TURNING AROUND BEFORE IT=S TOO LATE

(Preached on Sunday, March 11, 2007)

ANo, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.@                                                                                               -Luke 13:5

 

Jesus is pretty doggone harsh in this passage from Luke.

Instead of offering any comfort he says the real demand, in the face of such terrible tidings, is will you repent?  Jesus says, you cannot look at a person=s life and definitely tell whether they are a good or bad person.  In fact, everyone of us has some good and some bad.  We all have things we need to repent.  And if we don=t, it won=t be a matter of God punishing us, but rather of our actions catching up with us so that we receive the just rewards for those actions.

 

Repentance is one of those religious words we throw around far too easily and don=t really understand.  We think of repentance as saying AI=m sorry.@

But that isn=t repentance.  That is an apology.

In the Hebrew scriptures, the sacred writings which informed Jesus= life, the word Arepent@ is used very rarely. But the idea of repentance is often expressed by such words as Aturn,@ and Areturn.@

In this sense, Aturning@ means much more than a mere change of mind, though it includes this; it represents a reorientation of one=s whole life and personality.  It is not just a change at the level of mere vigilance, monitoring our behavior, but rather is a change at the deeper level of attitude, affection, and attachment.

In fact, the Hebrew faith understood that all human beings can offer to God is not their righteousness but their contrition.  It is God alone who must give to human creatures repentance and a clean heart.

 

Christian scholar and author C. S. Lewis describes this understanding of repentance very clearly when he writes:  AWe all want progress.  But progress means getting nearer tot he place where you want to be.  And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.  If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. ... There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake.  And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes.  We are on the wrong road.  And if that is so, we must go back.  Going back is the quickest way on.@

 

This is a radical approach to life that is not very easy to do.  But it is almost always the necessary action if we are on the wrong path, on a path that is destructive to us or to others around us.  Tricia Cunningham took such a dramatic step of turning around in her eating habits.  As a result, she grew healthier, and lost weight (going from 300 pounds to 130 pounds).  She described the moment of change in the Life Weekend magazine on Friday.  AI=d spent my life yo-yo dieting.  Then one day C August 28, 1999, at 9:30 a.m., to be precise C I was getting ready to watch a sporting event with friends.  I had something to eat with my morning cigarette.  Suddenly, everything started spinning.  I thought my heart was going to burst.  I never smoked again, and I didn=t eat anything for the rest of the day, nor for three days after.  I was afraid food would cause another panic attack.  On the fourth morning, I realized I couldn=t keep not eating and I was famished, so for breakfast, I ate the dinner I=d prepared for my children the night before.  That=s when I had my reverse moment.  I looked in the mirror and instead of hating what I saw, as I usually would, I decided I could change it.  I had to reverse course, to change my life, and to do it, I would flip-flop everything.@

What she did as a result of this insight was to start eating dinners for breakfast and breakfast for dinner.  She developed a pattern of eating her largest, heaviest meal in the morning and a small, very light meal in the evening.  She repented.  She turned around.

 

When we understand repentance as Aturning@ or Areturning@ we begin to see that it is not just about turning away from some negative but also involves turning to some positive.  It is a costly turning.  A change in the direction for one=s life.  Repentance is hard and painful. It is also remarkably liberating!

 

This is a very timely, vital, critically important lesson for us today.  The time has come for the human community C including people of faith and especially we who live in the western world C to turn our lives around and move in a new direction.  I am convinced, because I hear more and more experts being convinced, that we are running out of time on global warming.  We are like that fig tree that has not born fruit, and not born fruit, and not born fruit C so that the owner of the vineyard is ready to rip us out by our roots and replace us with some other tree that is more productive.  We are living on borrowed time, as the gardener attempts one last round of fertilizer and aeration of the soil to see if we will finally bear fruit.

 

Bill McKibben is a theologian who has written many books on environmental, cultural and religious topics for years.  In a recent article in Christian Century he calls for a movement to combat climate change and he is calling for that movement to materialize quickly to take a first action on the Saturday after Easter.  He quotes James Hansen, the country=s foremost climatologist who for decades as a NASA researcher ran the most powerful computer model of the climate.  Hansen has said that we have a decade to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere or else we will live C his words C on a Atotally different planet.@  He calculates that the United States needs to reduce carbon emissions by more than 2 percent a year to have any chance of staying on the right side of catastrophe.  We need C at the very least C a federal commitment to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.

 

That is a hard target, a huge task.  But by no means an impossible goal.  New technologies are steadily appearing.  We don=t lack for science or engineering, nor indeed for economic mechanisms to make a transition more efficient, or policy proposals to guide our work.  What we lack is simply political, and personal, will.

That is why McKibben says we need a movement.  A movement as urgent, as morally committed, as willing to sacrifice, as creative, as passionate as the civil rights movement was a generation ago.

 

I believe he is right, and I also believe that what he is really calling for is repentance C a turning around of our lives.  To reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent in 40 years will require a dramatic rethinking, re-visioning of our lives.  We cannot keep living the way we live, each of us driving our own personal gas guzzling, carbon emitting automobile.

We cannot keep using electricity in greater and greater amounts so that power companies add more and more carbon to the air creating it.

We cannot keep destroying the forests and the jungles and building human artifacts, engineering feats, and industrial activities everywhere on the earth.  We cannot keep thinking only of human interests, as though we human creatures are the center of everything.  We cannot keep devoting all our psychic and spiritual and physical energies on money and things, working for more and more in order to accumulate more and more.  We must stop, take a step back, and engage in a reflective re-evaluation of life.  We must ask ourselves the question AWhat constitutes a high quality of life?@ Is it really more possessions?  Or is it, in the words of that old Shaker hymn, ATo turn, turn will be our delight, >Till by turning, turning we come round right.@