ON THE PATH: REPENTANCE

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Romans 2:1-11

September 16, 2007

Romans 2

¹Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. ²You say, “We know that God’s judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.” ³Do you imagine, whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? ⁴Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? ⁵But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. ⁶For he will repay according to each one’s deeds: ⁷to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; ⁸while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. ⁹There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, ¹⁰but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. ¹¹For God shows no partiality.

Driving through the badlands, dust kicking up behind the tires as you barrel down the part gravel-part paved road. Your goal is to cross the bridge somewhere ahead and come out into the cool of the towering mountains. But then there is a sign. It reads: Bridge Out Ahead. Your traveling companion says, “You have to turn around.” You reply, “Well, maybe if we just bear a little to the left, we will find another way.” And the gravel shoots from under your wheels as you pull off onto a side road still heading for a bridge that leads nowhere.

For the five weeks of September we are in a sermon series called On the Path to Salvation: Conviction – which means we actually come to see our acts as sinful

Confession – we tell those sins to God

Repentance – we are sorry for those sinful acts and don’t want to do them again

Forgiveness – forgiven by God

Salvation – saved by God

Today we talk about that much-maligned, but life-altering concept, repentance. The word has almost become a standing joke with modern Americans. How else can you account for that guy at every sports event on TV wearing the tie-dye t-shirt and the rainbow wig, holding the sign that says, “Repent”? Does he seriously expect anyone to take him seriously or is it a joke? I was skiing in Utah once and got to talking with a family who told me about their favorite priest, an off-beat character that I am certain I would have liked. They said Father Phil stood up for his sermon one Sunday and said: “I was at a St. Patrick’s Day party that ran very late last night. I’m not feeling real well, it’s Lent…so quit sinning, repent…so much for this sermon, let’s get on with the service.” Don’t get your hopes up; you won’t be quite that fortunate this morning! And I once had a large poster in my office that had in huge letters with an exclamation point the word, “REPENT!” In small print at the bottom of the poster is read, “P.S. If you have already repented, please disregard this notice.” Old-fashioned, laughable imagery or an essential element in our understanding of salvation? What is repentance?

After a chapter describing torrid sins of the flesh, Paul the Apostle launches into the members of the church at Rome with a warning that their judgmental attitudes amount to the same level of sin as the perversions he has listed, and that they can’t escape the wrath of God by just preaching against sin. The old farmer came in from church and his wife asked, “What did the parson preach about today?” “Sin,” the farmer replied. “Well, what did he say about it?” she insisted. “He was against it” was the simple reply. But it is not enough to make a loud outcry against the public sins of others, for sin is a condition that hits us all and we are supposed to be taking care of our own sins first. How many of us have shaken our heads and wagged our fingers at Britney, Paris and Lindsay, the drugged-out, jailbird pop stars, when our own lives are filled with error and bad judgment and greed and spiritual malnutrition? Then Paul asks if perhaps his readers, then and now, are despising the kindness of a God who doesn’t immediately strike down those public peddlers of perversion. Paul implies that we had better hope that God is full of that same kindness for us! Paul says, “Do you not realize that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” God is trying to lead us to repentance.

Many people think that repentance means being sorry, but there are all levels of being sorry.

1. I am sorry that I got caught.

2. I am sorry that I did that but that’s just the way I am.

3. I am sorry but I had to do that.

4. I am sorry that you don’t like what I did but I’m not sorry I did it.

All of these amount to a lot of sorry excuses for sin. But none of it is real repentance. Real repentance says I recognize my actions as a sin against God, I am willing to face that, and I don’t want to do it again. It takes conviction and confession to get to repentance. But many of us are convicted of our sin and confess it to God only in hopes of getting the situation solved, the black marks purged. And that’s all we are interested in—just getting our record cleared. It’s sort of like paying off a parking ticket. It doesn’t really mean that we regret what we have done. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t intend to park illegally again. It is like St. Augustine’s prayer when he was still quite a sinner: “Dear Lord, forgive me. Make me chaste and pure—but not yet!” Not yet! Forgive me this last sin, but don’t ask me not to do it again.

That is not repentance. After several miles of bumping across the baked, dry path that served for a road, it became obvious that there wasn’t another bridge spanning the chasm that gaped between your car and the refreshing mountains. Your traveling companion says, “You have to turn around.” But you say, “No, I can see the mountains from here; we are so close. Let’s just veer off a little farther to the south; there has to be another way to get there.”

The Greek word for “repentance” is metanoia. “Meta” meaning “after” or “change” and “noia” meaning “to think.” Therefore repentance means an afterthought or a change of mind. I started out with one purpose but after thinking it through, I changed my mind. I was headed toward one goal but I have decided to do something else entirely. Repentance doesn’t just mean saying you are sorry for some sin done against someone or against God (for all sins are ultimately committed against God even if they are aimed at another person or even at yourself). Repentance means that something has changed in your mind. You realize that was not the way to go, the thing to do, the path to take. You don’t want to go there anymore. It is a renewal of your life, a new direction that the prophet Ezekiel says will gain you a new heart and a new spirit. (Ezekiel 18:30-32) Repentance is a turning away, even a turning around from the road you have been traveling.

I don’t know what it was that made him that way. His provincial upbringing, something about the war, a fear of economic competition, I don’t know…but he hated oriental people, just hated them. The horrid slurs dripped venomously from his mouth: chink, jap, gook, slant-eye. He never missed an opportunity to vilify any Asian he saw in person or on TV. Until he played in a golf tournament with a buddy of his in which the tournament director assigned you to a golf cart partner. “And guess who I got, Bill?” he said, “A Mr. John Kagiwada.” My mouth dropped open, fearing what he was going to tell me next. Had he refused to ride in the cart and walked the whole course instead? Was it homicide on the second hole? “What did you do?!” I asked, wanting to know but afraid to know at the same time. And he responded, “He was the nicest man I have ever met. We had a great time together.” And, personifying true repentance, he added, “Bill, I think I’ve been wrong.” A change of mind, a change of heart that leads to a change of life—that is repentance.

God is leading us to repent. Not a quota-grabbing traffic cop who delights to catch us in trespass, not a hanging judge who notches the noose count on the sides of his desk, not a pietistic sin-spotter who savors the sins of others and can’t wait to share with her peers, but a kind, loving God who wants us to complete our journeys and reach our potential and find our mountaintops.

You slam on the brakes, tires skidding across the pebbled surface, ricocheting off the protruding rocks, your foot trying to push the brake petal right through the floorboard. And the car slides to a stop with the front bumper hanging over a sheer cliff hundreds of feet above the river valley below. After you can breathe again, you stammer, “Maybe I had better turn around.” And God, your traveling companion, just nods…and smiles.