Sermonstudio

"Confession is good for the soul," so we say in Lent. And so we say in Advent too, "Confession is good for the soul." And my confession is this. Like many men I hesitate to stop to ask for directions. So much so that my wife presented me with a t-shirt which, on the front, had emblazoned these words: "Real men don't ask directions."

We "real men" like to solve problems on our own. We tend to dislike the feeling of dependency and helplessness implied by asking directions. We like to think we know where we're going, thank you, know as much where we're going as anyone else, thank you! We are sufficient to the task at hand. We can find our way through the corporate jungle, negotiate our path through social and cultural labyrinths, and clear a path through the Byzantine worlds of academia, politics, and club memberships. Weakness, uncertainty, and dependency are not for us. "Real men don't ask directions."

Except when we are in real trouble. Any pilot or navigator or sailor knows that. And my daughters who used to sail with me in their younger days know that. They still talk about an adventure in the fog, all day on Lake Michigan, fifty miles in the fog where we could scarcely see a few feet in front of the boat. And then, after a long, long day of seeing nothing, they saw it -- the lighthouse at the end of the channel leading to the safe harbor and the fulfillment of my promise of a nice dinner at a restaurant.

My daughters' faith in me as a sailor and navigator rose significantly in that episode because out of the thick, thick fog I had brought them safely to harbor, right on target, the lighthouse directly in front of us and the sumptuous dinner soon behind it.

Had I asked directions? Indeed I had. Not from anyone on shore, but from my chart of those waters, and from my compass, which was extremely accurate. (That was before I had Loran and GPS!) Any sailor will tell you there is nothing more disorienting than fog. In a thick fog, most people lose whatever innate sense of direction they have. Light is refracted in strange ways. The direction sound is coming from can be deceiving. Any sailor knows that in a thick fog, it is extremely difficult to sail, as we say, "by the seat of our pants." We need at least an accurate chart and an accurate compass.

If that is true in sailing on Lake Michigan or Long Island Sound, it is ever more true sailing on the sea of life. We need an accurate spiritual chart and moral compass. And if on days which seem to be spiritually and morally clear we feel we can sail the sea of life "by the seat of our pants," we will be in desperate trouble in times of spiritual obfuscation and moral confusion.

And it is my conviction we live in such a time -- a time of spiritual degeneration and moral confusion, a time of casual cynicism and comfortable skepticism; a time of refined greed and not-so-refined litigiousness, a time of frenzied competitiveness from fear of being left behind, and a time of easily compromised values and equivocated beliefs for the sake of attaining immediate gratification and instant success.

But the hopeful good news is this: we do have a reliable spiritual chart and a stalwart, accurate compass which have given people direction through moral and spiritual fog for centuries. I speak of that remarkable figure of our text -- John the Baptist -- John the Baptizer, that lonely, rustic, fiery prophet of the Judean wilderness whose voice echoed down the first century Jordan River Valley, rolling down the centuries into the stone and glass canyons of Manhattan Island and across the pleasant estates and waters of Long Island and on across the country -- John the Baptist -- a moral compass for all time.

And here are his moral directions for our time -- repentance and righteousness.

I

Consider first repentance. John thunders forth, "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." John was "preaching a baptism of repentance."

The word "repent" in the Greek language of the New Testament is metanoia, which literally means "a change of mind." And not only a change of mind, but a change of direction. It means to turn around, to go the other way. It means not only to feel bad about the direction your life has been taking, but to get a new mind, and to do something about it, to actually change directions.

Probably one of the most disheartening and yet humorous things we hear when we do finally stop to ask for directions is to be told, "You can't get there from here." But when we hear the words of John the Baptist, he is in effect saying, "Yes, you can get there from here." Yes, you can get a new mind. Yes, you can change directions. Yes, you can prepare yourself for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

And one way to do it is to do as John did -- go into the wilderness to be alone, to seek solitude, and to listen for the voice of God. I suspect many of us today do not clearly hear the Word of God because we are afraid to hear it. We are afraid to be alone with ourselves, afraid of quietness, afraid of solitude. The cacophony of voices competes for our attention. We are flooded with the inanity of television, with the banalities of movies where human life is trivialized by repeated violence and by sexuality divorced from authentic personhood.

But if you are in a time of moral confusion and personal uncertainty, look for quietness and solitude in the dimensions of worship and study and prayer so as to hear the still, small voice of God. Sailors will tell you, and so will pilots, that when you are in a fog, when it is dark, when you have lost your landmarks and lost certainty of your course, you must trust your instruments to guide you through.

