Worldy Ways? (Mark 8:31 - 38)

     Atlanta has the highest per-capita number of Mercedes Benz’s in the country.  Or at least it seems that way . . . you can’t drive a half a block without some joker in a Benz cutting you off, or gliding majestically down the highway like a ship of state, as if his status as a Mercedes owner gives him the instant right-of-way . . . Atlanta is a Mercedes town, all right, and nowhere is it more obvious than on the Perimeter road, that eight-lane ring of hurtling metal that circles the city, because it seems like every Mercedes in town is on it, from about six am until nine, and again from three-thirty until seven.  Every Mercedes and Beemer and Lexus in town--it’s like they’re mechanically incapable of doing anything less than eighty--and every day it’s a deadly circus, with cars whipping and weaving around and around Atlanta like _some idiot merry-go-round.

And one day, I’m poking along at sixty-five--all right, all right, so it’s ten miles over the speed limit--when some . . . guy . . .  in a Benz almost takes my front bumper off, and I’m sitting there stewing, looking at his tail-lights inches from my face, and what I’d really love, what I’d give my eye-teeth for at this very moment, is a roof-mounted gun turret, with laser-guided missiles and a heads-up display, so I could just blow him out of the way, just clear the decks and get on with my life.  So you can imagine my delight when I read about that Pennsylvania firm who’s modifying SUVs just that way--you press a button on the dash, the sun-roof slides open, and up comes either your own personal 50-caliber machine gun or grenade launcher--take your pick, soccer moms--but my disappointment was keen when I read the fine print, that these things were not to be sold in this country, but were for overseas hot-spots, like for Sheiks with too much oil-money on their hands.

     Now, while I’m being at least semi-facetious, I think that many of us secretly want to have the ability to take out the obstructions in our lives, to just overpower them and get on with our own agendas . . . or maybe to be a super-hero or a gunslinger, who use force--like bopping the villains on the head or a gunfight at the O.K. corral--to subdue the bad guys and help the helpless little people.  It’s the way of the world, isn’t it?  The ones with the most power--political as well as military--are the ones that get their way, the ones who get their paths cleared for them . . . and the good guys are the ones who use that power to help the helpless . . .

And I think that’s where Peter’s coming from when he pulls Jesus aside to talk to him.  After all, he’d just been the first disciple to figure out who Jesus was--Jesus had asked--not three verses ago!--“Who do you say that I am?”  and Peter had answered “You’re the Messiah.”  And that title carried with it some awful heavy baggage.  To the Jewish people, the figure of the Messiah was understood as a powerful militaristic figure, who promised deliverance of Israel over its enemies and the restoration of its former glory, the glory it enjoyed under the reign of their greatest King, David of Bethlehem.  And we can almost excuse Peter for his agitation . . . he’d just come to an amazing, startling conclusion about the identity of his teacher, and here Jesus was, talking gibberish.

He was saying that the Son of Man--another Hebrew title--must suffer greatly, and be rejected by the very ones who should know better, the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and worst of all, he was to be killed and after three days rise again!  And to Peter, this must have been just nuts, so he takes him aside to speak to him.  And we usually attribute it to Peter’s great concern for his master, and there may have been some of that, but the Greek word translated here as ”rebuke” is the same as the word Jesus uses to command the wind to be silent on the Sea of Galilee, and to order the disciples to be silent about what they had seen . . . and it’s the word he uses with demons who inhabit the bodies of humans . . . and this word ”rebuked” carries a whole lot of freight--it’s a word of command, a word of authority . . . it’s a word used to speak to underlings, people under your control, and here Peter is using it with Jesus!

And so when he pulls Jesus aside, Peter is treating the Messiah like an underling--or worse, as demon-possessed--but Jesus shows that he knows the real problem when he calls him Satan—"Get thee behind me, Satan!”--because Satan is the master of the world, the Prince of the old reign, and Peter is thinking in worldly terms here . . . he expects the Messiah to walk softly but to carry a humongous stick.  He doesn’t get it that Jesus is talking a different way of doing business--God’s way--and it isn’t the way of human culture. “You,” he tells Peter, “are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”  Peter expects Jesus to get himself to an armory and kick a little Roman you-know-what, but Jesus tells him instead he’s going to be killed.  I would say that there’s quite a gap in their understandings of the divine way.

