Near and Far (Isaiah 55:1 - 9)

     I toss in my sleep and furiously perspire, for I dream of one thing: Jerusalem.  Night after night, Jerusalem.  City of my forebears.  City of the golden Temple, of the Lord God on his throne. Now a city of ghosts, revenants flitting through the half-life ruins, living only God knows how, in ways I certainly don't want to imagine.

The Jerusalem of my dreams is not this ghost town, or at least most of the time it's not.  Most of the time, it is exceedingly beautiful: white walls gleam in the sun.  Palm trees sway like thatch-topped sylphs, enticing me closer.  Lithe women, baskets brimming with pomegranate and myrrh, make their way laughing to the markets.  No, I do not dream of Jerusalem as it is, but as it once was, for after all: it is my dream.

Not that I’ve ever seen The City, you understand: I am a child of the exile, born a generation after my grandfather—a rich merchant—and grandmother were brought here, in the final wave of deportations.  They carried a bitterness about them until the end of their days, which was understandable: in Jerusalem, they gave lavish dinners, attended by everyone who was anyone: other merchants, visiting princes, once even the High Priest himself.  Here, in Babylon, my grandfather worked in the royal stables and my grandmother sold ragged leather goods, pieced together from scraps scrounged from tannery garbage.

Their bitterness was inherited, to a lesser degree, by my father, who passed it down even more diluted to me.  Though there is little hope for my future, beyond inheriting my father's job, which he inherited from Grandfather, I was taught to read and write, courtesy of his fondness for education, and his unshakable hope for restoration.  But I do not share his bitterness, because Babylon is all I know, and it is wondrous enough.  The hanging gardens.  The Ishtar Gates.  The great ziggurat Etemenanki, "House of the Frontier Between Heaven and Earth," which lay next to the Marduk’s Temple.

And through it all flows the beautiful Euphrates, palm-lined and laden with fish, which inspired a harpist of a previous generation to write: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”  And though I cannot share the harpist’s anguish, still I dream, almost every night, about the Jerusalem of old.

Until last night, that is.  Last night I dreamed of water . . . rivers and fountains and up-wellings of water.  I was shown springs, with tendrils of moist, fertile sand spreading from them, teeming with creatures I did not understand.  I felt the cool breeze brought about by the moisture in the air; I shooed away tiny flying things swarming around on my face.

I plunged into the Euphrates, and magically observed the life swarming in its green-filter depth: small, golden carp peered at my face, eye to eye, mouth working, pumping water over their gills.  Plants swayed like a prairie in the wind—how did I know what a “prairie” is?  Dark forms darted among the fronds. Suddenly, a shadow came between me and the surface; I looked up and beheld a giant crocodile, snaking along just above, searching for prey.  And yet I was unafraid, because, in my dream, I knew in whose hands I was held.

And the dream went on and on, seemingly without end: oceans, lakes and watering holes.  Waterfalls, wells and inland seas.  Every kind, every quality, every quantity one could think of, shown to me, kaleidoscopically, like a festal vision, and yet particular, in every detail.  Until, at last, I woke up, feeling miraculously wet, as if I had in body made the journey instead of just in my dream.  Or perhaps it was only perspiration.

And all of today I have spent pondering the dream, trying to divine what it meant.  For as we all know, dreams are not sent merely for our pleasure.  Indeed, the divine speaks through dreams, whether through the strange gods of our captors, or our own Lord God Almighty.  And so I wrestled with the dream . . . was it a premonition?  Did it foretell some experience that I or someone I know would have?  Or was it informational: was God trying to tell me something?  Or—and this is a frightening thought!—did the Lord want me to do something, say something, pronounce something, like he did the prophets if old?

I could not come to any definite conclusion, and not for the first time I wished that God would be just a touch less mysterious.  And as night crept near, I began to wonder: what would I dream tonight?  What nocturnal visions would the Lord visit upon me tonight?  Would it be more water, this time in forms I can barely comprehend?  Would it be a return to the old Jerusalem dream, a fantasy that would never be fulfilled?  Or would God tell me what he wants from me?

