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Last
year, Robin and I were at the movies in Greensburg, and the film had just
started when the whole theater went black. Even the little red exit signs
were black. The whole area had lost power, although we didn’t know it at
the time. All we knew was we were sitting in a crowded theater in total
darkness, and it was pretty scary. But then one bright soul—and I use
the term deliberately—used his head, he got out his cell phone and
turned it on. The blue glow of the screen on his phone was enough to let
everybody pick their way down the steps and out of the theater.
That’s
a helpful metaphor as we look at the world the way it existed when Jesus
began his ministry. Both the world of the Jews and the outer world
dominated by the Romans were spiritually black. The Jews had failed to
fulfill their covenant with God; they followed the letter of the law but
not its spirit. Furthermore, they were a beaten and conquered people. The
taxation was a heavy burden on the people. Their morale was at zero. They
felt no love for God, nor, they assumed, did he love them
As
for the rest of the world, it remained a place where might equaled right,
where empires rested on the strength of the largest armies and the most
brutal enslavement of conquered peoples. But the world we know today is
hardly much more enlightened. This remains a world steeped in war. A world
where people go hungry, where racism and suspicion are commonplace, where
evil still runs unchecked. Robert Frost once wrote, “I have been
acquainted with the night. I have walked in the rain and out of the rain.
I have been acquainted with the night.”
This
world remains a place where a little light, as little as one cell phone or
one man preaching in the desert, can make all the difference.
I
don’t say these things to depress you. You all know there’s a lot of
darkness in the world. Darkness has touched the lives of every person
here. Certainly darkness touched my life, my heart this week when I got
the call that Art had passed away. Nowhere in scripture do we get a pep
talk that says the darkness really isn’t as bad as it seems. Instead, it
affirms that the darkness is real and threatening and apt to swallow us if
we give it half a chance.
But
scripture also underscores the reality that there is light at the end of
the tunnel. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light,” and Matthew quotes that saying in today’s
gospel lesson as Jesus begins his ministry. Matthew wants to tell the Jews
that the light they had been waiting for, the one prophesized, was here,
and it was time to change their ways, to repent.
There is a good
story about light that came out of the Civil War, and it happened in the
winter of 1864, the worst winter of the war. You probably remember the
name Gen. George Pickett, the Confederate general. He gave his name to the
terrible massacre of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. By the winter of
1864 the war had come down to trench warfare outside Petersburg, Va., and
both sides were suffering terribly. Then word arrived that Pickett’s
wife had given birth to a baby boy, and the Confederate troops built
bonfires up and down the line to celebrate.
These
fires were seen on the other side and word reached Gen. Grant, who ordered
scouts to try to figure out what the rebels were up to. Soon they brought
him word of the birth of Pickett’s son. It so happened that Grant and
Pickett had been classmates at West Point, so Grant ordered bonfires to
celebrate the arrival, too. That was a strange night. Bonfires burning on
both sides. No shots fired. No yelling back and forth. But it didn’t
last forever. Soon the fires burned out and the dismal darkness of war
resumed. The killing went on. No one had actually seen the light, and
changed their ways.
What
does it mean when we say that Jesus is the light of the world? He brought
the light to show us that what we were doing in the dark doesn’t cut it
with God.
Or
to put it another way, the truth is the light that dispels the darkness of
Satan’s lies. What was the truth that Jesus proclaimed? He said,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is here.”
That’s
a message of both personal responsibility, and of God’s mercy. Repent
means, change the way you think—it has the same root as the word
pensive. It means take responsibility for your past actions, recognize how
they hurt others, hurt God and hurt yourself and then live your life a new
way. People think of repenting like a heavenly dose of castor
oil—necessary, but very undesirable.
I
don’t know how many of you had a tough dad, but lots of people did. When
they hear the prodigal son story, they think of God as a tough dad who
will stand in the door way when we come back home, saying, “Well, I knew
you’d be dragging your sorry butt back here some day, ‘cause you’re
such a loser.”
