Sermon for the Third Sunday of Epiphany

The Rev. Matthew Potts, Sunday Service Oct. 30, 2022The 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 Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church Communications

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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, Jan. 22, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus begins his ministry. The verses that come before this, he's just been driven into the desert by the Holy Spirit and tempted. He returns and then he begins his ministry, and he begins his ministry with these words, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." Repentance is one of our themes here at the church this year. We're focusing on climate change in a lot of our programming. Last semester, we focused on apocalypse. This semester, we're talking about repentance. There's a question about what repentance is, what makes for authentic, genuine repentance.

I'm not going to name any names, but this came up in our family this week. One of my children harmed another one of my children, and I said to them, "What do you do when you harm someone? Say sorry." "Okay." "Say sorry!" "Fine, sorry." I said, "I'm sorry, that's not an adequate sorry. You need to say sorry and make it a real sorry." What is real repentance? What does it look like? In fact, there is this difficulty, this problem with repentance. How do you get inside someone and know whether they are earnest? They're authentic? How does someone demonstrate that? Their earnestness, their authenticity, the realness, the reality of their repentance?

I have some ideas about that in my book, which came out last Fall, available where all good books are sold, but Jesus has better ideas about it and he talks about it today I think. It's not obvious, I don't think, it's not altogether clear that what Jesus is saying is, "This is what repentance looks like." But I think in this passage today, we have Jesus telling us, "This is what repentance looks like." So Jesus, he begins his teaching saying, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near." It says that before he does this, John is arrested, John who had the same message by the way, the exact same words, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

John is arrested and it says that Jesus withdrew to Galilee. The word for withdrew here can mean take flight. You might read this as Jesus running away because John, with whom he's closely associated, has been arrested. So, Jesus is escaping deep into the back country of Galilee, and it is kind of back country. I'll say more about that in a minute, but I don't think this is Jesus fleeing in that sense. I think he's rushing. There's an urgency in his going to Galilee, but it's not because he's trying to get away from Judea or get away from Herod. As I said, he just finished this temptation in the desert and he's been told that he can have whatever he wants. All power is his if he wants it.

He's not running away from anything I don't think. He's running towards something, and what he is running toward is Galilee of the Gentiles. Why would Jesus run the Galilee of the Gentiles? That's where he's from, first of all. But Galilee is a complicated region at this time. Galilee is one of the ancient tribes of Israel, the tribe of Naphtali. As we heard in our lesson, Naphtali was the son of Jacob and Rachel's handmaid, Bilhah. And so, this was one of the ancient tribes of Israel, one of the ancient regions of Israel, but it had a very complicated history by the time Jesus was doing his ministry.

In the 10th century BCE, King Solomon gave several cities in Galilee to the Phoenician king and his ally, Hiram. And then in the eighth century BCE, the Assyrians overran it, took it over, conquered it, and for 700 years, Galilee belonged to the Assyrians, Galilee of the Gentiles, of non-Jewish people. It was only in the first century BCE, just before Jesus, that Galilee was reconquered by the Judean. There were still people practicing Judaism there, but a lot of people converted back to Judaism or to Judaism for the first time. Ethnically, religiously, these categories are complicated, but Galilee is a good example of how ethnic and religious categories are complicated.

At the time of Jesus, it was composed mostly of small, poor towns. It was this back country place of ambiguous meaning, marginal, unimportant, neglected. When John is arrested and Jesus begins his ministry, he doesn't go to Jerusalem. He doesn't go to the power centers of the region. He goes here to the back country where the marginal and the unimportant and the neglected are, and he begins his ministry there. More on that in a moment. He says what I've told you he says. He goes there and says, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Now, I don't know about you, but that line, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," sounds to me like, "Say sorry or you're going to get it."

Maybe, it sounds that way to me because that's what I mean when I say it to my children. But that's what it sounds like. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Say sorry, because you're going to get it or you're going to get it. Judgment is coming. I think maybe it does mean that, but I think it also means something else. It carries some other meanings as well. The word that we translate as reconciliation... Sorry, as repentance in this line, in both its Hebrew and its Greek meanings, has the sense of turning around. It means less feel sorry, feel something, and means more like turn around, turn back to the right way. So, this line also could mean something like turn and look, right beside you is the kingdom of heaven.

Look, right beside you. Just turn and look, right beside you is the kingdom of heaven. It's right next to you. It's at your hand. It's right there. I think even this sense of it being right next to you, that also can be specified further. Later on in this gospel, and in fact, in three of the gospels, Jesus is asked directly, "What is the greatest commandment in all the scripture?" Jesus has to give two. He can't reduce it to one. He says, "Love God and love your neighbor." I've preached before about how this category of neighbor is really important because Jesus doesn't say, "Love your friend," or, "Love your colleague," or even, "Love this stranger." Jesus says, "Love your neighbor."

