When a sixth grader was asked to identify William Shakespeare on a history exam, he wrote that Shakespeare was “the greatest writer of the Renaissance.  He was born in 1564 supposedly on his birthday.  He is famous only because of his plays.  He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies, all in Islamic parameter.”  Asked to identify Handel, of Messiah fame, on the same test, another student wrote that, “Handel was half German, half Italian, half English.  He was very large.”  (James Flamming, Christmas: Muslims and the Messiah, First Baptist Church, Richmond, VA, December 2, 2001)  If we’re going to know either Shakespeare or Handel any better than that, we’ll need someone else to introduce them to us and, if you will, set the stage for a better understanding. 

In some ways, John the Baptist doesn’t seem qualified to introduce Jesus on the world stage.  His dress is off the wall, not to mention his homeless meandering in the desert and culinary habits.  Locusts and wild honey?!  If this man were to ask to preach here this morning, we’d more likely refer him to a mental health professional than give him pulpit time.  Beyond his physical appearance and habits, his message was rather disturbing, don’t you think?  “‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’”  Vipers?  Not to mention “‘chaff’” and “‘unquenchable fire.’”  By the time John gets through we’ll better appreciate what the rattlesnakes must feel like at the annual Roundup in Sweetwater every year.  Skinned alive and deep-fried.  John sounds like the kind of guy you’d want on your side if you were looking to pick a fight, not end one.  He’s not my first choice for introducing the Prince of Peace.  How about you?

Truth is, we don’t pay much attention to John, even if he was, as some people actually believe, the first Baptist.  In our version of Advent, we rather ignore him, usually skipping right by him to rush to the wise men and manger scenes, the ones more palatable to our sentiments, if not our consciences.  I wonder, however, if we don’t do so at our own peril and only because, distracted by what appears to be locust-eating lunacy, we misunderstand something very fundamental about John’s message about genuine repentance, its relationship to confession and the connection of it all to the coming of Jesus.

This is the season of Advent.  And, if we’re going to do confession I must to confess to you that, in my West Texas Baptist tradition, Advent was considered one of them there high church words and we didn’t use it any more than we used real wine when we took the Lord’s Supper, which we never called Communion, either.  I have no idea how old I was before I even heard the word, something that would make my Episcopalian friends laugh.  I won’t tell you how old I was before I knew what it meant, which would make you laugh.  So, just in case there are any others here with their roots more in Texas culture than centuries old Christian tradition, Advent is a word rooted in the Latin adventus.  Mr. Hair, who had no hair, taught me Latin in High School, so at least I can pronounce it and tell you that adventus means arrival or coming.  Christians celebrate Advent as the arrival or coming of Jesus.  In a sense, John’s assignment was to give definition to the first Advent. 

At the heart of his message were these words, “‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’”  And, Matthew records that, in preaching that message, John was fulfilling Old Testament prophecy.  Isaiah, centuries before, had said that John would be the “‘voice of one calling in the desert (crying) ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’”  John’s was saying that, in Jesus, the very Kingdom of God was coming.  People had better get ready.  And, in droves people came confessing their sins and getting baptized.  Confession and repentance?  That’s how you get ready to meet God?

Not a red carpet?  Not a banquet?  Not a rehearsal so that, when the real performance happens, you’re at your best?  Not something you get dressed up for but something, if you will, you get undressed for?  Jesus, God in the flesh, is coming and John wants us to get down and dirty, as in down in the dirty stuff of our souls.  That’s how we’re to get ready to meet God.  In fact, it’s the only way.

To confess means to open up.  We can confess good things we believe or know, like the fact that we believe in Jesus.  Part of what it means to be Christian is to “confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’ (Romans 10:9).”  Christian confession also includes opening up about what we’ve been hiding from God, our sin.  We’re promised that, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).”  As John told the people that Jesus was coming, they got ready by confessing their sins.  They told God their hidden story.

To repent means to feel sorry for whatever you’ve done to offend God, to feel genuine remorse.  Not the kind you say you feel just because someone in authority told you that you had to, like when a parent tells a child who has hurt his brother or sister, “you say you’re sorry!”  To repent means to be so repulsed by your own behavior that you choose to turn away from it.  That’s why John told the Pharisees to “‘produce fruit in keeping with repentance.’”  On one occasion, Jesus said to some other folks, “‘unless you repent, you too will all perish (Luke 13:5).’”  To sin means to walk away from God.  To shove him out of your life.  To stiff-arm and keep him at a distance.  To repent means to stop running away, like the Prodigal Son, and turn toward God’s home.