And now I stride inside, toward my bed, determined to find out, though I am not the least bit tired.  But as I near the corner where my pallet lies, my feet start to feel leaden.  My eyelids droop, as if they are weighted, and as I reach the bed, I start to pitch over, toward it.  The last thing I recall before sleep hit is seeing the candles, lit by my mother at dusk, snuffing out on their own.  Or perhaps it's just the stirring of the air at my passing.

In my dream, I am before the throne of God, who is immense . . . All I can see are his feet, sandaled like mine, and tree-trunk legs, disappearing into the mist;  on second thought, into greasy smoke, and I know where I am: I am in the inner room of the Temple, the holy of holies, where only God can go.  I am reminded of the tale of my forefather Isaiah, and his vision in the throne room, and as if to reinforce the association, there are the seraphim, six-winged flying serpents, flapping and screeching above me.  Thank goodness they keep their distance, they don’t brand me on the mouth as they did Isaiah, but I get the point: I am to be in his tradition, I am to prophesy in his line.  It fills my heart with dread.

Now there comes a voice, indescribable and intimately familiar, nowhere and everywhere at once. It is quiet and infinitely loud, seductively female and decidedly male, near and yet very, very far.  It said “I am the Lord your God.  God of your ancestors Sarah and Abraham, Josiah and Tamar, of the infinite abyss and the highest transcendence.  I am the God of paradox, of light and dark, of opposites that compliment, and those that beggar the mind.  I am nothing and everything at once, empty and overwhelmingly full.”

The voice is silent, it seems to await a reply, so in a trembling voice I say: “Ah . . . mighty Lord of Paradox, I am, uh, honored to be in your presence, and of course, awaiting your command.  What would you have me do?”

And the voice is all whispers yet clear as a bell: “Prophesy, O mortal, as did your forefather Isaiah.”

Silence again.  “What would you have me say, O Lord?”

“Tell the people about life . . . true life.  Life that cannot be bought or sold, life that is not for sale.”

I do not understand, and I say as much.

“Remember the water, O Human, remember the water.”

Suddenly, I am awake, and it is morning, and the voice of the Almighty rings in my ears.  Remember the water . . . remember the water.  And I do, I remember the dream, the delightful, cryptic vision.  Every place there was water teemed with life, even in the harshest desert, even in the most sterile, lunar city.  The river, where harps were hung, the watering holes, the lakes and the seas, gushing with life.

All of a sudden, I know to say:  Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and as I write, I realize that I mean everyone, rich and poor alike.  These waters, this life does not discriminate, it is not rationed along the lines of have and have not.  There is no dry season for this water, this life.  This wine and milk are without cost, and what’s more, they are priceless, they are literally without price.

And now the words tumble out, driven by a spirit, by a wind, by a ruach that comes from within.  And it strikes me that in true prophetic fashion, I am speaking for God, yet they are my own words as well.  They are my own thoughts, and yet they are the Lord’s as well.  Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?  Why do you buy toys and amusements, things made of clay and metal, when they do not fill the void within?  They are temporal, finite, pretty and gaudy and fascinating, but they do not nourish, they are thin gruel.  The waters of life, gushing up from the desert, beloved by sages and all who possess true wisdom, are rich and satisfying.

And I find myself, in the name of God, offering up a covenant, an everlasting covenant, like that offered David, and it is breathtaking in its audaciousness: here they are, captives in a foreign city, strangers in a very strange land, and still God promises them everything.  You shall call nations, entire nations, to you, nations you do not even know, and they shall come!  And I realized that through my words, the Word, the word of God, continued to create, continued to call into existence a new reality, just as they did in the beginning, when they swept across the waters of the deep.

Now the words come tumbling, gushing out, and they are no longer as if from God’s mouth, no longer in the third tense.  I speak from my own experience of the nearness, the closeness of God: I urge the people to seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon God while he is near.  If they return to the Lord, if they come to the waters, God will have mercy on them, God will pardon them, for—says the Lord—my thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways, and I certainly get it, I get the mordant humor, the stark irony: God will pardon them precisely because his thoughts are not like our petty thoughts, his ways are not like our petty, childish ways.