That word neighbor means whoever is next to you, whoever is near you. Love God, love your neighbor. These two hang together. They cannot be pulled apart. The kingdom of heaven is next to you. Love your neighbor who is next to you, which is the same thing as loving God. These things all hang together. This is what Jesus is saying, "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Turn and look beside you, because right there beside you is God's holiness. Not somewhere up in the sky, that's not where the kingdom of heaven is. Not somewhere off in the future looming with its judgment, that's not where the kingdom of heaven is. Not in some other land or some other place, but in this place, even if it's a back country like Galilee.

In this place, in Cambridge, in this church. In your place and among your people, turn and look beside you. That's where the kingdom of heaven is. To their credit, this is what the disciples recognize when they follow Jesus. Against all odds, in this back country, when Jesus walks beside them and asks them to follow, they see even here, even in this place, even among these people, the kingdom of heaven can be and is and they follow. Two meanings here, repent, apologize, say sorry because judgment is coming, and then the other one, look beside you because the kingdom of heaven is right there. I'm not trying to elevate one meaning over the other. I'm suggesting in fact that they go together, that they have to go together. That's why I began with this question, what does real repentance look like?

Let me give or offer a contemporary example. Last year, the state of Florida passed a law that prohibits instruction in the public schools that could make any student feel any responsibility or guilt over the past actions of other members of their race. This is the language of the legislation. Any teaching that can make a person feel responsibility or guilt for the past actions of other members of their race. In fact, this week in the state of Florida, advanced placement African-American studies was stricken from the curriculum, rejected from being included in the curriculum, on these grounds, because it might make a person feel responsibility or guilt for the past actions of their race. Think about this. For fear of feeling the need to take responsibility in the present, we are refusing to acknowledge the truth about our past.

Jesus begins his ministry in this chapter, in this gospel, calling for repentance. But the call for repentance is bound up deeply and integrally and unavoidably in recognizing that God lives among the marginal and among the dispossessed and among the neglected, whether that place is Galilee in first century Judea or now. Repentance is also bound up in the fact that we are called to love all these, the marginal and the dispossessed and neglected. Love them as our neighbors, love them as ourselves, love them as if the kingdom of heaven were theirs. Stay tuned, Jesus is about to tell us the kingdom of heaven is theirs in a couple of weeks, and we do have better versions of this than what's happened in Florida. Not faultless versions, but better versions of this.

Last spring, our university, Harvard University, released its Legacy of Slavery report and tried to speak as frankly and as directly as possible about how enslaved persons were indispensable to the building of this university and its wealth. Along with that acknowledgement, along with that apology, along with that act of repentance, also came the promise of a hundred million dollars to rectify some of that wrong. But it doesn't stop just because it's happened. That's why the Harvard chaplains lead tours around Harvard yard as an act of penitence to see where these people, these enslaved persons who helped built this place, lived and died. At the Divinity school where I teach, it's why we're continuing to have year-long conversations about the legacy of slavery report because using that $100 million wisely will mean returning again and again to these acts of repentance, these acts of acknowledgement of past wrong.

This spring, as part of our climate year, a group of 12 students and Anna Burnham, our student engagement coordinator, and I will be traveling to Iceland because within 50 to 70 years, all the glaciers in Iceland are meant to be melted, gone, and we are going as an act of penitence, acknowledgement of wrong. But not just that, we are also learning about how Arctic peoples are being relocated, how their lands are being lost and what we can do. We're hoping to be transformed by this act of penance, so we can learn how better to be responsible, how better to be accountable to those who are going to suffer and are already suffering due to climate change.

Repentance is the first word out of the mouth of Jesus when he begins his ministry and repentance is the bedrock principle of Christian faith and life, because repentance means faith. It means believing in God's ability to forgive us and to make whole what we have broken. It means believing in God's power to heal wounds and grant new life. It means believing in God's power to live in and with the harmed and the wounded, believing in our power of God working through us to offer those people consolation. The failure to repent is the failure of faith, and real faith and real repentance means acting as if God walked among the harmed. Indeed, it is why we worship a victim on a cross.

Real faith and repentance also means remembering why they are wounded and who wounded them and how we might be responsible in some way for those wounds, but also how we might become responsible for tending those wounds now and in the future. Again, repentance is the bedrock principle of Christian life. Ironically, Christians have historically been really bad at repentance, a failure for which all of us who call ourselves Christians ought to repent now. We are surrounded as we know by Christians who refuse to repent, who enact laws against repentance, but we are also surrounded by opportunities to make repentance real and to make it right. Look beside you, the kingdom of heaven is right there, right at hand.