Sermon for 1 Lent 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Remember back to the last time the power went out in your house. There you are, doing whatever you do in the evening, reading or watching TV or messing around on the computer or talking with your family. And suddenly there is a big shudder, and a click, and the lights go out, and the whole house seems to give a great sigh, and fall into silence. And you frantically jump up and start rustling through drawers looking for that flashlight you last saw a year ago, and you poke your head out the door and look up and down the street to see if the neighbors’ power is out too, and you call the power company to report the outage. And if the power outage lasts, eventually you fumble around finding your pajamas, switch off all the light switches, and go to bed in the darkness.

When this happens, when I finally settle down, the thing I notice most is the silence. The mechanical hums of the air conditioner and the refrigerator and the other machines in the house are things my ears don’t hear any more, normally. But when they lapse into silence, I notice their absence; and I can hear a different kind of silence than what I normally think of as silence. It’s a silence punctuated by the sound of the breeze outside, and maybe a bird chirping, or a coyote howling, and maybe a car driving by now and then.

And maybe another sound too, a deeper sound I never stop to listen for.

John Cage, an avant-garde composer of the mid-20^th century, composed a work he called “4 minutes 33 seconds” in 1952. This work was on NPR’s list of the 100 most important compositions of the 20^th century. It is a work that can be performed by any instrument or set of instruments, and it is played in three movements of 30 seconds, two minutes twenty-three seconds, and one minute 40 seconds. During these three movements, what the musicians are instructed to do is to put down their instruments and sit in complete silence. The music becomes the sounds that the listeners hear during that silence.

John Cage has written about the experience that inspired this composition. It happened on a visit to Harvard, where he spent some time in an anechoic chamber, a chamber that is completely sealed on the outside, so no sound comes in, and on the inside the walls are built so that they do not echo – no sound comes back to your ears. In other words, it is as silent a place as you can be, without actually being in the vacuum of space. Inside, his perfect ears picked up two distinct sounds – one high, one low. When he described them to the engineer in charge, Cage learned that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and the low one was his blood in circulation. “Until I die there will be sounds,” he wrote afterward. “And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” Somehow, for John Cage, it took the profound induced silence of the anechoic chamber for him to hear the music of his own heart.

How do we listen for the music of our own hearts? For Jesus, it seemed that he looked for a place of silence in order to hear. In the gospel today, we see Jesus in his own wilderness experience of silence – leaving the busyness of the company of other people and even leaving behind the lingering echoes of God’s voice at his baptism, declaring him Beloved, and going out into the silent wilderness for a deeper experience of that Voice.

Mark’s version, which we read this year, is admirably terse, leaving out the details that Matthew and Luke give us about the temptations and fasting. Because Mark is so short, we also get a wider perspective: we see what happens before and after Jesus’ time in the wilderness: before, Jesus is baptized and hears the words: “You are my Son, the Beloved: with you I am well pleased.” Afterwards, fortified by his wilderness experience, Jesus goes to Galilee and begins to proclaim the heart of his message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near: repent, and believe in the good news.”

In the middle, he spends 40 days in the wilderness, living without the sounds of other people, listening to the beat of his own heart. And listening also to the sound of other voices that come to him in the silence. Because of Mark’s terseness, we can’t tell exactly what happened to Jesus in the wilderness. We only know that he came out of the wilderness understanding who he was and what he was called to do: fully formed and ready for his ministry. Something about that wilderness experience, that time of quietness and emptiness, helped Jesus to begin to understand the purpose of his life. Something about the experience of temptation, fasting, emptiness, silence, something about the harshness of the desert environment, with its thorns and snakes, helped Jesus to hear the voice of God, helped that voice to meld and harmonize with his own heartbeat, helped him co-create with God a new kind of music.

As I think back on the wilderness experiences of my own life, and the wilderness experiences that so many people have told me about over the years – times of sorrow and grief, times of anger and bewilderment, times when people have felt assaulted by the voice of Satan and abandoned by God – the common theme that strikes me in all those experiences is opportunity, new beginnings, new understandings. Some people, like Jesus, choose to go to the wilderness, to listen for the voice of God. Emptying themselves out through their Lenten fast, to hear that voice clearly.

Many others find themselves in an unwanted wilderness, an emptiness in their lives through no fault of own – the loss of a job or a relationship or some other devastating event. And when people come to me and tell me about their wilderness experience, I listen, and eventually I almost always ask them this question, and some of you will recognize this question: What in this wilderness experience, this difficult and challenging time you’re going through – what about this experience is a gift for you?