And the whole breathtaking construction suddenly becomes clear: God is infinitely near to us, less than even a heartbeat away . . . He is as near to us as a breath, close as a thought, and yet as far from our understanding as the stars above.  Mired in things that are by nature not divine, that do not nourish us or quench our thirst, the waters that God offers are sure and everlasting.  They are the waters of mercy, the waters of pardon, the waters of forgiveness.  Ho!  Come to the waters, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters and be washed in God’s love.  Amen.

Count Your Lucky Stars (Genesis 15)

In preparing for this sermon, I went to the website of a Lutheran pastor/scholar who is particularly insightful, one I’ve gone to in the past, in order to jump-start my thinking, and I was shocked to read this: “This story of a covenant ritual is about as bloody a sacrificial affair as there is in the Old Testament. Why is it in the lectionary? I don’t get the connection at all.”  And I thought: “thanks for nothing, Paul”—a lot of Lutherans name their children Paul.  That and “Martin” . . . Anyway, I thought “thanks for nothing”: you’ve been a big help.  But it did get me thinking: what did possess the creators of our lectionary to include this passage, and why now, why here, at Lent?

  Well.  To our Jewish brothers and sisters, this is one of the most important passages in the Old Testament, and that’s one reason it’s important to read it, because they are our ancestors in the faith.  But I think it holds something important to Christians on its own terms too, and I’ll give you a hint as to what it is: it’s contained in the name of a lot of congregations, including, you might remember, the previous one I served.  It’s a covenant.  The Abrahamic covenant, to be precise, and it’s the great grand-daddy of ‘em all.  The first in a long line of compacts made between God and the Hebrew people.  But it’s not the first covenant in the Bible: that honor goes to the Noahic covenant, the one God made with Noah, never to drown the whole world like he did in that embarrassing episode with the ark.  But this is the first covenant God makes in relation to the Hebrew people, but it wouldn’t be the last, not by a long shot.

In fact, “covenant” is such a big topic in the Bible that a whole branch of theology sprung up centered around the notion.  In that theology, covenants are in effect over certain time periods within the history of human interactions with God, and which one is operant at any given time is greatly influential in how any biblical event or passage is to be interpreted.  At one time, Covenant Theology was big in mainstream Reformed theology, though it has fallen on hard times, and is not much taught in our denomination’s seminaries, at any rate, though it is still popular in some of the more theologically conservative places.

But the notion of covenant is still important, and so maybe we’d better spend a few minutes figuring out what it means.  First of all, it’s a pact between two parties, in which the covenantor makes a promise to a covenantee to do or not do some action.  In real property law, the term “real covenants” is used for conditions tied to the use of land.  Homeowners' covenants fall into this category.

In the Bible, it is between God and a person, a group of people and/or all of humanity.  In it, God promises to do—or not to do—certain things.  After the flood, we’re told, God promised never to drown everybody on earth again.  In the Davidic covenant, God promises to establish David as a “sure house,” making him and his descendants the rightful kings of Judah until the end of time.  And of course, in the Mosaic covenant, God handed down the ten commandments, and promised to be the Israelite’s God so long as they obeyed them.

One thing that distinguishes some biblical covenants from others is the notion of conditionality, that is who has to do what to fulfill it.  In the covenant after the flood, the one transmitted to Noah, God promises to refrain from drowning humanity, but humanity doesn't have to promise to do anything.  It’s an unconditional or one way covenant. The one received by Moses, on the other hand, is conditional; the Israelites must do certain things to fulfill their side of the bargain.  The entire story of God’s interactions between humans in the Hebrew scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, can be viewed as one of Israel continually breaking one covenant or another, and God time and time again forgiving them.