And now Jesus goes on to clarify what he means, and this time, he addresses the entire crowd. “If any want to follow me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me.”  And this is a grim image--everyone in the crowd knew about crucifixion, the Romans made a public spectacle out of it, and even though Jesus has not said he would die this way, everyone in the crowd--not to mention the disciples--could picture a condemned criminal dragging the cross-bar slowly through the streets of Jerusalem, just hours or even minutes away from a horrible death.

     In the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou,” George Clooney’s character is making fun of his dim-witted companions, who’d just been baptized, and he’s calling it all superstitious mumbo-jumbo, and he says ”Why you two are just dumber than a bag of hammers . . . I guess you’re just my cross to bear,” which is how we’ve come to view it, as some kind of infirmity or affliction that God has laid on us to, I don’t know, burden us or something, but that’s not what Jesus meant when he said take up your cross . . . he meant that metaphorically, that we follow him like a criminal in the streets, always ready to suffer rejection and humiliation for our faith, always ready to be laughed at, to be discriminated against, for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Like Jesus himself on that fateful Friday, we follow Jesus as if we were going to our own deaths at the hands of our persecutors.

Well.  As if that weren’t enough to drive disciple-recruitment numbers way down, he goes on to amplify what he is saying . . . “those who want to save their lives will lose it, those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  And here the incongruity of life in Christ is in sharp relief--losing your life will save it?  Saving your life will mean losing it?  What, indeed, would profit anyone to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their own life?   And of course we can see that when he says lose their life he means not only physically--although surely he means that--but metaphorically, as well . . . ”deny yourselves,” he says “and lose your life for may sake, and for the sake of the gospel.”

      This is a basic text for Christian discipleship, and it’s repeated in Matthew and Luke as well . . . following him—discipleship—requires a denial of self, almost a death to self, so that we live our lives for Christ and not for ourselves.  And it’s been recognized as a very tough thing almost from the beginning . . . Augustine, the father of Christian theology, said: “How hard and painful does this appear!”  And he’s right, it does seem hard and painful, and even more so today, when the entire Western world is caught up in an orgy of self-involvement.  “Do something for yourself today!” the slogan goes, and it seems only right and proper . . . after all, you’re worth it, and besides, you deserve a break today . . . all that old self-sacrifice stuff is out the window, along with all those hair shirts that litter our closets . . . it’s the me generation, the I generation, and it’s sold as a welcome respite from the time when all we were encouraged to think about was others--and maybe it’s true, maybe there’s been a healthy re-balancing of concern for self.

And yet . . . we’ve gone way too far the other way, and cultural anthropologists tell us that it’s all being driven by consumerism, that ever-growing need to get more and more people to buy more and more things . . . here’s how it works: ads show people enjoying the newest, shiniest toy--the cell phone you can play games on, the mini-van with the DVD player--and they’re happy, successful, beautiful people, people we want to be like, people whose stuff we envy.  At the same time, they tell us we work hard for our money, we deserve what we get . . . and the manufacturers are there to give it to us.  Don’t like minty-fresh, licorice-striped Crest toothpaste?  We’ve got another ten varieties you might like better, there’s one out there for you!  Assert your individuality by buying something mas-produced!  And the media--especially TV, coincidentally sponsored by commercial products--models self-indulgence in every story-line . . . every show about doctors or lawyers or police detectives who never have any money problems . . . how many shows out there are about people living on the edge, maybe working at a fast-food joint, with no medical insurance, and for minimum wage, and with a passel of kids at home to support?  I dare the networks to put that one on . . .