We don’t normally think of wilderness experiences, those power outages that cause everything around us to collapse into silence with a great sigh, those times when we are left, panicking, with sound of our own heartbeat, as gifts. But if we didn’t have the wilderness, we might never hear that sound. I know for me, it has been the times when I was restless and discontent, when I was unhappy and searching for something new, when I was disgusted with my own behavior and questioning my own character – those have been the times when God has found ways to speak to me with a new voice.

If we’re happy all the time, we may never hear that music. As St. Augustine said: You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you. It is that very restlessness that drives us out into the wilderness and that opens our hearts to recognize our yearning for God, our desire to turn toward God. It’s not our perfections, but our imperfections, that open our ears and our hearts. We may think of Lent disciplines as something good, religious people do; but that’s not what Lent is – Lent is made for imperfect, messy, confused people, people who have no time for God, people who don’t know where God is in their lives. That is to say, Lent is made for all of us.

Because it’s the wilderness, the suffering, the questioning, the emptiness, the silence, that teaches us to listen for the beat of our own hearts. And to listen for the sound of another voice we rarely hear. The Jesuit Gerald Fagin has said, ‎"It is not just our hearts that are restless until they rest in God. God's heart is also restless. God's longing for us knows no bounds." People who allow themselves to fully experience the wilderness and the silence learn to listen for the voice of God’s longing, and have a chance to come out of the wilderness healed, reconciled, with a better understanding of the music their own hearts are yearning to play.

Sometimes it takes going into the wilderness, of body or of soul, to find out who we truly are. Traveling toward where the familiar contours of our lives disappear. Leaving the landmarks behind, the people and patterns and possessions that orient us. Which is why the church gives us the season of Lent. Lent is the wilderness time, the time that so well reflects the contours of our human lives, which are not always feasting and singing, but sometimes include fasting and silence. Lent is the wilderness time when we are all called to empty ourselves in certain ways, to silence ourselves so that we can hear the beat of our hearts, to allow God to speak into the silence with a new voice. Jesus’ time in the wilderness tells me that when we find ourselves in a wilderness place, that we can open ourselves to God’s redemptive love, and allow God to transform that experience into a gift.

When you find yourself in that wilderness place, ask: what is the gift in this? If you are fasting from something for Lent, or adding something – what is the gift of that discipline? It may not be evident now, but keep your ears and your heart open to receive the gift God has in this discipline, for you.

And, if you are in an unintentional wilderness, a fast you did not seek out – what is the gift in that for you? If you are lonely – what is the gift of the loneliness? If you are angry – what is the gift of the anger? If you are depressed – what is it in your spirit that is begging to be set free? How can that dark and wilderness place of depression become a gift for you?

I do not mean to say that these terrible experiences are things God sends to us on purpose, because I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that God sends illness and suffering to teach us lessons. But I do believe that God can bring good out of any situation – because after all, that is what God did with the cross.

On the cross, the Word of God gave a great cry, and a shudder, and a sigh, and lapsed into silence – yet even in the tomb, the voice of God would not be silent. Into the silence of the wilderness, the silence of death, God breathes new life, sings a new song. And the Word of God sings, across the centuries, into our hearts.

So listen.

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, 2.19.12

Scriptures for today are Here

In her book, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard shares stories of doctors who performed early cataract surgery in Europe. When a doctor removed bandages from one girl’s eyes, she saw “the tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard wrote about her own response to those words. “It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all, and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost, charged and transfigured…I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it.”

The sudden Transfiguration of an ordinary day, when the world glows with God’s presence – such holy moments have been described by novelists like Dillard; by poets; by saints – Moses at the burning bush, Elisha watching the chariot of fire. They are moments of vision, moments that open our minds to the wonder and glory that surround us at all times and places, less like seeing than like being for the first time seen: moments of mystical connection to the divine that give us strength and courage, for all the ordinary times, when we walk along thinking of nothing at all.

