In 2015 Donald Trump then a candidate for the President of the United States the first time was asked if he would ever ask for forgiveness or repent from something he had done. He famously responded, “why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I'm an honorable person. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.” Beware of the (fill in the blank) who walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market places… they devour widows’ houses” (Mark 12:38-40).
There was a time when my evangelical heritage would have been critical of Trump'’s posture. With Donald Trump’s white evangelical support from 2016 to today Trump remains who he was and is, but evangelicalism as I knew it at one time clearly has changed.
The Oxford dictionary defines repentance as:
1. Feel deep sorrow about one’s actions
2. Wish one had not done, regret resolve not to continue
3. Feel regret
While the word repentance most often carries a religious connotation it is not strictly related. Repentance is making a 180-degree turn. It is opening a different often opposite world view, which leads to actual change in personal behavior and convictions. It is why I can say today I have repented of evangelicalism.[1]
In the Older Testament repentance connotes this idea of turning. “Take your evil deeds out of my sight. Stop doing wrong, learn to do right. Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the cause of the widow.” (Isa. 1:16-17) In the religious context, repentance, in other words, is more than a confession, it is a change in direction that leads to justice, mercy and fidelity to the way of the Lord.[2]
In other contexts repentance is simply changing one’s mind from one action to another. Here God is even said to grieve a course of action and change God’s mind. Translations of the Hebrew word in this case range from repenting, to relenting, to changing God’s mind.
In a similar fashion in the New Testament the Greek word for repentance metanoia carries the idea of regret, changing one’s mind, or simply following in the ways of Jesus. In this latter case instead of saying Cesar is Lord, the repentant said Jesus is Lord and has decided to follow Jesus. Repentance here is not the eradication of sin per se, however that might be defined, it a radical turning of the self to follow and live out the ways of Jesus. And ipso facto should the penitent actually act on this we call it conversion.[3]
In the subsequent story of the church repentance has quite a history. In the Shepherd of Hermas a second century Christian text we read,
For the Lord has sworn by His glory, in regard to His elect, that if any one of them sin after a certain day which has been fixed, he shall not be saved. For the repentance of the righteous has limits. Filled up are the days of repentance to all the saints; but to the heathen, repentance will be possible even to the last day.
Here repentance was linked to the confession of individual sins and conversion. If someone were to sin after conversion, their very salvation was at risk. Repentance does not appear to carry any sense of a change in direction per se. Second chances were not offered. Given this take on repentance someone might argue that it is best to wait until the last moment of life to repent and wipe away sins.
For Tertullian, a Latin apologist also of the 2nd century, repentance was also attached to acts of self-mortification. For repentance to have any currency and appease God some kind of performance was required. It often meant pain.
In the Middle Ages at the Council of Trent. Penance was introduced as part of that performance. It underlined the penitent’s sincerity. And it was a way to atone for misdeeds. Atonement in these cases ranged from rituals of piety to indulgences.
“An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints” (Indulgentarium Doctrina 1)
As a Teenager, I knew nothing about penance or indulgences – those were Catholic things. But I knew about “altar calls.” It seemed every Sunday night was an occasion for an altar call. It was an occasion to receive prayer as in, “Lord Help me Jesus”; or it was an occasion to repent and “get saved” (perhaps again) which always involved a confession of sin and a (new) decision to follow Jesus, or it was an occasion to confess sin and get back on the right track with God, because in my tradition there was always the possibility that one’s favor with God could be revoked.