That
is so wrong. That is so abhorrent to God’s heart. At this very moment
God stands before the world with his arms open wide, begging people to
accept him. When Jesus tells the world repent, he means “Come back. You
and God have been estranged, but that’s all over now.” You know what
estranged means? In a family, when a father and son or a father and
daughter are estranged, it’s like a living death. They don’t speak,
they don’t communicate, they’re like strangers, and most of all, they
don’t forgive each other. Before Jesus, a huge gap existed between God
and man, but Jesus came and spanned that gap. He freed us from the idea
that we have to be perfect to come into the kingdom. It gets back to one
of my favorite bumper stickers: “Christians aren’t perfect, just
forgiven.”
The
good news is that if we believe in Christ, if we trust that his blood was
sufficient, then we are saved. And repentance is the natural response of a
grateful heart to the good news that Jesus paid it all.
Now
repent means different things to different people. Most people have some
idea that to repent means to feel sorry that you did something wrong. But
many are deeply sorry for what they have done, but do nothing to change.
Paul even said that remorse can lead to death, as in the story of Judas,
who was so sorry for betraying Christ that it led him to suicide—not
salvation, to suicide. Some people get so wrapped up in what they have
said and done that it leads them to self-hatred. That can have the
opposite effect of salvation—they become convinced that they can never
be saved because of their past.
Once
that happens, people would rather just sit in the dark than be disturbed
by the light. It’s a strange truth, but it is truth. People need the
light but don’t want the light. Another true story about light—when
the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille and started the French
Revolution, they went down into the dungeons and busted open the cells,
freeing the prisoners.
But
one prisoner literally had to be dragged out into the courtyard. Once
there, he begged to be allowed to return to his prison cell. He had been
in darkness so long, his eyes were in terrible pain from the light.
Before
any of us get too smug about others who reject the light, let me just ask,
what would happen if you were fast asleep in the dark and suddenly someone
came rushing into your bedroom, shining a flashlight in your face and
telling you to get up? You’d probably hold a hand up to block the light,
roll over and bury your head in the pillow. Maybe a few choice words would
be added.
Then
you might smell smoke and hear a fireman say, “If you stay here you will
die in the fire that is consuming your house this very minute. I am here
to bring you the light that will lead you out of a burning building.”
Pretty much what Jesus tried to say in Galilee. Did people listen? Some.
And some rejected both the message and the messenger. They preferred
groping in the dark to having the light of the world. Did that stop Jesus
from calling for repentance? Not at all. And the world hasn’t changed
much since then. Some people see the light, others grope in the dark, and
a relentless Jesus pursues them both.
In
his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” Francis Thompson reminds us that
Christ the light of the world never gives up on any lost soul, no matter
what dark alley they hide in: “I fled him, down the nights and down the
days. I fled him, down the arches of the years. I fled him, down the
labyrinthine ways of my own mind, and in the mist of tears I hid from him,
and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot,
precipitated, down Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, from those strong feet
that followed, followed after.”
My
dear friends, you know I love you, but there’s not one person here this
morning, myself very much included, who doesn’t have ways they need to
change this morning. Not one of us can afford to hear Jesus call us to
repent, and ignore him. But I really think that what needs to happen for
true repentance to happen is that the time needs to be right. The time was
right for Jesus the light to come into the world, and when he began to
preach he said, “Repent, for the time is right. The kingdom of God is
here.”
Why
do we need to repent? First, because we have a problem. For many people,
the hardest thing in the world is to admit we have a problem. Doctors
experience this with patients who come and lie about what symptoms
they’re experiencing or their bad eating habits or something, and then
they get mad at the doctor because he’s not helping them. Financial
advisors see the same thing—people will go to get advice, but they lie
about how much money they have or their spending habits. People have
problems, but they don’t want to admit them.
But
we all need to come to grips with is our sinful nature. In scripture sin
means “falling short of the mark,” like an arrow that doesn’t make
it to the target. Sin refers to a part of human existence that is
universal. Everybody has certain ideals and standards that they don’t
always meet. Everybody knows what Paul was talking about when he said “I
don’t do the good I want to do, but I do manage to do what I know I
shouldn’t.” Everybody’s in the same boat. So when the church talks
about sin, it talks about repentance with the same breath.
