Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. Today we hear that familiar phrase and remember the unique style and dulcet tones of one of music’s most talented singer-songwriters. But what it took to say those words—that name—proudly was a gift far more than talent. It was a gift of God’s grace.

The terrific new movie Walk the Line tells the story of Johnny Cash’s suffering and redemption. It begins with a clear understanding that he was not the favorite son. His brother was killed in an accident with a power saw. His father lamented that the wrong son died. All his life Johnny Cash wanted his father’s approval. Even success didn’t bring it.

A failed marriage and a drug habit nearly silenced him for good. Fame and money didn’t bring Johnny Cash happiness. Only the love of a good woman, June Carter, could reach him. It was a tough love, though. He couldn’t have her and continue to live in captivity to his father’s curse or his own addiction. But her love gave him reason to believe there was hope. With the help of her godly parents, June nursed him through withdrawal and offered him a future he could live into. Like all of us, he would struggle throughout his life with the demons of his past, but for his last 35 years, he would cling to the woman he carried in his heart and the love that the Spirit of God had poured into it.

Get you up! Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings; lift it up, do not fear … Get you up! It’s a phrase that took me bac k w hen I read it in Isaiah 40. God has the prophet say to , Get you up! has been mired in a captivity of its own for nearly seventy years in Babylon , addicted to the drug of daily bread. They have paid double for their sins, God says. Now the time of redemption has come. God is coming near, like a good woman, speaking tenderly, offering consolation and hope. Comfort, O comfort my people, says the Lord. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem .

This is not the only word prophets ever speak. Isaiah himself had harsher words for a long time earlier. Any time God’s people forget God, any time they begin to live as if God is not a part of their everyday lives, any time they think only of themselves and abuse or neglect the poor and their neighbors, they—we—are apt to hear something other than Comfort, O comfort my people.

But God’s wrath is never the last word. It is always only a wake-up call to embrace a life of love that God intends. God’s anger is not the opposite of God’s love; it is the burning of God’s love. God’s passion can be felt as searing pain or intense elation, depending upon where you stand in relation to God’s desire for the world to be a place of justice and righteousness. If you think you can get away forever with living for yourself, think again. God is relentless.

But in this Advent season, we hear the word of hope that comes just over the horizon. Isaiah tells that it has a future again, freed from slavery. God is doing a new thing. God is bringing comfort; God will be a shepherd to the flock; God will hold them tight as a mother coddles a child. Likewise, John the Baptist tells us that good news has arrived at last. John gets a bad rap, being the fiery desert preacher that he is. But his calls to repentance are really calls to accept forgiveness. The One who is coming is bringing forgiveness and the power of the Holy Spirit to transform all of life from the inside out. But the way any of us will experience that begins with a change in perspective.

Like little children who go to bed on Christmas Eve with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, you have to believe as a way of preparing yourself to receive. Isaiah says that if is to know that comfort, it has to believe something new can happen. has to let go of the idea that its people are in Babylon for good and have no hope. The Israelites have to begin to act as if it is already so. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make a highway in the desert for the coming God. John the Baptist picks up on that language, too. It means, he says, that the people have to repent in order to receive the comfort of God’s forgiveness and a new life that comes from it.

Here is a crucial Advent theme that requires deeper thinking. Most of the time we make it seem that forgiveness is the result of repentance. If you are sorry enough for your sins, then maybe you will be able to convince God over time, after you have reformed your life by yourself and proven your sincerity, that you are deserving of God’s forgiveness. But that gets the thing exactly backwards.
was captive in Babylon and had begun to internalize its slavery. Like Johnny Cash believing his father and thinking he was good for nothing, we can all fall prey to that trap. had messed up. The people had sinned. They had once been free people, but they had abused their freedom by forgetting their God and neglecting the needs of the poor in their midst. God cannot tolerate being ignored, and God will not stand idly by as the haves neglect the have-nots. Economic theories of the trickle-down effects of tax cuts for the wealthy that raise all boats in a rising tide of prosperity will not substitute for actual personal attention to the poor. Either you intentionally look after your neighbor, the weak, the widow, the orphan, the vulnerable, the sick, or the stranger, or you will find yourself among them before long.

