Sermon for Sunday, July 4th 2021

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, rcl yr b, 2021
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent

In 1934, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving a German-speaking congregation in London. Both Bonhoeffer, and the Germans who made up his congregation, were at a relatively safe distance from the goings-on in Germany, namely the increasingly violent rise of the Nazis.

But on one particular Sunday in July, the goings-on in Germany couldn’t help but enter his sermon. His text for the day looked “only too much like the news of the day,” he said.  What Bonhoeffer was referring to was the Röhm Putsch—a bloody event where Nazis had murdered Hitler’s party rivals along with Catholic leader Erich Klausener.

Bonhoeffer’s congregation, though, wanted to take sides in this event, to distance themselves from what was happening in Germany, “to accuse one person and exonerate the other.” And by taking sides, to claim their own innocence. They intended to do what so many of us hope to do when we hear of a great evil: to place ourselves on the side of the innocent, and to make others the real culprits.

Bonhoeffer, though, would have none of it. To be on God’s side was to be on the side of justice, but that didn’t make things any safer or make anyone any more innocent than another. “[T]o repent and submit […] to God’s justice,” preached Bonhoeffer, is to be “on dangerous ground.” Because to submit to God’s justice means that “[n]ow we are no longer bystanders, onlookers, judges of these events, but we ourselves are being addressed; we are affected [and] God is speaking to us.”

To describe what he meant, Bonhoeffer told a story about Gandhi. When Gandhi was the director of a school, as Bonhoeffer tells the story, an injustice was done to one of the students. It “shook him to the core,” says Bonhoeffer. “However,” as Bonhoeffer continues, “[Gandhi] took this not as an occasion that called for him to judge or to punish anyone but only as a call to repentance.”

But whose repentance? The perpetrator’s? Nope. It seems in this instance the perpetrator of the injustice was unwilling, or unable, to repent; in fact we know little, from Bonhoeffer’s story, about the perpetrator. Because Bonhoeffer’s point, as he told this story, was to speak of Gandhi’s repentance, not the perpetrator’s.

This was a story, though, that wasn’t really about Gandhi. It was about Bonhoeffer’s own congregation, and their own desire to claim to be on the side of God’s justice; but what this meant for them in practice was not to be convicted of their own sin or complicity, but rather to distance themselves from the violence happening in Germany. In their desire to take a side, the right side, they hoped to escape judgment. And if to escape judgment, then most certainly to evade the necessity of repentance. So Bonhoeffer tells a story about someone who wasn’t a perpetrator, who wasn’t guilty, but someone who, nevertheless, repented: in Gandhi Bonhoeffer saw a person who repented for others.

And in telling that story, Bonhoeffer encouraged his own congregation not to be concerned about finding ways to evade repentance, but rather encouraged his congregation to repent even if they felt they were on the side of God’s justice, even though they thought they were innocent of the violence taking place elsewhere.

At the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry, at least in Mark’s Gospel, we hear Jesus preaching, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

We hear an echo of that this week. In our Gospel passage this week, Jesus sends out his disciples into the world. He gave them a number of things to do as they went out to minister in his name; but what I’m more interested in today is what Jesus told them to preach. When it came to telling them what to say, when it came time to tell the disciples what their message was, they were to share Jesus’s own message, and the first thing we hear Jesus say in Mark’s Gospel. “So they went out,” writes Mark, “and proclaimed that all should repent.”

We often conflate confession of sin with repentance. And this is for good reason. They are similar. To confess our sin isn’t just to raise our hand and say  “yep, my bad.” It’s also to commit once again to the Gospel, to believe once again in the good news, to change our hearts and minds and to start again. Repentance is like that too; repentance is to change our mind, repentance is to change our hearts, repentance is, by God’s life-giving grace, to begin again.

But repentance in the practice of the church isn’t something we do as individual people. We repent in the church, as the church; and the church cannot ever be simply a collection of individuals. The church is something quite different from a collection of individuals: together we form one body, together we form one living person.

This is why Bonhoeffer can ask his London congregation to repent for things that have happened in Germany. Even though they might have a good argument for their own distance from that violence, even though they could probably make an argument for their own innocence and someone else’s guilt, this didn’t mean they were at all off the hook.

It’s why he told the story of Gandhi repenting for an injustice in which Gandhi himself wasn’t the immediate perpetrator. And this is because repentance isn’t something we do as individual people, at least not as individual people in the church, because the church isn’t itself something made up of individual people—the church is one body. What the few do, in the church, is done also by the whole. And this is true for sin, and for repentance.

This possibility, that we might repent for the sin of others, despite our own distance from that injustice has been on my mind a great deal of late. On the one hand, we can, with some success, make an argument for our own distance from what happened in residential schools; for a degree of remoteness from that injustice and cruelty. None of us, after all, were teachers or principals in those residential schools.

In fact some of us, and some of our families and ancestors, were subject to many of the same sorts of exploitation. Our forebears might’ve been brought to the new world as slaves, or tricked into service in the Navy only to jump ship and hide in a new world fishing village, or were subject to colonial injustice in another part of the world.

(On the other hand, just about all of us continue to benefit from the legacy of injustice towards indigenous people; most of us are, after all, living on a leased portion of the Haldemand Tract, a lease where the agreed-upon payments to Six Nations were never made.)

But still, concerning the issue at hand for us—the mistreatment of children at residential schools—we could all, in different ways, probably find ways to distance ourselves from that reality. To say that we have no sin to confess, that we take the side of God’s justice, that it was really others who did such awful things.

But what do we read today, in Mark’s Gospel?

“So [the disciples] went out and proclaimed that all should repent.”

And like Bonhoeffer’s Gandhi, and his German congregation in London, we can repent. We can repent for others. “[T]o repent and submit […] to God’s justice,” is to be “on dangerous ground.” Because to submit to God’s justice means that “[n]ow we are no longer bystanders, onlookers, judges of these events, but we ourselves are being addressed; we are affected [and] God is speaking to us.”

And as we do, we can and do come face-to-face with all the ways we continue to benefit, each one of us, from injustice. As we repent for the unrepentant, we would do so because injustice has been done in the name of the church of which we are members; and just as Christ reconciles the world to God through his own obedience, so too would we join in Christ’s own ministry of reconciling a disobedient humanity to God, the God who by his grace has convicted us, the God who by his grace has let it be known to us that injustice has been done in his name.

That we might repent and turn to him.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near,” says Jesus, “repent, and believe in the good news.” “So [the disciples] went out and proclaimed that all should repent.”

And so we repent, we repent for others, for those who have sinned in our name; we repent for ourselves, who continue to benefit from injustice; and we do so because to repent is to be born again, it is to join in Christ’s own ministry of reconciliation, the reconciliation of not just ourselves, but of others to God.

It is to die and rise with Christ in faith.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near,” says Jesus, “repent, and believe in the good news.”

The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons