Brushing Up for Salvation
On this second Sunday of Advent in Luke’s year, we get as much of the soft cop side of John the Baptist as there is to get, and we get the hard cop side as well. “Look, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and suddenly the Lord whom you seek come to his temple…But who can endure the day of his coming…For he is like a refiner's fire, like fullers’ alkali…he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” That sounds painful. But in our Gospel, John is like the prophet Isaiah preparing the exiles of Judah to actually “see the salvation of God.”
One of the few lines from the 1982 Hymnal that somehow has etched itself into my brain is from the well known “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord” — I only design thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine. The repentance that the Old Testament prophets, leading up to John the Baptist, call us to will certainly brush some of the more tender parts of ourselves. But on the other side of those brush strokes is the salvation of our God.
Thinking on Friday of what to say about John the Baptist, I remembered my friend, my fellow seminarian and fellow priest, the late Elizabeth Felicetti. She was very much a John the Baptist gal. She even had a John the Baptist nutcracker with fur clothing, long disheveled hair and beard, and holding a sign saying REPENT. I guess a nutcracker might fit what most of us think about John the Baptist. And we get two Sundays of JBap in Advent. Makes you wanna really hurry back to Bethlehem and that cute baby in the crib. But once again the Church insists on slowing down our nostalgic run back to the birth of our Lord and making us look ahead to his second coming, a time of judgment — Give us grace to heed the prophets’ warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.
Before we look back to Jesus’ first Advent, we need to look ahead to his Second Advent, which does appear to involve at least some judgment, and therefore repentance. But there are ways to see repentance in ways that don’t leave us feeling like we need to make a bunch of New Year’s resolutions (Advent being the start of the liturgical year), most of which we know we won’t end up keeping.
To repent is not first and foremost to make a checklist of all the things we’ve done wrong and try not to repeat them, only to fail more often than succeed. From the Greek metanoia, it means to turn your heart, your mind, your purpose; to look inside yourself and ask where you need to trust God more and not to turn to some emotional crutch. Then, it means to make whatever small changes you can make in your life and trust God to do the rest of the changing for you.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, we assume that when you confess in general your failure to love God with all your heart and your neighbors as yourself, you have in mind the specific failures done and left undone. So, when the priest declares God’s forgiveness and absolution, that is legal and binding as far as God is concerned. On the other side of the Tiber river, you cannot receive that assurance of pardon unless you confess your specific sins to a priest. On page 447 of our prayer book is “The Reconciliation of a Penitent,” of which the general rule is: All may, some should, none must.
In that rite, if you felt the need, you would kneel at the communion rail, I would sit on the other side. To quote the rubric in the prayer book: “The content of a confession is not normally a matter of subsequent discussion. The secrecy of a confession is morally absolute for the confessor, and must under no circumstances be broken.” As you make that confession, you are confessing to God, and the priest knows that the last thing they should do is do or say something that would put themselves between you and God. In this sacramental rite of reconciliation, judgment, repentance, and salvation come together at the same time.
John the Baptist came to prepare the world for the first coming. Whatever I can do to help you prepare for the second coming, I will do.
The Rev. David P. Kendrick
December 8th, 2024
2nd Sunday of Advent, Year C