I used to enjoy doing crossword puzzles.  I still do, from time-to-time.  The idea of looking for words that fit ‘just so’ in a space or fill in a clue is wonderfully challenging.  The challenge today is a seven letter word meaning ‘change.’  If you were listening closely to Luke’s Gospel you got it.  Let me add a clue.  It’s not a word that most people like to hear.  If you’re thinking ‘repents.’  You’re correct.  If you drop the ‘s’ you’ll see that ‘repent’ and ‘change’ both have exactly the same number of letters – coincidence?  Perhaps.

It’s not normally my way to tell a joke from the pulpit, but for some odd reason this one works for me and seems to fit today.  It seems an unscrupulous painting contractor was out to get the contract for painting a local church.  The bid he submitted was ridiculously low, but the trustees couldn’t resist the prospect of such a deal so they accepted it.  The contractor then watered down the paint to the point where, even with the low bid, he was making a goodly amount of money.  Buckets of watery paint in hand, then, he went to work.  When he finished, the church looked beautiful and he stepped back to admire his work — and his deception.  As he stood there, a storm blew up and rain came down in torrents . . . washing the paint right off the church and onto the grass.  The contractor was frantic and yelled out, “Oh God, what can I do?”  To his surprise a voice boomed out of the cloud: “Repaint! And thin no more!”

It’s a cute story, at least I think it is, and a nifty play on words.  The tragedy is that too many of us resemble the painter in our faith life.  We think we’re covering ourselves pretty thoroughly, but the paint of our repentance is often just a tad thin.  We don’t like to think about it because we get the ‘guilts,’ but repentance, conversion; change is more than a case of the ‘guilts.’

When Jesus talked with those folks in Luke’s Gospel about repentance, he was trying to get at the core of faith life.  They wanted to assign guilt, because in our mind-set every action needs to have a consequence.  It’s easy to see how they could think that way.  Many who came to Jesus for healing saw some sort of connection between sin and illness.  Over-and-over again Jesus says that there is more to this than a simple equation, though they just don’t seem to grasp the idea.  Here the Lord’s words to Isaiah flash to mind, “My ways are not your ways and my thoughts not your thoughts.”

Peter Gomes, chaplain and professor at Harvard, puts his finger on something.  He comments:

The fact of sin is not at question, nor is the fact of death, and sin still has the capacity to lead to death.  But it is not so much that sin itself kills as it is that the refusal to turn from sin, the denial of repentance, sets one up to lead a useless life and a meaningless death.  Jesus is interested not in establishing the cause of death, but rather in determining the terms of a life worth living, and the only way to do that is to confess and repent of sin.

The goal of conversion, then, isn’t to make us feel bad about ourselves or to wallow in guilt.  The goal of conversion is about accepting ourselves where we are and realizing that we are called to be different, to be renewed, to be changed.  Conversion is about having a life worth living and making the changes to have it.

I think that the word for ‘repentance’ or ‘conversion’ in the Greek, ‘metanoia,’ is quite powerful.  ‘Metanoia’ means literally a change of mind.  When Jesus calls people to conversion, he’s calling them to a radical – an at the root -- return to life in God.  To enter the experience of conversion is to move away from all those things that keep us from God.  Jesus’ teaching and his very life proclaim an unconditional turning to God.  Jesus isn’t just interested in people turning from things that are downright evil, he’s after a change, a conversion from anything that puts conditions on our living life in conformity with God’s will for us.

One does not accomplish such a change in direction by oneself.  Any of us who have undertaken a diet or exercise program know that so-called ‘willpower’ is a shaky commodity and in short supply.  The good Lord knows how often I’ve tried to diet – I’ve lost and regained whole people – and how willpower isn’t what completes the task.  What gets us to accomplish the goal, at least it is for me, is someone standing alongside us, encouraging us, and modeling the behavior for us.  In the spiritual life this person is Christ.  When we have an encounter with Christ, open ourselves to relationship with him, it makes a difference in who we are.  In fact, we can’t encounter Christ and remain the same; we can’t stay the same as we were.

All relationships, but especially relationship with the Divine, bring transformation – there’s a fourteen letter word meaning change – and they also bring, if they’re healthy, liberation – a ten letter word for change.  With change, regardless of how many letters you use to describe it, come both choice and responsibility.  I say this repeatedly, the freedom of the Christian is a freedom to, not just a freedom from.  The change God works in our lives gives us the freedom to love, to give of ourselves in true service, to open ourselves to relate to others without fear.  The freedom, the change, that relationship with the Divine works in our lives is the freedom to be; which is tremendously appropriate when you think that our God when asked for a name says, “I AM WHO AM.”  When we open ourselves to encounter God in the person of the living Christ it makes a difference, it brings change.

