© 2025 Evan D. Garner
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The Cursillo movement has largely gone dormant in the Diocese of Arkansas, but it is still vibrant in other parts of The Episcopal Church. Cursillo is a lay-led, clergy-supported renewal movement designed to raise up spiritual leaders in the church. It centers on a three-day retreat, during which participants, called pilgrims, hear and respond to a series of short talks about the Christian faith and, together with the other pilgrims, enjoy several wonderful surprises that help them appreciate a little more fully the magnitude of God’s grace. With the support of our bishop, I’m working with a group of clergy to try to bring Cursillo back to Arkansas, and, if things come together, I hope many of you will consider taking part in a Cursillo weekend, perhaps as early as next fall.
Back in Alabama, where Cursillo is still thriving, I remember hearing an enthusiastic participant describe the movement to a group of clergy and lay people. He did a better job than I just did, and I recall seeing in the audience bright eyes and smiles and gentle head-nods, indicating a potential willingness to take part. As he finished his sales pitch, he told the group, “Cursillo will change your life,” which I knew to be true. But, as soon as he had said those words, a cynical colleague sitting next to me muttered under his breath, “I like my life just the way it is. Why would I want it to change?”
It was the first time that it had ever occurred to me that there are people in this world who like their lives just the way they are. The trite refrain, “it will change your life,” had always been effective on me. Those words had always sounded good and inviting. But now this cynical priest had me wondering. I wouldn’t have expressed it like that, but I like my life, too. In fact, I like my life very much. If a stranger came and knocked on my door and offered to change my life without explaining how, I absolutely would decline the offer. I live a charmed life. I am the definition of privilege. Why would I want anything to change?
Why? Because there is a brokenness in this world that no amount of privilege can shield me from. There is a hurt among God’s people, which is disproportionately manifest in the lives of women, immigrants, and the descendants of enslaved people, that no follower of Jesus is allowed to ignore. As long as there is anyone among us who would respond in the affirmative to the invitation to have their life changed, we must join them in seeking that changed life because Jesus Christ has made us one with them—with all people, even and especially those whose lives are hard. We are one body—all of us—and if one member of the body suffers, we all suffer. But how do we do anything about it?
That is why the people of Jerusalem and all of Judea were going out into the wilderness beyond the Jordan River. They left the city behind and everything familiar within it—their homes, their jobs, their lives—to hear John the Baptist, to confess their sins, and to receive the baptism of repentance. Why? Because they were sick and tired of being sick and tired. Because they knew that something had to change. Because they realized that the life they had been living wasn’t getting any better, and John was preaching something different—a real change. Into a world in which poverty and oppression were the rule of the day, John the Baptist dared to proclaim, “The kingdom of heaven has come near,” and the people wanted to be a part of that kingdom and taste the freedom it would bring.
John gave them hope. John helped the people remember God’s promise of salvation. John invited them to believe that that salvation could draw near to them even when it didn’t seem possible. Even when the powers of this world were as strong as they had ever been, John proclaimed the nearness of God’s kingdom because John knew that God’s messiah was coming soon. God had put John the Baptist on this earth to do one thing—to help God’s people prepare to receive their savior—and, though his preaching, God had awakened hope in their hearts and minds.
God’s people began to believe that true freedom was possible and that that freedom was close at hand. They were willing to leave behind life as they knew it in order to receive that freedom. That’s repentance. “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.” Repentance is how we make a straight path in our hearts and in our lives for the kingdom of heaven to take hold. Confessing our sins means acknowledging and lamenting all of those ways in which our lives are comfortably bound up in the powers of this world—the ways of greed, fear, domination, and death. Repentance means saying to God that we’re tired of living in a broken world and that we’re willing to give up our place in that brokenness if God is willing to help us be a part of something different.
Repentance means turning away from life as we have always known it in order to embrace the life into which God is inviting us. Repentance gets a bad rap, but is there anything more exciting than that? Is there anything more hopeful, more promising, more wonderful than leaving behind those things that keep you weighed down—anchored to this broken world—so that you can experience the life-giving freedom of God’s perfect reign?
But not everybody wants their life to change. Some people don’t want to give anything up. Those who are comfortable with the status quo are threatened by those who dare to believe that life doesn’t have to be this way. They come out to see what all the fuss is about and to mock those who talk about radical change. “You brood of vipers!” John says to them. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Wrath is word that means God showing up and making the world a better place in ways that human beings are powerless to accomplish on their own. The only people who should be scared of God’s wrath are people who like the world the way it is and don’t want it to change.
Skeptics and cynics are drawn to those places where God’s power is beginning to unfold—where true freedom is beginning to take root. Perhaps it’s because they think that their laughter and mockery will guarantee that these nascent movements for change will never amount to anything. Or maybe it’s because they suspect that the status quo of inequality and oppression, of which they are the direct beneficiaries, is no longer sustainable. Or maybe it’s because they, too, are starting to believe that God has the power to make the impossible possible—that God’s ways of justice and mercy, of restoration and renewal, of equality and empowerment, are breaking through into this broken world in ways that will not allow us to go back.
“Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” the Baptizer says to us. That is a call to action. It is a radical and hopeful invitation to live in this life as if the ways of God were fully manifest here among us because, as Christians, we believe that they already are. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has shown us the truth. In him, God has shown us that the broken, discarded bodies of those whom the powers of this world count as less than fully human are raised up by God in power. In Christ, those who endure the bondage of poverty, oppression, illness, and humiliation are set free. It is not good enough for us to confess with our lips that we are sick and tired of living in a broken world and not also give over to God our lives as vessels through which God’s salvation comes.
We are a people who believe that God’s promise to come and save us is more than a dream. We are a people who believe that God’s salvation has already come near—that God’s ways are already a reality in our lives no matter how distant they seem from the world in which we live. Because of Jesus Christ, we are a people of hope. And hope is a powerful thing. Hope dares to believe that freedom belongs to everyone even when God’s people are not yet free, and, for that that reason, hope will not rest until they are.
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