The Things I've Done

Some of us are drowning in our to-do lists right now. We are writing down the things we need to do to prepare for Christmas and then crossing them off one by one. Some of us write things that we have already done, just to have the satisfaction of crossing something off our list.


What’s on your to do list for this week, 8 days until Christmas Eve?


If it’s like mine, it looks as long as Santa’s naughty list.

• Buy all the presents so I’m not at CVS at midnight on Christmas Eve again this year. AMAZON PRIME IT UP!
• Grocery shopping!!
• Rehearse four pieces of music
• Visit parents in New Hampshire
• See niece’s Christmas concert
• See Amahl and the Night Visitors
• Clean the house
• WRAP. OMG, I haven’t wrapped anything.
• Buy wrapping paper. Actually, scratch that. Just buy a bunch of bags.
• Write all the sermons. Lead all the services. Bake all the cookies. Drink all the egg nog.

I’m getting anxious just saying all of this out loud.


The crowd that gathers around John the Baptist is anxious too. But they are preparing for the end of the world, not the in-laws coming over (which for some of us might feel like the end of the world).


They are going to get baptized in the river Jordan quick…figuring better safe than sorry in the terrifying days to come. They ask John “What should we DO” to prepare for God’s arrival? And John is just a little harsh in his response.


YOU BROOD OF VIPERS, he says. (Isn’t it amazing that he can keep a congregation enraptured while at the same time calling them a bunch of “snakes?”)


He doesn’t stop there.


“Here’s what should be on your to do list: Bear fruits worthy of repentance, or be thrown in the fire. If you have two coats, give one to someone who has none. Stop charging interest. Be satisfied with what you have and don’t ask for more.”


The scripture calls this “good news.”


And John the Baptist wasn’t messing around. He subsisted in the wilderness on locusts and honey, and had a wild look in his eye. Whenever he preached it was fire and brimstone like a preacher wildly gesticulating on a street corner with a “repent or die” sign. If we encountered him now, it would be in a subway station with people walking quickly by assuming he was homeless and crazy.


But his followers believed he was onto something. In fact, some people thought he was Elijah come back from the grave, and some thought he was the Messiah. But John says “No, fools. I’m just a voice crying in the wilderness! I am the broom sweeping the house to help you prepare for his coming. I’m unfit to untie the Messiah’s sandals.” In other words, he has the humility to say, “hey, I’m not the guy you should listen to. He’s on his way.” He had the good sense to point his followers to God.


“John apparently had second thoughts about (Jesus) later on, however, and it's no great wonder.” Fred Buechner says. “Where John preached grim justice and pictured God as a steely-eyed thresher of grain, Jesus preached forgiving love and pictured God as the host at a marvelous party or a father who can't bring himself to throw his children out even when they spit in his eye. Where John said people had better save their skins before it was too late, Jesus said it was God who saved their skins, and even if you blew your whole bankroll on liquor and sex like the Prodigal Son, it still wasn't too late. Where John ate locusts and honey in the wilderness with the church crowd, Jesus ate what he felt like in Jerusalem with as sleazy a bunch as you could expect to find. Where John crossed to the other side of the street if he saw any sinners heading his way, Jesus seems to have preferred their company to (the diaconate), the Stewardship Committee, and the World Council of Churches rolled into one. Where John baptized, Jesus healed.”


I don’t know about you, but I’m more motivated to bear good fruit in service to a Loving God of forgiveness and healing than I am by the terrifying threats of a man who wants to convince me of God’s great wrath and vengeance.


However, the invitation to repentance still stands. Jesus convinces us that we should be motivated to repent simply because God loves us so extravagantly. There’s nothing else to do in response to that Love but name why we’re not always worthy of it. So, if we’re trying to get our spiritual houses in order to prepare for his coming, we might as well do it on our knees.


“Repent” translates from the Greek metanoia to “change of thought.” We are called by God to change our minds in response to Love. The only way to bear fruit worthy of repentance is to change our minds.


Have you changed your mind lately?


We are told it is impossible to change people’s minds….that “once a ‘fill in the blank,’ always ‘a fill in the blank.” We are told that people who change their minds are weak-minded, or at least weak-willed.


I wouldn’t be in this business if I believed that were true.


These days, I think the thing that humbles and impresses me most about ministry is the sheer amount of stories I get to hear about people changing their minds.


