Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

Well, not gonna lie, the first and lasting image I have of these texts—and there are many images from which to choose here for this next Sunday—is that God must have holy halitosis if, as Isaiah tells us this week, it’s strong enough to kill the wicked.

Can’t decide these days if I hope that God finds a mighty toothbrush or not, to be honest…

Anyway, these texts again relentlessly remind us of the identity of God, and of our own identity if we take God as God seriously.

I mean, listen to this: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see or decide by what his ears hear.”

Coupled in a hearty way with John the Baptist dropping some beefy insults to the religious authorities of his day, people eager to be seen Doing the All the Right and Noble Things, “You brood of vipers… do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

God can hear your words, God can see your actions, but God knows you, ‘knows’ as in the Hebrew yada, which is to say that God is intimately aware of your sincerity and integrity (or lack thereof).

Point is, doesn’t matter if you look or sound like you’re a person of faith: if your actions are only performative, but your heart has other loyalties, God’s got some morning breath to blow your way.

Now, these texts might get under the skin of Lutherans, because they are heavy on the works.

* shrugs like a Bruno-esque Lutheran *Honestly I have never been able to understand, theologically anyway, the allergy Lutherans have to being faithful as an expression of having faith.

Not only are engaging in acts of faith not inconsistent with our theology of grace, that practice, as in discipline, as in disciple, is definitely not inconsistent with Scripture.

Grace is not a whatevs.

Grace is a recognition that no matter what, we will never be able to extricate ourselves or anyone else from engaging in that which can cause harm.

It’s a rejection of selfish and base pursuits, engaging in “good works” only to earn points, making our acts manipulative, and what we receive to be rewards.

It’s an acknowledgment that we are not God, and cannot save ourselves.

It’s an embrace of humility.

It’s trust in God more than in ourselves.

All of that said, though, grace does not mean that there are no expectations, nor any mores on which we base our lives and the way we live them out.

And it also doesn’t mean that there is no judgment when we fail at righteousness.

Relatedly, we hear the word ‘righteousness’ four times in our first texts…six if you count the word ‘justice,’ which, both in Hebrew and in Greek, has the same root as righteousness.God will judge with righteousness, aka justice, for the poor, we hear, and decide with equity for the oppressed, and the needy will find deliverance.

The second Sunday in Advent, see, wants us to pick up what it’s laying down: when we are aligned with that agenda, we are aligned with God’s justice and we live with fidelity.

These texts, along with a mess of others in this Advent season, lay out the expectations, the values, the agenda, the identity of God:

Welcome, compassion, equity, justice, diversity, love.

Who wouldn’t want to participate in that, I ask you?

Well…turns out it can be tricky.

Greed, capitalism, domination, selfishness…those are powerful drugs.

Of this God and the writers of Scripture are aware.

And so these texts also invite us, this Sunday, to repent.

Repent is a word laden with a lot of baggage that isn’t its to bear.

It’s often associated with condemnatory preachers hurling it to a congregation of wide-eyed emoji parishioners, a command not so much addressed to those who maltreat the poor, the stranger, the naked, the ostracized.

Instead, it’s to the ostracized themselves, especially those who have engaged in some form of sexual or gender-specific expression that is not aligned with puritanical mores.

Yeah, so this Sunday gives us a chance at a repentance reboot.

My son Karl, who suffered a traumatic brain injury, is 24, but developmentally is about where he was at the time of the accident: he generally sits at the 3-7 year old zone.

Relatedly, the PBS (thank you PBS, our family has got your back) show Daniel Tiger, which is a spinoff of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (RIP) is a regular at our home.

It’s a terrific show, teaching not just young people about growing up, but parents about parenting those who are growing up.

The producers use short ditties as a way to help viewers remember the key messages. Karl knows all of them by heart.

One of them is coming to mind this week, because it has to do with apologies.

It goes like this: “Saying I’m sorry is the first step, then how can I help?”

That, that right there, that is full-throated repentance.