In the case of the covenant in today’s passage, it’s unconditional: God promises to make Abram’s descendants many.  "Look up and count the stars, if you can count them,” God says. “So shall your descendants be."  And thus begins the great dance of the descendants of Abraham and the Divine.  For the first time, we can see the shape of a people, the Hebrew people, and a bit further along, the Nation of Israel.   This covenant, between God and Abram, calls a people into being.

 But look closer at what does the calling: it’s the same thing that called the world into being, that said “Let there be light.  And there was light.”  It’s the Word of the Lord that literally speaks the Hebrew people into existence, just as it did the world at the beginning of time. And if you’re looking for connection between this dark, primitive passage, with its bloody, carved up cow and its floating lights, here it is: that self same Word that separated the water from the land, that blurted out the Hebrew people in the murky firelight, that same Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Or so says John, and who am I to doubt him?  There’s continuity between our two faiths, our two people, that runs from their very beginnings: from the violent execution of this first covenant right up through the equally violent birth of our own.  At the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus says “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”  And Paul said it after him and we say it after Paul every time we take Communion, and what I want to emphasize is that this right here is the Old covenant.  And rather than being the covenant in Christ’s blood, it’s one in bovine blood, and goat’s blood, and the blood of pigeons.

Kind of  bloody, isn’t it?  Kind of dark and violent, and many of us modern Christians—like the author of the website I read—don’t like to dwell on these notions.  But that is part and parcel of the season we’re in, the season of Lent, where such things come to the fore.  And that’s not the only point of continuity between the beginnings of our two faiths.  Look at what happens next: even though everything seems to point against it—he’d just left King Melchizedek with nothing more than the clothes on his back, he’s childless even after all these years, and his wife Sarai barren—even though everything seems to belie the promise of God, Abram believes.  He has faith.  And God counts it as righteousness.

It’s one of the models that Paul would use to describe the Christian faith.  He even quotes our passage: “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, so, you see, those who are believing are the descendants of Abraham.”  Here, according to Paul, it was Abraham’s faith in God that made him right with God, just as it is with those who have faith in Christ.  In this passage, we see the root of Paul’s—and our—doctrine of justification, of salvation, by faith alone.  In fact, the word he uses for justification—the Greek word dikiasune—is the equivalent of the Hebrew word zedekah, which the author of Genesis uses here for righteousness.  Abram believed in God, and it was reckoned to him by that God as righteousness.  We who are in a relationship with Christ, who are resting in Christ, and he in us, are in a state of righteous as well.

But there’s one more point of continuity between this passage and our Christian understanding of faith, one more reason we should read it at this time of year.  It goes back to our earlier discussion of covenants.  We saw that covenants come in two basic flavors: conditional, where the people promises to do something in return for the promises of God, and unconditional, where they have no responsibilities.  That’s the kind of covenant the Abrahamic one is:  Abram has to do nothing to maintain it.  God will make the people of Israel out of his ancestors, no matter what Abram does, and in fact he does some fairly rotten things along the way.

And in the same way, the new covenant in Christ, the meaning of which we ponder at this season, is unconditional as well.  Nothing we can do, nothing we have done, or will do, negates it.  Nothing we can do, have done, will do merits it.  God gives us this covenant—sealed in some way we do not understand by Christ—no matter what, and it cannot be rescinded.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.

A Thorn by Any Other Name (Luke 4:1 - 13)

  I’ve got this cool app on my iPad.  It's a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus, all rolled into one, and I use it a lot.  Now I know what y’all are thinking . . . Rick’s impossibly literate, cultured, learned, knowledgeable, educated and erudite.  What would he need a dictionary and thesaurus for?  Well, believe it or not, I am occasionally at a loss for words, and sometimes I just like to play word games.  Like the time I looked up the word “devil” in the thesaurus, just for grins, and came up with a pretty good list: Lucifer and Satan.  Mephistopheles and Prince of Darkness.    Adversary, Tempter and King of Hell.  The Debbil.  El Diablo, Angel of Darkness and The Nameless One.  And of course, my personal favorite, Ol’ Scratch.

