“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” a sermon by The Rev. Deborah Hawkins

When I was 12 or 13 years old I was off, far from home, on a Girl Scout camping trip.  We had a rule in the troop about doing things with a buddy. You never went anywhere by yourself, you always had a buddy with you. This meant that if your buddy had to get up and go to the outhouse (or the biffy, as we called it) in the middle of the night, you got up, without complaint, and walked with them. Nobody was to walk off, especially in the middle of the night, alone. 

One night my buddy called so out of our warm sleeping bags we got, put on our shoes, and into the cold and dark we went. Then, on the way back from the biffy, I lost my buddy.  

You might ask how I managed to do that, lose her when we were walking side by side, but lose her I did, no idea how. I looked around a bit but it was dark and I was alone so pretty quickly I realized I had to go back to camp, walk up the leaders, and confess what I had done. 

Just as I got back to camp some lanterns appeared in the darkness. They were carried by a couple who walked into camp with ‘Annie’, let’s call her, between them. They looked at the leaders and said, ‘excuse me she says she got lost but she belongs with you guys. Is she one of yours?’ Together, ‘Annie’ and I walked back to our sleeping bags. 

Repent is what you do when you figure out you have lost track of what was supposed to be your primary focus.  You turn around or go get help or put aside what has been distracting you and resume the task God gave you. Sometimes you know where you went wrong and other times you haven’t got a clue.  It is nice if you have a clue, because then you can hopefully learn something, but basically it doesn’t matter either way. When you realize you have lost track of your primary focus you repent and try again. That is what it means to be faithful to a calling.

We all have a calling from God. As Christians we are called to lives of prayer, love, and connection. The how of living those lives are different for each of us but we share a calling to walk a path of prayer, love, connection; and a common destination – life in Christ.

As we walk our paths, we all lose focus now and then and wander off in the wrong direction. To stay true to our calling we have to repent, turn around, turn in a different direction and get back on the right path. Most of us, no matter how much we might try, find we have to repent over and over and over again. 

There are lots ways people engage in repentance and I want to talk about just 3 of them this morning. 

The first is when we recognize we don’t know something and are open to learning. You could say it is to turn from the arrogance of ‘I know all about it’ to the humility of asking ‘what else is involved?’ 

That kind of opportunity to repent is what “Annie” and I experienced that dark night long ago when it became clear there were things we didn’t understand about paying attention and bearing some responsibility for one another’s safety. It is the sort of repentance that is thought to be especailly needed in adolescence but really is called for throughout our whole lives.

Another aspect of repentance has to do with choosing, choosing to turn around, choosing to change our mind, choosing to act on new information in such a way that our way of living is altered. When Jesus called the first disciples, when Jesus calls you or calls me to follow him, we have to choose to do so. 

Matthew says when Jesus called the first disciples they immediately jumped up and followed him. No hesitation, no thinking things over, just ‘right, here we go.’ Maybe. Some people do respond that way. It doesn’t ring true in my life though. How about for you? Decision, for me, requires a lot of pondering.

I wonder if the reason the two accounts we have heard this week and last – from Matthew and John – don’t exactly match up is not so much that they are accounts of an event told from different memories and different points of view as, maybe, I don’t know but why not, different memories of different events. 

Like maybe, in the story from last week John the Baptist is hanging out with some of his followers, students, when Jesus walks by and John turns to students, disciples, and says, ‘you know you guys are really into this spiritual journey and walking with God kind of stuff. You might want to go listen to what Jesus has to say.’  And so they they do, and spend an afternoon or something with him. 

They are impressed but, you know, life gets busy. There are fish to catch, nets to mend, so they don’t make any abrupt changes. They do, though, keep talking and thinking about what they saw and heard. Then, the next time Jesus walks by and says, ‘follow me,’ they do, ‘immediately’ this time. I don’t know. Could be. 

This imagining of the events fits nicely with at the end of John’s gospel, when after the crucifixion and the resurrection we once again find the guys back in their boats, fishing. And once again Jesus shows up on the shore. He calls out. ‘hey guys, hungry? I have a bunch of fish on the grill here. Come and be fed and then go feed others.’ 

To me there is a lot of good news in imagining the stories that way, a lot of room to repent and repent and repent. Good news: Jesus doesn’t give up on us as long as we are willing to try again. 

Then there is a kind of repentance that involves letting go of our expectations in order to return to the path we have been called to and, indeed, have chosen to follow. 

There are lovely midrash type stories of Zebedee’s response to his sons running off, ‘immediately,’ to follow Jesus. 

He would have liked to have gone off on some spiritual journey to find himself but somebody had to pay the bills. 

And all his hard work! He had built up a family business so there would be something to pass on to his children, give them a good livelihood so maybe they wouldn’t have to struggle quite as hard as he had to make something of himself. 

Then there was the business itself: it provided employees with a livelihood and helped feed people in the whole town not to mention through the countryside. What would happen if he had run off like that? What would happen to the widows and orphans he gave the unsold fish to each day?

Truth be told Zebedee was angry and he was hurt and his sons’ choices left him wondering about the choices he had made in life, the path he had followed. It took him a while, and a lot of talking to his wife and neighbors, to realize his sons’ needing to leave home and his way of life didn’t negate the value of his way of life. 

God may have called those boys to lives of prayer, love, and connection by following Jesus on an itinerant road. God, also, called Zebedee to a life of prayer, love, and connection – for him by a life imbedded in his community and serving those he knew well. 

Oh, he missed them, those wild sons of his, but by letting go of his expectations for their lives and trusting in God he was able to wish them well on their paths while renewing his dedication to his own. 

Thomas Keating has written, “To repent … means to change the direction in which you are looking for happiness.”  That was the repentance Zebedee came to. I wonder if it sounds familiar to you, too.

Turn around. Be willing to learn. Go get help. Let go of expectations. Repent, repent, repent. All of this is hard work. Repentance is not easy, for all that there are days when it seems like we have to repent 6 times before breakfast. So why do we bother, and why does Jesus call us over and over to repent? Because if we don’t we will find ourselves in hell someday? No. Because the kingdom of heaven has come near and Jesus wants us headed in the right direction so we don’t miss it! Repent!

Thanks be to God.

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