Repentance and Restoration Start Today
Repentance and Restoration Start Today
Today is the birthday of the Church, and the 2nd day of birth for Liam Willoughby. Whatever Sunday in the calendar the moveable Feast of Pentecost falls on, that Sunday will always be his 2nd birthday. In the water of Baptism, he will be buried with Christ in his death. By it he will share in his resurrection. Through it he will be reborn by the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit which filled up the hearts and minds of Jesus’s first disciples so much that they had to start telling everyone around them about God’s deeds of power. And in that very public telling, along with some 3,000 baptisms, the Church was born with a mission from God to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” (Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism, BCP, p. 855)
“Pentecost,” Greek for “fiftieth,” in this case the fiftieth day after Passover. So, Jerusalem was more crowded than usual with pilgrims from throughout the Roman world there to celebrate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. In addition to those who lived in Jerusalem, many of those pilgrims had probably been there for the Passover and stayed for the fifty days. I suspect that many of them had welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. But then, some were highly perplexed, to say the least, at his ‘dissing the Temple by disrupting the sacrificial system of exchanging Jewish coins for Roman coins to pay for their sacrificial animals. And then, as they saw no apparent change in the political system of Roman occupation, their disappointment boiled into rage, even to the point of joining the chants of, “Away with him, crucify him.”
But less than two months after running and hiding for fear of the religious and political authorities, Jesus’s disciples now charged into the crowd, shouting about God’s deeds of power. And as today, when some people having suffered a brain injury are able to speak a foreign accent or even a foreign language, those Galilean disciples were able to communicate the Good News of God’s love in Christ Jesus in whatever language the pilgrims needed to understand.
That was the first step to restoration of unity with God, which implies that they were not at unity with God. In this case, the bad news had to come first. In our reading from Acts, Peter hints at the bad news in his quoting of the Prophet Joel, the sun turned dark and the moon to blood. But later in his sermon, the first Christian sermon, Peter hammers the point home — Let all know for certain that God made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified…Repent, be baptized, and saved from this crooked generation.
You may be thinking: Isn’t this a lot to lay on the family of an infant? Why all this talk of repentance and crooked generations? But Liam will grow up. He will have to decide whether to stand or kneel before a Bishop, and confirm the Baptismal Covenant his parents and godparents make for him this Day of Pentecost; to pray, worship, and learn, to repent, proclaim, and serve, to promote justice, to respect and cherish all of God’s creatures. And that may be a more countercultural choice to make than it has been for a long time in the world of “Western Civilization.”
In May of 1944, the Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from prison, had some thoughts for the son of his close friend, Eberhard Bethge, on the day of Dietrich Wilhelm’s Baptism:
“We [Bonhoeffer’s generation] believed we could make our way in life with reason and justice, and when both failed us, we no longer saw any way forward. We have also overestimated, time and again, the importance of reasonableness and justice in influencing the course of history…You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one’s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ…Our church has been fighting during these years only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself…we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action…Until then the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one, but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God’s own time. May you be one of them, and may it be said of you one day: ‘The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day’ (Prov. 4:18).” *
* Thoughts on the Day of Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge, May, 1944. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday
June 8th, 2025
The Rev. David Kendrick