I was looking through a box in our basement the other day and came across a twenty-year-old copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Remember those? It’s been a long time since I’ve navigated with a paper map, but I have distinct memories of road trips as a kid where I got to be the one tracing our path on the map with my finger, or flipping through the pages to look up our destination street’s coordinates on the grid. Maps and printed step-by-step directions were helpful, sure, until you miss a turn and perhaps don’t realize it for a few miles.
These days, one of the phone apps I use the most is Google Maps. It’s usually pretty accurate (well, except on the Fort Pitt Bridge!) and has the added bonus of giving traffic alerts and estimated arrival times and alternate routes. It’s so helpful to have a voice speak up when I go the wrong way, letting me know that I need to turn around in order to get back on the route I intended to travel.
 |
| Photo by Ravi Palwe on Unsplash |
In today’s Gospel reading, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness of Judea with an important message - “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” In some ways, his call to repentance is like the voice on the GPS - you’ve strayed from the route, time to repent, turn around, go in a new direction. God’s vision for the world is nearing - are you prepared to join it? The way of the Lord is clear - are you walking in it?
People from Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to hear John, and be baptized, and release the burdens they carried by confessing their sins. Certainly the wilderness is an apt place for this work. The wilderness setting might have the people recall the stories of salvation history where God’s people wandered for forty years after their deliverance from enslavement in Egypt. Those wilderness years were a time of guidance and trust, of tough lessons and abundant provision. Through it all, God patiently called the people to follow in the way, and eventually they reached the promised land. John’s appearance, too, with his camel-skin clothes, connected to the people’s shared past, perhaps bringing to mind the great prophet Elijah - here is someone who is a man of God. Here is someone to pay attention to.
What John makes clear in his wilderness proclamation is that repentance is not an inheritance, or a feeling. Repentance, rather, is an action, a way of life. It’s a continual recalculating - of our choices, and our thoughts, and our lives - as we follow the way of Jesus. This is challenging work, to be sure! Repentance requires paying attention, humility to admit when we’re wrong, and the willingness to live differently.
This can easily sound like one more thing to do, or, realistically, one more thing to feel guilty about not doing in an already busy season. The good news, though? Repentance is not what saves us. It is by God’s grace alone that we are transformed, made whole, set free. Dead branches are chopped off, extraneous chaff is blown away, extra baggage jettisoned so that we might more easily follow the road toward the kingdom God is ushering in, and live the life of wholeness and shalom that God intends.
It is in the waters of baptism that we die to sin and rise to new life – and not just once, but every day. Baptism is not some kind of guard or guarantee that everything will be fine; it’s not guardrails that keep us from straying from the road. Instead, baptism is a promise - that we belong to God, that we are forgiven, that nothing can separate us from the love of God. When we stray from the way that God intends - the way of justice, truth, and love; the way of peace and wholeness - we are called to repent, to turn around, to return to the way of the Lord. Again and again God draws us back - back to relationship, back to wholeness, back to life.
Comments
Post a Comment