There are those among us who live by public opinion polls. Politicians must have them, of course. And smart businesses can make use of them, and even churches. But reliable spiritual and moral directions are seldom found in the herd instinct or mob reaction. On a boat in the fog, you do not take a vote among the crew as to which way to turn. You must trust your instruments.

The true compass for moral and spiritual navigation is to be found with God's prophets -- prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah, Amos and Isaiah, and yes, John the Baptist. Usually they are lonely, ostracized, ignored, persecuted, rebuffed, laughed at, and repudiated. But the centuries have proved them right and the majority of us wrong, for they continue to speak while their detractors have long since perished and been forgotten.

John's advice to repent is hopeful good news, because it is something we all can do. John will not accept a blind determinism or an easy acquiescence to fate, or an irresponsible shrug of the shoulders which says my heredity and environment made me this way.

The good news about repentance is that we can change, we can make a new life, we can become a new person, we can do things differently, we can break these addictions, we can avoid the path of destruction, we can improve the self and our relationships, we can change our job, alter our career, change our thinking.

But many of us paint ourselves into a corner and refuse to consider alternatives. In the many years that I have been counseling people in troubled marriages, I have come to the conviction that in at least sixty or seventy percent of the cases, partners can make the needed changes to lead to a happier marriage if they want to. They do not have to repeat the destructive patterns of their past. If they have the ability to recognize the problem, they also have the ability to do something about it.

Each of us knows in his or her own heart the changes that are needed for the better self, the better marriage, the better career, the better citizenship, the better churchmanship, the better parent, the better son or daughter, the better boss, the better employee.

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." That is the good news -- we can have a change of mind and heart for a new way of living. Listen in the solitude of spiritual earnestness for the still, small voice of God to guide you. It is the spiritual moral compass.

II

If John speaks of repentance, in Matthew's expanded version of our text, he also proclaims the need for righteousness.

"Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" he thundered against the public leaders of his time. And then he boldly challenges them, "Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father'; for I tell you, God is able from those stones to raise up children to Abraham." And then with piercing eyes and authoritative voice he adds, "Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire" (Matthew 3:8-10).

If individuals are spiritually confused, existing in a moral fog, so are groups and nations -- especially our nation. But many people are slow to realize it. I remember only a few years ago a stalwart woman member of our church who proudly proclaimed America as the closest thing to the Kingdom of God on earth. But is it really?

Veterans of World War I wanted to make the world safe for democracy -- especially our democracy. Veterans of World War II wanted to fight the war to end all wars and come home to white picket fences and flourishing churches and an age of unprecedented faith in America. Korean War veterans somewhat grudgingly went dutifully to their "police action," and Vietnam veterans confusedly, bitterly, and dutifully went to have their lives wasted.

And the '60s generation marched and protested against their parents' prosperity and pride in what they regarded as the closest thing to the Kingdom of God on earth, and drugged their way in and out of the Woodstocks and free love communes and back-to-earth impulses of eros, long suppressed yet now in full flower; only to be followed by the "me generation," to be succeeded by the greed and impatient selfishness of the "me-right-now generation." Is this beloved country of ours the closest thing there is to the Kingdom of God? Can we claim, "We have Abraham as our father," meaning we have a great past and can rest on our laurels?

I think John the Baptist would choke on his locusts and wild honey at the thought. For example, cheating in our schools has reached an all-time high. And our public education system, despite massive increases in budgets, has declined in educational achievement. William Bennett tells of Judith Kahn, a math teacher at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, who says she loves teaching there because of the immigrants. "They have a drive in them that we no longer seem to have."

At Williams College in the Berkshires, a sociology professor says that Americans have become the object of ridicule among immigrant students on campus. He says, "When immigrant kids criticize each other for getting lazy or loose, they say, 'You're becoming American.' "

A Washington Post article told the story of Paulina, a Polish high school student studying in the United States. In Warsaw, she would talk to friends a while after school, go home and eat with her parents, and then do four or five hours of homework. But, says Paulina, "When I first came here, it was like going into a crazy world, but now I am getting used to it. I'm going to Pizza Hut and watching TV and doing less work in school." Then she adds prophetically, "I can tell it is not a good thing to get used to." The Kingdom of God will not come to a people intellectually lazy and morally corrupted.

Nor will it come to a people who have lost moral backbone in the midst of unprecedented affluence. We are a rich and proud and powerful country. There are noble qualities in our nation. But there is a lot that is ignoble. Best-selling novelist John Updike put it this way, "The fact ... that we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly."

Since 1960, our population has increased 41 percent. Our gross domestic product almost tripled, and total social spending at all levels of government increased nearly five times. However, said William Bennett in a recent speech, "During the same thirty-year period, there was a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high school students."