Lots of names for something we're supposed to be scared of.  But Ol’ Scratch is a popular figure in song and story as well.  “That Old Devil Moon.”  “Devil Woman.”  “Devil in Disguise.”  “Devil Dance.”  “Friend of the Devil.”  “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The Devil’s Right Hand.”  And last but not least, Devil With a Blue Dress, blue dress, blue dress, devil with a blue dress on.  (Sorry . . . I got carried away.)

But my favorite of all is a song by the Charlie Daniels band: “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  It’s about when when the Devil, behind on his quota of souls, desperately offers a fiddler named Johnny a deal for his soul: if Johnny beats him at a fiddling contest, he’ll give him a fiddle made of gold.  But if not, Johnny’ll have to give the Devil . . . his SOUL!!!!

Well.  Johnny’s an even better fiddler than Ol’ Scratch, he gets his golden fiddle, and it’s a twist on the story of blues man Robert Johnson’s selling his soul on a Mississippi-crossroads Midnight, which itself is a riff on a venerable folk tradition.  So venerable, in fact, that it's got a number . . . two, in fact.  "Bargain with the devil" is motif number M210 and "Man sells soul to devil" is motif number M211 in folklorist Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.  Put that in your fiddle and smoke it.

Of course, the most famous example might be the classical German legend of Faust, immortalized in plays by Christopher Marlow and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.  But even that has precedents, dating all the way back to the sixth century and a man named Theophilus (presumably not the same one Luke wrote his gospel to five centuries before).  Theophilus, whose name is Greek for God-lover, was an Archdeacon at Adana, now a part of modern Turkey.  A humble man, Theophilus refuses to be appointed Bishop, but regrets it when the man who does take the job unjustly deprives him of his position as Archdeacon.  So naturally, he seeks out a wizard to help him contact Ol’ Scratch.  I mean, that's what I’d do, wouldn't you?

At any rate, the devil demanded that he renounce Christ and the Virgin Mary, sign the contract in his own blood, and made him Bishop.  Years later, he got worried about his immortal soul, and so he prayed to the Virgin Mary to get him out of it.  Long story short, after several twists and turns, including a grade-A scolding by the virgin, she finally intercedes with God on his behalf and he is absolved.  But the devil doesn't want to give up so easy, but after three days, he gives up, and Theophilus is freed from his contract.  Shades of Jesus’ three days in the grave.

Now.  Even though there really was an archdeacon named Theophilus, the tale of his pact with the devil is considered to be legendary, even by the Catholic Church.  Which, of course, has no problem accepting as, er . . . gospel, that much the same thing happened to Jesus five hundred years earlier.  Oh, it's not spelled out explicitly or anything, but the three temptations of Jesus require as payment the worship of the devil, which to me amounts to the same thing as selling his soul.  And lest we divert into metaphysical territory, I have no idea whether Jesus had a soul or not, but the classical Trinitarian formula has him fully human yet fully divine, and humans have souls . . .

Anyway.  Without opening the can of worms known as biblical inerrancy, one of the reasons I like this story so much is that it’s like a folk-tale.  It’s a real story, with a beginning and an end, and a protagonist—Jesus—and an antagonist, Ol’ Scratch himself.  It’s quite entertaining, perhaps the most entertaining one in the New Testament.  The Old Testament seems to have more than its share: Ruth, Esther, and Job come to mind, as well as Tobit from the Roman Catholic bible.  These stories are told and retold, and they’re a preacher’s dream because it’s easy to retell the story, updating it to appeal to folks in the pews.  Three years ago, in this very pulpit, I pictured the devil as a “successful yuppie with tasseled loafers and an Izod shirt. . . a Starbuck’s in one hand” and a briefcase in the other.  In another sermon, I envisioned him in an Armani suit, big ‘ol cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, like he’d been watching too much Dallas or something.

