Scriptures for this week are Here
I recently returned from vacation, and if you’re new here, you should know that these guys don’t let me come back from vacation unless I have a story to tell. So let me tell you about the wondrous, beautiful, complex city of Prague. Wherever you go in Prague, you can peel back another layer of history. We landed in Prague to discover (not for the first time) that our luggage did not make it there with us. So our first full day there, I found myself without decent shoes, tripping over the ancient cobblestones of Prague in flimsy sandals, and it became a priority to find a place where I could buy some decent tennis shoes.
We wandered for several miles until – the first layer of history, current history – Tom finally Googled “Prague shoe stores” on his Blackberry, and we discovered that in the center of the city, right on Wenceslas Square, was surely the largest shoe store I had ever seen, 5 stories of every imaginable brand of men’s women’s, and children’s shoes. Now you can peel back the history of Prague just one layer to appreciate the amazing irony of a 5-story shoe store right on Wenceslas Square. Because 22 years ago, at the height of communism, we would hear of people waiting in lines for hours just to buy ugly black shoes that didn’t even fit, but under communism they were lucky to have something, anything, on their feet. Now, there on Wenceslas Square, where 600,000 people crowded in November 1989 to hear Vaclav Havel speak, and gently bring down communism in the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, now you can buy a pair of Nikes, or any kind of shoe you want, in air-conditioned comfort, from a sales clerk who speaks fluent English, and not wait in line at all.
Peel back more layers of history in Prague, and you begin to find a searing history of religious conflict in the Protestant-Catholic violence of the 17th century – which I will tell you about another time.
Peel back another layer of history in Prague, and you might find yourself in one of the most fascinating sights I’ve seen. In the old Jewish quarter, there is a 13th century synagogue, the oldest synagogue in continuous operation as a synagogue in Europe. It doesn’t take much peeling to know how unusual this is – most synagogues in Europe did not survive WWII – but in Prague, Hitler preserved the Jewish Quarter because he intended to open a museum there to the extinct Jewish race.
The tour guide in the synagogue told us how 3 Jewish men worked through WWII to catalog priceless Jewish treasures brought there from looted synagogues all over Europe. Among the many treasures were numerous Torah scrolls brought from destroyed synagogues. If you don’t know, the Torah scroll is the most precious possession of any synagogue. It is the hand-lettered, illuminated scroll on which the Hebrew Bible is written, and each Sabbath the members carry it out, touch it and kiss it, and read from it in the synagogue. The Torah scroll is so precious that if a synagogue catches on fire, it is the one thing people will run into a burning building to rescue. When a scroll finally wears out after centuries of use, it is not thrown away – it is buried in a graveyard, like a person.
After the war, the treasures that were catalogued in the old synagogue in Prague were dispersed all over the world, because the synagogues they had come from were destroyed, along with their people. The tour guide in the synagogue told us of one Torah scroll from a small Czech town that was saved from the war and ended up in a synagogue in New Zealand. The woman rabbi from the New Zealand synagogue brought the Torah to its ancestral home in the small Czech town (with its destroyed synagogue) for a visit, and Jewish leaders from all over the country came for the occasion to celebrate the Torah’s visit to its home village. The tour guide owns a DVD of the Torah’s visit, and she got tears in her eyes as she told us about it.
Hitler is gone, but the old synagogue in Prague is still there; you can still see its plaster walls, its worn-down stairs; its outer room for women, its inner sanctum for men at prayer. And most fascinating to me, its ancient Torah scroll, carefully stored in an inscribed tabernacle on the wall, with an eternal flame burning next to it. Just as we have a flame burning here behind our altar to show that God’s presence is here in the bread and wine we have reserved in our tabernacle, the Jews keep an eternal flame burning next to the Torah.
Why is the Torah such a precious thing to the Jews? It is because the Torah is the closest the Jewish people believe God comes to them. When Paul quotes the Hebrew Scriptures (in today’s epistle lesson) as saying “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart,” he is reflecting the Hebrew belief that the word of God that we hear in the Bible is the same power of God that spoke the universe into being. God’s presence is with them in the words of Torah. The word of God carries the power of God, and it is more precious than gold.
