Sermon for 3.18.12

Scriptures for today are Here

On Valentine’s Day, 2011, a group of people was out on the ocean in a small boat, when they ran across a very strange sight – a young female humpback whale, lying still in the ocean, with her breathing hole just barely above water. As they got closer to her, they saw what had happened. She had gotten tangled in a mass of nylon fishing line and crab traps, and couldn’t get free. She was in the process of slowly dying. The group radioed the Coast Guard for help, but the Coast Guard said they couldn’t get there for another hour. So they got out some small knives and began to cut. You can watch what happened here.

When the whale was finally free, she swam a little way from the boat and suddenly jumped for joy – a full breach out of the water. And for the next hour, the group watched as this young whale made full breaches, time after time, about 40 breaches while they watched. It was a dance of freedom and joy by a young creature of God.

That is a beautiful story of freedom – but freedom is sometimes a bit more complex for human beings. Here’s a very different story.

At 6:15 a.m. last Wednesday, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London, sent an email to his boss resigning from the company. What his boss didn’t know as he read that email over his morning tea was that 15 minutes later, at 6:30 a.m., a different resignation letter by Greg Smith would hit the website of the New York Times. It was the kind of resignation letter that is reminiscent of some fiery exits from other jobs in the past. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the resignation of Steven Slater, the flight attendant who in 2010 cursed out a passenger over the intercom, grabbed a beer, deployed the inflatable slide, and slid to freedom.

But it was still dramatic. In an op-ed, Greg Smith began, “Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs.” He went on to skewer the firm’s business ethics, client service and culture, in a sort of shot heard round the world – and the business pages have not stopped talking about it since. Among the many serious questions this spectacular exit has raised, are some more personal questions about Greg Smith, including the question of whether any employer on Wall Street will ever hire him again. Employers don’t like to take a risk that a person who made a spectacular exit once, throwing bombshells back at the office he was leaving, might do it again. Which is an example of a way an unhealthy system protects itself: unhealthy systems will guard against taking their bad behavior public by providing safeguards, enlisting everyone involved, including competitors who share in the profits of the system, in making sure things like this don’t happen. The threat, “You’ll never work in this town again,” becomes a very real one in a system like that.

This is just one example of a very serious human truth: if you are trapped in an unhealthy system – an abusive relationship, an bad work environment, an addiction, a personal set of poor habits – it is really hard to set yourself free.

Which brings us to our Old Testament reading today: a very weird story of snakes. And we may ask ourselves, why in the world did the lectionary people decide to include this weird story in our Lent readings? The other weeks in Lent have brought us stories of major covenants: Noah, Abraham, Moses. But this week – snakes? I’m with Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark – Why does it have to be snakes? I hate snakes!

The easy answer is, this story is referred to in the gospel, so our Old Testament lesson is selected to give us the background for the gospel reading. The more complicated answer is, this story, in a very real way, tells us something very important about the development of our Biblical tradition and how that tradition speaks of freedom in new ways to new ages and new people.

When you look at this story of the snakes, you can see layers of theological development, new ways of looking at the world and God’s relationship to us. At the most basic level, we have the story of a people, wandering in the desert after being freed from slavery in Egypt, encountering a snakepit and many getting bitten. The people ask Moses, their leader, for help, and Moses creates a symbol of God’s presence, a snake on a pole, to reassure them. People look at this symbol and are healed – perhaps of snakebite, perhaps of fear; at any rate, this symbol allows them to continue their wilderness journey.

So that’s the first level of theological development here: fearful former slaves run into danger and need a tangible sign of God’s protection. The second level of development is this: people begin to ask why the snakes were there. They can’t think of another explanation than that God must have sent them, and they attribute the snakes to God’s punishment for their complaining. Unfortunately, this makes God look temperamental and arbitrary – having a temper tantrum, sending snakes, then instead of removing the snakes, sending this snake on a pole. And it also raises other questions: do we have God to blame for all our misfortunes? Does God send tornadoes, does God send cancer, does God send automobile accidents? If so, God has a lot of ‘splaining to do. And I don’t believe that God operates this way.

