John was calling people to turn away from everything that stands in the way of God's work. He told them to turn away from the crooked paths and rough ways of sin. Fulfillment of the promise lies the future, but we are to repent now in preparation for the age to come. We are to prepare for the coming of the Lord--not just at Christmas but at the end of time. We are to prepare now for the final judgment.

The New Testament word for repentance is metanoia. It means a change of mind. It means acquiring a new attitude. It means turning our thinking toward God. Because thinking, believing and acting are really inseparable, repentance means not only to have God-centered thinking but to act upon it--to act upon our renewed thinking. We are always in need of repentance because we are always walking along crooked paths and rough ways.

John used the majestic language of Isaiah in his call to repentance. But there is a very earthy word used often in the Old Testament which can be used to elucidate the steps by which we repent. That word is dung. Let me explicate. In the Italian city of Siena stands Europe's greatest medieval square, the Campo. This is the place where a centuries old rivalry takes place each year. It is a horse race like no other. It is the famous Palio. It is the working out of an ancient enmity between the city's districts which are called contrade.

A person is born into a contrada and remains in it for life. Each contrada is centered around a parish church. If a person marries someone from outside the district, one of the spouses makes the terrible sacrifice of leaving the contrada and parish of birth. After the annual race, people from the winning contrada wear their colors for months. The men walk around for weeks with pacifiers in their mouths signifying a new birth. These customs have endured for centuries.

One of the more colorful traditions of the Palio is bringing the contrada's horse into the church before the race and blessing it. If the horse should happen to leave a residue on the floor, this is not picked up until the race is over. And the horse droppings are festooned with flowers.

Even though garlands of flowers may surround the smelly substance and rest upon it, and even though it sits on the church floor in the presence of the reserved sacrament, it remains nothing more than horse dung. And so it is with our sin, with our evasions and denials.

There is a well-known colloquial expression which calls manure a holy item. At first glance, the placing of flowers around horse droppings might seem to signify its holiness but the flowers really disguise the manure. They deny its reality. This resembles ever so much the way we deny our own sin.

It is quite human to produce fecal material in both the physical and the spiritual sense. With running water and flush toilets it is quite easy to dispose of the former, but we place flowers around the latter and tend not to remove it at all. We say such things as: "This is just the way I am," Or my anger is righteous, my dalliances are explainable, my greed is unavoidable, my pride is just honesty about myself--and so on. We place flowers of self-deception around our own spiritual mess and tend to leave it there for a lifetime.

The first step toward repentance, toward metnaoia is to remove the flowers from our own spiritual dung When we can see it for what it is, then we can roll up our sleeves, grab a shovel and begin to remove it. Recognizing it is the first stage of repentance, and removing it is the second. This is a lifetime job. Holiness resides not in the aforementioned substance which lies on the floor of our own temple. Holiness is first to recognize it for what it really is and then to haul it away. As long as we surround it with flowers of self deception we can never get started. So repentance begins with a clear vision about ourselves. A spiritual sense of smell helps as well.

Repentance waxes and wanes in our lives. Sometimes the pile gets very large, but sometimes we manage to haul some of it away. Repentance and unrepentance have consequences in the world. We can see this easily. Individuals in a group can either act as a mob or work for good. Whole societies do the same. Germany in the 1930s and '40s was totally unrepentant and set towards evil. Germany today is not. South Africa was mired in apartheid, but has come to a kind of national repentance. Other parts of the world have never repented of genocide.

Narcissism, injustice and violence are all contagious and infectious. Groups of people and even whole societies can be drawn into the bottomless cesspools they create. Sin always affects others. That is why metanoia/repentance spills over and affects others. It changes societies.

We Americans have heaped tons of flowers around our own national dung. We become steadily more greedy, materialistic, narcissistic and coarse, piling up for ourselves a huge pile of dung, disguising it with wreaths of what we pretend is individual freedom. The garland of self-interest renders us insensitive to the needs of others.

And now we condone the destruction of human rights and we fight a pointless and endless war in the name of good against evil--all the while avoiding the stench by placing upon it the idolatrous wreath of self-righteous morality and a perversion of the Christian religion.

Prepare the way of the Lord! Only God can finally purge the global human temple of the dung that accumulates. Complete cleansing will take place only with coming, not of the infant Jesus, but of the risen Lord at the end of the age. We cannot bring about the final outcome of God's plan. It is not we who fill in the valleys or make low the mountains and hills or make the crooked ways straight. It is God who does this. We can only prepare the way of the Lord. But we can and must prepare the way of the Lord by rolling up our sleeves, grabbing our shovels and hauling away as much of the mess as we can.

Repentance, metanoia is a personal individual act. It is both a command and a promise given to each one of us. Prepare the way of the Lord! The mountains and hills and valleys and crooked paths of our lives are all included within the vast sweep of God's plan. We as individuals will personally see the salvation of God. What is spoken to all the peoples of the earth is addressed to each one of us.

But repentance is also a word spoken publicly to all the world's people--to the entire human race. Especially to the so-called "people of the book" who supposedly take Isaiah seriously: It is spoken to Jews and Christians and Muslims. The call to repentance is both a promise and a warning. It echoes down the ages to Sunnis and Shiites, to insurgents and suicide bombers and to armed militias, to Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaeda, to the Knesset and Likud, to all invaders and occupiers of nations and to all who kill the innocent with cluster bombs or rockets or i.e.d's, or through massive military operations among civilians. It is a word spoken to generals and soldiers and politicians and leaders and citizens of all nations including our own.

It is a word spoken from the distant past to the peoples of the book in Iraq, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, to the nations of Europe and to the British. It is a word spoken to us, the people of the most powerful nation the earth has ever seen.

Repentance is a new way of thinking. It is the first glimpse of the salvation of God. It is a call to re-orient our attitudes. It is a vision of the way things really are. It is a call to action. It is a demand that we remove the flowers from our spiritual dung. It is a command for us to pick up our shovels and get to work.

Hear again the words of Isaiah and John the Baptist.

"Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."