For Christians, we treasure the words of God in the Bible; but we believe that the Word of God that spoke the universe into being has gone further than words; it has come into human flesh in Jesus. (Which, incidentally, is why we in the Episcopal Church are not Biblical literalists. The words in the Bible are mediated to us through imperfect human authors, though they are divinely inspired. Only Jesus is a perfect reflection of God – Jesus is the Word of God made flesh.)
So, when we read the gospel from Matthew today, about Jesus walking on water, we should not get distracted by tangential questions – such as: did Jesus really walk on water, and how could he transcend the laws of physics if he was truly human? Or, questions of what Peter did or shouldn’t have done – is this a story about Peter’s faith or lack of faith? (I personally think Peter shows amazing faith here – I’ve tried to walk on water, and I haven’t succeeded yet!)
I think about all those questions, and they are all good ones, but I don’t believe that those are the points Matthew wants us to understand in this story. This is a story with one point, and the punch line is this: “Those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’”
Over the 14 chapters of his gospel to this point, Matthew has been carefully unfolding a narrative that asks one question: who is this Jesus? He tells us things like, this is someone who threatens earthly authorities and people in power, who teaches about love and lives it out, who has authority to heal and forgive, who ensures (in last week’s gospel) that God’s creation means that everyone has enough to eat in abundance, in whom God’s kingdom has come to Israel, but who has also come for the healing of the whole world. Now, for the first time in Matthew, we understand: This is the Son of God.
Which means that in Jesus, the fullness of God’s presence has come to us. Torah is no longer only holy words on a beloved, cherished page. Torah, God’s law, God’s word, God’s power, is human flesh and blood in Jesus – human life that lived, died and was resurrected, and who has changed the very nature of human life as a result.
Our eternal flame burns next to the consecrated bread and wine because these elements mediate the real presence of God to us in Christ’s human body. Jesus said he personally is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the completion of the Torah that is held in such reverence by Jews. In Jesus, God’s presence dwelled, not symbolically in words, but completely enfleshed in a human body, lived out in a human life from birth to death.
Which means that our life, our Christian way of life, is more than just reading, understanding, and believing a set of words or doctrines. Too often, Christians have lived as if believing certain propositions about Jesus is enough, and we could live however we want to as long as we believe. Like the Jews, we are called to live by the Torah. But for us, that means we are called to live a life transformed by encountering Jesus in all the ways he comes walking toward us, recognized or not.
Christian author Kurt Willems wrote an online article this week, in which he made the shocking statement that he was done living like Jesus – he was done serving the poor, going the extra mile, being a husband who loves his wife as Christ loves the church, visiting the sick, loving his neighbor, living with integrity. Instead of living like Jesus, he said, he wants to start being like Jesus.
As we encounter Jesus through prayer, worship, spiritual disciplines, reading the Bible and sharing the Eucharist, he said, we become like Jesus. As we encounter Jesus in other ways - walking toward us, recognized or not, in times of fear and trouble; challenging our way of life, urging us to ask ourselves if we are truly living the law of love, we come to know Jesus. As we come to know Jesus through all the ways he encounters us, we don’t just do the things Jesus commanded us to do. Through knowing Jesus we become the kind of people who can’t help but do those things. We become people for whom the hard thing is not loving our enemies, but failing to love them; the hard thing is not helping our neighbor, but turning him away; the hard thing is not working for healing, but allowing unhealthy behavior to flourish. Through daily encounters with Jesus, we become people for whom the only safe and happy thing to do is to love God and love our neighbor. We become like Jesus.
So Kurt Willems wants to stop mechanically doing what Jesus would do and simply start being like Jesus: “So, yes, I’m done with living like a Christian. I’m trading that in for living in a deeper relationship with Christ. I want to know Jesus. I want to hear Jesus. I want to be empowered by Jesus. Not simply in theory as I do the good things that he calls us to do, but as the natural outflow of intimacy with God. The former way “gets the job done.” The latter way changes the world.”
When we open our hearts to being like Jesus, it is the Word of God who lives and breathes through Jesus that takes flesh in us.
When we encounter Jesus, become like Jesus, it is God’s Word that begins to breathe through words we speak to others who have not encountered Jesus.
And as we are transformed by Jesus, it is God’s own Son who reaches out his hand to us, and empowers us to change the world.
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