Renewal through Turning from Evil
Sermon preached by Rev. Patricia Farris
March 5, 2006

Our Lenten theme this year is RENEWAL. This theme grows out of our year-long work in Worship Renewal. It grows out of the theme of the recent WCC Assembly from which I have just returned, “God, in your grace, transform the world.” It also grows out of the renewal we are experiencing in our congregation, in an explosion of program and mission opportunities, Youth Sunday, stewardship, leadership development, refurbishment of Simkins Hall and much more. So much that some of you are complaining that you’re having a hard time keeping up with everything that’s going on, which is just as it should be in a healthy and vital congregation. Thanks be to God!

Perhaps for many of us, repentance would be a more familiar Lenten theme than renewal. But, you see, repentance is the first step in the process of renewal. We repent in order to turn and embrace new life. Repentance begins with awareness, confession, regret for what is less than whole and true, sorrow for sin, grief for a less than total commitment to God and neighbor. As we hear in Scripture: “Turn to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping and with mourning,” says our God.

And then, you see, as we turn towards God, our repentance becomes the basic building block of the work of renewal that must happen in each of our lives and in our common life together.

This is our Lenten work – a turning to God, a movement from something towards something new: from sin to wholeness, from death to life, from darkness to light, from suffering to healing, from brokenness to reconciliation. “Repent, and believe in the good news,” Jesus says. Repentance turns towards renewal in Christ Jesus. It is, as our youth put it so powerfully last Sunday, a commitment to walk in the light and to let the light of Christ be our guide and our way.

Of course, it is Jesus himself who gives us the model for this central movement in the life of faith, this turning from evil to fully embrace God’s good news for us and for this world. We hear it so powerfully in Mark’s Gospel this morning. Jesus is baptized and the Holy Spirit descends upon him. But then, immediately, before he could begin his ministry, before he could begin proclaiming the Good News, it is that same Spirit that drives him out into the wilderness where, for forty days, he is tempted by Satan, and the wild beasts are all around him and within him, and the angels minister to him.(continued...)

"Renewal through Turning from Evil" by Rev. Patricia Farris, March 5, 2006

What does this tell us about our faith? We, too, are baptized. Just like baby Kiera Elizabeth this morning, we are baptized. And in every baptism, though perhaps our eyes and ears aren’t quite tuned to perceive it, the Holy Spirit comes into the life of each new Christian, and in heaven a very pleased God can be heard to say: “This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”

But also, you see, for every Christian, even in time in the life of this precious child, something else is going to happen because we are baptized in Christ. Because we share in his baptism, we, too, will be pushed by the Spirit to confront evil in every and any form. Baptism brings with it engagement with the world, with the hardest things about this world, with the ugliest things, the most cruel things, the most destructive things. God claims us in baptism and charges us to bring Good News into the places where it is needed the very most. And that will mean, as Jesus says, that we have to first confront that evil in ourselves. It seeps in. It starts to push out the places where God should be. We come to take it for granted. It overwhelms us and saps our strength. We are tempted, just as was Jesus, to turn away, to take the easy way out, to seek our own security over engagement with the needs of the world. These are the wild beasts that are all around us and within. Repent, Jesus says to us this morning. Repent. And believe the Good News.

The plenary sessions of the World Council of Churches’ Assemblies always take on the toughest issues of the day — violence, poverty, globalization, HIV/AIDS. As a result, it sometimes gets the reputation of being a political organization. Even a cab driver I met in Porto Alegre had this impression. He was taking me over to the campus where we were meeting one morning, and he asked: “Are you going to that Council of Churches meeting?” “Yes,” I said, mostly glad to have understood his question with my very limited Portuguese. “Hmmm,” he said….”isn’t it political?” Now mind you, I didn’t have enough vocabulary to carry on a nuanced conversation here, but enough to say: “No, it’s mostly religious.” “OK,” he said, “muito bem,” and on we went.

What I couldn’t explain to him in any detail was that as the church of Jesus Christ, we were just trying to honestly confront the wild beasts that threaten God’s people and God’s creation. And you can’t speak Good News to evil or truth to power unless you’re paying careful attention to what it is and how it operates and what it’s doing in the world and what it’s done to deform your own heart. Jesus spent forty days doing just this before he even started his ministry, and in the Bible, forty days just means a long and very significant amount of time. Confronting the wild beasts of our time is religious work. It comes with our baptism. It is the job description of a Christian.
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"Renewal through Turning from Evil" by Rev. Patricia Farris, March 5, 2006

And so, we have to pay attention. We have to face the wild beasts: starvation in Darfur, environmental degradation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the violence of poverty and of war, homelessness in our own community. As Christians, we are driven into this wilderness by the Holy Spirit to face the wild beasts of our day and of our own lives. Because, you see, evil triumphs when we give up, when we are defeated by despair and apathy, when we conclude that nothing can be done. And so it will take every ounce of strength, of courage, of wisdom, of compassion we can muster to take an honest look, to grieve and to repent. And then to commit to the work of making life whole.

“Repent, and believe in the good news,” Jesus says. Turn from darkness to light, from suffering to healing. Turn from brokenness to reconciliation. Turn from evil to what is good and true. Turn from death to life.

But we are never alone in this. God is with us. The angels will minister to us, and lift us up and renew our hope. This is what we will celebrate in Holy Communion in just a few moments, Christ’s own body broken, his self poured out, for us, for our healing and our renewal, that we and God’s whole creation might turn from death to life. “Do this,” he said, “to remember me.”

Worship is one of the most powerful parts of any World Council Assembly though perhaps the least reported. Twice every day we came together to pray and to sing, some 3000 Christians of every spot and stripe imaginable from all across the globe, to pray and to sing, often this new hymn that I know you sang on a couple of the Sundays while the Assembly was meeting. It is our Lenten theme and prayer. “God in your grace, God in your mercy, turn us to you to transform the world. Turn us to you to transform the world.”

The Sunday Singers/choir will lead us in singing this prayer as we begin to turn towards this sacrament of remembrance and renewal.