Over in First Corinthians, Paul says “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us . . . it is the power of God.”  It’s foolishness to human culture, but it’s the wisdom of God . . . “for God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger.”  And that’s what today’s passage is about as well . . . Peter just couldn’t believe it when Jesus said he would die, it seemed foolish to him, it was against the ways we humans have contructed, against the ways of power and might . . . and in just the same way, denial of self is diametrically opposed to modern wisdom, which says you can’t help others until you help yourself.  But Christ calls us to self-denial, to the giving-up of our own lives, for the sake of his gospel.

     The way of human construction is . . . the country with the biggest army and navy and air force . . . wins.  The way of God’s rule is . . . the meek shall inherit the earth.  The way of human construction is . . . the ones with the most money do whatever they want, those with the least . . . do without.  The way of God’s rule is . . . the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.  The way of human construction is to do anything for the advancement of the self, but the way of God’s rule is to deny that same self, take up the cross and follow Him.

This Lenten season, as we meditate on the meaning of the cross, and the meaning of Christ’s death for us, think about Peter and his misunderstanding of the true nature of discipleship.  What does that look like today, in our churches that are embedded in the culture of success and excess and win, win, win?  Think Peter’s misapprehension of the gospel, and apply it to the church as we know it today.  Amen.

Beginning, Middle & End (Mark 1:9 - 15)

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I’ve been working a movie script. It’s true! It’s in development with Pound Foolish Productions, a mail-order studio out of Slidell, Louisiana. It’s called “Priests a-Poppin’”, about an overworked Episcopal minister and a repressed hotel clerk who find true love during Holy Week. I chose the romantic comedy form because rom-com plots are as formulaic as Kabuki Theater, so how hard can it be?

Anyway, like most movies, It proceeds in three movements or “acts,” as we say in the biz. In Act 1 we meet a beautiful priest named Ariel and her kooky best friend, Deacon Gloria, who urges her to slow down, maybe take some time off, already, but it’s Advent and she’s got a ton of work. Cut to the hotel manager, a handsome guy named Gabe and his best friend, kooky bell-hop Mark. They’re sitting in Gabe’s office, going over the books, looks off dismay on their faces. Sales are down, and Gabe’s under pressure from the owner to cut expenses.

Act 1 ends when Ariel and Gabe meet cute: Ariel books into the hotel with Gloria for a ladies-only weekend. And as she and Gloria troop toward the elevators, weighed down by their luggage—Ariel may be a priest but she’s still a woman, yuck yuck—Gabe comes out of his office, head buried in paperwork. They collide, and her luggage spills all over the floor. She gets mad, spitting out “I want the manager!” And when Gabe says I am the manager, they look deeply into one another’s eyes.

In Act 2, their romance blossoms: there’s lots of shots of them holding hands and kissing, a montage of them visiting a park, then more holding hands and kissing. Finally it’s Lent, Ariel’s work has tripled, and she begins to give their romance short shrift, she has to break some dates, and finally, the night before Palm Sunday—the beginning of Holy Week—she’s promised to go to a basketball playoff game with Gabe, the most important game of the year, but there’s been a hitch in worship preparation, and she has to cancel, and he tells her they might as well cancel their romance and hangs up.

Lot’s of moping around: Gabe’s team is out of the playoffs lost and management has offered him a transfer to Omaha. She officiates blankly at Holy Week services, just going through the motions, and cries at night, surrounded by sad music about the crucifixion. Finally, Ariel realizes that she can’t live without Gabe, that she just has to have him. So she calls him and Mark tells her he’s accepted the transfer and is even now at the train station. Act 2 ends with a shot of her shocked face.

Act 3 is the shortest; it involves Ariel racing to the train station while Gabe prepares to board the train. She gets into a taxi; he pays for his ticket. The taxi gets stuck in traffic and she jumps out to walk; he strides out of the terminal and sits on the platform. She hurries up to the station, robes billowing and collar askew, while train pulls into the station. She sprints out to the platform, sees him boarding the train and calls out—prettily—Gabriel! Gabriel! And At last he hears her, turns, and they end up in each others’ arms.

I’m really excited about my script; Pound Foolish Productions has promised to get started on it as soon as they receive the final payment. It’s a classic three-act structure—the first establishes the characters and sets the plot moving, the second develops the plot and throws up an obstacle, and in the third things are resolved, sometimes happily and sometimes not so much.

