Be sure to read to the end of this email to hear 

why Bethlehem was featured on the local news!

John the Baptist shows up every Advent with the very same call: “Repent!”, he says.

In worship this week, Pastor Hoffman reflects: I’ve usually thought about repentance as a turning around, facing a completely different direction, turning our back on sin and death, and turning towards God and life. But I’ve struggled with this definition, because it makes it sound like a binary choice: we either choose sin or we choose God. And my theology says that it’s more complicated than that.  We’re Lutheran Christians. We live in the both/and. We are both saint and sinner. So what can it look like to repent, if it’s not simply a turnaround?

The Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr, has helped me think about repentance differently. In an interview with Brene Brown, he talks about how the word “repentance” comes from the same root word that means to “do penance.”  That’s why it’s so easy to hear John the Baptist’s call to repentance as a call to shape up, to reform ourselves, to turn our lives around.  But repentance is not simply an about-face, turning one’s life around to go in another direction. Repentance means a radical reorientation. A whole new perspective, a completely transformed way of relating to the world.

Because that’s what Jesus comes to do: transform the world. He brings the peace, justice, and righteousness that feels out of our reach. As the fulfillment of God’s promise to the prophet Isaiah, he is the branch that grows out of the root of Jesse. The Spirit of the Lord rests upon him.

Having been baptized with water and Spirit as John the Baptist foretold, we are grafted onto that branch. The Spirit of the Lord rests upon us, too. The spirit of the Lord gives us new eyes to see the world around us, beyond the brokenness to the peace and love and joy that bursts forth.  This spirit reorients us to the height and breadth and depth of God’s love active among us, even now. This spirit gives us the hope of being the means through which others catch a glimpse of a new way of being, too.

O come, O Branch of Jesse, free

your own from Satan’s tyranny;

from depths of hell your people save,

and give them vict’ry o’er the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O people of God at Bethlehem.

P.S. The spirit of the Lord leads us to speak up and stand united against hate. On behalf of the Perinton Pastoral Association, Bethlehem hosted an interfaith prayer service on Sunday afternoon in response to the racial and religious vandalism that occurred in Perinton over the Thanksgiving holiday, including at the Church of the Resurrection on Mason Road. The local news showed up!  Watch the segment here.
P.P.S. Would you like to reflect more deeply on the aspects of God for whom we wait? Share in conversation after worship at 10:15 in the sanctuary with a Pastor during the weeks of Advent.