Repent or perish!

Sounds pretty fire and brimstone doesn’t it?

You may be asking — Where’s the grace?

It’s there. In a big way.

The best description I heard for repentance is this — radical re-orientation. It means to turn or be turned back around so that you are facing one another.

Sin can be used as a verb and a noun. To sin is to do an act that breaks a relationship. Sin in the sense of a noun is the state of being. For Lutherans, we believe that someone does an act of sin because they are a sinner. They don’t become a sinner because they sin. Do you catch the difference? It’s slight, but important.

Without getting too deep theologically, we believe in original sin — that we are born in the state of sin. This is a state of brokenness. It is not because of anything we did. And we can’t fix it either. Only God can. Which makes sense — how would you know what fixed looks like if you start off broken? It’s similar to the idea of a color blind person describing what the color red really looks like when they have never seen red as it actually exists. (And yes, I’m color blind. Don’t ask me what I see, I have no idea what you see, so how can I accurately describe it to you? I’ve never seen colors in a normal fashion.)

During Lent, we are called to repent — to turn or be turned back towards God. To do some self-examination and see the extent of our brokenness and sin. To see them for what they are. Not because we are masochistic. But because in seeing our brokenness and sin…