Our reading proceeds in three acts as well. In Act I, Jesus encounters John the Baptist, who has been baptizing in the River Jordan, at that point not particularly deep and wide. I like to imagine it like Jesus just walking along, minding his own business, maybe whistling a little tune, maybe he’d come out to see what all the hubbub over John was about, but he’s just ambling along when John says “Behold, the Lamb of God!” and before he knows it, he’s baptized, and as he comes up out of the water a voice comes from heaven telling him who he is: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And notice that God is identifying him not to the bystanders, but to Jesus himself, and that’s the end of Act I.

In Act II, the conflict, the difficulties in his path start out from the get-go. The Sprit—that’s the Spirit of God, you understand—drives him out into the wilderness, where for forty days and forty nights he’s tempted by Satan. And although Mark doesn’t give any details—that’s Mark for you—we can imagine Jesus, already discombobulated by the heavens cracking open and a big old voice booming out at him, already off-balance from all that, and now he faces ol’ scratch himself. And as I always point out in this passage, testing is another translation of the Greek here, and the words are kind of interchangeable, aren’t they? A temptation is certainly a kind of test, isn’t it? If you fall you fail, if you resist you pass.

Anyway the angels wait on him, and then he hears that John has been arrested, and that’s the end of the second act. And in the third Act, his ministry begins. His proclamation, which he calls “good news,” is that the Kingdom, or reign, of God has come near—another translation says it’s at hand—and as a response, his listeners are to repent, to go to a higher way of being, and believe.

To reiterate, Act I: Jesus is initiated (that’s what baptism is) and labeled as Son of God. Act II: he undergoes a trial, he is tested and comes through. Act III: his ministry begins. And it’s good to notice that each Act is initiated by a specific action. In my soon-to-be classic rom-com, Acts II is precipitated by Ariel and Gabe meeting, and in today’s passage by the voice from heaven telling Jesus who he is. In my film script, Act III is precipitated by Ariel’s learning that Gabe is leaving. In our passage from Mark, Act 3 is driven by Jesus learning that John has been locked up.

And that’s kind of how our lives proceed, isn’t it? Things are going along swimmingly, on an even keel, when something happens to disrupt things. It doesn’t have to be anything momentous, like being called Son of God by a supernatural voice or tempted by the devil—it can be a simple realization that you’re getting too complacent, or you’re not doing anything of import with your life. And this precipitates another direction, another act in your life.

Well. I learned the way to structure the telling of a story—whether it’s fact or fiction—by reading the New Testament. And New Testament authors learned about it from Greek dramatists, who learned it from their exemplars, and if we go back in time, looking at how writers of the Old Testament Scriptures structured their writings, we begin to suspect there might be something basic, something primal even, about the three act dramatic structure.

Richard Rohr, Franciscan Priest and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, speaks in a way that might help us with this. He calls the process “orientation-disorientation-reorientation,” and thinks that its the major progression through which our lives are transformed, through which we move from life-stage to life-stage. Orientation is a “ground state,” a state of stability, of steady-state, to use a systems term. Things are going along smoothly, there are no problems of any magnitude, although that’s not to say there are no difficulties. In “Priests a-Poppin’,” both Ariel and Gabe are successful at what they do, although both have the normal kind of problems, she with stress and he with impatient bosses. But their lives are generally moving along fairly steadily and on an even keel.

Then something happens. It can be sad or happy, blessed or a tragedy. Whatever its nature, it is disruptive enough that it moves us into a second stage of disorientation, where everything is unsettled. Having children is one such event, which the majority of couples undergo. Our daughter and son-in-law have a 20 month old, our granddaughter, and I’d venture to say that they’re still in the disorientation stage . . . their lives are still in a state of flux (cynics might say it’ll last till the children leave the house).

Another such disorienting event is when you meet another whom you fall for, or become infatuated with at any rate, another individual, and he or she turns your life proverbially around. You walk around in a daze, you can’t think of anything else, you feel the hand-holding, making-out euphoria that Ariel and Gabriel do . . . and this disorientation can last a long time, years, even, before things settle back into a new, different normal.

Rohr makes a special study of suffering . . . when a life-threatening illness strikes, for example, we’re always hearing about how near-death experiences gives you a new lease on life, you don’t sweat the small stuff, you concentrate on what’s important . . . after the period of suffering, or dis-orientation, you’re re-oriented to a different way of living. After you lose a loved one, after Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief—you know, bargaining, anger, etc.,—one can be a long time in this uneven, unsettled state. And even when things stabilize, when you are re-oriented, as Rohr would put it, it is not the same, it is a different state of being. It’s not just that the loved one is gone, or the kids are gone, but this re-orientation leaves you changed, different, you have undergone transformation.

But perhaps the ultimate disorienting event is an encounter with the divine, something dramatic, like a vision, or maybe just the proverbial still, small voice, the voice you’re not even sure is there. Like a nudge in the dark, or in prayer . . . St. John of the Cross writes of his experiences with the divine, and calls the confounding, confusing period in his life that followed “The Dark Night of the Soul.”

And that’s what I think is going on here: Jesus meets the divine, in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven, and it sends him into the wilderness, a metaphor for this time of disorientation and trial if I ever heard one. Though Mark says it’s forty days—and it might have been—forty is another symbol for a long time, and besides: it’s the same number of years the Israelites were in the wilderness. And really: wouldn’t you be discombobulated just a little if that happened to you?

He comes out of that phase by cold necessity: his cousin John is arrested, and somebody’s gotta carry on in the family tradition. And so Jesus’ life—and remember, in Mark he’s very human—his life is upended and reoriented to his mission, to announce the good news of God’s coming Kingdom.

And now, on this first Sunday of Lent, we begin to accompany Jesus on the last chapter of his life, the last, melancholy phase . . . We’ve seen the beginning, heard about the wrenching, affirming time of wilderness trial, and seen him take up the ministry mantle, perhaps a changed person, the same and yet not . . . And now we follow as he enters the last, apocalyptic upheaval— the scene at Gethsemane, the humiliating trial, the agonizing, final suffering as he’s nailed to a tree.

But we’ll also witness—on Easter Sunday—the transformation, as he’s raised and elevated, then taken up, to be with God the Creator as the cosmic Christ. And I guess that’s where his life intersects with ours . . . One way or another, after intense bouts of suffering, when all seems gray and lost, like Jesus we will be transformed, either in this life, or the next. Amen.

Six Days Later (Mark 9:2 - 9 )

     Context, if not everything, is certainly a lot. We talk about discrete passages, like this one describing the Transfiguration, and sometimes take them out of that context, and I venture to say that it’s always a mistake. The meaning of an certain passage is always affected by what comes before it and after it. After all, you wouldn’t read a chapter in a novel without context, without knowing what has come before it, would you? And when you read what comes after it you keep it in mind, because without it, it wouldn’t make any sense. It’s the same with scripture, especially when its embedded in narrative, in a story like this one. And this one has a big, fat hint right at the beginning: “Six days later,” it says, and so it would be really good idea to ask the question: “Six days later than what?”

     Well . . . Jesus is running around Palestine with his students, doing his ministry, doing his thing: teaching and preaching and doing signs and wonders, like the one we talked about a couple of weeks ago, where he kicked some demons out of a man they’d possessed. Or healed him of his psychological problems—take your pick. And just before our episode, Jesus asks his disciples “Who do people say I am?" And they reply: “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” He asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers him, “You are the Messiah.”

