Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

The Rev. Dr. Matthew PottsThe Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D., Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity. File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Gazette

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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Dec. 4, 2022)

So first, I just wanted to say thank you to all of you who extended your condolences to me and to my family after the death of my mother a couple of weeks ago. I'm very grateful, and your prayers are felt deeply by us and your support is felt deeply. And I wanted to especially thank the university choir, which sent a lovely bouquet to our family. And everybody signed the card. Thank you. We love you. Not just because you're great singers. We love you because of who you are. And the bouquet was well received. Thank you.

I want to talk about repentance today, just like John the Baptist. "Repent." he says. "Repent. Repent." So I'm going to start with a little parenting story about repentance. When you're a parent, and especially I think if you're a parent of more than one child, there are a lot of investigative dilemmas. Someone comes demanding repentance from their sibling because they've been wounded by the other in some way. And then you tell that person, you try to fix it and they say, "Well he did this first. Well he did that first." And it keeps going, and going, and there's no resolution. This is a frequent experience.

I'm reminded of something that happened a couple of years ago. It was just before Christmas, actually. I looked back, I took a picture of the note, you'll hear about the note in a second. I took a picture of the note and it was just before Christmas. It was December 22nd, 2020. And there had been one of these issues where someone, I can't even remember who, it was between Danny, who's here today, and Sammy. And someone hurt somebody else and came in demanding justice from me. And so, I tried to get somebody to apologize, and the other person was like, "Well he did this first." And, "He did that first." And it went back and forth and back and forth. And at one point I just, you know, you don't want to get to the bottom of it, you just want it over.

And I also knew it was just before Christmas, just before Santa's visit. So I had some cards to play, which I don't always have. And so I said, "I don't care who started it, I want you both to go and write an essay about why you should not hurt your brother." Danny was six at the time. I don't know if essay writing was a skill I should have expected of him. However, Danny produced a beautiful essay, which I'm going to read in full. I tend not to read verbatim from the pulpit, but this I'm going to read verbatim. This is the note that I took a picture of that he delivered to me at the end of his essay writing to demonstrate his penance and repentance.

It reads as follows. "I need to be nice to my brother because I need to, because I might hurt him or his feelings. If Sam hurts me, I shouldn't hurt him back. I won't hurt Sam. I will never hurt Sam. I almost hit Sam with a brick and now I regret that." So we got to the bottom of it.

We have this figure of John the Baptist out in the wilderness calling for repentance. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He says it again and again. But he is also kind of distracting, in his camel hair cloth and his bug eating. And there's other stuff that's distracting in this lesson too. I want to talk about repentance. The message is clear repent, but there's a lot going on here. And so before I speak about repentance, around the way to me speaking about repentance, let me address a couple of other things.

First, this unquenchable fire that he talks about. The wheat will be separated from the chaff, and the chaff will be burned. I know what that sounds like, but I don't really think this is an image of hell or eternal punishment. In fact, the idea of hell as a fiery place had not yet been fully developed at the time of Jesus. I don't want to overstate that. There were some ideas of a fiery afterlife as punishment, but that was not fully developed here. And while Jesus does talk about hell in the Gospel of Matthew, the word that is translated from hell into English is gehenna, which is actually a trash dump outside Jerusalem where they burned garbage.

So I'm not sure this is about punishment, maybe it is, but I think it's about something different like purification. Because he doesn't say, the good will be winnowed, and the bad will be set to fire. He says, "All of you are going to be baptized by fire. All of you are going to receive the Holy Spirit and be baptized by fire." And what is useful, this is the agricultural image of separating wheat from chaff. What is useful in you, the wheat, the fruit. The fruit of the grain, that will be preserved, and the rest will fall away like ash.

So I think there's a suggestion of purification here. And indeed, baptism is a ritual of purification. It is in our Christian tradition. And also, the form of ritual bathing, that John is exhorting people to undertake, is also a ritual of purification. Now, in the ancient religion of Judea, there were lots of ritual bathing and ablutions. But what John is probably referring to here, or invoking here, was proselyte baptism, baptism for converts, for people who wanted to become Jewish. Men especially would have a ritual bathing, a baptism, and then they'd be circumcised.

So what's going on here, out in the wilderness with John, is he is asking people who are already Jewish, already Judeans, to come out and go through a conversion ritual to Judaism. And this might be a clue as to why the religious leaders are concerned, why the Pharisees and the Sadducees are coming out. Because this is not necessary. Why convert to something you already belong to? And I spent a lot of time when we were thinking about the Gospel of Luke, talking about the caricature of the Pharisees in the Gospel of Luke. That caricature is also, exists in the Gospel of Matthew, and it's something we need to be careful of as Christians.

And indeed, this passage has been interpreted in an antisemitic way throughout Christian history, but I don't think it needs to be. And in fact, I think there is something that resists antisemitism in this line. Because the gospel says that all Judea came out to John, all the Judeans, all the Jewish people, came out to John. And what he says to them is, "Do not presume that we have Abraham for our ancestor." That line, it is not warrant, that ancestry is not warrant for divine favor. Righteousness comes from somewhere else. The election of Israel is real and true, but it's different than righteousness. And that's what John is telling them. Righteousness comes from somewhere else.