Daniel gets that repentance involves several stages:

* Knowing what you should have done.

This step has, surprise surprise, to do with identity. Who are we, and on what basis are we that? To whom or to what are we aligned? Or, to use First Commandment language, who or what is our God, and how is that conviction demonstrably true?

* Acknowledging that you have not done whatever it is that you were called to do.

This step involves incredible humility, vulnerability, and faith that God and perhaps even the person, people, or system which deserve your repentance, will actually receive your acknowledgment, and ideally with some grace.

* Asking what can be done to repair the breach.

Typically, we think of repentance as stopping what you are doing.

But Daniel and Matthew pull us further into its meaning: it is that, but it’s doing something else in the stead of what you have been doing.

That’s the ‘then how can I help?’ part from Daniel, and the ‘Bear fruit worthy of repentance’ part from Matthew.

If you don’t change behavior, then you haven’t really repented.

The word ‘repent’ is, in Greek, metanoia, and it literally means ‘to turn around,’ as in doing a 180º.

I like that, but I’m reminded of a gorgeous interview that Krista Tippett had with Prof. Louis Newman, a Jewish philosopher and ethicist, who has written a book entitled Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah.

Turns out that the word for ‘repentance’ in Hebrew, teshuvah, has a similar meaning—a turning away from something, but also a turning, or a re-turning, to God.

And then he says this, an interesting dialogue and counter point with the Christian emphasis on a drastic and immediate shift, Dr. Newman says:

“If you think about this in terms of a 360 degree circle, if you’re headed in one direction and you turn only one degree or two degrees to the right or to the left, over a long period of time — it may be a very slight turn, but over an extended period of time, if you now walk in that direction, you’ll end up in an utterly different place than if you extend that line outward infinitely. And that sense of turning even slightly…it doesn’t have to be a radical, all of a sudden transformation into a new life. It’s actually a very gradual process of recognizing, ‘you know, I need to pay attention to that particular failing a little bit more, and move in a little different direction.’”

That’s quite lovely.

It offers grace, patience, and compassion, without losing sight of an expectation or an act.

I like it…mostly.

But both in our texts and in our world, we perceive—or ought to—urgent need for repentance.

Patience is not always a virtue; in fact, it can sabotage the expression of reign of God, as in “Let’s just meet them where they are.”

I’m certain I’ve already griped about how Jesus met ‘them’ where they were—and, in Sunday’s text, so did John the Baptist believe you me—but then either took ‘them’ to a new place, or demanded that they move their own blame selves to anew place.

Perhaps here is a classic case of both/and.

Change is hard.

Sometimes there might be slow changes that can be made, and can only be made slowly, like a new eating or exercise pattern, or moving through trauma or unhealthy self-dialogue, or learning to load the dishwasher correctly.

Little shifts every day can make a significant difference over the long haul, and can pave the way for more little shifts, or confidence in bigger ones.

But other times, when we are engaging in unrighteous, unholy, unjust behaviors and systems that hurt the people of God or the creation of God, then the time to change them is now.

I did vote for Trump, and now I’m going to protests.

I did not speak up, and now I’m writing letters to the editor.

I did not address candidly the implications of the gospel from the pulpit, for a myriad of reasons and some of them even good and understandable, but I realize that I’ve enabled Christian Nationalism and hate for our neighbor, and have allowed the oppressors to sit tight in their oppressive ways, and in so doing stood in the way of both the poor and the rich, the oppressed and the oppressors, the meek and the mighty, hearing the law and the gospel, and reminding them that they are beholden to nothing and no one but God.

And that’s key, here, namely tying it all to God.

The goal of the repentance, that is, is placed firmly at the identity of God.

The entire point of God’s revelations to us is to express God’s hope for love, equity, joy, diversity, and peace for God’s creatures and creation.

The intention of repentance is not to create a place of rigidity and fear, what one might expect were we to leave the word ‘repent’ where it h...

Second Week of Advent: Saying I'm Sorry Is The First Step