Ironically, once a month we would take communion (not the eucharist – a Catholic, Lutheran or Anglican designation involving some kind of redemptive act). Communion in our circles (Pentecostal/evangelical) was symbolic in memory of what Jesus did on our behalf on the cross. It was an act completely cerebral, and so children were not encouraged to take it until they fully understood what it meant. Years later, however, I could never figure out why if it was only a symbolic ritual, we were always reminded it had deadly consequences if we partook it in an “unworthy manner.” What was an unworthy manner? An unworthy manner meant there was latent unresolved sin in one’s life. The prerequisite for our partaking was a pseudo perfection.[4]
In other traditions communion/eucharist is taken every service precisely as an act of repentance because we are not worthy. The only prerequisite may be water baptism. In an Anglican church that I have sometimes frequented, they participate in the Eucharist [5] by having people proceed down the middle isle and in groups form a semi-circle as they partake together the elements. It is intended as an act of solidarity and collective contrition. It is hard to hold a grudge, justify racist and/or homophobic attitudes if the offending subject of your self-righteousness is standing across or beside you and is partaking at the same time.
Altar calls in my tradition have lost most of their luster. There is a time factor. Gone are the Sunday night services where time was not such an issue. For the pastor the “altar call” also exerted considerable pressure to outperform yourself week after week. There was an emotive element in the altar call. A good altar call would leave congregants exclaiming we had “church today.”[6] But as I reflect about those adolescent years, however motivated, praying with my peers in humble acts of solidarity with God’s mercy, worked to reimagine my world. Though the word was not part of my vocabulary in no uncertain terms they were often woke moments.
On Wednesday morning the day after the latest divisive US election I made the mistake of doing two things I usually try to avoid. My first mistake was opening Facebook. And the first post on my feed was a simple panel that read. Woke Lost. It was clearly intended as a positive outcome affirming the election of Donald Trump as President elect of the United States, and an affirmation of the “evil” Democratic party as being woke. The comments section was already filling up with emoticons of handclapping and thumbs up. To get some context on the high-fiving "Woke Lost," I looked up the person who started this thread. It was not someone I know personally but discovered, among other things he pastors a church. So, there was a religious affinity behind the words - Woke Lost.
My second mistake that morning occurred when I commented on the posting. I should know better and repent of my actions. I wrote, “I did not know that woke was on the ballot. Can anyone tell me what woke means?” The responses were slow at first but once they started, they came in a flurry. The only clear thing that emerged was that the respondents neither knew the history of the word or what it meant. In their world woke as political rhetoric stands in for all the perceived socials evils of western society. Social evils that allegedly are products of liberal thinking that is eroding family values, the church, the economy and leads to crime.
I paused before I started again and compounded by second mistake by responding again. I had asked the question so I felt I should probably post a response to my own question. The whole post has since been taken down so I cannot replicate exactly my response, but I began with a brief etymology of the word woke.
A little research will inform you that woke first appeared in African American circles in the 19th century. To be woke was to beware of your surroundings. It was to know the rules of social engagement because if you were black, ignorance could mean your life.[7] Woke was a cautionary word. Later, in literature the word was occasionally expanded beyond the African American culture to include other marginal groups. To be woke was to be aware of your own safety but also looking out for the safety of marginal groups, to use the language of the Bible, the widows and poor. Most recently the word was resurrected with the killing of George Floyd[8] where it was later hijacked to become anti-woke. With the rise of Critical Race Theory, wokeness became symbolic of a leftist ideology that apparently is brainwashing children, dividing races against each other, and rewriting history.[9] Wokeness is said to be a radical belief system that our institutions are built around discrimination and all disparity is the result of that discrimination enforced by an angry mob.
And then I wrote. “you realize Jesus was woke”. When Jesus said, “you have heard it said but I say to you…” is woke language. When he visited the house of a tax collector, intervened in the stoning of an adulterous woman, those were woke deeds that called for repentance from the privileged onlookers.
As I was preparing this past week for a Sunday sermon as a guest speaker in a church that uses the lectionary, the New Testament reading for the day was Mark 12:38 -44. It begins “Beware or bewoke of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
Yes, Jesus had a radical belief ideology that argued that the irreligious institutions of his day (including the Temple) were built around discrimination and disparity. His views were not terribly popular among the privileged and as we know they ended badly for Jesus.
The inaugural sermon of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus reads from Isaiah wokes me every time I read it. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4 :18-19). However, one interprets that verse it is a long way from the mass deportation of undesirables.
Commenting on this passage, Brandi Miller a staff member and justice program director with InterVarsity, writes, “
So we might expect Jesus’ inaugural sermon to be about saving souls, but it isn’t. He shows up talking about overturning systems of classism, ethnocentrism, disease, and evil, all while connecting it to a proclamation of good news. The people in Jesus’ day lived devoutly religious lives that were hyper spiritual and consequently disconnected from the social realities that marginalized people around them. Jesus was trying to reorient people who had traded justice and wholistic faith for vague religiosity.[10]
Not sure the word Woke can recover from the abuse that has been afflicted on it. Much like the word evangelicalism forces have so distorted the word that my claiming Jesus was woke, (which I affirm) was in part just poking the bear. I repent. But in a time of political upheaval my prayer is to continue to keep my eyes wide open, beware (bewoke) of my own white cis-gendered privileges and repent when those privileges, however invertedly conflict with the stranger, the widow and the poor. And second, with eyes wide open as opportunities present themself stand up for those same marginalized people. “Wokeness” To Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.
[1] This is not a bitter statement. Largely by association with American politics evangelicalism has changed and died the proverbial death by a thousand qualifications. It used to be a champion of Scripture; in the USA it has now become a political lobby party. And as it is trending, Canada will soon follow suit.
[2] The earliest recorded image of spirituality in the Bible is in Genesis 5:21 where Enoch is singled out because he walked with God. Walking in the way of the Lord was the idea of a pilgrimage that was contrasted with walking in the way of evil doers. Amos 4:6-13, Hosea 5:15-6.5, Jeremiah 3:12-24.
[3] Conversion therefore is more than saying a sinner’s prayer. Nor is it a turn to living a perfect life. It is a lifetime change of orientation to seeing the world, ourselves and our neighbour in radical new ways. Love God and your neighbour as yourself. It may have a starting point, but it never has a finishing point.
[4] I have since come to believe that the only “unworthy manner” is if you think you were worthy. More of a Trump position.
[5] Eucharist is hotly debated among denominations but it is generally understood that in partaking the bread and wine mystery is present and in some sense something happens. Perhaps healing and/or the remission of sins.
[6] As a result of these pressures sometimes pastors would resort to nefarious means to get a required result. Chief among these would be guilt and fear. On one occasion I remember being a guest speaker at a church during the Toronto Blessing era (if you are unfamiliar with this, google Toronto Blessing). Clearly this church was a Toronto Blessing advocate. As the preacher that Sunday I initiated a very specific altar call. Three people came forth and I was in the process of quietly praying for each person. When the pastor not impressed with my results went to the pulpit preached his own mini sermon followed by his altar call and half of the congregation responded to his passioned plea and with much emotive sounds and gestures stood on the opposite side of the platform. Clearly my performance did not cut it.
[7] On August 28th, 1955 Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy from Chicago was murdered while visiting family in Mississippi. His crime? He was accused of whistling at a white woman, a clerk from the local store. His death and the subsequent aquittal of the murderers (who after the aquittal admitted their culpability to Life magazine) became a catalyst for the birth of the civil rights movement and his burial was witnessed by tens of thousands.
[8] On May 25, 2020 George Floyd, a black man, was asphyxiated as he was restrained by police in Minneapolis. His death led to the largest protests since the civil rights era.
[9] As a Canadian, I knew nothing about residential schools until I was in my 30s. I did not know they existed. Shame on me, but shame also on the institutions that covered up that history. Some history needs to be rewritten opening the door to social repentance and the healing of our land.
[10] Brandi Miller, https://commonhymnal.com/blog/the-awakening She writes further,
“To be woke is to know the theoretical ins and outs of our world and recognize that the stories we have been told about are not the whole picture.” I wish I had read her before I stepped into the proverbial facebook lions den with my own posting.
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