'Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" given 2-21-16

            Here, at the beginning of Lent, this morning’s Gospel, Luke 13:31-35, looks ahead to Jesus’ Passion. L:uke says Jesus has “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (9:51). We are on a journey with Jesus that shall lead to the cross. Jesus moves steadily toward the capital city, toward what awaits him there. And as he does, without a thought for himself and his fate, he takes a moment to warn us about our fate. He takes a moment to call us to repent.

            Lent is the season of repentance, 40 days of honest reflection upon our identity as sinners, yet sinners who, by the grace of God, are being redeemed in Jesus Christ. We are being redeemed through the work that Jesus goes to do in Jerusalem Yet we shall not be redeemed unless we repent. Jesus calls us to repent.                            

            In years past the church seemed preoccupied with this message. There was a day when, if you asked someone “What do they do at church?” they would respond, “Church is where you go to be told that you are a sinner and that you need to get down on your knees and repent.”                                 

            We don’t tend to hear that message as often in churches today. Today, we are usually told that we are basically good people who are doing the best that we can, and the best that we can is good enough for God. God loves us, just as we are, blemishes and all. Talk of sin is so depressing, a put down.                                         But that was not the message of Jesus. He was on his way to Jerusalem. And it is in Jerusalem that we will discover that our incomplete and broken human nature is seriously blemished by our sins. Sins so serious that we shall conspire to put the Son of God to death on a horrible cross. And he was put there, not for the things that we usually call ugly and evil, but for the things that we call good. He was nailed to a cross by religious people, all of whom thought that they were following scripture, doing the will of God.

            And they did it in our name—yours and mine. Remember the words of Caiaphas in John 18   “It is expedient that one man should die for the people”

            Therefore Jesus’ cross stands as a stark warning to us of the perils of our complicity as well as our sin. Yet, by the grace of God, the cross stands for us as a sign that God forgives, that Christ takes our sin on himself, bears it, forgives us, and gives us new life.

            Therein is our hope, our only hope in our sin. Jesus moves to Jerusalem, not to punish but to call to repentance. He promises a people who have a long history of turning against the prophets, of ignoring the truth, a vision of forgiveness and new life.

            One of the most detrimental, evil notions abroad among us is the idea that, “People don’t change.” This attitude can keep someone  trapped in the hell of addiction, or inappropriate relationships, or poverty, or just plain old fashioned consequences. Once a drunk, always a drunk. You can’t fight genetics. You can’t fight human nature.

            This attitude tells us in effect, that we arrive here in this world fixed at birth, finished. All of life consists of simply replaying the tapes that were implanted in your brain when you were born. Life consists of a whole host of determinisms. Once your gender, or your socioeconomic level, or your skin color has spoken, what can anybody do?      

            But Jesus doesn’t buy into that malarkey. Even at the end, even as he moves toward his own certain death, Jesus calls on people to change and grow and turn their lives around.. He calls on Jerusalem to repent. We might have thought after all of the teachings of the Law, after the centuries of prophetic warnings, it would be too late. But it’s not too late. There is still time to repent.

            And there’s time for you and me as well. Jesus may well have more faith in you than you have in yourself. I know. Old habits die hard; you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I know a leopard can’t change its spots,,,yaddda, yadda, yadda. But I also know that, in Jesus, there is an irresistible power unleashed in human life.

            There is a spiritual power greater than that of our own devising or imagining. The Genesis creation story says that you and I were made in God’s image. It  was stamped upon us. Admittedly, we have defaced that image terribly with our sin. Yet God intends to have God’s way with us. By the grace of God, we can learn, we can be humbled, we can change.

            And that can happen even in the midst of our wounds and failures. .Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a virtual ode to hopelessness, contains the following remarkable sentence: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

            Repentance can be painful. It often comes because we have exhausted all our human cunning plans and schemes and have nothing left but the taste of ashes in our mouths. Caught in the web of our failures—we finally give up and call out to God in surrender. Such moments do indeed bring breaking. Yet Christians understand that it is in such breaking, in such stooping and humility, that our true selves are discovered. Here is a stooping that leaves us standing taller, a breaking that makes us strong.

            In the spirit of Lent and of Jesus, I therefore want to invite you to honest consideration of your life. Where have you been broken by the world? Have you allowed it to make you stronger, or more bitter?  How have you wandered far from God’s way? What are those habits, those inclinations, those propensities that need to be changed if you would live the abundant life? How have you strayed from God’s design for your life?

            The good news is, Jerusalem can repent. The good news is, Jesus means to have you, to have all of you, you as you are meant to be. The good news is, you can change. The good news is that that power I mentioned a moment ago is the power for us to change—sometimes even when we aren’t aware that its work is going on. That power is the power of the Holy Spirit, and it is the power that drives us, calls us, invites us, beckons to us, yearns for us to turn our lives around and repent.  To look deep inside us and around us and discern God’s Will for us, for our lives and to write God’s way on our hearts.

            But, like they say in the TV infomercial ads—“Wait! There’s more!” When God’s way is written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit, we discover that God’s will and our will become one and the same. Not only will we not want to be perpetually angry with our brother, or sister not only will we not want to commit adultery or carry grudges, we won’t commit adultery, we won’t nurse anger, and we won’t even notice that we don’t do it. That’s freedom! Our wills have been blended into God’s will.

            Impossible you say. Precisely. It’s as impossible as unlocking the door from the inside with no key. It has to be done by divine intervention. Something has to work upon us from beyond ourselves. That is exactly what God announces through Jeremiah in his New Covenant. That’s exactly what Jesus’ was trying to tell us

            “With human beings it is impossible, but not with God,” said Jesus, “for all things are possible with God” (Mk 10:27).                                                        

            Decades before the civil rights movement really took hold in the South, a white woman was a member of a church located in rigidly segregated Southside, Virginia. Her teenage son was killed by a car full of intoxicated joyriding black youths. The bereaved mother said, “I don’t understand why I don’t hate those drunken colored people.” She paused. “I guess God has given me a forgiving heart.” All things are possible with God.                                                                                            Twenty years ago, a young black man named Michael Griffith, was attacked for no good reason ten years ago in Howard Beach, Brooklyn, by a band of white teenagers. His mother, who was frequently seen reading her small Bible during the trial, says that the pain of her son’s death has not diminished over the years.                    

            “Sometimes I sit here and cry,” she said. But speaking of the three men still in prison for the attack, she said, “At night I pray for them. I ask God to forgive them. When I talk to people about that, they say ‘You’re crazy; how can you feel that way about somebody who killed your son?’”                                                                       Yes; crazy. St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. Has not God  ”made foolish the wisdom of the world’?

            These two women are examples of the power of the Holy Spirit at work. They did not even know how they had received this power that they had in their hearts, but once they’d experienced it, they knew it was “not their own doing, but a gift from God” (Eph 2:8).

            This is New Covenant that Jeremiah spoke of.  God writes it on our broken hearts. It becomes like breathing. It happens, because God gives it. The urge to violence and revenge went no further because of those women’s reactions. The cycle of bitterness came to a halt before the power of their deeply internalized Christian faith.

            These two women were women of prayer. They sought God’s will precisely at the point when human nature wants to go in another direction. The Lord’s will, Jeremiah teaches, cannot be stopped by the disobedience and sin of human beings, but as people of the New Covenant, our part is to pray daily that our wills would be conformed to his.

            We can do it.. It’s not too late. Even on his way to the cross. Jesus calls on Jerusalem to repent. Even on the cross Jesus forgave those who nailed him their in our names. We can be forgiven. We can forgive. We can change. We can grow. We can repent And that is the good news.