And every now and then in life, God might give a few of us ordinary folks such moments of transcendent glory. It happened to me one day. I went to a worship service at a Greek Orthodox cathedral. If you’ve ever been to an Orthodox service, you know what they are like: a vast gold dome overhead, beautiful gold icons lining the front, clouds of incense billowing so that you could hardly see. And above us in the back somewhere was a choir balcony, with the choir singing heavenly chants, all in Greek so you couldn’t understand a word, their voices soaring like the song of angels. And I stood there, an ordinary person leafing through the prayer book and trying to figure out what was going on. And I looked up at the people in front of me, and suddenly, unexpectedly, they glowed like fire. I looked at them and knew they were just like me – they had eaten breakfast, brushed their teeth, rushed the kids into the car, gotten to church late – and they were blazing with God’s glory. I felt that for just a moment, I got to see them as God sees them – and then it was gone, and they faded back into ordinary people again. But I never forgot what I had seen.

It makes sense that I should catch a glimpse of transcendent glory in a Eucharist. The Orthodox believe that the Eucharist, what they call the Divine Liturgy, is going on all around us, at all times and all places. Angels and archangels are always celebrating Eucharist, constantly singing Holy, Holy, Holy. And when we step into liturgy ourselves, we simply … join in with the angels – whether we see it or not.

Maybe once or twice in a lifetime, we are granted a gift of vision – the ability to catch a glimpse of the world as God sees it.

But here’s my question: which time is holier? The times when we become aware, have a sudden insight of God’s dazzling presence on the mountaintop, or the times when God is walking along beside us, unseen, in the valley? Were those people who were glowing with uncreated light at the Greek Orthodox church – were they holier at that moment, or were they holier as the rushed around to get the kids ready for church that morning, or as they scrambled into the car afterwards, making plans for the afternoon? Were they holier as they listened to choirs of angels singing, or are they holier as they move out into the difficult times of life, sicknesses and work problems, addictions and difficult relationships and sorrow?

Are we holier here, now, in this mountaintop experience we bring ourselves to each Sunday to gain strength for the coming week, or are we holier as we go out into the world to answer God’s call for each one of us? What is the holier time, the time on the mountain or the time in the valley?

Well, maybe looking at Mark’s gospel can give us an idea. This story of Transfiguration stands at the center of Mark’s gospel. Everything has been working its way up to this point, and everything will go downhill from here on out. Just before this story, Peter has declared that he believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus has turned around and astonished the disciples by telling them that he is not the kind of Messiah who will rule in glory; he is the kind of Messiah that must suffer and die.

They go up to the mountaintop and see what must seem to Peter like the vindication of Peter’s faith that Jesus is a Messiah of glory. Jesus is talking with Moses and Elijah, symbolizing the law and prophets. All of Jewish salvation history seems to have led to this moment of glory. Surely God is about to act! Surely this glory will shine forever! Peter offers to create dwellings, in Hebrew “booths,” for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, because there is an ancient Jewish prophecy, where the messianic age will begin during the Festival of Booths. Peter wants to be ready for God. Peter believes the messianic age is dawning, and he’s right. What he doesn’t understand is what messianic age involves: suffering and death.

We can broaden our perspective on Mark’s gospel to understand this a little better. There are three “mountaintop” experiences in Mark’s gospel. This Transfiguration mountain stands at the center, but it points backwards to the first and forward to the third, and all three are similar. The first is the baptism of Jesus, when the heavens open and Jesus hears a voice saying, “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.”

Today’s Transfiguration story is second, Jesus glowing with uncreated light and the same voice saying the same thing: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Both are times of glory, mountaintop experiences, times when Jesus must have been alive in every nerve, tingling with presence of God coursing through him.

But Mark wants us to understand that Jesus will plunge down off this mountain and immediately begin to make his way to the third mountaintop. That third mountain is the hill at Calvary, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Here on the mount of Transfiguration, his clothes shine dazzling white; there they are stripped off. Here a cloud descends on the mountain; there the world will be shrouded in darkness. Here God’s presence shines all around; there he will cry out “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” Here God’s voice will pronounce him the Beloved Son; there a centurion will look on as he dies and say in wonder, “truly this man was God’s Son.”

Mark wants us to see that the place of glory and transcendence shines with God’s uncreated light, and so does the place of shame and suffering. Jesus is God’s anointed Messiah on the mountaintop, and on the cross. You can’t understand Messiahship by looking only at this mountain of glory. You have to look also at the mountain of shame – and vice versa. One explains the other.

And which is holier? The place of glory, or the place of shame? They are both holy; they are both glowing with the dazzling presence of God; they both reveal to us the truth of who God is. God is the one who loves us, and who is present with us, whose glory shines on the mountaintop, and on the cross too.

It’s my belief that Jesus and the disciples were given this gift of vision in order to strengthen them for the holy time to come – that this vision of God’s transcendent glory gave Jesus what he needed to go to Jerusalem to die. Jesus too, human as he was, needed God’s strength and comfort.

