As many of us well know, the call to repent has been co-opted by conservative Christians - Evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics alike - as a guilt-tripping process, as a way to induce in the lives of far too many a sense of shame for who they are, what they have done, what has happened to them, and who they know themselves to be often up against those things that society and public policy insist in normalizing - even if it means the demeaning, disenfranchising, marginalization, and sickness of fellow human beings.
To repent, if we are holding close to the truth we named last Sunday, has nothing to do with humiliation, fear, or being made to feel unworthy.
To repent, according to the way of Jesus as witnessed in Scripture, and as we hear it in Matthew 4:12–23, is first and foremost an invitation to think differently.
It is an opportunity to loosen our grip on the stories society tells us about who we are and what we are worth; to refuse the definitions imposed on us by policy, power, or prejudice; and to break free from the burden of becoming what others expect us to be, so that we may live more fully into who God has created us to be.
To repent is also an opportunity to re-examine our assumptions and biases, to name them honestly, to confess them, and to release them. It is an invitation to practice, through the power of the Holy Spirit, a way of life that resists the logic of domination and scarcity that shapes so much of our world.
That means refusing the belief that worth is measured by productivity, that time is money, that the strong are entitled to exploit the weak, or that the elderly, the sick, and the forgotten are disposable. It means choosing truth over propaganda, history over myth, and solidarity over exceptionalism.
Repentance is an opportunity to turn our energies outward. Many people across the political spectrum are deeply committed to self-righteousness, to their own versions and perceptions, and to their own sense of security. The call to repent is a call to redirect our lives toward community, toward shared wellbeing, toward hospitality, dignity, peace, and solidarity.
By ushering a call to repentance with and among the rejected, marginalized, and disenfranchised of 1st-century Judean society, Jesus also joins the movements of marginal communities and gives them a divine spotlight. In Jesus, movements of marginal communities are revealed as tried and true ways of being community, and at the same time, a whole new thing, a whole new way for people whose commitments are to conform to the mainstream.
Matthew is not rejecting political engagement, but rejecting imitation of imperial logic. If Matthew was right, Jesus revealed to the mainstream a new way of being community made up of people who have not and cannot conform to the norms - a people, a community, that is constantly learning how to be with, for and on behalf of each other in a way different from 1st century political structures, religious expectations, and ethnocentric sensibilities.
A new way of being community. A new time. A new opportunity.
Not the past.
A community of the present and looking ahead. A community broken free from leader-centered paradigms and commitments. A community free to see the life and accomplishments of the church as ours, and not as of any individual person.
A new community.
part of a sermon shared with the Presbyterian United Church of Christ (Saratoga Springs) on Sunday, February 1, 2026