A line from a poem in my third grade reader has been running through my head recently:
“Where we walk to school each day, Indian children used to play.” (Annette Wynne, Indian
Children).
From the time I was a child, on our farm in the Flint Hills, I always loved the outdoors. This
line impressed me as I looked at the hills around us. I could imagine those children who lived
there. It made me uncomfortable with the “cowboys and Indians” games that seemed to be part
of the culture of the time. So, when my sisters and I rode our make belief horses around our
yard, we never played “cowboys and Indians”; for us, it was the good guys after the bad
guys…(and they weren’t Indians)… That line still affects how I look at the countryside…and
where we live….in our cities and towns.
Our first reading tonight is from the Book of the prophet Malachi. The book can be dated around
450 BC, several generations after the return from Babylon. The Children of Israel had come
back joyfully, working at rebuilding their temple and their worship and culture. But several
generations had passed, the priests were getting a little lax, and that rubbed off on the people.
Malachi wants to draw them back to a full hearted observance. He promises a prophet, who our
tradition recognizes as John the Baptist.
In the 400+ years before the birth of John, the chosen people had experienced much social
upheaval, the persecution under the Greeks, who tried to erase their culture and religion so all in
the empire would be like their “superior” culture. Another rebellion, a short time, and then the
Romans took over. So now they live under another powerful regime and their leaders try to
accommodate this government so that they could practice their faith.
John the Baptist, in the reading from Mark, is calling the people to repentance…a change of
heart, a change of perspective. In the Baltimore Catechism culture in which I grew up,
repentance meant confessing your sins…like disobeying your parents. (Otherwise God would
get you…) But repentance means more than not breaking the law. Repentance, metanoia, in
the Hebrew language means more than that. It means turning around, getting a new perspective.
We are called in our time, during this time of Advent, to turn around, to see as God sees.
As I have followed the Synod and tried to understand better the perspective of Pope Francis, I
have begun to look at the perspective in which I have been formed, and which influences how we
see the world. I look back over 60+ years at the changes of perspective that have been a part of
our culture. I think of the Cold War, the standoff between the Communists and the “Free
World.” I think of Vatican II and its call to update the church. I think of how our country was
changed and rocked by the civil rights movement, the anti war movement, the struggle for
women’s rights. There was the liberation theology movement that made use of some Marxist
thought, which frightened many in the west, and in the church. And then there were struggles in
many Latin American countries which we watched from afar.

Then there was the fall of the Berlin wall, which marked the end of communism…so that the
“bad guys” were no longer the communists. But then after 9/11 we found another group that
were identified as the “bad guys.”
In the global north, Europe and the United States, capitalism was the new perspective.
Globalism took over… the theory was that the invisible hand of the market would make the
world better for everybody…if we just let it… And the Church stayed out of that, focusing
instead on culture wars, relativism, abortion…
In this globalized world, there are many different perspectives, many have become polarities that
lead to wars. Some tend to “circle the wagons,” to try to keep all those others out. We may see
the world in terms of winners and losers…
What is the repentance, the metanoia, that is needed today?
John the Baptist lived at a time dominated by the Roman Empire, as well as the religious leaders
who were trying to keep things going… John was not advocating insurrection as were some of
his contemporaries. Instead he is calling for a new way of looking at things, at life…
When I was a child, in the summer, my dad and my brothers did a lot of baling hay. When they
would come in, they would be really dirty, so that you hardly recognized them. My brothers
liked to go swimming in the pond after that…and they came out looking like new…
John the Baptist may be calling us this Advent to look at our perspectives, our way of looking at
the world, and see how we can become new…