Table Manners (John 12:1 - 8)

      Here’s a riddle: how is a table like a well?  Answer: in the Bible, at least, lots of things happen around them.  Biblical romances develop around wells: Moses meets his Midianite daughter at one, and Jacob first catches a glimpse of the hard-to-get Rachel as she waters the livestock.  And in John’s gospel, this romantic undertone plays beneath Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well.  And as we saw last week, table fellowship is very important -- it figures at some level into many of the gospel stories.  Over in Matthew, Jesus eats with assorted sinners, folks who were considered to be outside the pale, who were considered unclean.  In Luke, the king invites all the riff-raff from the highways and hedges in to eat at his wedding banquet with him, thus admitting of the hilarious possibility that the all the homeless and road-crazies, all the blind-beggars and widowed orphans, would be rubbing shoulders with the Kim Kardashians of the day.  I like to imagine the dialog . . . Kim, turning to the dirty fellow scratching an open sore on her right: “that new chef at ‘Metropole’ is marvelous: his rack of lamb just melts in your mouth.”  To which the dirty fellow scratching an open sore replies: “Uh, yesterday, the bread in the dumpster out back was only 3-days-old . . .”

      Anyway, over in John, the table imagery is less specific, less in your face, but it’s there nevertheless . . . the wedding in Cana, where Jesus turns the water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, where the people are told to recline, as if they were at table, and of course the last third of the book, most of which occurs at the Passover table.  And I think this scene around Mary and Martha’s table should be viewed in that light . . . the significance of the table should not be ignored in this scene . . . it’s a foreshadowing of the last supper – where in a stunning turnabout, Jesus will anoint the disciples’ feet – and the upper room, where the resurrected Jesus will eat and drink once again, and the great Messianic banquet that we ourselves foreshadow at our communion table.

      So let’s try to picture the scene around Mary and Martha’s table . . . who’s there?  Well, we know that Lazarus is there, don’t we . . . as a matter of fact, this comes right after the scene where he’s raised from the dead, and all the people were murmuring about it, they were wondering about it, they were being converted over it, or so John tells us, and it was making the religious authorities real nervous, and John is very careful to emphasize the fact that he’s there, he mentions it twice . . . and so maybe we should ask ourselves what Lazarus represents in our little tableau . . . death is the ultimate unclean, and here Jesus is eating with someone who until recently was very dead, four days dead, as a matter of fact . . . and Lazarus’ death and resurrection clearly prefigures Jesus’ own, so we’re clued in to a central theme right at the outset . . . this episode is about Jesus’ upcoming crucifixion, just seven days away.

      And if there is any doubt, here comes Mary with a whole pound of perfume made out of pure nard, and the smell of it saturates the room, so that it overcomes even the heavy Middle-Eastern cooking, and the scent reminds each disciple there of the best times they’ve ever had, times when they’d snuggle up to their own mothers as children and smell her rough-soaped hair, or the exotic caravan women with their black-kohled eyes and sinuous glide, passing on the road to Egypt . . . it was a wildly feminine scent, an extravagantly female aroma, and Mary takes the perfume and kneels with graceful flow at Jesus’ feet and begins to massage in the perfume, and the scene is both incredibly intimate, as she wipes them with her own hair, and overtly symbolic, as she clearly anoints him for his burial.

      And why is she anointing him now? Why is she anointing him when his death is still a week away?  Could it be that this is one more symbol in this over-packed scene?  Could it be that we – who know about the empty tomb – are supposed to recognize what she apparently gets implicitly, in her heart?  That somehow, in some way, Christ won’t be around for her to anoint when they go to the tomb?

And just who is this Mary, anyway?  We see her at least two other times, in the episode just before this, when she mourns her brother’s death, and over in Luke, where she sits at Jesus’ feet while Martha bustles around the house, getting more and more annoyed.  There, as well as here, she seems to be the only one who gets the true nature of Jesus’ mission.

      Well.  We’ve talked about Lazarus – symbol of death, symbol of resurrection, symbol of unclean made clean – and we’ve talked about Mary, but there’s another person here besides Jesus, and that’s Judas.  And when John introduces him here, he does so with an editorial comment: Judas Iscariot, he says, was “the one who was about to betray him,” and by pointing it out John makes sure we understand who this is, but it also has the effect of cutting off further consideration in the scene . . . we immediately dismiss him as The One Who Betrayed Jesus in big capital letters, and will believe anything . . . of course he steals from widows and orphans, he’s The One Who Betrayed Jesus, it’s expected . . .