Of course, it's not just in sermons . . . Popular culture gives us updated devils  as well.  Besides starring the typical Aryan Jesus, a turn-of-the-century TV miniseries gave us two—count ‘em, two!—Beelzebubs, one male and one female, but both foreign . . . in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Satan is played by a woman, but she is decidedly androgynous.  And, of course, foreign.  Finally, in the latest incarnation—television’s Lucifer—the title character is played as a suave lady-killer who’s on vacation in L.A.  And he’s—you guessed it—foreign.

And I think it's obvious that our imaginings about the Prince of Darkness say more about ourselves than they do about Ol’ Scratch.  In the movies, he seems to reflect whatever the prevailing angst is at the time.   Our rising national xenophobia is shown in the fact that Satan is almost never played by an American actor. Gibson’s androgynous, female demon reflected his homophobic reaction to the rising gay rights movement, as well as his well-known misogyny.  And my Texan devil reflected my distaste for rich oil-men and my six year stay in that great state.  And maybe too much Bobby and J.R. Ewing.

We project our fears and dislikes upon the figure of Satan, and psychologists have shown us that it's often characteristics within ourselves that we don't like, or that we don't want to admit we have.  Thus, my Starbucks-swilling yuppy just might reflect the fact that I do love my Starbuck’s and all the rest of my stuff, and though I don't want to malign Mel Gibson any more than I already have, it's a pretty well-known pathology to project all the things you hate about yourself onto the opposite sex.

Psychologist Carl Jung called this figure, this entity—which contains all the personally or socially unacceptable stuff of our own—the shadow, and he showed that we—both individuals and societies—project this figure onto others.  In the thirties, the German people projected all their fears and anxieties onto the Jewish population of Europe, and ended up killing six million of them.  For a long time, since before the Civil War, white Americans have been projecting all the stuff they hate about their own selves onto African Americans, contributing to the continuing poverty and marginalization of our black population.

And individual projection can be just as detrimental.  We’ve all heard it said that “oh, they don't get along because they’re too much alike,” and probably experienced it as well.  The truth of it is explained in the phenomenon of projection: we don't like the other person because we see ourselves there and have projected—all unconsciously, of course—all the stuff we dislike about ourselves, or are socially unacceptable, onto them.

You know, Luke never describes the devil, he never tells us what he looks like.  There's no Germanic accent or misogynistic blue dress or midnight fiddler.  He just says that he tempts Jesus, and leaves it up to us to imagine what he might be.

And maybe that's the point.  Maybe I’m not supposed to personalize Satan, because if I  do, if I imagine the enemy as a person running around out there, it's too easy to dismiss it as outside of myself.  It's too easy to project all my very human faults and foibles tidily onto another and imagine that they aren't mine to work on, mine to fix.  And when that happens, when I imagine that everybody but myself is problem, well, there can be literally Hell to pay.

And so, on this first Sunday of Lent, when we begin our exploration of what it means to be human in God’s calculus of salvation, let’s consider this: maybe the devil isn’t some demon flapping around, whispering in our ears, some guy in red long-johns sitting on one shoulder, while an equally insipid angel sits on the others.  Perhaps the devil is our own shadow, our own stuff we project outside of ourselves, onto the world and those who are in it.  And maybe, just maybe, the kingdom that Jesus says is within begins when we accept that shadow, when we become conscious of it so we can stop the cycle of violence and recrimination and bring the kingdom of God to fruition both without and within.  Amen.

Don't Shine Me On (Luke 9:28 - 36)

      This is a transitional passage, at least the way the Church treats it: we put it on the last Sunday of the first period of Ordinary Time, a time that’s ordinary only in the sense that it’s not a festival season like Christmas or Easter or Lent.  Of course, I’m talking about the Church Calendar, for you folks new to this whole Presbyterian thing.  That’s the calendar that doesn’t follow the Gregorian one that the Western world observes . . . the church doesn’t begin its year with hangovers and party-burn out on the first day of the coldest month of the year . . . it begins it with Advent, the first Sunday in December, or the last in November, like it was this year.  And it’s good to think about why it does that . . . it does it to reenact the life of Christ, in its worship and liturgy, every year.  Thus, because we celebrate the birth of Jesus—away in a manger, no crib for a bed—a week before January One, we begin our new year earlier as well.