Mr. Bennett goes on to recite these alarming facts: "Today, thirty percent of all births and 68 percent of black births are illegitimate. By the end of the decade, according to the most reliable projections, forty percent of all American births and eighty percent of minority births will occur out of wedlock."

Are things getting worse? Mr. Bennett goes on to compare 1940 student bodies with 1990 student bodies. When in 1940 teachers were asked to identify the top problems in schools, they mentioned chewing gum, talking out of turn, making noise, running in the hall, cutting in line, dress code infractions, and loitering. But guess what teachers said in 1990? They spoke of the top problems being drug use, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. Is it any wonder that many teachers I talk to can hardly wait to retire?

Add to that our increasing atrocity overload where we lose our capacity for shock, outrage, and disgust. We are, says Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "defining deviancy down," and we seem to think the more we can tolerate violence, crime, suicide, substance abuse, and sexual degradation, the more "sophisticated" we are. Our television talk shows feature topics such as cross-dressing couples, women who can't say no to cheating, prostitutes who love their jobs, a three-way love affair, a former drug dealer, and on and on. So in our cities of gold and alabaster, we seem to have moral rot and spiritual corruption at the core, and seventy percent of our populace does in fact admit we are off track.

What should we do? We should follow the example of black leader Delores Tucker, who is fighting the pornographic, violent, misogynistic lyrics of "gangsta" rap. At a Washington civil rights church meeting, emcee Eleanor Norton said, "We (black women) were astonished to hear this filthy, lowdown music, and it was about us." Then she added, "And we looked to the right and looked to the left, and there was silence -- until one woman said something and did something."

And that woman was Delores Tucker, who bought stock in Nobody Beats the Wiz, Musicland, Sony, and Time Warner in order to protest at stockholder meetings. This is precisely what she did at the Time Warner stockholder meeting -- standing up and reading the unbelievable "gangsta" rap lyrics. Why do the corporations do it? "It's greed-driven, drug-driven, and race-driven," says Tucker.

Tucker, a minister's daughter and former church organist and choir director, says she is motivated by "a passionate love affair for God and my people." Then she adds that in order to make a difference in the world, "I realize we always started at the church and marched to the political kingdom, whether it's local or national," to make a difference. In the meantime, many Christians are totally anemic or naive or spineless when it comes to making a difference.

And what should we do?

Another John the Baptist of our time, William Bennett, who knows the political process well, and notes its importance, says the problem is not primarily political. It is primarily spiritual and moral. It is, he says, acedia, a Greek word meaning sloth, yes, but also a negation of and aversion to spiritual things. It manifests itself in a "joyless, ill-tempered, and self-seeking rejection of the nobility of the children of God."

Therefore, more than ever we need a spiritual chart and moral compass to direct us in the way of wholeness and health. And the hopeful good news is that we have them -- in the Bible, in the great prophets like Elijah and Amos and John, and of course, in Jesus himself, who like John insisted on repentance and the works of righteousness.

Yes, we self-made, prideful, materialistic, successful American men and women need to confess that it is time to stop and ask for directions. And the hopeful, good news is, we can get there from here.


Prayer

Almighty God, by whose power the universe is shaped, and by whose presence all the worlds are sustained, your Mind structures all things, animate or inanimate, and your Spirit infuses the world with the pulse of life. We praise you as participants in the miracle of being, and thank you for consciousness to know you.

We come into your holy presence first to acknowledge we have not lived up to your expectations of us. We easily are distracted from the vision of our higher selves. Our loftiest ideals too quickly are compromised in the pressures of the moment. The noble, courageous things we intended to say, but didn't; the good we had hoped to do, but failed to do; the kindness we should have shown, but neglected -- all come to mind in your radiant presence. We confess we are sinners more often by what we fail to do, than by what we have done. Forgive us, O God, and grant us new resolve to become the persons we should become.

If we make our confessions in your holy presence, so also would we make our petitions. We pray especially for people who have lost their way -- lost sons and daughters, far from their parents' love in a strange and foreign place; lost husbands or wives, lured from the bonds of faithful commitment to the enticements borne of imagination and infatuation; lost talents in young people who vainly pursue the life of indolence and indifference; lost older people suffocating in the stuffiness of outdated ideas and worn-out memories; lost geniuses who have dissipated their gifts on trivialities; lost disciples of your cause who have succumbed to a hardened skepticism and casual cynicism; lost children, alone and afraid in an adult world often indifferent, neglectful, and violent.

O God, whose nature it is to seek and to save the lost, come to us, wherever we may be on the ways of life, and rescue us from our worst selves, and bring us back, like lost sheep and lost sons and daughters, into the glory of your loving guidance and care. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.