Bible editors help us address this question with the third level of development in this story, by setting it in a particular context. The people of Israel begin to understand this event as part of a larger movement from slavery to freedom. Look at what’s going on in this story – the people of Israel are wandering in the desert, not sure where they’re going or when they will get there, and they start to yearn for the old familiar days of slavery. In their slave days, they were oppressed, they were beaten, their children were murdered, and they had nothing of their own. But at least things were settled and predictable. It takes courage to be free.

Human beings sometimes find predictable slavery easier to bear than frightening freedom, with decisions that have to be made, dangers that must be met, limitless possibilities, promises for the future – and we constantly have to fight our temptation to run back into our familiar, comfortable lives as slaves. In slavery, the suffering is known and expected; in freedom, you run across dangers you don’t know how to deal with – like, symbolically, snakes.

Greg Smith declared his independence from Goldman Sachs – now he faces the “snakes” of unemployment. An abused wife leaves her husband; now she is going to have to deal with the job market and the legal system and a custody battle and her own guilt and love for the man she left behind.

Freedom is hard: and what the people of Israel came to understand is that on the hard journey to freedom, the only way they would get there was to rely on God. Not just in the initial act of leading them across the Red Sea, but every single step of the way, from Egypt to the Promised Land. Because every step of way, their temptation was to fall back into slavery once more. Finally arriving at a place of freedom was an amazing act of courage.

Which is a truth that every one of us can look around and understand today. I mentioned last week that the Ten Commandments are not limits to our freedom: they are God’s way of life that save us from our own temptation to fall back into slavery – slavery to our possessions, to our passions, to our work, to false gods. We are always tempted into comfortable slavery instead f frightening freedom.

Just ask any member of Alcoholics Anonymous – people become slaves to alcohol, they are owned by alcohol, and they can’t just decide to be free. It takes reliance on a higher power to free them from that slavery – it takes God. They have to take a journey through a wilderness of healing, and every single day of that journey, they will be tempted to fall back into slavery. To be freed, they have to keep sight of that higher power before them.

Comfortable slavery is sometimes much easier than exhausting freedom. Now, one caveat: personal covenants we make, like marriage, can sometimes feel binding and limiting. In a marriage that is not abusive, the path to freedom lies through that covenant, not around it. God works through that marriage to teach us the way to love another human being. But in many other areas of life, there are many things that try to enslave us – unhealthy ways of life, bad work environments, our possessions and our debts that hold us in bondage, unhealthy systems we are trapped in. To get to a place of freedom, you have to have strength, you have to have courage, you have to have other people supporting you, and most of all, you have to have God. Because we humans can’t free ourselves on our own.

Which brings us back to our gospel for today. Right before the most famous passage in the New Testament, John 3:16, we hear a reference to this story about snakes, as Jesus speaks about being “lifted up” like Moses’ bronze serpent. When the Jesus we see in John’s gospel talks about being “lifted up,” he means being lifted up on the cross. John is telling us that looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross provides healing like Moses’ bronze serpent did. And what kind of healing does he provide? This kind:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Jesus on the cross provides healing of body, mind, and spirit. The word that Jesus uses for “believe” here is not the same kind of “believe” that you would use if you said, “I believe in evolution” – that is, you have looked at the scientific evidence and decided that it makes logical sense. This is the kind of belief that you would use if you say, “I believe in peace.” It’s not a question of whether peace is factual, it’s a question of whether you put your trust in it, work for it – whether you live according to that belief.

Jesus tells us that for us, looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross is how we are healed, because in him God frees us from slavery to sin and death, and leads us to freedom and life – and we can put our trust in him. The healing happens for us because on the cross, what we see is this: God’s love for us, so strong that Jesus gave his life for the sake of that love; and God’s utter involvement in our own struggles for freedom.

When we were slaves to sin and death, God entered our slavery, took our sin and death upon himself, and led us out of slavery into freedom. And Freedom is not an easy task: but day by day, we can put our trust in Jesus to give us strength, to give us courage, to help set us free from all the things that enslave us – so that we may not perish, but have everlasting life. And then, knowing that we are free, we can, like a young and beautiful humpback whale, a beloved creature of God, dance in joy and celebration.

Sermon for 3.11.12

Scriptures for Today are Here

It’s the time of year when you start seeing a lot of green. This coming Saturday, there will be an inordinate number of people wearing Kelly green. There will be leprechaun hats, shamrocks, parades, and green beer. In Fountain Hills, where I live, at noon on March 17, the fountain will turn green. All for a festival known as St. Patrick’s Day.

