I love words. I am fascinated by them. In fact, I love them enough to pay attention when I hear new words. Not long ago, I learned that I am a philologist, which means in simplest form, “lover of words.”

Beyond that, I think words are very important, far more serious than the ways in which we often use them: trivially, or spitting them out without considering what they mean or what the implications will be.

Some of my friends also think I am a technophobe, or at least a technoskeptic because while I see great benefits to the technology of our modern times, I also see great dangers. One of the dangers is that the dramatically increased speed of communication means that words are not chosen or used carefully. Sometimes they are chosen-or changed-purely for the sake of efficiency or speed. Sometimes they’re not used at all.

We have three teenagers at our house. They are educating me. Think about the kids growing up today: cellphones that need to be answered 24-7, computers with email messages popping up constantly. And then there’s the phenomenon of “I-M–ing.” That’s “Instant Messaging” for those of you living in the dark ages.

Instant Messaging is email messages sent online with instantaneous receipt and delivery, so you are quite literally typing a live conversation. Actually, kids today are normally typing in anywhere from 2-8 live conversations…simultaneously. Now, to have, let’s say, six conversations going at one time, new vocabulary that is more efficient has to be developed. You can’t be bothered with choosing words and using them because it’s too slow. And the new vocabulary is the vocabulary of abbreviation.

For example, if you are having an Instant Message conversation and have to run use the bathroom, you just type in “BRB,” which everyone knows means “Be right back.” TTYL means “talk to you later,” and G2G is a sign-off for “gotta go.” JK means “just kidding.” My favorite is when one person writes something humorous, and the other simply responds with LOL…Laugh out loud. And after the first service, someone gave me another good one: POS. That means “Parent over shoulder!”

Now, it’s not just instant messaging that dilutes the vocabulary we use. We also change the meaning of words, and create confusion. In many circles, “nasty” or “sick” now is an emphatic expression for “really good!” “Mark has a nasty jump shot,” (that is, a really good one).

We also ruin words by overusing them. “Awesome,” might be one older example. Once it meant something that inspired awe, that was totally overwhelming. Now we call things that are barely routine or slightly above… “Awesome.” “How do you like your haircut?” “Awesome!”

For a variety of reasons, many of the words we use are ill. They need to either be discarded, or cleaned up and put to right use again.

Let me tell you another word that is in danger. It’s one from our text here, that John the Baptist uses several times: Repent.

REPENT!!

Now, when I shout out that word, what do you think of? Here’s what goes through my mind:

a) a picture of a stocky preacher marching around a big stage with a tan colored leisure suit on and white shoes, sweating under the TV cameras and screaming out the word, “Repent.”

b) a guy on the streets of downtown Seattle in sandals and dirty jeans and a long beard with a glazed stare in his eyes, holding a sign that says just one word: Repent.

c) From my college days, a guy named Holy Hubert on the campus of the UW. Holy Hubert was…what was Holy Hubert? He was a very aggressive Christian agitator who liked to engage college students in shouting matches. I still remember him standing on top of a wall, yelling at the top of his lungs, eyes locked on a debate opponent, snarling out the words “You, buddy, better repent! While there’s still time.”

For many of us, we hear a word like “Repent,” and it has been used, overused, used wrongly, used to beat people over the head so strongly that we just shut it off. Click. I’m not listening. I wonder…if John can redeem this word. Maybe John the Baptist can be a word doctor for us this morning.

John is an interesting character, isn’t he? Marching out of the desert, camel hair clothes, leather belt, wild honey dripping out of his mouth and grasshopper legs stuck to his beard. The exact depiction of Elijah, the Old Testament prophet who many Jews believed (and still believe) must return before the Day of the Lord. John dunked people under the waters of the Jordan. And John liked to do a lot of pointing. He especially pointed people towards confessing their sin, towards repentance.

One way of thinking of John the Baptist is as a bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament. A bridge between the Law and the Gospel. Between judgment and grace.

John probably could have had quite a career. He had people lining up at the river, had people who wanted to follow him, had his little niche all marked out, probably could have done it for a long time. But he made one serious tactical mistake. He had no hesitation at all…in pointing right at people and saying things like: “You’ve got some secrets. Your motives are way off base. You…are a hypocrite. You need a good scrubbing on the inside.” And the thing is, he said it to anybody that needed it. Anybody.

Usually we think of John’s message of repentance as directed to people generally “out there.” But Matthew tells us that he particularly went at the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the spiritual leaders, the most committed religious people in Israel. Went at them like there was no tomorrow. “You brood of vipers, you den of snakes…who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

John talked to them as though he saw what he may have seen in his time in the wilderness; a sudden wildfire sweeping across the stubble and low bushes of the desert, driving the snakes and scorpions and little creatures ahead of it.

Repent. What was John asking? Or rather, telling them? There was a day in long ago antiquity, long before John when the word for “repent” essentially meant “having second thoughts,” or “changing one’s mind.” It was used for all sorts of things which were pretty casual. Repent once meant just realizing you made a mistake.

I wonder if we don’t sometimes think like this when we have our times of confession, either here in worship or at other times: “Lord, I need forgiveness…I made a mistake. Lord, I shouldn’t have gotten angry at that idiot at work. Lord, the more I’ve thought about it, I probably should have made a different decision.”

You hear how it sounds. It’s just not that big of a deal. “Whatever issues are going on in my life, the Lord and I can sort of sit down and negotiate a bit and it’s all better and it doesn’t really cost much.”

