The Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 2010

Text: St. Luke 15:11-32

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

What Does Repentance Look Like?

So a priest and a rabbi are discussing the pros and cons of their various religions, and inevitably the discussion turns to repentance. The rabbi explains Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement, a day of fasting and penitence, while the priest tells him all about Lent, and its 40 days of self-denial and absolution from sins. After the discussion ends, the rabbi goes home to tell his wife about the conversation, and they discuss the merits of Lent versus Yom Kippur. She turns her head and laughs. The rabbi says, "What's so funny, dear?" Her response, "40 days of Lent - one day of Yom Kippur...so, even when it comes to sin, the goyyim pay retail....."

If repentance was really the way we pay for our sins she might have a point. One day verses forty sounds a lot better to me. But we trust that it is not we who pay for our own sins by our works of penance; Christ did that perfectly when He offered Himself once for all time upon the cross.

But if repentace isn’t our payment for sin, what is it? It’s obviously something that is at the very center of what it means to be a Christian. When Peter was asked by the crowd on Pentecost, “What shall we do?”—meaning really, “What shall we do to be saved?”—Peter answered, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). ‘Repent, and believe the gospel”—that was the central message of Jesus’ preaching (Mark 1:15). And He said He hadn’t come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Mt. 9:13). “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent ye of your sins…draw near with faith”—it’s something we hear every Sunday morning.

Well, if repentance is such a central part of the Christian life, do we really know all of what it entails and what it asks of each of us? What does repentance actually look like? Is it just about being sorry for our sins? Is it about coming to Confession? Does is demand some kind of action on our behalf?

Well, Jesus preached a semon on repentance. We call it “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” and we had it as our Gospel lesson this morning. Actually, The Parable of the Prodigal Son is really the third part of His one sermon on repentance. It’s preceeded by two other shorter parables—ones that are also very familiar to us: The Parable of the Lost Sheep and The Parable of the Lost Coin. Together they make up one sermon. But Jesus builds up His sermon to its great climax in this, perhaps the most familiar of all His parables, The Parable of the Prodigal Son.

All three of the parables emphasize the misery of Man in being lost in sin, in being in that state of lostness and separateness from God, like a coin from its owner, or a sheep from its shepherd, or a son from his father. But the first two parables focus on the joy that God has in receiving back penitent sinners. So Jesus ends each of them with this summary statement: “Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents.” The last parable—The Parable of the Prodigal Son— focuses on what repentance really looks like, what it entails. That makes it extrememly instructive to us, who so need to make repentance a basic part of our Christian lives.

So walk with me again through The Parable fo the Prodigal Son.

You know the basic premise of the story. A man has two sons, and the younger of them gets it in his head one day that he’s just got to have his inheritance now! And so he goes to his father and demands from him that portion of his father’s property that would eventually belong to him. But consider what this means. It means that the son wishes his father was dead, or at least he wants to treat his father as if he were dead. Because when does an inheritance get divided amongst the heirs? After the death of the one who owns the property. Right? As in our culture, so in that culture. So if you ask you father to give your inheritance before he’s dead, what you’re basically saying is: “Hey, I wish you were out of the way. I wish you were dead so I could get control of what is yours without you being in the way. I want your property more than I want a relationship with you.”

But you see this is exactly the nature of sin. As we read in our book on Anglican public worship this past Spirng, “[Sin] is a traitor’s act who aims at the overthrow and death of his sovereign; it is that…which, could the Divine Governor of the world cease to be, would be sufficient to bring it about.” Sin really is the attempt to live as if God were dead. Or it’s living in such a way that you wish God were dead. You don’t want to answer to God for how you’re dealing with what belongs to Him. You want Him out of the picture. In another parable, what was it that Jesus said was the attitude of Man’s heart towards God? “We will not have this man to reign over us” (Lk. 19:14). So when God came to us, what did we do to Him? We crucified Him. We killed him. Well, this is exactly what is in the heart of this younger son towards his father. And this is why being in a state of sin is being in a state of death towards God. And that’s the next part of the parable.

See, far from it being just a wonderful state of freedom, and happiness, and carefree living, Jesus describes the state of sin as state of utter misery and degredation. He says the young man took his father’s property and squandered it on riotous living. That means he abused what rightfully belonged to his father and used it merely to satisfy himself and his insatiable desire for pleasure. (And if you’ve never been there, then you’re more than a saint.) But then the money rain out. And when there was no more mon’ there was no more fun. His friends abandoned him, what friends they were. And then he looked around and he realized that there was nothing else out there for him. Jesus says there was a great famine in the land. And the only thing he could figure out to do to keep himself alive was to hire himself out to a local pig farmer, and even then no one gave him anything, so that the slop the pigs were eating actually began to look good to him.

But then something changed in this young man’s heart. He looked around and it suddenly dawned on him what his reality had actually become.He began to reflect upon the difference between his present situation—sitting their starving in a pig pen—with the joy and plenty he once enjoyed with his father and brother, where even the servants had bread enough and to spare.

Isn’t it true that it’s only when we hit absolute rock-bottom that we finally recognize what our situation really is? I mean, how many times have you heard people, who once set out on what looked like the primrose path to pleasure in the world of drugs and alcohol and sex, say in the end, “How did I ever get here?” as they’re sitting in jail, or in a rehab facility, or in hospice care dying of AIDS? You might have said something like that yourself at one point in your life. Hardship has a wonderful way of making us see the facts.

Jesus says that in a similar way this young man finally “came to himself.” He came to his senses. He came to a better mind. And you know what? That’s the first part of repentance. The Greek word for repentance, metanoia, literally means “a change of mind.” It’s to have a change of mind towards your sin. It’s to have a change of mind that expresses itself in a godly sorrow for what you’ve done. St. Paul says, that kind of godly sorrow produces repentance which leads to salvation (2 Cor. 7:10). It’s the first step. It’s what we call Contrition, being contrite. And this is just where this young man is as he sits among the swine at their feeding trough.

How do we know that? Well, look at the intention that begins to build in his heart. He says to himself, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called you son.”

I want you to notice, first of all, that he wasn’t sorry just because of the situation he was in. He wasn’t sorry just for what he had lost. That’s not that godly sorrow St. Paul is talking about. That’s just self-pity, isn’t it? He’s sorry for what he had done. He’d sinned. And he accepts that he sinned. He didn’t say he just made a mistake, or that he’d just had a lapse in judgment, or that he was just having a bad day. He called sin “sin,” and he didn’t try to sweep it under the carpet or justify it in anyway. And he’s sorry. He’s sorry first of alll that he had sinned against heaven, that is, against God. All sin is first and foremostly sin against God, because all sin is the trespassing of His commandments, whether it’s the commandment to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, or to love our neighbor as ourselves. But he also recognized that he had sinned against his father. He hadn’t honored his father. In a very real sense he’d murdered his father in his heart. He’d exalted self-love over love of his father.

But you see, now resolves to go and confess his sin to his father. That is the second part of repentance: Confession. It’s returning to the one you have offend and telling them your offence. It where we get the old idea of ‘fessing up to your sin. It’s throwing yourself upon the mercy of the one you’ve sinned against without making him feel in any way that he owes you his mercy: “I am no more worthy to be called you son. Make me as one of your hired servants.” Confession is not manipulating forgiveness, but rather humbly placing yourself at the mercy of the one you’ve offended. Thankfully with God, His “property is to always have mercy.” We’re not always sure about our fellow Christians.

But the important point is that the young man did not remain merely at the level of sorrow for his sins. Judas was sorry for his sins, but he didn’t take the second step. He didn’t return to the Lord to seek His forgiveness. And so he was not truly repentant. He couldn’t get himself to fess up. But he also couldn’t bare the weight of his guilt. So he went and hanged himself. That’s what happens when Contrition doesn’t move to Confession, when you resist the urging of godly sorrow to return to the one you’ve sinned against to seek their forgiveness. It will consume you, and ultimately destroy you. Because you can’t bare sin’s weight. You have to let another unburden you of it.

And so that was this man’s intention: to go and confess his sins. But he didn’t stay at the place of intention. He didn’t stay in his place of sorrow, and he didn’t just intend to go and confess his sin; he got up and left his situation. That’s the third part of repentance. It’s what we call Amendment. He did’t just write his father a letter and tell him who sorry he was for offending him, but that he was just going to remain in his pigsty, thank you very much. No, he got out of the muck and went back to his father.

You see, Contrition and Confession are still not the fullness of all of what it means to truly repent. We’ve got to at least intend to leave our sinful behavior behind. John said to those who came to be baptized by him, and were confessing their sin, tha they needed to produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, “Go, and sin no more.” In other words, repentance is not just something we do with our lips; it’s something we do with our lives.

Amendment may even mean that we might have pay some form of restitution to the one we’ve injured. That’s not a payment for forgiveness, but a giving back of what we’ve unjustly taken from them. I always like to bring up Zachaeus at this point—the wee little man who climbed up into a tree to see Jesus. Zachaeus was publican—a tax collector—whose job it was to extort as much money as he could possibly get out of people to pay off the Romans. He was a thief. But when Jesus saw him, He said to him, “Come down, [Zachaeus,] for today I must stay in your house.” And as a result of that calling from Jesus, somehow or other Zachaeus experienced a deep conviction of his heart, and he said back to Jesus, “Look, Lord. I give half of my goods to the poor; and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore fourfold.” You see, Zachaeus didn’t just make confession with his mouth, but had the sincere intention in his heart to amend his ways, and even to make amends for his past wrongs.

This is why, just before the Confession in the liturgy, we hear every Sunday: “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins…and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways, draw near with faith.” And here’s the wonderfull thing: God meets us at the point of our intention. To Zachaeus Jesus said, even before he went and paid restitution for all he’d stolen, “Today salvation has come to this house.” And in the parable, even before the young man makes it all the way back home, the father is running down the lane to meet his son. Even before the son gets all of his well-crafted confession out, his father is already calling for his servants to bring out the best robe and to put it on him, and to put a ring on his finger, and sandals on his feets, and to kill the fatted calf and to make merry, and to restore him to the position of full sonship. That’s the Gospel, isn’t it?

God in His amazing grace meets at the point of our intention to turn from our sins. But if we are truly going to be his sons and daughters and honor Him as our good heavenly father, then we must strive with all of our being to make good those intentions.

Contrition, Confession, and Amendment. Our parable this morning teaches us that those are the steps in the process of returning to God that we call repentance. It’s what repentance really looks like. And if we take those steps, and we help others to take those steps, we know how joyously we will be received by our heavenly Father. For Jesus says, “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine “just” person who need no repentance.” +