Repentance leads to Joy which leads to Christ

One of my Kairos prison ministry friends forwarded an email to me and a bunch of her other Kairos co-workers that is apparently making the rounds of cyberspace this year, containing an imaginary letter from Jesus. In it, Jesus offers some practical ways of drawing closer to him in order to experience more fully the joy of his presence on the anniversary of his birth.

Set up a nativity in your own yard if your community won’t.

Write a letter of thanks and hope to a soldier.

Visit someone in a nursing home.

Send a card to the President, telling him you will be praying for him every week.

Spend as much time with your children as your spend money on them.

Forgive someone who hurt you.

Give everyone a warm smile; at this time of year, when so many are lonely, it could be the difference between hope and despair, life and death.

Wish the cashiers at the stores a Merry Christmas, even if they can’t return the favor.

Support a missionary.

Support the Salvation Army, and in our case, I’m sure Jesus would also add the Thrift Shop or the Care Center.
John the Baptist offers similar advice in today’s gospel.

If you have two coats, give one of them to someone who doesn’t have one.

If you have more than enough to eat, share with someone who doesn’t have enough to eat.

Be content with your wages and don’t take advantage of others.

Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest and one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, came up with 12 steps, rooted in Holy Scripture, that have proven invaluable, not only for alcoholics, but for all of us who are powerless in one way or another over the many temptations that confront us in life: temptations to pride, anger, greed, lust, gluttony, envy and boredom. Let me remind you of those 12 steps.

1. We admitted we were powerless over [sin] alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Acting on any of this godly wisdom will be spiritually effective if it is an act of repentance, an action which we do not normally do, an action which runs contrary to our natural way of thinking or acting or speaking. But we dare to act in this way because we believe that the Lord is near, that he is in the very midst of our lives, and not at some great distance, and that the steps which we take will draw us even closer to the Lord. Joy is the feeling we experience when we sense the near and gracious presence of the Lord. The joy that we experience is like a signpost, pointing us toward the Lord and encouraging us to draw even closer to him.

Paul commands us to rejoice in the Lord always because the Lord is always near. We can be gentle with ourselves and with those around us precisely because the Lord is near, and not far off. We do not have to worry about anything if he is near, if he hears us when we pray, if he knows our needs before we ask and offers us the means of remaining faithful to him and therefore to ourselves and to others.

Zephaniah even goes so far as to say that the Lord rejoices in us, that he is determined to draw closer and closer to us, even more than we rejoice in him. He seeks us out, even when we are looking for pleasure or happiness in other places, or when we come to believe that God has given up on us or abandoned us to our own frustrating and failing attempts to try and carry on without him. It’s easy for us to feel this way, to reach this conclusion, to believe that God is a cop and the only reason he ever comes near to us is to arrest us and to punish us for making such a mess of our lives.

In the case of God’s people during the lifetime of the prophet Zephaniah, God did indeed use the Babylonians as the rod of his discipline, to frustrate his people’s attempt to live without him, but not as a cop, but as a loving Father seeking to shape the will of his wayward children without crushing their spirits. Zephaniah announces that God is in their midst to renew them in his love, to save those who are lame and to gather those who have been cast out, to take away their shame and to give them lips of praise as he restores their fortunes. In their case, the prophet calls on them to repent by doing something they hadn’t done in a long time, to sing aloud, to shout, to rejoice all their hearts to God as a way of expressing their faith that the Lord was indeed in their midst to bless them and not to announce any further judgment or disaster.

The fact that even tax collectors and soldiers came out to be baptized by John was an indication of just how disillusioned everyone was with their own various walks of life and how much everyone, even tax collectors and soldiers, who had the power to do pretty much as they pleased, was ready to follow John’s advice and try something new, being baptized in the Jordan, publicly confessing their sins, if that is what it would take to prepare for the appearance of the Messiah and all his blessings. There were still a few who clung stubbornly to the pride they felt in being descended from Abraham, but John crushed their pride, insisting that the coming Messiah had the power to raise up children from the very stones at their feet, that all therefore needed to repent.

So take the time between now and Christmas to do that one thing that will be a genuine act of repentance for you, something you would not normally do, but are willing to do because you want to believe that the Lord is in fact near, even if you can’t see him at the moment, and that he is ready to bless you, despite all the ways in which you have resisted or ignored him in the past. It may be something from Jesus’ imaginary letter: forgiving someone who’s hurt us. It may be something that John recommended to those who came out to be baptized by him at the Jordan: being content with our wages. It may be one of the 12 steps: making amends, taking inventory, confessing our weakness. It may be something that the Spirit invites you to do. I don’t know exactly what my act of repentance will be, but I know it will involve doing what Paul suggests, being gentle with myself and with those around me when it would be very tempting to take the bull by the horns and try to make it, whatever it is, happen, trusting instead that the Lord is near to bless us all during this holy time. Whatever it is, for you or for me, let’s be sure we do it, knowing that we will experience once more and always the joy of the Lord, who is the desire and longing of our hearts. AMEN.