Returning Requires Repentance
On restoration and change I The Word in the Wild, Advent 3, Year B
Note: I’m going going to begin experimenting with a new format for these lectionary reflections. Paid subscribers will receive these on Tuesdays and free subscribers will receive them a few days later on Fridays. This is a way I hope I can thank paid subscribers (especially those pastors who might find these reflections helpful for their own sermon prep) but also offer this content to all subscribers in due time.
I wonder what it feels like to lose everything.
I wonder what it feels like to regain what was lost.
We gathered around a corral, the aluminum tubes rattling in the wind. Men and women in boots, many with wide brimmed cowboy hats, standing attentively toward two brothers at the center of the circle. This was a field day, part of a sheep workshop in Eastern Oklahoma. We were here to see how these brothers managed their ranch—how they had transformed the land.
They spoke in terms more economical than ecological, but what we saw was a wild wonder. They had taken hundreds of acres, most of it destroyed by a mix of strip mining and overgrazing, and turned it to rich grasslands hosting an abundance of life—meadowlarks singing from the fence posts; kestrels hunting along the pasture edges. The land had come cheap, abused and destroyed through extraction. For these brothers, it was an opportunity. If they could restore the land, heal it, then make a living from it ranching—raising sheep and cattle on grass. To be able to raise healthy sheep and cattle on grass, meant they didn’t need to buy feed or bring in hay. It was a thrifty move. But it was also one that meant they had to pay close attention to the rotation of the animals, following the patterns the buffalo had once had on this landscape. They had to set up paddocks where the animals would graze for a short while, pruning and pulling the grass, and then moving on with the land getting a long rest. The rest periods these paddocks enjoyed gave the grass a chance to deepen its roots, providing habitat to birds and insects, as it grew. Cycle after cycle of this, slowly the land that had been abused was restored, the soil improving with each year.
It’s been over a decade since I saw that Oklahoma ranch, but it has remained a fixture in my imagination, an example of what is possible. A broken land was healed; what was lost was renewed.
The people of Judah knew what it what it felt like to lose everything. It was a wound, an absence, that transcended generations. Like the indigenous people of Oklahoma, like the people of so many places across the world, past and present, they had been the extracted commodities of an Empire. A generation had passed, the oldest among them would have been young children when Jerusalem burned. The memory of their homeland was one of imagination more than anything, a reality kept alive in the remembered stories they began to collect.
The people of Judah knew what it feels like to regain what was lost, but it was a tenuous return, a fragile renewal. The key in the midst of their rejoicing was to learn how to live in a different way, to not repeat the patterns that had led them to destruction. No one returns the same after a long absence, but sometimes a place has its own kind of gravity, its own deep grooves that are easy to fall back into. The key for Israel, the key for any restoration, is to return in a new way.
Return requires repentance. Prepare the way of the Lord.
John was a wild man. He’d bent his life to break the grooves, to disjoint himself from the patterns that would make restoration impossible. Before return can happen there has to be a change of the way we live. This is why we need John before Jesus, the baptism of water before the baptism of the Holy Breath. Jesus is the new humanity in which we can discover a new life; but in order to find this new humanity we have to let go of our old ways of being—the ways of power and control, the ways of violence. These Empire ways need only the Empire of the heart to begin their destruction. Repent, turn around, do something different.
Ours is a broken world, stripped of everything by the extractive Empires of our hearts. We long for a different place, a better way, a return to some homeland we’ve heard of in the old stories, imagined in our dreams. That we can find our way to such a place is hope, and that is part of the prophet’s task, the task we find fulfilled in Isaiah. But to return, we cannot go the way we are, our lives and bodies bent according to the formation of Empire’s way. If we want to enter a changed land, we too must change, and that is why we need repentance. The call for repentance is one of the other tasks of the prophet, and that is the one we find fulfilled in John the Baptist. Together, they provide a path, one we enter each Advent. This is a time of hoping for restoration, for healing; and it is a time of turning, of changing our hearts and minds, so that we will be ready for such healing, able to handle such renewal.