An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Repentance and Embracing the Stranger

A sermon on Acts 2:36-41 & Luke 24:13-35 by Nathan Nettleton

It is not often that a prayer becomes major news, but it did this week. News to some, anyway. If you were one of those who tuned out whenever Charles and Camilla were mentioned, you may have missed it, but one of the prayers chosen for the liturgy to bless their marriage attracted lots of media attention. It was a prayer of confession of sin, and it was considered newsworthy because the public has a great appetite for sexual scandal, and on that score, Charles and Camilla have been spectacularly public sinners. The prayer was thus commented upon as though it was an exceptional confession of adultery, which it wasn’t. Under normal circumstances, the inclusion of a prayer of confession in a service of Christian worship would attract no attention at all. In fact, a somewhat similar prayer in the papal funeral has not drawn comment in any news report I’ve seen. Perhaps if Charles and Camilla had chosen the prayers of confession from our liturgy, the acknowledgement that we sometimes “pursue our desires at the expense of others” would have made the news backed by pictures of Diana.

Despite the element of silliness and sensationalism in the commentary, perhaps the beat-up can serve to remind us that the prayers we use in public worship, though all written to be generally applicable to all participants, are all intended to take on specific content in our own hearts and minds. During Pascha, our prayers of confession are a bit shorter than usual. Having been more focussed on rooting out sin during Lent, we are more focussed on celebrating God’s gracious forgiveness now. But the theme of repentance is still strongly present, even if the emphasis now falls more on what we are turning to, rather than what we are turning from. Tonight, this repentance theme is enacted even more strongly, because we will shortly be welcoming James into our membership as he reaffirms his baptismal vows among us.

During this rite of initiation, James will make statements about renouncing corruption, rejecting selfish living and loveless desires, and turning to Christ and trusting him alone. These are, again, all worded generally without application to the specifics of James’ life. You can easily imagine though that if James had a Charles-and-Camilla-like public profile and was linked in the popular mind to some major act of corruption, we and the newspapers would hear his words as being full of specifics. And indeed, the call to James tonight, and to all of us who have just responded to God with the same words in the Paschal Vigil two weeks ago, is to call to mind our own specifics and to make good on these vows in light of our personal set of specifics.

In our first reading we heard an extract of a sermon the Apostle Peter preached in the public square in Jerusalem just a few weeks after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. He makes a bold call for repentance, urging his fellow citizens to turn their lives around and be baptised into Jesus Christ so that their sins might be forgiven and they might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. But what is especially bold about his preaching is that he takes the risk of being pretty specific about their sin. “You people crucified the one who God has chosen and anointed as Lord.” Now we sometimes talk of how we are all implicated in the killing of Christ, but for the crowds in Jerusalem, this was no theological theory. They had bayed for his blood when he was on trial before the Roman governor, and threatened to riot if he was released rather than made an example of. They turned up to his execution in their hundreds to cheer and jeer as he was led out and strung up to die, and thousands more just silently condoned the actions of the authorities from the anonymity of their own homes. To say that they had Jesus’ blood on their hands was specific content for them.

But Peter, like all the Apostles, always speaks in terms of communal identity. “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” he says, “and be baptised into Jesus Christ.” And when those who welcomed his message were baptised, it doesn’t say that three thousand persons were individually saved, it says they were “added”, added to the new community which is being saved in Christ. In the extract which we heard from his later letter, he speaks similarly of our need to be saved from “the futile ways inherited from our ancestors.” (1Peter 1:17-23) Sin does not always involve wilful wickedness. Just living the way we have been brought up and conforming to the ways of our society will form us in the ways of futility and death. “Therefore repent,” says Peter. “Turn your lives around and immerse yourselves in Christ.”

But tonight we are given these readings from the Apostle Peter alongside another from the Gospel according to Luke, and when we allow them to commentate on one another, some interesting things emerge for how this general call might find its specific content for us. In the story of the resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus, we see something that happens frequently in the resurrection appearances: Jesus appears as a stranger. The couple who meet him do not immediately recognise him as the risen Christ. In fact, when they do finally recognise him, he is gone. And in this experience, we are reminded that Jesus taught us that we would encounter him often, in the the stranger, in the needy, in the prisoner, in the refugee.

The people of Jerusalem did not think they were participating in the killing of God’s anointed one. So far as they were concerned, they were just supporting their appointed leaders in protecting the interests of their nation against trouble makers, dangerous non-citizens, and suspicious ideologues. So it seems that Peter and Luke would tell us that we do indeed have Christ’s blood all over our hands in quite specific ways. The risen Christ has come to us, and he didn’t seem like our type, so we treated him coldly or patronisingly and we felt better when he went away. The risen Christ has come to us and he associated with people whose lifestyles were sinful and a threat to our family values, so we shunned him and denounced him and barred him from holding any responsibility in our churches. The risen Christ has come to us, and she hadn’t gone through the proper immigration procedures and had no paperwork to prove her story, so we sent her out into the desert and locked her up indefinitely, and her children with her. The risen Christ has come to us, and he seemed like a wild eyed fundamentalist and was convicted of treason, so we jailed him for life and wondered if the death penalty shouldn’t be brought back for people like him.

The call to repent, and entrust ourselves to the risen Christ, has very specific content. There is content that is specific to each individual, and there is content that belongs to all of us because we belong to a nation and a people which has blood all over its hands and we have condoned and even supported at least some of its atrocities against the many strangers and outcasts in whom the risen Christ came to us.

James is a good example to us of someone who invests himself personally and heavily in resisting the systemic evil of our corrupt generation and striving to change the way we treat those who are powerless to stand up for themselves and in whom the Christ is so often present. The repentance he is about to express in symbolic ritual, is already being expressed in the way he lives his life. No doubt there are other aspects of his repentance that are less public, but as we have journeyed with him through the catechumenate over the last year, we have seen him to be one who faces whatever Christ makes known to him with integrity and courage. And so tonight, on a night when our scripture readings remind us of the call to turn to the Christ who comes to us in the stranger, and to honour and serve Christ in the apparent nobodies who we may only later realise were the Christ in our midst; on such a night it is a joy for us to celebrate the expansion of our communal life to include a man who will frequently bear the word of Christ to us, and will frequently embody and proclaim the call to serve the risen Christ who comes to us in the least of these strangers, and whose true identity is made known to us in the breaking of the bread.

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