Aha! You say.  Gotcha!  Why don’t we begin the new church calendar on December 25 then, why do we begin it four weeks before the blessed event?  Is it so we can throw Mary a baby shower, or maybe help her decorate the nursery before the big day?  Well, it’s preparation, all right, but not for Mary: it’s for us. To prepare us for the cataclysmic event that changed the world.  It’s so we can stop and take a breath, stop and wait upon the Lord as we are commanded to do, and while we wait, to ponder it in our hearts, just as Mary pondered it all in hers. 

 And this Sunday, here we’re on the cusp of another of those church periods of contemplation and prayer:  Wednesday night we’ll have the traditional service, seven o’clock, right after supper, we’ll do a service of readings, hymns and the imposition of ashes, then we’ll continue our Lenten journey in the Fellowship Hall by experiencing the labyrinth, an ancient devotional practice.  Then we’ll have forty days of it, forty days of thinking about how maybe we were there when they crucified our Lord, and I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag or anything—because we’ll talk about it next week—but it’s 40 days because of the 40 wilderness days, when the devil tested Jesus with three temptations.

But the church puts Transfiguration Sunday right before Ash Wednesday, and the question is why?  Why would we put it right before his 40 days in the wilderness, when chronologically, it happens well into his ministry, well after the temptations that begin it?  Well, let’s take a look: the first thing to notice is that it’s almost like a tableau, like one of those bathrobe pageants a lot of churches—including this one—put on around Christmas time, with Jesus and Mary and the wise men all standing around for a half hour or so, only here the tableau is Jesus standing beside Moses and Elijah in the heavenly spotlight.

Jesus leads Peter and James and John up on the mountain—and it isn’t an accident that it’s the same three that are in the garden—he leads them up onto the mountain-top and suddenly, his face and clothing start to glowing, and all of a sudden there he is, flanked by maybe the two greatest prophets in the Hebrew canon.  And they’re hob-nobbing away, talking about his departure from this mortal coil, which is about to happen at Jerusalem, and that’s one reason the church puts this event right before Lent.  It’s right as he sets face toward Jerusalem, as Luke puts it, and even though it takes nine more chapters to get him there, we know what’s gonna happen when he arrives.

But there’s another reason, a perhaps more compelling reason we celebrate transfiguration three days before Lent, and it can be seen in the reaction of the disciples, summed up by the actions of Peter, who is, as usual, a stand-in for what the rest of the disciples are thinking.  Here they are, all standing up on the mountaintop, shining to beat the band, and the message is clear to them.  They are, after all, good Jews, and they get that Jesus is one with Elijah and Moses, that he is of the same stuff of Elijah and Moses, that he is, as we often put it, a continuation of the prophetic line.

And unlike in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the same disciples doze off three times, this time they stay awake, even though they’re weighed down with sleep.  And because this time they stay awake, they get to see the whole thing, and what is the first thing out of Peter’s mouth?  Master it’s good for us to be here, it’s good for us to be here on the mountain-top.  Let’s make some rooms, one for each of you, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.  Just as the two were fixing to leave, Peter tries to get them to stay up there, at least temporarily, by building them places to stay, like tabernacles or motels or something.

Peter wants them to stay on the mountain-top, to be enthroned up there like three peas in a pod, three earthly rulers, and why shouldn’t he think that?  He was, as I said before, a good Jew, and good Jews at the time were expecting a Messiah—in fact (and this is important) in the passage right before ours, that’s what Peter calls him, Messiah.  Jesus asks “Who do people say I am,” they say “some say Moses and some say Elijah”— and if you think that it’s a coincidence that those two are the ones standing with him right now, I have a bridge to sell you.  And when Jesus asks “but who do you say I am?”  Peter pipes up with “The Messiah of God,” which means the anointed of God.