As we ordinary human beings do too. On the night before he was killed, 4/3/68, Martin Luther King, Jr. told of his own mountaintop experience: how God came to him in a time of fear and filled his heart with God’s presence. He sat in the kitchen of his house, afraid for his life and his family’s lives, and suddenly knew that God was all around him. He heard a voice: Martin, stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness.

That stormy night in Memphis, April 3, 1968, Dr. King talked about that experience and about the valley he somehow knew he was entering: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land…Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

So where are you, today? On the mountaintop, or in the valley? In the church each week, God calls us to the mountaintop, joining with angels and archangels, shining with Jesus in the glory that is the destiny of all of us, whether we can see that glory or not. But this is not the only holy place: this is merely the place we come to get strength for the rest of our lives ahead.

And those lives are holy too: the everyday ins and outs of relating to our spouses and children and friends and neighbors; the work we do, whether we enjoy it or not; the casual conversations with people we meet in the grocery store. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

And the real valley times, the real desert times, when we are suffering through illnesses or difficult relationships or grief – those are the most holy times of all. The mountain is given to us as God’s glorious gift of vision, which strengthens us for whatever will come. That light is God’s gift to us – the gift of glory, of veils being lifted, of new hope being granted. It’s a gift that lets us know that wherever we go as Christians, Christ will be there with us. God’s light is shining all around, at all times and all places – and the Messiah is here with us, whether we feel his presence or not.

And which is holier? The mountain is holy, and the valley is holy. So, as we celebrate Eucharist together today – come up the mountainside. Let God nourish you and give you strength. Whether you see it or not, your life is holy, and God’s light shines in you.

Sermon for 2.5.12

Scriptures for today are Here

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and that means many prayers will be ascending today. People rooting for opposing teams will be praying in a cacophony of voices for conflicting outcomes; and no doubt advertisers will be praying that their zillion-dollar ads will be hits. Denver Broncos Quarterback Tim Tebow brought prayer in sports into the spotlight this season, dropping to one knee and giving thanks after touchdowns, making open proclamations of his faith. A recent survey showed that 43% of Americans believed that God did answer Tebow’s prayers and helped him win.

According to a Saturday Night Live skit in which Jesus shows up in the locker room after Tebow and the Broncos beat the Bears, Jesus goes wherever he’s called to go, which means he spends a lot of time at football games, beauty pageants, and country music awards. And because he’s so busy running from one event to another, that’s why last season he didn’t have time to attend the whole of any one Broncos game – he could only show up in the fourth quarter – explaining all those wins in the last minutes of the game.

The Tebow phenomenon – complete with the one-knee gesture that for him is a prayer, for millions of others has become an icon of sorts, has made him famous, along with his Christian faith – causing both praise and ridicule. The logical, and faith difficulties of opposing teams offering prayers to win gave rise to a New Yorker cartoon. A grumpy-looking football player talks to a reporter after a game, saying, “First of all, I’d like to blame the Lord for causing us to lose today.”

In Tebow’s defense, he doesn’t seem to be praying for victory, according to an open mike recording of one of his prayers – he seems to be praying for strength and for the ability to give glory to God. And his is not an empty faith. He takes care to use his fame to help sick and injured children – flying a seriously ill child and his family to each game, paying all their expenses, visiting with them before and after the game. After losing badly to the Patriots in the playoffs, he still visited with a young man named Zach McCloud, saying, ”I got to make a kid’s day, and anytime you do that it’s more important than winning a game, so I’m proud of that.”

Tebow seems to have a solid handle on what is important to God in prayer. Perhaps other athletes don’t: he’s certainly not the first player to drop to one knee after scoring a touchdown, to cross himself before stepping up to the plate, or to give a post-game interview attributing his success to God, or to ask God for help with the game. The wife of Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback, has requested prayers for her husband in today’s Superbowl, hoping God will help him win because he deserves it, because he’s worked so hard (as if the other athletes on field haven’t).

All of this begs the question, does God really concern himself with the outcome of football games? And with all those conflicting prayers ascending, how does God decide which ones to pay attention to? And most important, exactly how does God interact with this world?

