Preaching Repentance

This is strictly about religion. That is, the earthly expression of higher concerns, and issues of how to organize the doing of those unspeakable divine imperatives.
Claiming to be a Christian Mystic means nothing if I have no message. I don’t suggest we all stop and drop into some contemplative or prayerful pose and let the world pass us by, as if that were the whole answer. We do that when the internal imperative demands it, but most of the time we are still interacting with the rest of humanity. Those Three Pillars are simply an explanation of things we do in our heads to guide what we do with our bodies.
A friend of mine called yesterday. His theology isn’t much like mine, but he calls because he recognizes the power which drives me is the same as in his soul. He needed encouragement because he was fighting theological battles with others. I told him that was the wrong battlefield. His passion is misdirected. The one thing few Christians can argue against is the call to repentance. I reminded him about the message of John the Baptist and what Christ preached shortly after His baptism.
That message had a crystal clear mystical component, of course. Telling people “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” was not exactly a literal statement. Jesus had no intention of taking over the political situation, though He could easily have done so. And it would have changed very little, because that’s not how God works. That was a major element in what Christ did, by drawing to a close the one very huge failed experiment performed before the eyes of all humanity. Trying to fix human problems with a national identity and human government was never going to work. The prophets had continued for centuries offering all the ways in which it could work, in theory, if only the nation would stay faithful. But humans can’t do it that way. In some sense, that was the whole point of the exercise. The Covenant of Moses was God’s patient proof His Laws don’t have the power to change human nature. They make life better, but their best service to mankind is pointing to a way out of this life.
You have to die in order to live. You can’t do that by your own power; your resources can’t take you there.
No, I didn’t really tell my friend all that, because it’s above his literacy level. But I did say things which could help to point him in that direction. He’s still hung up on trying show how clever he is, rather like the people Jesus argued with about the meaning of His Father’s revelation. My friend’s theology is just plain silly at times, but I don’t talk to him much about that. It’s not important. What matters is faithfulness to the things his mind can grasp, which is the central necessity of preaching repentance. He can go anywhere the wind takes him, to any brand of church he likes, and they’ll accept the message that sin kills, so get out of it. He might listen to that encouragement, but so far he has spent way too much time arguing his pet theology with the pastors in this area.
There is lots of room for repentance preaching. The only reason I bother with deep discussions of Hebrew thinking versus Aristotelian epistemology is because holiness can’t be defined by the latter. It’s really nothing more than background for the call to righteous living. So my blog title is “Do What’s Right” because those unspeakable things will correct themselves if you can just grab hold of the idea that there is “Right” to be embraced. That is, if people can embrace repentance, they will find all the other stuff sooner or later.
Granted, this leaves an awful lot of space for debates. I’m willing to bet precious few preachers will understand my support for Open Access, but I insist this is the righteousness of God and most assuredly consistent with His Laws. It fits neatly into the Hebrew frame of reference, but not with Post-Enlightenment Western social mythology. And while it does seem to overlap with Post-Modern Western silliness, that’s merely by accident. Sometimes the crazy ideas of mankind will stumble into the truth, but they seldom notice.
Still, the fundamental issue on this blog is just what the title says: I want people to consider their ways. Whatever God wants to do with people starts with repentance.