The Repentance Trip, Advent 2 (C) – 2009

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The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

What MapQuest had indicated was a real road was, in fact, a road under construction. He should have known, the man sighed to himself. When he had turned onto the road and left the main highway, there had been a warning: “Proceed at Your Own Risk. Construction Ahead.” But the sign gave no information about how long the stretch of construction was.

Just past the turn-off, the surface was paved, but there were no markings, just blacktop. After a few miles, the asphalt gave way to gravel and a thin layer of tar. The smell of the tar and the sound of gravel bouncing up against the bottom of the car got the children’s attention. They had been sleeping in the back seat, dozing while the family made its way to the next stop on their vacation. They had slept while their father had driven them through this vast section of forested wilderness on their way to the lodge in a national park where they had reservations. Now they were awake.

“Are we there yet?” “How much farther?”

“We have a ways to go,” said the father as he rifled through the glove box looking to see if he still had an old-fashioned map in the car.

When the gravel ended and they hit dirt, he started to worry. It didn’t help that they seemed to be the only people on this road, and they had seen no one else coming from the other direction. Worse yet, what at first seemed to be dirt was actually mud. He decided to keep driving and hope that this was just a bad patch – that the “real” road, the passable road, was just ahead.

It was clear, though, that the car had begun to sink. The pinging noise of gravel against the car’s undercarriage had given way to a slurping sound as the tires kicked up mud and then were enveloped by it.

“I have to keep going,” he thought. “If I can just keep moving forward, we’ll be all right. We’re way behind schedule, but we’ll be all right if we can just keep moving.”

But the mud deepened. The car became mired in the mud, sunk right up to the chassis, tires half submerged. He gunned the engine, pretty much expecting the result he got, but he did it anyway, because it was something to do.

He turned the car off.

“What’s happening, Dad?” the children asked from the back seat. “Are we there?”

He thought for just a moment about what to say. He considered a lie: “Why, yes we are. Look at this fascinating scenery.” Or perhaps, “I was hoping for some real adventure on this vacation, and here it is.” He thought about blaming MapQuest or the people who posted such a useless sign. Instead, he told the children they would need to be patient and maybe they could teach him some songs they had learned in school while they waited for some help to come by.

Help came in the form of a tow truck with great big tires that traveled that stretch of road a couple times a day in case things like this happened. The car was towed back to the main road, and directions were given for a much longer, but passable, route to the lodge.

That part of the vacation became known as “the repentance trip” because it embodied so well the definition of repentance – an active turning around, going a new direction, a change of heart, a change of mind, rather than continuing down the same path, moving in the same direction that is leading nowhere or somewhere dangerous, fast.

Repentance is not the same as remorse or regret. It is not listing all the ways things could have gone differently. It is not wishing you were a better person, that some things had never happened, that bad things wouldn’t keep happening to you. It’s not feeling guilty or ashamed. It’s not feeling afraid. It’s not something that leaves us stuck, or standing still, or spinning in circles, going nowhere.

Repentance is about movement, letting yourself be grasped by God, getting new bearings, and relying on God for directions.

The new life that follows repentance, the new direction that comes with a fresh start is what John was proclaiming in the wilderness. John’s message is a call to action: repent, turn around, accept help. God is coming to meet you on a road in the wilderness.

And when God comes to us, our response can look like the picture from Baruch: a widow who puts away her mourning clothes and instead puts on a beautiful garment. It’s not that sorrow has never happened or that there was not a reason to grieve. She accepts the robe of righteousness and a crown of glory because she trusts that her wholeness and joy lie ahead of her in some future that God is preparing, down a road that God is constructing.

Repentance can happen when you are confronted by something, maybe remorse, maybe disappointment or regret, maybe the sense that you are stuck or spinning your wheels. Maybe it comes from something as small as wishing you hadn’t said something, or wishing you could take back an action. Maybe it comes from something as large as the report from the doctor that indicates more tests are needed, and you decide that whether it turns out to be something or it turns out to be nothing, whether you have three more decades or three more weeks, you want that time to count for something, to be something you can offer back to God. Maybe it comes when you realize there are other people with you on your journey and that your decisions affect them too and the wilderness is not a good place to be forever.

Repentance comes in many ways. When God turns us around, offers us a way to get unstuck, move ahead with a new way of life, our response is to say thank you.