Strangely enough, God does seem to have paid attention to the fact that today was Superbowl Sunday when inspiring church leaders to design the lectionary for this day. Because a verse from our Old Testament scripture is one that Christian athletes famously use for inspiration. Tebow has at least once etched it in eye black under his eyes. That scriptures is Isaiah 40:31: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

You can see how this verse would inspire young men who are hoping to play strong, but I have to say this verse was not intended to inspire football players. Instead, it’s a verse that can provide inspiration to anyone who is feeling weak or alone or troubled – it’s the idea that strength to face it comes from God.

Isaiah is writing five centuries before Christ, to a dispirited group of captives – the Israelites in Babylon. The empire of Babylon had invaded Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground, and carted away the Jewish leaders into slavery in Babylon. Interestingly, the Israelites’ time of failure and degradation in Babylon seems to have been an absolutely formative experience in development of Judaism, one example of how God can bring strength to us in our weakness. Where many captives, or immigrants, in foreign countries eventually assimilate, subverting their own culture and beliefs to the stronger culture that surrounds them, the Jews used that time in Babylon to more strongly define who they were in contrast to their Babylonian captors. Scholars tell us that a great deal of Old Testament oral tradition was probably put in writing by the Jewish people during their time in Babylon.

In the Old Testament reading, we see a long passage about God’s power in creation. By knowing the context in which Isaiah prophesied, we can understand more about what he is saying. The Babylonians worshiped nature gods, stars and suns, and had creation myths where the world was born out of conflict between gods. Isaiah proclaims a very distinctive truth: that there is one God who created everything, who is supreme over all nature, and all squabbling lesser gods.

“Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Isaiah cries. “Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” God is supreme over all powers of nature and over all powers of earth, those frightening powers that hold us captive and proclaim their own might. They will fade away like grass in the wind, and God’s power will be revealed.

When I read this, I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars, and our little star and our tiny earth taking our minuscule place on the edge of universe. Yet we may be tempted to think that a God so mighty as the creator of universe, could never be concerned with beings as small and inconsequential as we are, grasshoppers, in the words of Isaiah. But Isaiah counters this too: God is concerned with human beings, our lives, he says. Nothing is so small and so weak that God does not take notice of it: in fact, it is the weak who receive the power of God. And therefore this scripture tells how God brings strength to those who are weak: “Even youths will faint & be weary, & the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run & not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Israel’s prophetic tradition shows that when Israel was strong, mighty and independent, God sent prophets to call them away from their pride and self-service to remember to care for the poor and weak, to put themselves in service to others. But when Israel is downcast and weak, God sends prophets of hope like Isaiah, and Jesus, promising that God will pour strength into them.

It’s an illustration of the truth that so often, it is not our strengths and successes that make us better people – it is our troubles, failures, weaknesses, our repentance and willingness to change and grow, that bring us closer to God. And it seems that God, who is concerned with not just great and mighty things, but also with the minutest events of human life, acts in this world not by hurling thunderbolts at the wicked or manipulating world events like toys, but by pouring strength into those who are weakened. By standing on the side of the downtrodden, by working through human beings who recognize their own weakness and open themselves to him in faith, and by giving them what they need to change human history and transform the world.

I do not mean to imply that God sends us troubles in order to teach us things. A woman once said to me, “I know that God gave my mother this sickness so he could teach me a lesson.” Well, I don’t believe God does things like that – I don’t believe God sends illnesses any more than I believe that he sends hurricanes or tsunamis. These things happen in the course of nature, because we live in a finite and imperfect world – nothing will ever be infinite and perfect within creation. Suffering, disasters and death will always be with us in this world, until God’s kingdom comes in its fullness.

What God does do is gives us strength to meet the challenges we face. Sometimes by curing, as Jesus does in today’s gospel, and as I have seen happen – miraculous cures that I can only attribute to God’s intervention. And sometimes not by curing, but by healing, which is not the same thing – healing sometimes involves a physical cure, but not always. Sometimes it involves a different kind of healing: a spiritual strengthening, an ability to learn new ways of confronting problems. A realization that God is present in the midst of our suffering. Why God cures some people and not others, I don’t know – it’s certainly not the strength of one’s faith or the fervency of one’s prayers that brings cure. But I do believe that prayer always works to bring healing of some kind. By opening ourselves to God’s power, we grow into stronger, braver people. And by allowing God to give us strength, we are healed whether or not we are cured.

So – does God care who wins a football game? I don’t really know, but I’d say if so, he cheers for the underdog. But does God care about the people playing and the people watching? Absolutely. He cares about the people who are there, and he cares about the sick kids who Tim Tebow brings to games. Because God cares about every aspect of our lives. And it is true that “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”