     Then comes that whole scene where Jesus predicts his death and resurrection, and Peter—who’d just called him Messiah, you understand—rebukes him for saying that, and Jesus rebukes him for rebuking him, issuing the famous words “Get thee behind me, Satan!.” Then Jesus tells them that to be his followers, they must take up their crosses and deny themselves, for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake and that of the gospel will save it. Finally, right before our passage opens, he tells them, the disciples and a crowd that has gathered, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

     So it’s six days after all that that Jesus takes Peter and James and John up on a high mountain, apart—away—from everyone else. And the first thing is that it’s six days later, and the thing to notice about it is that it’s not seven . Seven is the complete number, the number that signifies perfection, fulfillment. The best known example is the first creation story—yes, there are two—where God creates the world in six days, but it’s not complete until the seventh, when God rests. And so our episode happens six days later, six days after Jesus predicts the kingdom of God coming with power, and it’s only six days later, not seven, things aren’t perfect yet, the kingdom hasn’t come, it’s not yet fulfilled.

     And there’s more symbolism packed into this first sentence: Jesus takes them up on a mountain, apart, and Jesus spends a lot of time on mountains, he often goes up there to pray—apart from the disciples, alone—and he even preaches a major sermon on one, the Sermon on the Mount. Further, both Elijah and Moses—who are about to show up, remember—had major adventures on mountains, not to mention Abraham almost sacrificing his own son on one. So a lot of stuff happens on mountains, but perhaps the salient thing about a mountain is that it’s high, and who in the ancient worldview dwells high up in the sky? That’s right—God. And where does God dwell? Heaven. And the Kingdom of God, which he just predicted, is heaven on Earth. Thy kingdom come . . . on Earth as it is in heaven.

     But not yet . . . it’s only six days later, not seven, and suddenly, Jesus is transfigued, transformed. His clothing is dazzling white, it’s shining with it’s own light, and I can imagine that sheepherders and other desert wanderers see the glow around the peak and wonder about it, is it a storm up there, is it lightning? Is God warring against the forces of darkness up on that mountaintop? But Peter and James and John know what it is, and they barely have time to shade their eyes when there are two more figures there with him, bathed in Jesus’ brilliant glow, and they’re hob-nobbing with him, just as casual as you please, as if they’d been doing it all their lives.

     And it’s not an accident that Moses and Elijah are up on that mountain, Elijah, the greatest of prophets, and Moses, savior of the Hebrew people, they represent perhaps the two major roles Jesus takes on: prophet and savior. And besides: hadn’t Jesus just asked him who people think he is? Well, he certainly isn’t Elijah or Moses, because there they are, right beside him . . . and the disciples are amazed, they’re dazzled, and Peter, for one, is almost struck dumb, and maybe it would have been better if he had been, because what he says isn’t all that bright: “Rabbi,” he sputters, “it’s good for us to be here; let’s make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

     Peter doesn’t have time to consider what an idiotic thing he’d just said before the voice of God booms out of a dark cloud saying “This is my beloved son” and they know that that’s the first thing God said at Jesus’ baptism, followed by “in whom I am well pleased,” but here it’s “This is my beloved Son . . . listen to him,” which the disciples—especially Peter—hear as a rebuke, because that’s patently what they hadn’t been doing. He’d told them (a) he’s gonna be murdered and resurrected, (b) if they want to follow him they have to give up their lives and (c) the fulfillment of the kingdom of God hasn’t yet arrived, so they can’t very well stay up there close to God, ‘cause it isn’t yet time.

     And suddenly they look around and there’s no more Elijah and no more Moses, there’s only Jesus, and they get the message, they finally listen to him: he is sufficient unto himself, he is Moses and Elijah—savior and prophet—all rolled up into one package. And as they trudge back down the mountain, back to then plains below, he warns them to not tell anyone about it, and Peter thinks “that’s good, because no-one would believe us anyway.”

On one level, we can think about the transfiguration as a tableau, like a pageant where the disciples are the only audience. Every detail has meaning: up on a mountain, close to God. Dazzling white clothing, sign of purity . . . Jesus glows, he is so pure. The three of them, standing together, of a piece: prophet, Lord and savior. Moses and Elijah disappearing, leaving Jesus alone, it’s almost as if he absorbs the other two, and he is now the only one left, the only one needed: prophet, Lord and savior.