      But in this episode Judas is more than that, in this episode he fulfills the same role as Peter in so many others, the role of symbol, of stand-in, of exemplar of something larger than the sin of just one human being.  Mary gets what this scene is trying to foreshadow . . . she gets it that Jesus – far from leading them in a glorious re-establishment of the Davidic throne, far from being a great revolutionary leader in the manner of Che Guevara or Mao Tse Tsung – she gets it that Jesus was going to die on a cross just about a week from that time.

      Judas . . . doesn’t.  He doesn’t understand . . . and here, maybe, is the crux of the matter, the crux of the difference between him and Mary . . . she treats him with royal respect, treats him like a king while still acknowledging that he is going to die.  Her anointing of him carries the dual significance of royalty – kings were anointed with pure nard – and death.  She treats him as one who is already dead, but who is king nevertheless.  And that’s the opposite of what the disciples thought – including and perhaps especially a certain one named Judas Iscariot.  Like the rest of the world, like their society at large, Judas believed that might makes right, that it took the strong to survive.  To the world – and was it so to Judas as well? – a dying Messiah was a walking oxymoron . . . Messiahs didn’t die, they led glorious re-takings, glorious revolutions.  The world had no use – and it still has no use – for a leader that gets spiked to a tree.  That’s the foolishness that is the cross, as Paul would memorably come to say.

      In the film The Last Temptation of Christ, Judas is pictured as a fiery, red-headed zealot, who grows weary – and wary – of Jesus’ preaching of peace, of his insistence on not resisting his march toward crucifixion . . . and is this why Judas betrays him?  In the film, it's Judas the zealot who perhaps loves him best, piles all his hopes upon him, and like other spurned lovers in literature, reacts violently when the object of his adoration turns out to be other than he supposes . . . Is this what drives Judas to betray him? When Jesus doesn’t fulfill his role as rabble-rousing revolutionary, does he get him done in?

      Regardless . . . this story is essentially about two ways of looking, two ways of being, and it illustrates them by contrasting Mary – who understands that Jesus’ true glory, his true king-ship lies in his death – and Judas, who doesn’t.  One way, John is saying, belongs to the world, to the powers that be, the other, is the way of the believer, the way of the true follower of Christ.  The true follower of Christ knows that Jesus’ royalty, his glorification lies precisely in his death, and will acknowledge, will anoint him king in that dying.  Mary’s anointing of Jesus is acknowledgement of that, it is a symbol of her conversion, her belief that it is the way of humility, the way of service that signals genuine faith.

      You will always have the poor to serve, Jesus says, and by this he isn’t resigning himself to that fact, or giving us permission to ignoring them . . . to believe that you have to ignore all the rest of his teachings, by both word and deed, in which he fed and housed and healed the least of these who walked on earth.  What Jesus means by this is that you can serve the poor anytime, don’t let me stop you, be my guest, but you will not always have me around to anoint.

      But I think it goes deeper than that . . . if Mary’s anointing constitutes true belief, if it symbolizes her conversion to genuine faith, then perhaps Jesus is linking true service of the poor to the anointing of the crucified Christ in our hearts, that unless we too understand, like Mary, that true power lies in humility, that Christ’s kingship lies in pouring out his life for us, just as Mary poured out that expensive nard, our service of the poor will end in scandal and ineffectualness, like it did for Judas.  True service is grounded in a self-emptying love, not the other way around.

      And that’s the way in for us in this passage, the way to see ourselves here, to apply it to us today . . . it’s the notion that Judas is somehow representative of – and a symbol of – the other disciples, who mirror the world’s inability to understand the true nature of the gospel – that true power, God’s power, lies in Jesus’ oft-repeated phrase that the last shall be first and the first last, in the Apostle Paul’s insistence that the power of God is weakness to the world.

      And speaking of Paul, in his beautiful Christ hymn, he characterizes what Christ does as kenosis, as self-emptying: emptying himself of all he is, his God-hood and taking the form of a human, even until death on a cross.  And we shouldn't miss the parallel as Mary does the same thing, extravagantly emptying herself by pouring the fabulously expensive perfume all over the body of her beloved.  Judas didn't understand the significance of that any more than he understood when Jesus did it a week later.

