Matthew
4:12-23
There’s
a pretty well-known cartoon that was in The
New Yorker a few years ago. It had a
man leaning down and staring his cat right in the eye and saying, “Never, ever,
ever think outside the box.”
Cats
aside, thinking outside the box is something that we generally applaud and
admire – when it works. When it doesn’t
work, it’s just craziness or stupidity.
When something is obvious, you just go with it.
The
ancestor of the tuba was an instrument designed specifically for church back in
the day when Gregorian chant was the major type of singing in worship. The bass line in that kind of singing is
sometimes called a “drone”, and for good reason. There are times when a bass feels like he’s
singing a dial tone moved down two octaves.
Basses need instrumental support because you can only go so long singing
one, very low note before your voice starts to give out. To get the really low notes, though, you need
a very long tube (in Latin that’s tuba)
and you end up with one of those horns that you see in pictures of the Austrian
Alps, where it takes one person to blow the horn while someone else stabilizes
it. If you want to play more than one or
two notes, though, you need a third person covering the holes. It just isn’t practical. Then around 1590 a Frenchman named Edme
Guillaume came up with the idea of twisting the tube around like a snake so
that one person could handle it. He
called the instrument a “serpent”. Later
developments came along, like valves and keys, and twisting it differently to
go around someone in a marching band, but it was that one big leap that made it
possible, a leap that now seems obvious.
So I
want to talk about repentance.
Repentance and tubas kind of go together in my head. When I hear tuba music I often feel like I’ve
mde a mistake. It’s not what you think,
either. It has nothing to do with how
much really bad music there is out there that relies on an oompah beat.
When
I was in about seventh grade, I played violin in the school orchestra. We had a lot of violinists – some of them
very good. There was a shortage of tuba
players, though. The orchestra director,
who was more than a little bit of a tyrant and who really had no business
teaching kids, decided for me and a couple of other string players that we were
going to switch instruments. Now picture
someone about 4’6” trying to carry a tuba on a school bus, then getting it home
and trying to prop it up on a chair to climb inside the thing to practice. If you want to know what repentance is, one
version of it is the feeling you get when you find yourself tipping over
sideways while trying to find C# and grabbing at the music stand at the same
time.
You
know that feeling. You know that
how-did-I-get-myself-into-this-and-how-do-I-get-out feeling. You know that sinking sensation that tells
you it might be worse than you thought, and it’s your own fault for going along
with some hare-brained scheme just because you were in a position where you
knew it was not a good idea to say, “No.”
That’s
not really repentance. That’s remorse.
Repentance
is what Edme Guillaume did when he rethought the way things were done and
invented the prototype of this thing that would one day threaten to engulf
many, many middle schoolers. Remorse is
feeling bad about something. Repentance
is thinking about how to do things a whole new way.
Jesus
didn’t come to make us feel remorse.
That was already going on. People
have consciences and have known from the beginning that when you’ve made a mess
of things, there will be trouble. Adam
ate the apple and then heard God calling his name and decided he needed to go
and hide. That was remorse. Moses killed an Egyptian soldier in a fit of
righteous rage, but then realized what he had done, hurriedly buried the body
in a shallow grave, and ran for the desert where he could hide from the
consequences. That was remorse. David fell for the beautiful wife of one of
his generals, got her pregnant while her husband was away at the front, and
realized that his sin would soon go public.
That was remorse, and more followed when his horrible efforts to cover
things up went wrong and resulted in the general’s death. There was no need for God to send his Son to
make anyone sense their guilt.
Jesus
came for something else. Matthew says,
as do the other gospels, that his message began with the news that God was
doing something new and that we can, too.
“Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” [Matthew 4:17]
Rethink things.
Rethink the things that lead you to feel remorse. Rethink your assumptions. Think outside the box. God was already doing that, reaching out
beyond the usual suspects to the people who were on the edge of things. Jesus would start his preaching ministry
telling the people who were farthest away from Jerusalem and the center of
religious life that if they felt too far away from God, God would come to them.
“Land
of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea,
across the Jordan, Galilee of the
Gentiles –
The
people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region
and shadow of death
light has dawned.” [Matthew
4:15-16]
We don’t have to find the kingdom of heaven. Jesus brings it to us.
Rethink
how you understand God. Is God way out
there or way up there? Or is God right
here? Is God always upset and angry
because of our sins (which are real and a real problem), or is God more hurt at
our rejection? Does God want to reject
his people in return, or does he want to restore humankind to a right
relationship with himself and with one another?
Repent. Rethink. Reimagine.
Recalibrate. Readjust. Re-whatever it takes. Re-new.
Maybe sometimes re-know.
“The
kingdom of heaven has come near.”
You
can see how things begin when Jesus calls the first disciples. Business as usual is left behind.
“As
he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called
Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea – for they were
fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow
me, and I will make you fish for people.’
Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other
brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their
father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their
father, and followed him.” [Matthew
4:18-23]
These are people to whom the kingdom of heaven very
suddenly and unexpectedly became a present reality. A switch was flipped on. The people who walked in darkness saw a great
light.
In
the dark, you walk carefully and only walk paths you know well. Even then, you stub your toe from time to
time. In the light, you can move in all
kinds of ways, and move with confidence.
You see the obstacles and can go around them. You aren’t as limited or as tentative. You could even, if you are so inclined, run
or jump or dance or spin around.
Frederick
Buechner wrote,
“The Kingdom of God is so close we can almost reach
out our hands and touch it. It is so
close that sometimes it almost reaches out and takes us by the hand. The Kingdom of God, that is. Not man’s kingdom. Not Saddam Hussein’s kingdom, not Bush’s
kingdom, not Gorbachev’s kingdom.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how these people are all out of
the picture, but Jesus isn’t? Let me
continue, though.
“Not any of the kingdoms that still have nuclear
missiles aimed at each other’s heads, that worry like us about counting
calories while hundreds of thousands starve to death. But God’s Kingdom. Jesus says it is the Kingdom of God that is
at hand. If anybody else said it, we
would hoot him off the stage. But it is
Jesus who says it. Even people who don’t
believe in him can’t quite hoot him off the stage. Even people who have long since written him
off can’t help listening to him.
…the Kingdom of God is the time, or a time beyond
time, when it will no longer be humans in their lunacy who are in charge of the
world but God in his mercy who will be in charge of the world. It’s the time above all else for wild
rejoicing – like getting out of jail, like being cured of cancer, like finally,
at long last, coming home. And it is at
hand, Jesus says.”[1]
Yes. He
does. Because it is.
[1]
Frederick Buechner, “The Kingdom of God” in The
Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 164-165.
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