We think of this day as a cute little folk festival, beloved by Irish-Americans. But what is almost never talked about is St. Patrick himself, who was a real human being, a dedicated Christian, who changed the lives of millions of people, including, incidentally, yours and mine.

To understand this, you need to know Patrick’s story. To begin with, he was not Irish, but British. He was born around the year 400 in Roman-occupied Britain (at a time when the Roman Empire was on its last legs), and was raised in a Christian family but never took the faith seriously. But at age 16, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates and sold as a slave in Ireland. Ireland in those days was a wild and dangerous country, outside the Roman Empire and therefore not civilized in the same way as the rest of Europe at the time. It was a land full of marauding bands of warriors, landowners who terrorized slaves, and religious leaders who performed human sacrifices to appease gods. As a slave, Patrick was mistreated, beaten and starved, and suffered from fear and desperate loneliness and homesickness.

In his loneliness, Patrick rediscovered the Christian God of his childhood and began to pray. He wrote in his memoirs: “After I came to Ireland, every day I had to tend the sheep, and many times a day I prayed – the love of God and his fear came to me more and more, and my faith was strengthened. And my spirit was moved so that in a single day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and almost as many as night, and this even when I was staying in the woods and on the mountains; I used to get up for prayer before daylight, through snow, through frost, through rain, and felt no harm, and there was no sloth in me.”

After 6 years as a slave, God came to Patrick in a dream and said it’s time to go home, your boat is waiting for you. Patrick walked 200 miles to the eastern coast of Ireland and found a boat waiting there, as God had promised. He went home to Britain, then to France where he studied to become a priest, then home to Britain again, where he assumed he would spend the rest of his life. But then he had a second dream, in which he heard the voice of the Irish people: 'We beg you, young man, come and walk among us once more.’” He heard it as God’s call to return to Ireland.

He obeyed that call and went to Tara in Ireland, the seat of the great high king of Ireland, and confronted the king on the feast of Beltine, the Spring Equinox. The king had forbidden anyone to light the first fire of Beltine before him. But the feast coincided with Easter that year, and in the darkness before the dawn, standing on a hillside opposite the king’s castle, Patrick lit the first fire of Easter ever lit in Ireland, and called down God’s protection with these words:

At Tara today in this fateful hour

I place all Heaven with its power,

And the Sun with its brightness,

And the snow with its whiteness,

And Fire with all the strength it hath,

And lightning with its rapid wrath,

And the winds with their swiftness along the path,

And the sea with its deepness,

And the rocks with their steepness,

And the Earth with its starkness:

All these I place,

By God’s almighty help and grace,

Between myself and the powers of Darkness.

It’s not clear exactly what happened next (it’s lost in the clouds of myth and legend), but by the end of the confrontation, the king of Ireland had become a Christian. It was St. Patrick’s first conversion in Ireland – but in 30 years, he converted most of Ireland to Christianity, put an end to human sacrifice in Ireland, abolished slavery, and founded dozens of monasteries that went on to “save civilization” by preserving it in Ireland when the Roman Empire fell, bringing the Dark Ages to Europe – meaning he has a continuing influence today that touches all our lives.

The reason Patrick succeeded in converting an entire nation was this: he would look around him at the people of Ireland, and try discover where God had been there already working, and join in. Patrick looked for and found common elements between Christian and native Irish beliefs.

Christian love for creation was one reason Patrick found Irish receptive. The ancient Celtic peoples had a deep and abiding love for nature; they saw God as profoundly immanent, deeply present with every living thing. Our Judeo-Christian tradition has always revered creation, as we see in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” We do not worship nature, but we believe that nature points to God and proclaims God’s glory, and we honor it as the work of God’s hands.

The ancient Irish believed that holy things came in threes, and Patrick found that this belief paved the way for him to explain the Trinity, three in one. The Irish native plant, the shamrock, with its three leaves, was not just a decoration on a leprechaun’s hat – it was how Patrick demonstrated the idea of the Trinity to the Irish – one being, expressed in three persons.