     But though the tableau was for Jesus’ people—Peter, James and John—Mark’s account of it, written some 40 years after the fact, was for his people, his congregation, if you will. And of course, unbeknownst to Mark at the time, it’s for we who read it 2,000 years later. And for us, Peter’s clueless remark—this is a good place to be—alerts us to the fact that it’s only six days later, not seven, the time has not yet been fulfilled, the race has not yet been run.

     It’s like on a retreat, where you go to get your batteries recharged, we often feel closer to god, whether it’s up on a mountain or not, just being apart , just being away from the grind can do it, separated from the hurly-burly day to day. But we we know we have to descend, we have to come down from our mountaintop experience. There’s work to do.

Of course, we have a mini-mountaintop, every week: it’s called worship, and that’s what it’s for: refreshing us so we can re-charge our batteries, re-enter our lives. And I know, sometimes it does a better job than others of doing so. But the “mountaintop” is not just so we can go out and be better bankers or engineers or retirees. Peter and James and John didn’t go back down the mountain and return to being fishermen. They returned to accompany Jesus, sharing in his ministry of compassion and hope.

     Sisters and brothers: every week, before the benediction, I give a charge. Traditionally, it’s something like “go out into the world . . .” but I prefer “go out of those doors . . .” but however you say it, it’s to remind us that we’re not just going out to live our lives, we’re going to be Jesus’ hands and feet and eyes and ears. In other words, there’s work to do. Amen.

Faint and Weary (Isaiah 40:21 - 31)

     If any of y’all have missed Al’s Sunday School class, you’ve missed a really good time. All the wonderful Old Testament stories showing how God hasn’t always been the model of modern jurisprudence have been delightful, with good lessons thrown in to boot. Most of them so far have been from Genesis, in which the Lord was a God you could encounter walking down a country road with some of his buds, looking for a place to eat, which is exactly where Abraham—who was still Abram at the time—met him one hot Palestinian afternoon. Well, there was a little ambiguity about just who those three guys were . . . At first, they were just men, then it seemed that they might have been angels, and finally it was revealed, right at the end, that at least one of them was the Lord, when he yelled at Sarah right through the walls of her tent.

     But the point is that the God of the book of Genesis, from whence most of Al’s stories so far have come, was a very personal God, you could talk to that God face to face, maybe drink a glass of wine or eat a bagel with that God, and share a joke or two. Not so the God in our passage from Isaiah . . . that God is remote, terrifying, even. The Lord is so far beyond us it’s not funny, who “sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants”—that’s us—“are like grasshoppers,” we’re like bugs, we’re so insignificant, and holy guacamole, I’d be scared to death to meet this God on the road, even if he’d stoop so low as to walk down one, which I highly doubt.

     But wait . . . there’s more! We’re not just insignificant, like ants or horny toads, we’re destructive, too . . . few things can strip a field faster than a swarm of grasshoppers, or to use their other name, locusts. So from the perspective of the God of Isaiah 40, we’re both negligible and harmful, irrelevant and devastating. Sheesh . . . you’d think God would make up God’s own mind.

     But you might well ask: wait a minute, Pastor! You talk as if there more than one God, you keep saying the God of this and the God of that . . . I thought there was only one God . . . And if there’s only one God, I thought that God was everlasting, unchanging, forever and ever, amen. What gives? Are you trying to pull a theological fast one?

     Well, no . . . I don’t think so . . . And I also think there’s only one God, too, but how can I be sure? Angels look pretty God-like from the standpoint of us grasshoppers. And our Hindu sisters and brothers have a passel of gods, and Buddhists don’t have any, so the world-wide jury’s still out on that one, but we Christians are monotheists—meaning one-godded—so let’s stick with that, which still leaves the question of if God is never-changing, etc., and while that may be true, what we’re dealing with for certain is that our conception of God is changing. Genesis was written a thousand years, more or less, before Christ, just as the Kingdom of David began to roll, and it describes a time—perhaps wistfully—before the nation of Israel began, when the people were nomadic, tribal wanders. When they worked for themselves, not for some king.

