Repent!

Repent! It’s a refrain of the Lenten season. We heard it again in today’s Gospel—and with a particularly stark warning. “Unless you repent, you will all perish.”

But what does it mean to repent?

There’s the easy definition of repentance—even if it isn’t so easy when you’re living through it. I do something I shouldn’t do. I feel guilty. I admit that I got it wrong. I try to make up for the harm I’ve done. And I commit to doing better in the future.

That straightforward sort of repentance is the stuff of the Confession of Sin that’s part of our service every Sunday.

In our 10 o’clock service, we put it like this: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.”

That straightforward sort of repentance is also the stuff of our service of Reconciliation of a Penitent. Did you know that the Episcopal Church offers private confession? It’s not used nearly as often as it is in the Catholic Church, but you can make an appointment with any priest. We often sum up our doctrine on private confession this way: “All may. Some should. None must.” But the service is in our prayer book because there are times when we need ruthless honesty. There are times when we need to speak a hard truth in the presence of another person. There are times when we need to hear another person tell us that God forgives us.

The experience of sin, repentance, confession, and reconciliation can be a powerful one. It can be a time of honesty, and an occasion of tremendous grace.

The trouble is this: That sort of intense experience of self-examination and repentance doesn’t happen every day.

But still Jesus calls us to repent. Every day. “Unless you repent, you will all perish.”

What should we do when we don’t have anything terribly serious on our conscience? Do we need to deliberately stir up feelings of guilt and sorrow if we want to follow Jesus’s call to repent?

I don’t think so. Because the word “repentance” as it’s used in the Bible can also have a broader meaning. It can mean something more like a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of focus, a turn in a new direction. A turn away from self and a turn towards God.

And that’s the sort of repentance that we all need—whether or not we have a specific sin on our conscience. We can all do a better a job of following Jesus.

But still, repentance sounds hard. Why does it matter so much?

It turns out that repentance and judgment and grace are all tangled up together.

We want life to be fair. We want good things to happen to good people. We want bad things to happen to bad people. (Except of course in those moments when we begin to suspect that we ourselves might be the bad people.)

We want life to be fair. But life isn’t fair.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about some of the tragedies and atrocities of his own time. It seems that the Roman governor, Pilate, had killed a group of pilgrims on the Temple grounds—adding sacrilege and desecration to the horror of death. Another group of people had died suddenly in the collapse of a tower.

Why did these particular people die in such horrific ways? Were they extra-terrible sinners who deserved special punishment?

Jesus simply says no. No, they were not. You can’t assume that a person is evil just because they meet with bad fortune.

So does that mean judgment doesn’t exist? Well, no. That isn’t true either.

It can be a hard truth to remember in a moment when we hear Jesus calling us to repent, but God’s judgment is actually good news. Good news for the oppressed. Good news for the suffering. If you’re a victim of injustice, God’s judgment of those who hurt you is justice itself.

This morning’s reading from Exodus reminds us of the link between God’s judgment and God’s compassion, God’s grace. The Lord called to Moses from the burning bush: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”

God’s judgment is real. But God’s grace is also real.

For me, grace is at the heart of the parable of the fig tree—the parable that we heard this morning. A man planted a fig tree, but year after year it failed to bear fruit. He wanted to cut the tree down. But his gardener asked him to be patient—to give him more time to tend the tree, to fertilize it, to care for it.

God wants us to bear fruit. God calls us to repent. And again and again, God shows us grace, gives us another chance to get it right.

Ok. But isn’t this all a lot of navel-gazing? The world cries out for justice. There’s so much work to be done. Shouldn’t we keep our focus on practical matters instead of spending all our time focusing on self-examination and repentance?

Well, maybe. But that’s not what Jesus modeled. His times were at least as difficult as our own. But Jesus didn’t tell his followers to spend all their energy condemning Pilate’s atrocities. He told them first to repent and follow him.

But here’s a secret of a life of faith: It turns out that we can make more progress in building God’s kingdom on earth if we start with a little introspection.

C.S. Lewis put it this way: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

On this third Sunday in Lent, let us do what Jesus told us to do. Let us repent. Let us turn to follow God. Let us aim at Heaven. And let us trust in God’s justice and God’s grace.