Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven Draws Near!

Grace and peace to you from God the Father and Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. Amen.

This week at St. Matthew’s bi-weekly Thursday morning Bible study, I posed this question: What would you do if a man dressed in coarse fur with a leather belt around his waist came out of the woods behind St. Matthew and started preaching, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?!?”

One of those in attendance answered: “Call the police!” and of course we all had a good laugh.

It would be unsettling to have a man dressed in such a way, saying such things emerge from the woods! We’re not used to having prophets back there, we’re just used to having phone tower people back there.

But such is the strangeness of many of the prophets in our biblical literature. And John is one of many voices recorded saying strange things, acting in strange ways and getting the attention of people by doing those things for millennia.

In our readings today, we also hear from Isaiah, another prophet who is, admittedly a little less strange in behavior than John the Baptist, but nonetheless he still says things that would have jarred those listening.

Today, Isaiah speaks about a “peaceable kingdom” that catches the attention because of how it’s described: “the wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard lies down with the kid; the calf and lion feed together and a little child shall lead them; the cow and bear graze together;” the lion will eat straw like the ox and children will be able to play alongside spiders and snakes without any fear.

This is an impossible place but the poetic way Isaiah describes it does catch our attention, the image of a cow and bear grazing side-by-side stops you for just a few seconds longer as you imagine that image and wonder about a place where there is no danger and all live in peace having what they need.

Well, that’s the job of the prophet. To get our attention, to stop us for a few extra seconds so they can say, “WAKE UP! If this kind of peaceable kingdom is desired, then things have got to change around here! Turn yourself, turn your life in a new direction! Face God and notice how God is calling us to be and do different!”

And here is where we come back to John the Baptist, who asks of us to “repent” in todays text. That’s the thing his whole strange, attention-grabbing act is about, like the prophets of old: Repentance.

That word, repentance, rings a little differently in our modern ears because if you are at all like me, we have the baggage of Christian guilt and when you hear the word “repent” it makes you feel like you should be listing out all the bad things you’ve done, be ashamed of them and sorry for them, and it is in that shame, guilt and sorrow that true repentance happens.

That kind of repentance might happen in our life and it’s sometimes needed. However, during this Advent season where we are anticipating and readying ourselves for the coming of the Christ Child I imagine a different kind of repentance, not one that is an apology for something done – but one that follows the prophetic invitation to reorient of our living, to turn around and move in a new direction to face God and notice how God is calling us.

To illustrate what I mean, I think about this very room – the sanctuary of our church. When you come into this space, you physically face the altar and the cross. When we leave this place to go back into the world, we turn away from them. We are sent back into the world where we work, tend to our families, and do our best to live wonderful fulfilling lives. However, our prophet Isaiah drew our attention today to what my Old Testament professor, Rolf Jacobson calls a “poetic impossibility” about the world, where lions and lambs live peacefully and where children can play around snakes and spiders with no fear. The real world, as we know, is filled with daily tragedy, both little tragedies and enormous ones. Our various vocations, from teaching, to business, to nursing, to family care are all in the name of reducing the big and the little tragedies we know to exist in the world. It’s normal for us to want an end to tragedy. But, just like Isaiah’s poem, we know ultimately all our effort will not fully stop the tragedy. Just like we know that our kids will never be able to literally play with a snake safely. When we leave this Sanctuary to go into our daily living, we experience the tragedies of the world. And at times, it can all get exhausting.

And so, each week we have an opportunity to turn around – to enact a repentance - and come back to this sanctuary. We turn ourselves back to the altar and to the cross where we lay the tragedies of the world onto the altar, giving them up to God, at the foot of this cross, trusting in God’s presence with us in our experience of the little and the big tragedies of our living.

And then God meets us. We are nourished by hearing the promises of God in scripture – the very same scripture we handed to our youngest members this morning - and we eat of God’s promises in the Communion Meal. And then, God sends us to go into our daily lives different people, a people who have oriented our life around the scriptures and the sacraments – heeding the very call of the prophets.  

To be sure, our coming to this place with this altar and this cross is not the one and only place to which we can turn and meet God. God is always reaching out to us. But this physical place is a helpful reminder and can be one of our tools that help us to enact our repentance – our turning toward God - and can help us prepare for the kingdom of heaven which comes near to us at Advent!

This physical place helps us to notice God’s outreaching… because it might be hard to notice a baby boy, born to a young girl, in a barn behind an inn on a winter evening amidst all the noise, bombastic figures and tragedies of the world.

But guess what, that little boy is a universe altering event. It is God himself entering creation to be in the tragedies with us, to bring us hope as our Advent Candle signified last week, hope that God’s promise of peace on earth as our Advent candle this morning symbolizes, is possible through this little baby boy. “Repent!” Orient your life to God’s calling and see the baby Emmanuel sleeping peacefully – God is with us.

Repenting, turning our hearts – our whole lives – toward God, is our Advent preparation for the coming Christ child, for Jesus who we know as Savior and Lord.

Thanks be to God for the man who came out of the woods and got our attention to see it!

Amen.

Rev. Ryan | December 7, 2025 | Second Sunday in Advent