. Second, we normally won’t act until the circumstances change or intensify. And then third, we often need some kind of support or accountability to encourage us to do what we need to do, and then to keep doing it. In a word, we need community – and community of such intimacy that we can be honest about our circumstances and humble enough to seek support. I saw this pattern play out quite clearly in an article in this weeks’ Time Magazine. It was about Frances Haugen – the whistleblower who publicized masses of internal Facebook documents this summer that gave evidence of how Facebook is willfully choosing profitability over what is ethically right. They know their algorithms are detrimental to teen’s mental health, how they aid the activities of human traffickers, how they blatantly spread misinformation to dire effect – especially in developing countries. It was a huge exposé that will hopefully lead to healthier systems. What was especially fascinating about the article was that it was answering this specific question: “Out of tens of thousands of Facebook employees, why was Frances Haugen the one to come forward?” For the purposes of this sermon, that question could just as well end, “…why was Frances Haugen the one to repent?” what made her shift from silence or complicity to whistleblower? And the article reveals the exact same three steps I just listed: moral clarity, change of circumstances, and external support. Frances Haugen has always had a strong drive towards moral clarity. She was a nationally ranked high school debater whose specialty was to analyze the debate through the crucible of morality: what core ethic is at play in this issue? And so, when she was being recruited by Facebook in 2018, she only wanted the job if they would assign her to Facebook’s “integrity” operation – its now defunct branch whose mandate was to keep the platform and its users safe. So she began her work with Facebook from a position of moral clarity. But she was pretty quickly disillusioned by how the company actually functioned. She kept going to her supervisors with observations and suggestions, but was routinely dismissed. And this frustration at work was taking place during a larger season of her life with radically changing circumstances, (the second stage of repentance): she had a near-death experience that landed her in the hospital for a month and left her physically impaired and in need of in-home support; one of her closest friends became so lost in the morass of online conspiracy theories that it destroyed their friendship; and then the pandemic hit and she moved from California to Iowa to work remotely while sheltering in place with her parents. And (!) her mom just happens to be an Episcopal priest, which meant – for months – her mom was her constant sounding board. Step three. She had that external support to help her process what she was experiencing at Facebook and what the core ethical values were that she wanted to hold onto. And so, when she eventually moved back to California, and the circumstances there worsened, “her mother’s counsel had mentally prepared her…. ‘When that moment happened,’ [she said,] I was actually in a pretty good place…I wasn’t in a place of crisis like many whistle-blowers are.’” And now, please God, may her actions – may her repentance – “prepare the way of the Lord.” May it lead to straightened paths and valleys that are filled, mountains and hills made low. For if it shall lead to fewer teen suicides, if it shall reduce the misinformation infecting the minds and spirits of vulnerable people, if it shall frustrate the activities of human-traffickers, then this is what it means to build a highway for our God, that when Christ shall come again he shall find a people and a planet prepared to meet him with joy as he makes his way to his throne among us. This was the message of John the Baptist, and it remains the message for us today. When we repent, when we begin to participate in God’s vision for us, we are smoothing the rough places plane such that all flesh shall be able to see the salvation of our God. We may not all be Frances Haugens – brilliant and skilled and recruited by the world’s top corporations. Our actions and acts of repentance may have no global consequence. But just like she, we each are equally called to live out our faith within the spheres of our own lives: our own work places, our own neighborhoods, our own church. And for most of us, there is no sphere of our belonging that is of more significance than our families – those relationships to which we are most devoted, and that have the most power to bless or to curse. And because the nature of families and our identities within them are so complex, they are particularly subject to stasis. Changing anything in the way our families function and relate is extraordinarily difficult. We all know our roles and we stick to them. But, of course, we all would dream for families with more health, more harmony, more trust, more respect, more laughter. And in these days of societal division, the fault lines of COVID and politics are piercing their way into our extended families, often with devastating effect. But to look at this woe from a fresh perspective, I’m wondering if the stressors of these last few years might not be the “Stage 2” of repentance we need to force us out of stasis. If the circumstances are intensifying in such a way, that anger and intolerance are simmering right beneath the surface (or busting through!), something’s got to change. And, if so, perhaps St. John’s can be that “Stage 3,” providing the community and support you need to be a healthy source of change, of repentance, in your family. This “Home for the Holidays” online class we’re offering on Thursday could be exactly what you need. You’ll see in it the same elements we’ve been exploring here today: clarifying the values you want to see alive in your families and learning particular strategies to help foster the kind of relating everyone would prefer. It’s easy enough to sign up for the class, and I strongly encourage it, so you can return to your families prepared to begin living differently. “You my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way” (Luke 1:76).