Lloyd Douglas, Congregational minister and novelist, confronted this issue of the change that meeting Christ brings in his book The Robe.  The centurion Marcellus, who was in charge of the Lord’s crucifixion, returns to his wife Diana — and there’s something very different about him.

“What I feared was that it might somehow affect your life — and mine, too.  It is a beautiful story, Marcellus, a beautiful mystery.  Let it remain so.  We don’t have to understand it.  And we don’t have to do anything about it; do we?  Let us plan to live — each for the other — just as if this hadn’t happened.”

She waited a long time for his reply.  His face was drawn, and his eyes were transfixed to the far horizon.  Diana’s slim fingers trace a light pattern on the back of his hand. 

“But it has affected my life, darling!” said Marcellus firmly.  “I can’t go on as if it hadn’t happened.”

“What have you thought of doing?”  Diana’s voice was unsteady.

“I don’t know — yet,” he replied, half to himself.  But I know I have a duty to perform.  It is not clear — what I am to do.  But I couldn’t go back to living as I did — not even if I tried.  I couldn’t.” [The Robe, chapter 21]

 

Once we’ve seen the face of God, how can we return to what we’ve always seen?  Even if we try, we can’t be the same.

As the character Marcellus discovered, change brings choice.  The prophet Isaiah asks Israel, “Why do you choose that which is substandard and non-nourishing?”  God offers a whole new array of choices, of possibilities that bring real nourishment and empower us for a life of loving freedom.  Why do people make these poor choices?  Because they’re comfortable, they’re stuck in habits – a six letter word meaning no change and which derives from older words for a home or dwelling place, habitus – and you know how hard it is to move when we’ve lived somewhere a long time.  We accumulate stuff and stuff is hard to move. It’s the same with habits, they’re the stuff we’ve picked up in a lifetime of living and now find difficult to move, or to let go.

Still, it’s important for us to realize that conversion isn’t something that just happens once and that’s it.  We probably will move more than once in our lifetimes.  So, as life is a continual process of growth and change so, too, is the Christian life.  That’s why I went for the seven letter version – repents – it’s an ongoing action.  When we think of repentance or conversion, then, we need to away from considering it as something onerous or problematic.  We must begin to see it for what it is: growth and development.  Christian life, then, is about living life in a new, God-ward direction; it’s a life of continuous conversion with each new day bringing new freedom in God.

I know as I have confronted the whole cholesterol thing recently, my attitude has not always been what it should be. I see exercise, diet, and so on, as a real burden.  The truth is, I think of ‘diet’ as a dirty four letter word.  So you can imagine how I feel about ‘exercise’ – it’s twice as bad.  (I think I was frightened by a gym teacher when I was a child.)  I need a metanoia, a change of mind on this so that my attitude matches my goal: renewed health.  That change isn’t going to come in a flash, it’s going to take time and effort.  It’s no different for the life of faith.  God tells us, through Isaiah, “my ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts.”  If we’re going to attune ourselves to ways and thoughts so radically different from our own, we need to take time and work at it.  Yes, everything needs a beginning, we’ve got to start somewhere, but the process takes a lifetime.  Adin Steinsaltz, a Jewish author, puts it this way:

Repentance does not bring a sense of serenity or completion, but stimulates a reaching out in further effort.  Indeed, the power and the potential of repentance lie in increased incentive and enhanced capacity to follow the path even further . . .  In this manner, the conditions are created in which repentance is no longer an isolated act but has become a permanent possibility, a constant process of going forward.

Because God’s ways and thoughts are so different from ours, God is more patient with us that we are with ourselves, or even with others.  Like the gardener, God knows that it takes time for a life to bear fruit.  The wonder of God’s love for us is expressed in God’s patience with us as we try, and try, and try to become the people God intended us to be.  The Lenten wilderness is designed to have us ask the questions about what really matters to us.  This is the time I get to ask what really makes the difference in my life.  With the Psalmist I can look to God and from the depths of my heart say, “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you.”  And in this wilderness of modern life God keeps encouraging us to ask the questions, to look for the answers, to discover who it is that we are called to become.  God waits for us, this One whose “steadfast love is better than life,” and wants us to continue the search.

I ran across something Harry Winters wrote in Word and Witness that I think neatly summarizes the Christian life of continuous conversion.