The first 39 chapters of Isaiah have the prophet foretelling disaster to come become God will not allow such injustice to go unaccounted for. The ancient empire of Babylon —modern-day , don’t you know?!—moved across and occupied its homeland. The Babylonians carted off the best and the brightest of to live under the thumb of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors in and around Baghdad . But God’s judgment is always discipline, never punishment. God is always teaching us something, never just getting back at us. God is always trying to reform us, never destroy us. And so in time God vows to deliver the people again and start over. But they have to believe it and begin to live that way.

President Bush signed an order this week declaring that Rosa Parks will have a permanent place in American history by being the only African-American woman in statuary hall in the capitol building in Washington, D.C. Her likeness will stand alongside segregationists like Jefferson Davis and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. But what is it that we owe her? On December 1, 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama , city bus when a white man came on who did not aim to move himself to the back. She was tired from a long day’s work, but more than that, she was sick and tired of a long life of complicity with a lie. She went to church on Sunday and heard that she was somebody; but when she went anywhere else in Montgomery on Monday, she was told she was a nobody, a servant of and not an equal to white people. She listened to Martin Luther King, Jr., preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and she began to believe the good news that God was doing a new thing and would bring comfort and deliverance to the oppressed and that there would come a new day of freedom and opportunity for everyone. And so she repented of her complicity. She kept her seat and began to live as a witness instead to that new day dawning, no matter the cost.

Get you up! Sounds a little hillbilly, doesn’t it? Sort of like when Grandma brings out the pecan pie and says, Now get you some of that while it’s warm! Well, Isaiah says that we need to get us up and bear witness to the good news of what God is doing. And the way we do that is by repenting and accepting the forgiveness and new life that God is bringing. Rosa Parks got her up by sitting herself down. Johnny Cash got him up by not letting his father get him down. He would never have let go of drugs and self-destructive behavior if he hadn’t repented in the face of June’s love, which carried God’s love with it. But he would never have done that if her love hadn’t offered him something to live into.

So what I’m saying is that forgiveness precedes repentance. Grace precedes our ability to answer it. God comes to comfort us, but the only way we will experience that is by giving in to a new possibility for our lives. Advent is a season of spiritual preparation. You cannot experience the “joy to the world” of Christmas unless you tune your ears to the angels and turn your heart to the gospel.
Christina Van Dyke teaches philosophy at Calvin College . She has written lately about what she has learned in recovering from a painful divorce. For a high achiever, she says, she had to come to grips with her inability to fix her marriage by sheer force of will and just trying harder. It broke me, she says. I remember rocking back and forth on my couch, in so much pain that I couldn’t even cry and could hardly breathe. Yet on a brilliantly clear Sunday morning in August of 2000, long before my external circumstances improved at all, something miraculously changed my life. I finally let go. I was still broken. My life was still shattered. Yet, I came to realize that, on some fundamental level, this wasn’t the whole story. … I am not living the life I thought I would, but that doesn’t keep me from responding to God’s call at least as well as I could have in the life I had idealized. God doesn’t call us to live perfect, bright, shiny lives. All God asks of us is to live in grace with honesty and integrity. [Context 37.12B (December 2005): 6.]

Living in grace with honesty and integrity means believing the good news that God is not finished with you yet. Live into that truth. Lean into it hard. Don’t remain stuck in slavery to a life defined any other way.

Do you know the story of the two caterpillars that were crawling about on fresh, soft green grass when suddenly they found themselves slogging through wet, brown grimy mud? They went from caterpillar heaven to caterpillar hell without ever consciously sinning. As they struggled, they noticed the shadow of butterfly wings above them. These butterflies reflected the brilliance of the sun in their glorious wings. One of the caterpillars turned to the other as the butterflies flew overhead and said, I don’t know about you, but they are never going to get me up in one of those contraptions! [ All en Walworth, GraceWorks (December 2005): 4.]

Well, God says, Get you up! It may be scary to leave the comfort of your current condition, but if you want to know the power of God’s promises in your life, you have to get you up. Let go. Open your heart to God. Raise your sights. Accept your forgiveness. Find out what you are missing. Join the work of God in the world. What are you waiting for? Get you up!