Beyond Repentance: Changing the Default Settings

Stephanie Crumley-Effinger
Meeting for Worship, ESR Board of Advisors Meeting
September 28, 2003

I was at Meeting for Worship a few weeks ago, at West Richmond, two blocks north of here, standing at the back of the room, when the theme of this message came to me. I was standing because our family was serving as ushers that week, and I was one of the people delegated to take one of the portable microphones to people who stood to speak out of the open worship. Initially resisted by some of us because it seemed interruptive and aesthetically unappealing, this has been reframed as an act of hospitality toward our members with hearing loss, and has come to feel natural.

So there I was, hovering ready to go, microphone in hand, should anyone be moved to speak, and trying at the same time to be present to the open worship, when the rudiments of a message began to form within me. It was the early September Sunday each year when our pastoral minister, Josh Brown, speaks on the passage from I John 4 which begins, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God . . .” This is a tradition to which Josh has felt called for quite a number of years at whatever Meeting he is serving, so as to remind everyone that the basis for our life together is love from and for God and one another.

I became uncomfortably aware that on many occasions when I have the opportunity to respond to someone in love, it is something other than love that rises within me. And then came the thought that has become this morning’s message: “my default settings are not set on love as automatic response; how might they be changed?”

Now if you, like me, are a user of computers, you have experienced the power of a default setting. It’s that stubborn, bossy mechanism which decides that even though you want the margin here, it should be there, and even if you want each item on a list preceded by a line, it will be marked by little squares. I don’t know about you, but I regularly sit at the computer fussing about way that the default settings have changed a page from how I want it to be. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about the computer to go into the control panel or whatever is THEIR boss, and change them so that they will respond to my wishes rather than their own.

We human beings are a lot like my computer. Each one of us has default settings particular to us, which have been established by a variety of factors – our genes, upbringing, culture, race, will power, ideas about right and wrong, friends, choices that we have made, the impact of others’ actions, our personality type, and so on. We default to, or naturally respond with, certain attitudes and behaviors. For example, when I ask one of my children for the third time to pick up the soccer paraphernalia scattered across the family room and am told, “Yes, Mama, I’ll do it later,” unfortunately my default response does not tend to feature love, but impatience, sharp temper, and other unfortunate things that I soon regret.

Jesus, in the verses we read from Matthew’s gospel, offers challenges to a number of religious default settings that were an important part of his hearers’ experience. The default is set to prohibit murder; Jesus challenges them to change it to a prohibition on angry insults. Another default is set to prohibit adultery; Jesus tells them not to look lustfully upon another person. And on it goes. He established a new standard for a default setting, extending to a deeper level the behavioral standard which had been set for them by their faith tradition.

Changing the default settings in our character is not an easy mission. I was so struck by the poem that Stephanie about the paper-training of a tortoise, especially the lines,

There I am, skewered by this description like an insect in a museum display, a well-intentioned Christian painfully far from the new default settings which Jesus wants to install in my characterological hard drive.

If I truly become so annoyed by the default settings on my computer that I decide they must be changed, I can go to Steve or Zach, my patient Seminary Computing Services colleagues, to have them teach me the method (or, if I am really pathetically unmotivated to learn something new, to do it for me.)

If only I were like a computer, if there would be a way that I might go to Jesus and have my default settings changed. Some people have had that experience, a sudden or even instantaneous change of some aspect of their automatic response. I have a friend whose addiction was healed, fast, not through years of AA groups, but at once. But usually, Jesus’ method of changing our default settings is of the crock pot slow cook means rather than the microwave or stir fry variety of change.

In the story about the young man who became mixed up with drug dealers, Kathleen Norris from whose viewpoint it is told, heard him recount it because he had been so drunk that her bartending husband had brought him home to sleep it off. He had been saved from the disastrous road on which his drug-dealing operation had been leading him, but clearly there was a long way to go before this repentance was sealed with a true change of being.

Jesus challenges us to the sort of change that goes deep down, restoring us to the image of God in which we were created and which we are called to manifest. But this is not meant to be accomplished through sheer will, by our fiercely constraining ourselves.

Being honest with God and opening ourselves for divine transforming love form the road to a change in our default settings. This includes the willingness to learn more about these habitual places of brokenness – including our capacity for fooling ourselves – and confessing to God and our brothers and sisters in faith. Gathering with others in worship, taking time for solitary prayer, reading about the struggles and triumphs of others who have gone before us – the ways of sanctification are neither complicated nor mysterious to undertake. We have to be careful to resist various snares, whether these take the form of self-disgust and self-rejection, or its mirror image of arrogance and complacency. Because Jesus’ method is of drawing us into divine love which blossoms into change.

As one author has written,