The
point is not to condemn people, but to offer new life, a new way of doing
things, to fix the mistakes we’ve made. My friends, I’ve never been
shy about standing here and telling you that I’ve made tons of mistakes
in my life, but through God’s grace, I work at fixing them. Doesn’t
mean I don’t make new mistakes, but I have faith that God will keep
after me and keep the repair work going. But who among you are willing to
look me in the eye and say that you have never made a mistake? Are you
making the necessary repairs in your life? The time is right. The kingdom
of God is here.
Second,
we need to repent precisely because we can do something about our
problems. Mark Twain once said that “Man is the only animal that
blushes. Or needs to.” He might have said that “Man is the only animal
that can change its ways, or needs to.” Nobody condemns a lion for
attacking a zebra, or a cat for eating a mouse. That’s their nature. But
Jesus came to tell us that it doesn’t have to be human nature for the
strong to prey on the weak. Of course, some people are always predicting
that man is doomed to live in sin.
Some
people are always predicting that the light is finally going to flicker
out, that the world will be plunged into darkness forever. People have
often made predictions that were about as useful and accurate as a broken
clock. For example, in 1773 King George III said that the American
colonists had no stomach for revolution. In 1912 an official of the White
Star Line said the Titanic was unsinkable. In 1939 the New York Times said
the problem with this new invention, the television, was that you had to
sit glued to the picture tube and Americans wouldn’t have time for it.
In the early 19th Century an English astronomy professor said
high speed air travel was impossible, because the passengers would
suffocate. Prove the nay-sayers wrong. Repent. The time is right.
Finally,
we need to repent because we need to leave our old ways behind. We need to
give up what we’ve been carrying around, what weighs us down.
One
last, true story about seeing the light. A few years ago a story came out
of Lincoln, Nebraska about two men and how they conquered darkness. One of
them was a man named Larry Trapp who, you might say, was trapped in
darkness. He was in a wheel chair, and was diagnosed with a fatal disease.
But his real disease was hatred. He was a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux
Klan. The focus of his hatred was a Jew, Michael Weisser. Larry threatened
Michael with harassing phone calls and hate mail, with a goal of driving
him out of town. Michael decided to take a bold approach. He decided to
call Larry on the phone.
“I
just kept leaving messages on his answering machine,” Michael recalled,
“but he never answered them, until one day he picked up the phone in a
fit of anger and said ‘What do you want. You’re harassing me.’ “
Michael said, “I was real quiet and calm. I said I knew he had a hard
time getting around and I thought he might need a ride to the grocery
store. He just got completely quiet and all the anger went out of his
voice. He said ‘I’ve got that covered, but thanks for asking.’
The
remarkable end of the story is that the two men eventually became friends.
Michael, this Jewish man, had this former KKK leader over for dinner. It
was amazing for someone who was so full of hate. Eventually Larry decided
to devote the time he had left to freeing others from the destructive
power of hate and bigotry. And the people of Lincoln saw a great light,
the light generated by a change of heart which was caused by someone
reaching out, not lashing back. Both love, when it is practiced, and
hatred, when it is destroyed, give off a great light.
Have
you folks discovered that light bulbs aren’t as bright as they used to
be? I mean, I’m sitting around trying to read, and I discover that I
just can’t read something by the same lamp as well as I used to.
Actually, I’m kidding. It’s not the light bulbs getting worse, it’s
my eyes. There’s no darkness is this world that the light of Jesus
Christ can’t overcome. Do you have that light in your life? Is it
shining as bright as when you first saw it? If not, I can assure you,
it’s not because the light got dimmer. Maybe you moved away, or you let
something get between you and the light.
Matthew
tells us that Jesus came into Galilee bearing light that allowed the world
to understand a simple message: “The Kingdom of God is here. It’s
right on your doorstep. So why not repent of your old ways, turn to the
lights and embrace the best news you’re ever going to hear?” Why not
today?
An
old, wise rabbi was walking with some of his disciples when one of them
asked, “Rabbi, when should a man repent?” The rabbi calmly replied,
“You certainly should repent on the last day of your life.” Several of
his followers protested, “we can never be sure which day will be the
last day of our life.” The famous rabbi smiled and said, “The answer
to that problem is very simple. Repent now.”
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