• "It is Not Enough Merely to Say 'I'm Sorry.'"
• Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
• December 14, 2003
• The Reverend Stephen C. Scarlett

On the third and fourth Sundays in Advent, John the Baptist comes to the forefront. John is the messenger God sent before Jesus to call people to repent and be ready for the Messiah. John taught it is not enough merely to say "I'm sorry." We must "bear fruits worthy of repentance" (Luke 3:8). We must stop doing the things that we say we are sorry about and we must start doing new and God-honoring things.

We respond to the message of John on two levels. First, there is an initial time of repentance that marks the beginning of the Christian life. When we first confess our sins and come to faith in Jesus Christ, we undergo a season of change as we adjust our lives and behavior to our new faith.

The clearest change that takes place is this: Before our initial season of repentance, we were outside the church, the community of faith. We were threatened by the implications of faith and obedience and we thought of committed Christians as "they" and not "we." After our initial season of repentance, we find ourselves inside the church. Christians are "we" and not "they."

My point can be illustrated by Peter's sermon on Pentecost. He concluded, "Repent...and be baptized...and you will receive the Holy Spirit" (2:41). Those who repented received an unrepeatable gift. And we who repented and were baptized received the same unrepeatable gift.

But John's message of repentance is not only for the unbeliever. Each week, we demand repentance of those who come to receive the sacred gifts. Once we have come to faith, we need to grow in our repentance. The question might be put thus: How do baptized believers who are faithful in their marriages, honest in their work and generally good to others continue to repent?

Ongoing repentance requires deeper examination, reflection and understanding. To grow in repentance, we must understand that sin is a disease that infects the soul and perverts all things from their God given glory into something less than they ought to be. Sin consists not just of doing things a commandment said not to do; sin consists of all the various ways our acts, thoughts and motives fall short of divine perfection.

As we come to understand the nature of sin, we discover a frustrating paradox. Quite far from having less to repent of, it seems that we have more. We turn away from what we thought were our main sins-our outward and obvious behavioral issues-to discover the other darker thoughts and motives in our hearts that we had not seen before. Just when we had hoped to make progress against sin, it seems as though we are, in fact, getting worse. But this growth in self-knowledge is, indeed, spiritual progress.

In the house in which I was raised, there were two mirrors in two different bathrooms. I greatly preferred the mirror in the bathroom on the north side of the house; not so much light of day shone in and I always looked better there. I did not like the mirror in the bathroom on the south side because the sun illuminated that mirror and revealed not a few additional blemishes. I was the same person in both rooms, the lighter room just revealed more.

Growth in repentance is like this. We don't actually get worse, we just see more of the truth about ourselves as we get closer to the Light of the World. Now, such a revelation can be disconcerting and some are not ready to face it. They may prefer to remain in less illuminated places. As Jesus said, "This is the condemnation [of the world], that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19 KJV).

We must always remember that God sends his messengers-as he sent John the Baptist to Israel-to convict us of sin for one, and only one reason: he wants us to see and confess the truth so that we might be forgiven, healed and saved.

After the first sin, Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve hid from God in the bushes. Fallen mankind still hides from God. People often profess to be looking for God. But it is more accurate to say that God is looking for people. God came looking for fallen Adam and Eve in the garden. He called out to them as they hid in the bushes, "Where are you?" (3:9). God comes looking for us, calling to us, waiting to see if we will come out from our silly hiding places and be honest and penitent about who we are and what we have done so that he might save us.

Of course, we get comfortable in our hiding places. We get comfortable in the dimmer light where less is revealed. Left to our own devices we might stay in hiding all the way to Judgment Day. That is why God sent John the Baptist to prepare Israel for the coming of Christ and that is why God sends ministers to call us to repent so that we will be ready when Jesus comes again.

We need, in the first instance, to heed the call to repent by making those major life changes that accompany a commitment of faith. And we need to continue to grow in repentance by looking more closely at our thoughts, motives and behavior, by making better and more honest confessions in the clearer light of day.

As 1 John says, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:8,9).