Repent!
The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
And we are invited to seek a different perspective, so that we might recognize it as a reality and live as if it were so.
This is what it means to repent, to go deeper –to seek the very roots of our sorrows and afflictions and to upturn them, to take them off, so that we might see with new eyes the wonders of His love. So that we might know that we are not separate individuals running the rat race of life, playing our own individual games, but that we are one with all, connected to the true vine, Jesus Christ. And so that we might abide, in our deepest and most vulnerable places, in this truth: we are seen, loved, and forgiven.
Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
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Starry Night
What signs of our redemption will we experience this Advent? Advent invites us to rachet it down a few notches just as our culture is kicking it up. But just like the paradox of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel and the both/and of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we can live with an Advent mindset during this time of holiday glitz, looking expectantly for signs of God’s inbreaking everywhere.
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The King of the Jews
If Jesus is truly our Lord, he belongs in the room when we encounter a neighbor in need, when we enter the polling place or the board room, balance our check books, or enter the work place. We need to acknowledge Christ’s Lordship, not in an ostentatious way—for Jesus has something to say about that—but as a fixed part of our lives.
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A Hopeful Apocalypse
Apocalypse is about revealing; revealing that which our current judgment impairs us from seeing and understanding. Revealing the ways in which our social, personal, and political realities are undergirded by a divine, spiritual action of God. It’s a perspectival realignment from earthly existential anxiety to cosmic hope in God’s providence. It’s about heaven being made real on earth even as we speak, even when it is obscured from our eyes and our better judgment rightly tells us that for many there is hell on earth.
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Expectant Purpose
If we draw close to God, we need not accept the horrors of this world, even death itself, as passive actors, but are welcome and invited to push back against them, against God even, with our hearts and minds and bodies. But we must be prepared for God to push back, to take our open, hurting, and maybe even indigent hearts, and resurrect them into glory, in ways that might be painful and unexpected and yet nevertheless, always redemptive.
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What if the Hokey Pokey Really Is what It’s all About?
So the deep existential question I pose this morning is this, “what if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” What if? The Hokey Pokey goes body part by body part, “You put your right hand in, your left hand in, your right foot, your left foot, you head, until finally your whole self.” And that of course is the aim of the Christian spiritual journey. To put our whole self in. To be all about what God is about, justice, peace, love, healing for ourselves and for the world. And to follow Jesus whole-heartedly, without reservation into the very heart of God.
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