Lent 2 - Year C

There is no getting away for the call to repentance in Lent. I was reflecting on this, in light of the Gospel today, and the imagery that came to me was of ... the beach.

There is something about the beach, the water and the sand, that many people are very drawn to. In Australia, of course, it is the main leisure holiday, "going to the beach". A key basis of our culture is landscape, and we are captioned in images of our heart of desert and red rock, and our enormous edge of water and beach.

For me, arriving at the seaside is not arriving until my feet are actually in the water. As I get out of the car I am listening, listening for the sound of the water pounding as testimony to me finally being there. As I cross the sand, I am already anticipating the feeling of the water of the waves coming and surrounding me. And then it does, and something in me becomes right, a connection, and I feel something go from me and a renewal, a resettling, happening within me. Just with a wave of water touching my feet.....

This reflection on the effect of the waves in my life has come in this Lent time because of the message of repentance that is the driving force of this pre-Easter time. It has come because it seems to me we are caught up in the scripture stories that bring us continual calls for repentance, like waves in our life. And the continual calls for repentance are not because we never do, but because we always must.

It is such a unique call of the church, this call for repentance of sin. We cannot get away from the reality that the whole of Jesus' ministry is based on that call. In the gospels we are told he began with the words.... "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." And then in his final commission to his disciples, according to Luke, Jesus says... "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem."

So we who are Christians are not only to be part of the action of repentance, but are to proclaim it as the way, indeed the only way, to live and be with God.
I don't hear a lot about this from the pulpit - which is also saying I don't preach a lot about it either! It's a hard thing to market, giving this message to people of not being up to scratch and where is their ‘sorry statement'.

Here's the thing. Repentance is not about saying sorry; in fact, it would seem it is not about "sorry God" at all. It is about a primeval, a basic action of instinct, as eternal as the waves of the ocean holding the rhythm and gravity of this world.

True repentance is acknowledging the human condition not only of myself, but of humanity's relationship with Creator God. We are not fully right in God's eyes, and it continues to be so. And our confession of this is very much in that balance of reflecting on not only what we have done, but also what we have failed to do. The sin of omission is as great as those things we can readily see as not living as God would want us to.

Repentance is getting real about our sin of omission. And that is very simply about not living the true relationship with God that should fill our lives all the time, in everything we do. Every thought, every action, indeed our breathing needs to be of Christ thought, Christ action, Christ breath. We continually turn away from living so; repentance is turning back to being so. Christ is our gravitational force in life; those are the waves of our life we need to be part of.

The key joy here, and there is always joy because God loves us so much, is that God knows what we are like. In other words, we are already forgiven. Just as the waves are not still, God knows our lives are like that.... continual movement back and forth in our relationship with God. But it's ok because the call for repentance is for those waves to keep coming. We can do that without giving up on ourselves nor the human condition because the correlating call in repentance is forgiveness, and that has already happened.

I think we get caught in the human temptation of thinking we need to repent to be forgiven. We are already forgiven, Easter has happened, that cycle of life is here in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, repentance is to call to our hearts and the heart of this world to live in that love of Jesus. Repentance is about us acknowledging that we are not getting that love relationship right.

That is what our confession is all about. It is not a condition of forgiveness, to say confession, to think we are only forgiven if we say "sorry God". We are already forgiven - I actually think we should have the absolution from the priest before the confession, to remind ourselves of that. There are no conditions on forgiveness; we live in that grace no matter what.

It is when we acknowledge that, the action of God's love in this world, that we are being repentant. When we acknowledge that, God's heart is glad because God feels those waves of returned love and then, and only then, does God's kingdom get closer to that day when there will be no need for repentance, we are living right in that relationship.

Returning to the imagery of the waves and beach: The act of repentance is walking the sand to feel the new life of the wave, and immersing our life in that wave to take back to God. Repentance is simply love returning to its maker.
This season of Lent is about us walking across the sand to the gift of that moving water which is always there, beckoning us with the eternal life presence and cycle of Christ.
Enjoy the beach experience of Lent; our prayer is that we all make it to the water and join the waves. Amen