     Cut forward in time 500 years, give or take, when this part of Isaiah was written, and Israel had had a king for almost that entire time, and their conception of God had become like the monarchs they knew: remote and all-powerful. In fact, Biblical scholars tell us that over all the books of the Old Testament, as they get newer, their picture of God gets more and more far out. My favorite example is in Ezekiel, written 200, 250 years after Isaiah, where God appears as some sort of multi-headed, whirling beast, spitting fire out of the holes where its legs go. Oy.

     And another thing—this part of Isaiah was written during the Babylonian Exile, when all the elites had been carted off to captivity. And this part of Isaiah—which scholars call Second Isaiah—is a song of comfort, where their God is a king, strong and powerful, and not only are we like insects to him, insignificant and destructive, but Isaiah says God “brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” Quite a lot of comfort for folks caught up and exiled from their beloved Jerusalem. Their God is a powerful God, who’ll take care of the princes and rulers holding them soon enough, you’ll see.

     So in the Old Testament, at least, the people’s idea of God seems to be based on a combination of (a) increasing trandscendence with time and (b) what God needs to be at any given time. What about in the New Testament? Well, that volume is all about the implications of the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. We call it the incarnation, of course, and according to orthodox ideas, God was one and the same as the human being Jesus. He was both fully human and fully divine, like us in every way save that he was without sin. Which kinda obviates the fully human part, doesn’t it, because isn’t that one of our defining characteristics, like “to err is human, to forgive divine,” or something like that.

But never mind. In the New Testament, God becomes one of us, as the song goes, or as Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John: “if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” (Father being the name he gave God). Jesus made the divine attributes crystal clear: compassion, forgiveness, grace and love.

     So. God is revealed in the New Testament not to be away up there somewhere else, looking down on us like we’re ants, ready to chop our enemies up into little tiny bits, nor to be a weird, multi-headed, flying turtle right out of a bad acid trip like in Ezekiel, but having the best attributes of humanity itself. Does God look like the man Jesus, who ran around Palestine for 33 years? Of course not . . . but Jesus was God where it counted: he displayed the attriubtes of the divine, he taught us what God is like: compassionate, gracious, forgiving and full of love.

     And furthermore, God is with us even, as Jesus said, unto the ends of the Earth. He said that in Matthew, and in John we get an idea of how that works: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” As Paul puts it, “In Christ all things hold together.” God and God’s Word—another term for Christ—permeate everything, they hold everything together. They are the glue of the universe, they keep everything from flying apart.

     Wow. We went from the personal God to the cosmic God, from just another guy walking down a road, to the universal, all within the same Bible. And scientists today are revealing that the poetic way biblical authors put things might not be so far off. Quantum physics, which begot the New Physics, is showing that everything is connected, in some way or by some thing, showing, for instance, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Barbara Brown Taylor has called it a “luminous web” connecting everything, and everybody, in the universe.

     So. What does that mean for us, held as we are in these days of turmoil and strife, where things are so divided? We increasingly live in our own little ideological bubbles, increasingly locked there by what news we watch and which social media feed we read. What news you see—what video you watch, what stories are covered—depends on which network you watch. They are completely different on each. And social media is just as bad—on Facebook, if you look at an item pro-alien abduction, for example, you get fed increasingly large numbers of pro-alien-abduction articles, and none of the ones that call it hogwash. Of these biased sources—what “news”we watch and articles we read—of these biased sources are bubbles made.

     Wouldn’t our lives together be better, wouldn’t we be less divided, more unified, if there were only something we all had in common, something that we could see in one another that was the same, so we could say we aren’t so different after all? Hmmm . . . What could that be?

     What if we saw the divine spark in everyone, from that politician we despise to the news-commentator we loathe?  What if we—like the Benedictines do—actively practiced seeing the Christ in everyone?  If Christ is in you and Christ is in me, how can we hate one another, how can we be truly divided, how can we hate?  Maybe if we do, maybe if we quit thinking of a God “out there,” on our side, and admitted God is in here, all around, and in everybody else, we could truly say, as Isaiah did so long ago, that we shall renew our strength and mount up with wings like eagles.  We shall run and not be weary, shall walk and not be faint.  Amen.