Lies Without Error

The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. It is a renunciation of the lies we have been told about ourselves and our neighbors and our universe. “I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar! My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors.” Meshech and Kedar are place names: Meshech a far-off tribe, thousands of miles from Palestine in southern Russia; Kedar a wandering Bedouin tribe of barbaric reputation along Israel’s borders. They represent the strange and the hostile. Paraphrased, the cry is, “I live in the midst of hoodlums and wild savages; this world is not my home and I want out.”

The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance. It is always and everywhere the first word in the Christian life. John the Baptist’s preaching was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 3:2 RSV). Jesus’ first preaching was the same: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17 RSV). Peter concluded his first sermon with “Repent, and be baptized” (Acts 2:38 RSV). In the last book of the Bible the message to the seventh church is “be zealous and repent” (Rev 3:19 RSV).

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding that you were wrong in thinking that you had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on your own; it is deciding that you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world. And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth. Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.

Repentance is the most practical of all words and the most practical of all acts. It is a feet-on-the-ground kind of word. It puts a person in touch with the reality that God creates. Elie Wiesel, referring to the stories of the Hasidim, says that in the tales by Israel of Rizhim one motif recurs again and again: A traveler loses his way in the forest; it is dark and he is afraid. Danger lurks behind every tree. A storm shatters the silence. The fool looks at the lightning, the wise man at the road that lies—illuminated—before him.2

Whenever we say no to one way of life that we have long been used to, there is pain. But when the way of life is in fact a way of death, a way of war, the quicker we leave it the better. There is a condition that sometimes develops in our bodies called adhesions—parts of our internal organs become attached to other parts. The condition has to be corrected by a surgical procedure—a decisive intervention. The procedure hurts, but the results are healthy. As the Jerusalem Bible puts verses 3-4, “How will he [God] pay back the false oath? / of a faithless tongue / With war arrows hardened / over red-hot charcoal!” Emily Dickinson’s spare sentence is an epigraph: “Renunciation—the piercing virtue!”

God’s arrows are judgments aimed at provoking repentance. The pain of judgment called down against evildoers could turn them also from their deceitful and violent ways to join our pilgrim on the way of peace. Any hurt is worth it that puts us on the path of peace, setting us free for the pursuit, in Christ, of eternal life. It is the action that follows the realization that history is not a blind alley, guilt not an abyss. It is the discovery that there is always a way that leads out of distress—a way that begins in repentance, or turning to God. Whenever we find God’s people living in distress, there is always someone who provides this hope-charged word, showing the reality of a different day: “On that day there will be a highway all the way from Egypt to Assyria: Assyrians will have free range in Egypt, and Egyptians in Assyria. No longer rivals, they’ll worship together, Egyptians and Assyrians” (Is 19:23). All Israel knew of Assyria was war—the vision shows them at worship. Repentance is the catalytic agent for the change. Dismay is transformed into what a later prophet would describe as gospel.

The whole history of Israel is set in motion by two such acts of world-rejection, which freed the people for an affirmation of God: “the rejection of Mesopotamia in the days of Abraham and the rejection of Egypt in the days of Moses.”3 All the wisdom and strength of the ancient world were in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But Israel said no to them. Despite the prestige, the vaunted and uncontested greatness, there was something foundationally alien and false in those cultures: “I’m all for peace; but the minute I tell them so, they go to war!” Mesopotamian power and Egyptian wisdom were strength and intelligence divorced from God, put to the wrong ends and producing all the wrong results.

Modern interpretations of history are variations on the lies of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians in which, as Abraham Heschel describes it, “man reigns supreme, with the forces of nature as his only possible adversaries. Man is alone, free, and growing stronger. God is either nonexistent or unconcerned. It is human initiative that makes history, and it is primarily by force that constellations change. Man can attain his own salvation.”4

So Israel said no and became a pilgrim people, picking a path of peace and righteousness through the battlefields of falsehood and violence, finding a path to God through the labyrinth of sin.

We know that Israel, in saying that no, did not miraculously return to Eden and live in primitive innocence, or mystically inhabit a heavenly city and live in supernatural ecstasy. They worked and played, suffered and sinned in the world as everyone else did, and as Christians still do. But they were now going someplace—they were going to God. The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives. The no released them to a freedom that was diverse and glorious. The judgment of God invoked against the people of Meshech and Kedar was, in fact, a sharply worded invitation to repentance, asking them to join in the journey.

Among the more fascinating pages of American history are those that tell the stories of the immigrants to these shores in the nineteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of people, whose lives in Europe had become mean and poor, persecuted and wretched, left. They had heard of a place where a new start could be made. They had gotten reports of a land where the environment was a challenge instead of an oppression. The stories continue to be told in many families, keeping alive the memory of the event that made an American out of what was a German or an Italian or a Scot.

My grandfather left Norway a hundred years ago in the midst of a famine. His wife and ten children remained behind until he could return and get them. He came to Pittsburgh and worked in the steel mills for two years until he had enough money to go back and get his family. When he returned with them he didn’t stay in Pittsburgh, although it had served his purposes well enough the first time; he traveled on to Montana, plunging into new land, looking for a better place.

In all these immigrant stories there are mixed parts of escape and adventure: the escape from an unpleasant situation, the adventure of a far better way of life, free for new things, open for growth and creativity. Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.

“I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar! My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors.” But we don’t have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.