My favorite compliment I’ve ever gotten was confessed publicly by one of our beloved conservatives at a church dinner last spring as we were introducing ourselves to each other: “I’ve come to this church for forty years,” he said. And then, pointing to me almost accusingly he said, “and she turned me into a liberal.”


Another one of the conservatives at the table replied to him, “What? NO! I’ll talk to you after dinner.”


Lest you think he was kidding, the other day, I saw that same guy share a post on Facebook about climate change from Bernie Sanders. God’s miracles never cease.


But in all seriousness, imagine being humble enough to take in new information, examine it in the light of Love, and change your ideology as a response.


When I came to First Church in 2014 for my candidating week, I was surprised to find that the thing everyone wanted to talk to me about was the process to become open and affirming to the LGBTQ community, which you all had yet to complete. I didn’t know that it was a long and painful story in the congregation’s history, and you all wanted to know if I was going to help you write the final chapter.

I remember sitting with one of our 90 year olds at a “meet the minister” coffee. He told me a story about how he left his last church because of an open and affirming process. “I didn’t think it was biblical,” he said, “to affirm same gender relationships.” And he didn’t like the fact that the minister was heavy-handed about it, and that the process seemed rushed, and “pushed through.”


“Oh,” I said. “So I take it you are concerned that I might do the same thing?”


“Oh, I’ve since changed my mind,” he said, with an off-handed gesture, as if it was no big deal. “I think it’s long past time for the church to become open and affirming. We need to be welcoming to all of God’s children. I hope you’re going to help us get there” he said.


“How did you change your mind?” I asked him, amazed. I was far more entrenched in my own ideological leanings at 38 than he was at 90, and couldn’t imagine changing my position on such a deeply held moral intuition.


“I listened to my grandchildren, and prayed about it.”


Such a simple and profound act of humility: I listened, I prayed, I changed my mind.


With God’s help, we have the power to develop new habits of mind. Even me.


I wrote a sermon early on in my ministry here for Advent about Mike Brown’s death in Ferguson. I was pretty proud of it. It even got chosen to be on the UUA’s worship web as an example of how one should preach about racism.


Not everyone appreciated it, though. I was lucky enough to have two beloved parishioners in my office the very next week because they trusted me enough to tell me the truth with grace. “Our son is a police officer. His life matters. We want our pastor to love him, too,” was the general content of our conversation.


We talked about their fears every time he leaves the house. We talked about racism, and their thoughts on police corruption and the split second decisions police officers have to make that are a matter of life and death. They agreed that some of the cases of the deaths of unarmed black folks we heard about in the news could be because of racism. We disagreed in some ways, but there were many points of connection and a ton of empathy for one another. We hugged and we told each other how much we cared about each other at the end of the conversation.


Still, they left my office, and I immediately burst into tears. I wasn’t sure I could minister outside my bubble. It was too hard. I liked preaching to the choir better. I texted my clergy friends, “I don’t belong here,” I said.


One of my colleagues called me immediately. “Robin,” she said, “you’re not supposed to belong there. You can’t do good ministry among people to whom you think you ‘belong.’ What would you learn? What would they learn?”


I thought the only way to do ministry was to be among those I perceived to be like-minded. I had so little faith in the God who calls me to re-think so that I might prepare him room. I had so little faith in the God who creates us like-hearted, not like-minded.


Maybe that’s what John means by separating the wheat from the chaff: we must burn what no longer serves us in the fire of truth, and return over and over again, to Love.


My friend Jake Morrill says that “the central task of these times of de-humanization is for us to engage in “re-humanization.”  Which may be another way to say that we need to see and hear one another—our stories, our wounds, our quirks, our confessions—and even fall in love a little with one another. And, while we're at it, to come back to ourselves.


I don’t know the exact strategies that will fix the big problems we face, or heal the wounds. But I think faith communities and other artistic communities can be about falling in love again with each other and with the earth, bearing witness to beauty even in the wreckage, and taking up the discipline of re-humanization.


If our hearts got stirred up like that, if we let beauty tug us out of our stupor, we could be moved to fight for what we love. Tenaciously and tenderly. Like something precious might, even at the last hour, have a chance of being saved.”


The best way to prepare for the coming reign of Love is to learn how to re-think everything we are sure we know. If we’re going to be ready for the One who comes in the form of a poor, brown, middle-eastern, Jewish, helpless baby migrant boy, born to an unwed mother and a stepfather in a cattle stall with only poor shepherds as witnesses….we better let beauty tug us out of our stupor. Like something precious might, even at the last hour, have a chance of being saved.


Amen.