But by the time the New Testament was written, there was a much deeper and more powerful meaning. Repentance wasn’t just the recognition of a mistake. It was a rending (tearing, breaking, shredding) of the heart, a crying out to God and a recognition that we need help. Repentance came to mean the changing of one’s whole direction in life, literally a turning around, turning from the bad and coming back to what is good in God.

John the Baptist is telling the religiously serious people (and I hope you find yourself in that description), the most spiritual people, to surrender all their false securities…that it is pointless to rely on the past or on their heritage for safety with a God who is both loving and demanding, both grace-filled and holy. “God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these dead, inanimate rocks.”

John the Baptist is not the one who is going to say to us “you need to accept yourselves.” John is no the one who will tell us “God loves you just as are, don’t move a muscle.”

John the Baptist is the one who convinces us, according to Eduard Schweizer, “The community that hears the Gospel (should) tremble in fear of being mere chaff.” The message is: “Turn away…from yourselves. Turn away from the message that you’re not that bad, or that whatever is wrong you can fix, or that God wants just a part of you. Turn, instead, towards God.

That’s what repentance is, a state of the heart, a direction we are turned. At least on the inside.

But John the Baptist is also the one who says “Bear fruit, if you are truly repentant. Show it.” Yes, it sounds legalistic, and we’re saved from that legalism only because good fruit comes out of a heart facing the right direction. Repentance means that our entire life is one in which God is taken so very, very seriously that it spills out into our lives.

Last Thursday was World AIDS Day. I toured an exhibit down at Pier 66 that World Vision put together which gave a pretty darned realistic experience, via headphones and visuals and a mock village set up in a warehouse…of being in a rural African village ravaged by HIV/AIDS. This disease, AIDS which has killed over 20 million people so far, probably 40-50 million eventually, that has created 15 million orphans and decimated whole cultures and wiped out an entire generation in many countries.

I was also asked to share for a few minutes at a pastor’s breakfast meeting that morning about my trip to Uganda two years ago, in 2003. I talked, and I told a couple of stories, stories which I hadn’t thought about for awhile and which I found were attached to very tender parts of my heart.

And oddly enough, one of the stories involved a different John the Baptist, one that I met in Uganda. Let me tell you about him. John the Baptist was the real name of a 7-year old boy (gotta love that name!) in a very, very small, rural village outside of Kampala, Uganda. He lived in a house that was maybe 20 feet square, sitting on top of a simple cement slab. The walls were crumbling inside, but it didn’t matter much because there wasn’t much furniture. In fact, there were a few clothes, a handful of dirty dishes and two filthy mattresses propped against the wall. That’s all. The village had no electricity and the water supply was about a ¼ mile walk down a hill.

This tiny JohnTheBaptist lived with his 10 year old brother Paul, and his 13 year old sister Justeen. Nobody else. Their parents died of AIDS, their dad in the 1990’s and their mom in 2001. Those graves were literally 15 feet from the front door, so you saw them every time you walked in or out. The 13-year old big sister, Justeen is the head of the household, because all of the other adults in the extended family have also died of AIDS. A neighbor woman tries to look in on them once in awhile.

This John the Baptist doesn’t yell or point at anyone. He, along with his brother and sister, just try to grow enough food, or beg enough food to eat and stay alive. Of all the places we visited on that trip, this was the one that was the hardest, that seemed to be devoid of hope.

“Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

Big John the Baptist’s words were rattling around inside me even as I talked about Little JohnTheBaptist. Repentance is not just internal. It carries an ethical demand. The way that we live our lives matters. Is my whole life lived as one of repentance, is it bearing fruit in how I treat the poor, the parentless? In how we clothe the naked and feed the hungry and care for the sick?

In how we watch out for the homeless and the unstable?

I realized again this week how long the distance actually is between that village (and a million others across the world) and the place I live. I realized again how vast the expanse is between my comfortable home and people that I now know, know personally, here in Seattle…who live on the streets and sleep in freezing cold cars.

For God’s sake, I realized again that some weeks the most important issues on my mind are which school my kids will go to or what their test scores will be or which food I will choose for a meal or where to have coffee or whether we should trade in our old car.

That’s a long, long way from being seven years old and walking past the graves of my parents each time I go in or out of my little house, wondering if there’ll be food to eat. Are we to be involved in these terribly hard places, in our neighborhoods and our city and Uganda and other places?

“Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

Now, I don’t tell you about either of these John the Baptists this morning so that you will have guilt and burning coals heaped upon your heads. But Big John the Baptist came for a particular reason. To prepare people. To prepare us. And the way to prepare…was to repent. To turn away from self-focus and turn towards God with our whole lives, everything we are and everything we have.

Martin Luther once wrote of John the Baptist,

“John was to accuse them all and convince them that they were sinners in order that they might know how they stood before God and recognize themselves as lost…In this way they were prepared to receive grace from the Lord.”

You see, John is cleaning up this word “repent” for us.

Repentance has a purpose. To prepare us to receive the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When our heart is soft and broken, when we are facing God and open to our brothers and sisters, we might be ready for Jesus. That’s who John points to. With one foot in the Old Testament and the other in the New, he points at us with one hand and says fiercely “Repent!,” and with the other hand he points us towards Christ. Because until we know that we need a Savior…we will never be ready to receive Him.

Let us pray