Ancient Celtic peoples believed in the power of place – that there were certain places in the world that were “thin places”, where the boundary between heaven and earth was stretched so thin that heaven could break through at any moment. And so they found a kindred belief in the traditions of Jews and Christians, and our ancient stories of mountaintop experiences, like the story of Moses, who stood in a “thin place” on the mountain of God, as he received the 10 Commandments in our Old Testament lesson today. As Rabbi Caplan told us last week, there is an ancient Jewish tradition that not just Moses, but all humans were present at that holy moment – Jews, Christians, pagans, and all peoples who have ever lived. And therefore we, with the ancient Jews, with Jews of all times, with the wild Irish and the Celtic Christians who are our spiritual ancestors - all of us stood in that thin place on Mount Sinai. All of us heard the God of Israel say: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of slavery; you shall have no other gods but me.

Patrick understood at a deep and personal level that God had brought him out of slavery, and out of gratitude he devoted his life to living God’s way. Which is the pattern the Ten Commandments, and that moment on the mountain, lay out for us as the life of the people of God: the Jews were already free from slavery before they arrived at Sinai.

First God leads us out of slavery into freedom, then we devote our lives, every day, every moment, waking, sleeping, working, loving – to living God’s way. If we look at the 10 Commandments and set aside the notion that they are simply a set of “thou shalt nots,” a prison to limit our freedom, we can begin to understand that the whole of the law that Moses received on that holy mountain is built on the foundation of a relationship with a God of freedom, a God who reminds us that freedom is God’s divine gift to us. And we can begin to understand that living in freedom means living in life-giving ways, refusing to fall back into slavery, which is our constant temptation. It means refusing to become slaves to material possessions by stealing or coveting. It means refusing to become slaves to false gods who want to keep us small by forgetting the true God. It means refusing to become slaves to our own self-interest and our hurtful passions by committing murder or adultery. It means refusing to become slaves to our work by insisting on a day of rest, Sabbath peace.

In farming, a “demonstration plot” is where new ideas are tried, farmers can watch crops grow using new seeds or new methods and see how they work. The 10 Commandments became the foundation of the Jewish law, the way of life that formed Israel into a “demonstration plot” for the world. The Jews became a people who lived differently from the world around them, who saw every part of their lives as grounded in their relationship with the God who set them free. Christians understand this too: Our ability to accomplish things for God rests not on our abilities, but the foundation of our relationship with God, who has set us free in Jesus Christ and given us the gift of life-giving love.

The ancient Celts believed that the gods were intimately involved with everyday life, that every moment of the day was holy. Imagine a woman getting up and lighting her hearth fire in a dark, damp Irish morning, and praying, “I will kindle my fire this morning in the presence of all the holy angels of heaven.” They had similar prayers for everything they did during the course of a day. Christians believe every moment is holy too, which makes sense for a religion whose God took human form, knew what it felt like to hold a tool in his hand, what it felt like to fall in bed after a long day’s work, or to take a drink of water when he was thirsty.

This belief in the godly nature of everyday life came to life in Irish monasticism. Patrick’s method of conversion was to establish Christian monasteries, colonies of Christian men, women, and children, lay and ordained, married and unmarried, throughout Ireland. In the daily monastic life of prayer and work, study and sleep, worship, hospitality and community life, every moment was considered holy.. Monasteries became “demonstration plots” for the truth of Christianity. Monasteries were the visible fruit of the Christian life, and people found them attractive reflections of God’s hope for humans.

As a new church, we at Nativity, maybe more than most churches, are called to a ministry of evangelism – helping others to know the good news of Christ’s love for us. And evangelism can be a scary word: but we can take heart from the example of Patrick: who was not a silly little leprechaun with the gift of blarney, but a man who had an abiding sense of the personal care and comfort of God in affliction, that a slave led to freedom by God must feel as few others can.

Patrick’s life, dedicated to following Christ and proclaiming the good news, gives us an example of what our own calling as Christians should be. Evangelism for us, as for Patrick, is not a matter of arguing people out of one set of logical propositions and into another, or of telling people they’re going to hell. We too, like the people of Israel, like the Christian monastics of Ireland, are a “demonstration plot” for Christian truth. We are people who are called to live day to day with our lives demonstrating the truth of God’s love in Christ.

By our love of God, and love of neighbor, we make God’s love visible. Evangelism is living the good news of Christ, in such a way that we become a “demonstration plot” for the way of life that is a gift to us from the God who leads us out of slavery to sin into a new land of freedom to love.

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.”