We are a homeschooling family. Recently we got a writing program that begins with a DVD series on how to teach writing. At one point the presenter talked about the need in writing, and speaking, to reiterate things, that we need to hear things more than once in order to understand them, but we have to use different words or people just zone out. He said, “people need repetition, but abhor redundancy.” He named for me a problem I have with Advent. Repent.
John the Baptist said repent. Repent, I’ve been told, means to turn around. Now, when I was first Catholic, being baptized at 27, and I heard repent, it filled me with spiritual energy. I was making a complete change in my life, entering the Church, and taking on this faith as my own. But after a decade, and every Advent and Lent I’m being told to turn around, I’m thinking, wasn’t last year’s turn good enough? But every year I’m being told to turn around and turn around and turn around. It’s just spinning! I have to relearn what “repent” means.
I know that there is more to repentance than arbitrary reversal. Repentance is about orienting myself toward God. And I know that I need the repetition, that I need to regularly re-orient myself. It’s like when my kids get squirrelly at dinner and I tell them to sit up straight and face the table. They haven’t left the meal, but they need to re-straighten themselves. I need to re-straighten myself. But hearing the same word, repent, is redundant.
The longer I live, the more aware I am of the difference between what I say and what I do. Even when I think I’ve made big leaps in spiritual development, I later realize how many contradictions I still carry. I have said for years that I support fair trade, but if you were to audit my grocery receipts, it wouldn’t be obvious. It’s like that vignette that if they made Christianity illegal, would there be enough evidence to conflict? I talked about fair trade but I didn’t do it. Buying fair trade was a nagging tug inside me, something that I knew I should do, it was something that I talked about, but it wasn’t something that I actually did much.
Perhaps that is the turning of repentance. Not to turn around and around and around, but to turn those tugs into actions. Each one of us has tugs in our hearts, probably a lot more than one. They may not be about buying fair trade, but God tends to put these persistence urges into our hearts to simmer for a while before we take action. Advent is a time to listen to one of those naggings and to move it into action.
In our gospel reading John the Baptist called the Pharisees and Sadducees a brood of vipers. That is harsh. It’s especially harsh because if I put myself in the story, I have to admit that I am a Pharisee. Myself, and most of us here, are committed ministers. We are the ones who have studied, who have received formation, who have committed our lives in service to the Church and the community. The Pharisees were the educated, committed ones too. John said, don’t think that any of that education or formation counts for anything. “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.” His warning resounds in my ears. I have to turn a tug into action.
In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah gives us a poetic vision of the ideal king, the king he foresaw in Jesus. Where justice would be constant, where the poor would be protected, and where conflict would be settled non-violently. After all that’s how calves and lions and can lay down together. This ideal king would be known by his fear of the Lord, his respect for the authentic power of God the Almighty, and no fear of earthly power.
I am struck by the way John the Baptist describes this same ideal king. But instead of a ruler, he describes one who separates the wheat from chaff. I have never winnowed wheat, but at John’s time I’ll bet most everybody had. It was a common experience and I decided I wanted that experience too. So this fall, I planted some wheat. I’ve never grown wheat before, and I doubt it will be more than a symbolic amount, but I wanted the experience at least once. So I planted a few rows in the garden this October and it grew a few inches high before winter settled in. In the spring it should keep growing and by the middle of summer will have turned a golden yellow. We’ll cut the stems and gather them into bundles to finish drying. Then we’ll thrash them to knock the wheat heads off, probably by whacking them inside a five-gallon bucket. Each of those wheat heads will have a little lightweight sheath on them, the chaff, that we’ll need to get off. You could pick them off one by one, but that would take forever. I’m told that it’s easier to throw them into the air, while somebody waves a fan, a winnowing fan. Those lightweight sheathes will blow away and the heavier wheat will fall down. Jesus will “gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” What we need is weight! Good fruit gives us weight.
I have met people who are so solidly authentic that they have weight. There is substance to them. They are the people who would fall to Jesus’ threshing floor, not because they have education or formation, but because they have done the much harder work of bearing good fruit, and of doing it year after year and year. They have of lived out what they say they believe, they have resolved conflicts non-violently and have dealt justly with the poor.
They are probably people who have spent many Advents and Lents turning those nagging urges into visible actions in their lives. They have repented.
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