And so it’s understandable that Peter wants to enthrone Jesus along with the two prophets up on the mountain-top.  And was it the same mountain-top where Satan tempted Jesus to rule the whole world?  You got me, but it does give you pause . . . mountain-tops are perfect places for palaces, and for fortresses like earthly kings had to defend all their stuff, before they had intercontinental ballistic missiles, at any rate, so it’s understandable that Peter, who thought Jesus was the king who’ll take back Palestine from the Romans, would want him up on one.

But just as he says it, they are enveloped in a gray cloud, and I imagine Peter is thinking “Holy guacamole, what’d I say?  What’d I say?” and they’re all terrified as the sun is blotted out and a chill strikes to their bones, and suddenly, a voice comes out of the cloud—and was it the same voice that came out of the clouds at Jesus’ baptism?  You got me, but it starts out saying the same thing as at the baptism, “This is my Son,” but instead of calling him “my Beloved,” it calls him “my Chosen.”  And afterward, after they’re down from the mountain, Peter asks himself “chosen for what?” but at the time, all he can do is shake in his boots, thinking now I’ve done it.  And when the voice stops, the cloud lifts and there in the ordinary Palestinian sunlight, Jesus is alone.  Quite alone.

And just like to Peter and the others, he is revealed to us in that moment as well, as singular, a man apart, a man who even though in the same line as Moses and Elijah is different from them, greater than them, perhaps.  And we can see the sequence, can’t we?  (1) Jesus and the other prophets are talking about his departure, (2) they’re about to go their separate ways and (3) Peter says something stupid, something that causes God to make a point: and that is that Jesus isn’t just like the prophets, that he is not an earthly ruler who might rule from the heights, as earthly ones were wont to do.  The voice from the cloud was correcting Peter when it said: “This is my Son, the Chosen” and if Peter didn’t know it, we certainly do, we know what he was chosen for, and it wasn’t any mountain-top experience … It wasn’t any serene hill-top life-style, the life-styles of the rich and Palestinian, the life of a ruler of humans, of a warrior holed up in his mountain like some latter-day David, descending in the Spring, when kings go out to battle.

No.  Jesus was chosen for something altogether different, and that’s why the church puts the Transfiguration right before Lent: to remind us of what he was chosen for, and to foreshadow what is to come in just 40 short days.  Jesus the Christ is chosen all right, he’s hand-picked by God, but not for any earthly power and might, not to stay up on that mountain top eating sweet-meats with his fellow prophets.  Jesus the Christ, the anointed one, is chosen to be the embodiment of cosmic incarnation, emptied of any God-hood, and become fully human, even to death upon a cross.

We know all that, because, well . . . hindsight is 20-20, after all, and we’re aware of the rest of the story.  But it seems to me that we need to be reminded, on a regular basis, to listen to him, because just like Peter, who didn’t hear when they were talking about Jesus’ death, we need to listen to who he really is as well.  We’re admonished to listen to him, just like Peter, as he tells us what he tells the disciples, not ten verses after today’s passage: “Let these words sink into your ears,” he says, get this through your thick skull:  “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.”  Far from ruling gloriously over the rest of the world, far from lording it over his countrymen like they expected him to, he would be betrayed into human hands and die.

And I think that like Peter, many of us project our own desires and longings onto Jesus.  We develop prosperity doctrines, to justify our over-the-top consumerism.  We picture Jesus as some personal, magic genie, there to grant our every wish, to help us win football games and avoid the consequences of our actions, to reward us here on earth for being Christians.  Many of us, whether we say it out loud or not, imagine ourselves privileged through our relationship to Jesus, and we just know it's our destiny to end up in that mountaintop right along side.

But in the Transfiguration, we are reminded about who Jesus really is, what he really signifies: he is one who stands alone, apart, who comes down from the mountain instead of staying up there, eating bon-bons and commanding armies.  Who comes down to serve the people, to heal them and feed them and free them from oppression.  Why does the church insist we hear this right before Lent?  To remind us of what Lent is all about: a time to do that thing the voice of God commands us to do.  And that’s to listen.

 

I say these things in the name of God the one who creates us, God the one who redeems us, and God the one who empowers and comforts us, amen.