And indeed, in our own day, it's white Christian nationalism that wants to look to ethnicity as the sign of favor, rather than to justice and righteousness. And so that's why I think there are actually roots that stand against racism and nationalism in this text. But what's important is, again, righteousness comes from elsewhere. Where does righteousness come from? What is righteousness? What does it look like? How do we have it? How do we find it? And for John, the answer is repentance. This baptism is a sign of repentance. You are baptized because you repent. And he says to them again and again, "Repent."

So repentance, what is it? The Greek word here is metanoia, which actually just means change of mind. Change your mind. It is a little bit stronger than that in the Greek, it means, of the meta part, noia is mind, the meta means like change, or after, or beyond. So it's something like going beyond your mind.

But in particular, I think this line refers back to a Hebrew word. John was not speaking Greek. The gospels are written in Greek, but John was not speaking Greek. And the word that's translated as repentance, or as the Greek metanoia from the Hebrew Bible, is teshuva. And that means turning around. That means to turn back or return. In fact, a decent Latin translation of turn back or turn around or teshuva is converso, convert. John wants these people to convert. Not their religion, to convert their lives. To show with their lives who they are, to whom they belong. To show with their lives, that they are descendants of Abraham in his faithfulness. But then, what does repentance look like? And there's lots of anxiety in the Christian tradition, for 2000 years, about how to repent well, what good repentance looks like, how to show you're really sorry.

As you might guess, I've been thinking about my mom a lot the last couple of weeks. And I remember when I was a child, before I went to school, my mom spoke to me in Japanese. And this is a joke in our family. There was one word in Japanese that my mom could say to me, and it would make me start crying immediately. And in fact, my brother used to try to get my mom to say it, because if she said it I would cry. And that word, it doesn't sound powerful, but for me it was, that word is mo. Which in Japanese just means like enough, enough already kind of thing. And I also remember, when I was at age, that my apology was not full and final and enough until I said it in Japanese, back to her. Gomen'nasai.

There are these practices we undertake to try to make our repentance obvious to others, to show others that our repentance is sincere. And as I said, there is this anxiety throughout the Christian tradition to show that our repentance is sincere. And in fact, there are all these traditions of self abasement, and self mortification. Traditions I don't particularly like, but which are part of our tradition where hurting one's self, or abasing one's self, or demeaning one's self, are how you show you're really sorry.

But that's not what John the Baptist is talking about out in the desert. I don't think it is. For all his fiery rhetoric. He doesn't want anybody abasing themselves, or mortifying themselves. He says one thing about how you show your penitence, your repentance. He says, "Bear fruit. Bear fruit worthy of repentance." The repentance is not the thing, the feeling is not the thing. The life that you live is how you show who you are. Repentance here, for John, doesn't mean groveling. John is not asking the crowds who visit him out in the wilderness to feel bad. He's asking them to do good. They are God's people. We are God's people, and he just wants us to act like it.

What does acting like it look like? What is the fruit of repentance that we might bear? And as in so many things, the example we have is Jesus. The next thing that happens after this line, after John is out there saying, "Bear fruit worthy of repentance." Go live your lives in a way that show who you are, from whom you descend. The next thing that happens after this line is Jesus shows up, and John baptizes Jesus with water. Like I have been baptized with water, like many of you have been baptized with water.

And so, what does Jesus' life look like after this moment? How does he bear fruit to this ritual he just has gone through? What does Jesus do first? He's driven out by the spirit into the wilderness, a baptism of the spirit. And what he does in the wilderness is important. He goes out into that same wilderness where John was and he rejects all forms of power. He's tempted with every form of power that can be offered, and he turns away from all of it. And when he is done with that, he doesn't just go home and watch football, he does another thing. He turns away from power, and then he turns toward the afflicted. He goes out, he turns away from power. And then the rest of chapter four, everyone comes to him. And it says, "He turns no one away." Whatever their ailment was, he heals them, and he ministers to them. That's chapter four.

Then chapter five, he goes up on the top of a mountain and the crowds are around him. These people who have come to him for healing and he preaches them the sermon on the mount, blessed are you poor. Blessed to you who hunger, blessed are you who mourn. Love your enemy. And that sermon takes a couple of chapters. It's a long one.

And then from there, he's off again, ministering to enemies. The first person he runs into is a centurion, a Roman. Ministering to enemies, and outcasts, and indigents, and anybody else in need of a sign of God's love. And he keeps going. He keeps widening his reach, until it touches everyone. He keeps going through the gospel, until he arrives at the cross, and through that cross, widens his reach and touches even us. Even you and me. Us folks here on the other side of the world 2000 years later, sitting in this sanctuary. He touches us. We who are waiting, once again, this advent, to hear the good news. To hear the story of his birth in this world, which is still full of enemies, and outcasts, and indigents. Here we are, waiting for some good news. Meanwhile, John and Jesus are waiting for us to be that good news, to live that good news, and to bear some fruit worthy of the love we have been shown.