Human Beings are Fascinated by and Drawn to Repentance

It is tragic that the verb repent and the noun repentance are absent from the teaching, preaching, discipling and general conversation of the Western church in the twenty first century, despite the fact that that verb and that noun were constantly on the lips of the people of the New Testament.

The unwillingness of Western churchers to speak of repentance and to call people to repentance is tragic, particularly in light of the fact that human beings are innately aware of the need for repentance, and are attracted to stories of human repentance.

Repentance is, and always has been, a popular theme entertainment media.  As humans, we acknowledge that repentance must be an important part of becoming who we can be.

Below are examples of repentance in arts and media in recent centuries:

One of my favorite secular songs is an early Eagles song and it's one of my favorites because it is a call to repentance.  The song is Desperado:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCdjvTTnzDU

"Desperado, why don't you come to your senses... 

...Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones
That you can't get...
And freedom, ohh freedom. 

Well that's just some people talking

Your prison is walking through this world all alone... 

Desperado, Why don't you come to your senses?
come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you
You better let somebody loooooooooove you...ohhh..
before it's too..oooo.. late."

As the decades-long popularity of this song makes clear, human beings understand that it is a normal human need that we must "come to (our) senses" and "open the gate."  We must have that attitude of heart that leads us to change the way we live, "before it's too...ooo...ooooooo late."

This is repentance.  This is what Jesus and the apostles--all New Testament voices--call for.

The call to repentance is highlighted in all popular entertainment, not only in popular music.

One of the traditions many people embrace during the Christmas season is to read or to watch one or more TV or movie versions of Charles Dickens' most familiar story, A Christmas Carol.  Who can fail to recognize that Dickens describes how what Paul calls 'godly sorrow' resulted in the repentance of one of the best know characters in English literature: Ebenezer Scrooge?

My favorite childhood movie, Mary Poppins, is the story of Mary, an apostle of repentance, leading a whole family: George, Winifred and Jane and Michael Banks, to see their error--their dysfunction--and to seek to live a new way in being a family.  In the film, Mary works to accomplish what John, Jesus and the apostles tout:  Repentance.  And, note that powerful scene, before repentance comes, when George Banks is a broken man, nearly paralyzed by sorrow.  Note that it is from his sorrow that change blossoms.  Then note the joy that is the fruit of George's sorrow-wrought change.

In the 1990s Harold Ramis directed and Bill Murray starred in a movie that was masterpiece on repentance: Groundhog Day, in which TV weatherman Phil Connors is caught in time until he, though an ongoing process of many decisions to change, achieves a new way of living.

A new way of living? The goal of repentance.

Evelyn's favorite novel, the Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice, depicts dual repentance when Mr. Darcy, in abject despair, turns from his pride and Elizabeth Bennet  rejects her prejudice and, in the end, they live 'happily ever after.'  The book remains relevant today because it ends happily yet depicts spirit-crushing despair from which true joy and happiness must come.

Isn't this change what Jesus would want for the haughty? 

Repentance.

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Yet, repentance is what American Christianity, for the past 80 or so years, can not bring itself to call for. 

It strikes me as being ironic, beyond measure, that the secular mind is fascinated by stories of repentance and that the institutional American church won't even use the word.  Clearly, the fascination with repentance, even in the secular mind, is fruit of the essential human conviction that change for the good is good--even if that change is hard to choose and even harder to achieve.

It should be a lesson to the leaders of American denominations that Pride and Prejudice and A Christmas Carol are still continually reprinted and made and remade into movies and TV shows.  Jane Austen is certainly far more popular than she was during her lifetime.  And, wasn't there a 2013 Tom Hanks/Emma Thompson movie about the making of Mary Poppins entitled Saving Mr. Banks?

The testimony of the past century is that the Western Church is rapidly losing the world Jesus calls and empowers it to reach.  That reality cannot be disputed.

Why is it losing?

In part, it is losing because it won't call people to repent when it is a truth that people are predisposed to accept the importance of that call.

We must, well, repent of repentaphobia.