Confession and repentance don’t mean striving to reach a point of moral perfection that God finds acceptable.  That would mean we had to make ourselves good, something God alone can do.  No!  Confession and repentance are much more hopeful and helpful words than that.  Within most religions, as within “Islamic parameters,” God is unapproachably holy.  Life is a struggle to become better and better so that God will let you come to him someday.  Though Muslims, like us, believe in one God, the center of their faith is a book, the Koran.  The center of a Christian’s faith is a person, Jesus.  In most religions, salvation means finding a way to get to God.  And, if that is what was involved in confession and repentance, we’d be like terminally ill patients who had to get well before the doctor would even see is.  In Christianity, we worship a Great Physician who makes house calls.  Celebrating Advent means celebrating that we don’t find God.  In Christ, God has found us. 

Confession and repentance mean opening the door of our lives to the God who has come to find us and telling him our story so that he can heal us and make us whole.  John said that Jesus would come to “‘baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.’”  Confession and repentance open the door to God’s healing and cleansing and a relationship in which he can empower us to live in ways that do honor him.  That’s how we get ready for the coming of God in Jesus.  We open up about what’s kept us away.  We tell him our story.  When we do, a whole new relationship is born.    

At an Adult Sunday School party recently, they played a game called, “I have never.”  Now, I have never played I have never.  But, this is the way it works.  Everyone sits in a circle and is given twenty-five pennies and some kind of dish is placed at the center of the circle.  The games starts when the first person says, “I have never,” and then finishes the sentence by confessing something they have never done.  Those are the easy confessions, the ones others make, right?!  Then, it gets tough.  Everyone in the circle who has done what that person confessed to never doing has to get up, walk to the center of the circle and put a penny in the dish.  They don’t have to say a word.  But, by walking to the center and dropping in a penny, they’re making their confession, telling part of their story.  For example, someone might have said, (let’s make it G-rated) “I have never slept during a sermon.”  And, everyone who ever has slept during a sermon has to put a penny in the dish.  Actually, I understand that, before the night was over, the confessions had gone far beyond dosing off during a sermon and the party was rated a strong PG-13; supposedly some people actually wanted to claim Fifth Amendment protection.  It’s tough, isn’t it, when it’s time to drop your penny, isn’t it?

Interestingly, something else happened.  People heard each other’s stories.  Secrets kept long hidden came to light and relationships were forged on new levels that might have forever remained superficial.  It was all meant for fun.  In fact, it was the acting out of what ought to happen in our relationships with God and each other all along.  Every time we tell each other our story, make our confession, we open the door to relationship, with each other and with God.

If you need a little help telling your story, just remember that Jesus is the only one who can sit in the circle and legitimately say, “I have never.”  He never turned away from his Father.  There were no secrets between the two.  Jesus “was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet was without sin (Hebrews 4:15).”  That makes our relationship with God possible.  It also makes our relationship with each other possible.  You see, if Jesus is the only one who can legitimately say, “I have never,” that also means we will never, ever be sitting in the circle without someone else who needs to make the same confession as ours.  Our common bond is not just that Jesus came for all of us, it is also that we all needed him to come for us. 

In my Pastor’s column, Passages, I’ve been writing recently about my mother’s struggle with clinical depression during my late elementary and middle school years.  I loved my mother deeply.  But, I didn’t know how to make sense of what she was going through at the time.  I wasn’t ashamed of her.  But, I must have felt a sense of shame and fear about her illness because I didn’t dare talk about it to anyone.  It wasn’t until years later that I understood depression for what it was and knew that is was nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.  My journey toward that understanding began one day when I was on a school bus with the seventh grade football team, of all places. 

That day, I overheard a friend, Scott, telling someone else about his mother’s struggle with depression.  I thought I was the only on the bus, in the whole school, whose mother was depressed.  For the first time, I didn’t feel so alone.  When I heard Scott tell his story, it somehow freed me to tell mine, for the first time.  (It was my story, too, because a parent’s illness is always part of their child’s story.)  Someone else had felt my kind of shame and fear.  When Scott confessed his, I was able to confess mine.  He eventually went his Episcopalian way into the priesthood and I went mine into what Baptists call, “being a preacher.”  I’ve wondered.  Do you think Scott, my Episcopalian friend, was the first to tell me what the word Advent meant?  I wonder.  Do you think he told me?  That God had to come us, in our fear and shame, and as we tell him, and each other, our story, the Light of Bethlehem breaks through the swamp-black darkness of our fear and shame and frees us to live, really live, for the first time, forever.  I wonder.