      The upshot of it is that Judas feathered his own nest at the expense of the poor – John spells it out, to be sure we get it – and that hasn’t changed much since his time, has it?  All the wealth of Western society is built on the backs of the poor, who produce our goods and services at less-than-living wages so they remain cheap and affordable.  We trickle help down to them in dribs and drabs, in food banks and ever-cut social-welfare budgets . . . wouldn’t want to cut the national security budgets, gotta get the money from somewhere, and the poor don’t have a lot of lobbying power . . . and so we give ‘em a little palliative help, just to keep ‘em happy, throw ‘em a little welfare bone . . . western society feeds off the poor every bit as much as Judas did, because Western society believes just as he did, that those with the most stuff, the most power, the most money, win.

      But you know what?  Even though it obscures our view of Judas, even though it over-simplifies this undoubtedly complex man, John’s insistence on rubbing in the obvious, on pointing out the fact very clearly that Judas was the one who crucified Christ, serves a purpose.  We know what Judas’ beliefs got him, don’t we?  We know that he died, some say he hung himself, some say he fell into a hole and burst his stomach, but the fact of the matter is that he was wrong, wasn’t he?  The way to happiness doesn’t proceed from power, it doesn’t proceed from money, from climbing the old social or political or monetary ladder . . . what proceeds from all of that is death . . . the way to life is the tougher way, the more narrow way, the way of Mary, the way of self-emptying, where you will lose your life to save it, paradoxically enough, the way to life is through death.  Amen.

My Two Sons (Luke 15:1 - 3; 11b - 32)

To understand this parable, you have to realize that it’s misnamed — it’s not about the prodigal son, or the responsible son who gets so jealous. It’s about the father, and how the father behaves, and like most of Jesus’ parables, it is a radical reversal of the expectations of his audience.

And it’s important to realize who makes up that audience -- they're the religious leaders of the day, and they're grumbling about Jesus' association with tax collectors and other dregs of society. They say – “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”   and today we say – so what? So what if Jesus ate with tax collectors? I mean, maybe we don't like the IRS, but we'd still eat with them . . . after all, they are respectable members of society.  But in Jesus' time they weren't – they were Jews, hired by the Romans, and they got rich collecting the heavy Roman taxes. They were turncoats, outside the pale, the lowest of the low. And for the Pharisees, the term “sinners” wasn’t for folks who steal a few pencils from the office,      or drive a little too fast down 275. To them, it referred to outcasts, those outside the religious system, who did not worship at the temple or observe the Torah.  Sinners were those whose breaking of Mosaic law was known in the community, and they were outcast from the temple.

One final piece of the puzzle – have you ever wondered why they made such a big deal about who ate with whom? Over and over again in the Gospels the religious leaders go on and on about who Jesus ate with, and there was a reason – what you ate and who you broke bread with was highly ritualized in the Judaism of the day. It defined your standing in the religious community – in Jesus’ time you didn’t eat a meal with just anybody. Being invited to eat in a Jewish household implied that you were clean, holy and consecrated within the community.   And here Jesus was – eating with sinners, folks who by definition weren't holy and consecrated within the community.

And so the Pharisees are accusing Jesus of a serious breach of religious practice – table fellowship with sinners.   And in response, Jesus tells them three parables. And note that the reason Jesus tells them the stories is because they’re griping about his eating with sinners; so one should expect that the stories have something to do with that. The first parable is about a shepherd who leaves a flock of 99 sheep to find just one lost lamb; and the second is about a woman who scours her whole house, top to bottom, to find a tenth of her money, which had been lost.

And our parable begins -- “There was a man who had two sons,” not “There was a son who took his inheritance and left home” or “There was a son who was really ticked off when his father forgave his younger brother.” It says “There was a man who had two sons” and remember, it's in response to Pharisitical grumbling about Jesus eating with tax collectors and other sinners.

Now, it wasn't unheard of that a son would take his inheritance early, and strike out on his own. In fact, it's clearly allowed for in Hebrew custom, and could be an advantage to a younger son. He could get his one-third of the estate and head out to establish his own household while he was young and vigorous, and not have to wait until his father died. The problem was what this son did with it – instead of investing it in real estate or tax-deferred mutuals pegged to the Standard and Poors, instead of saving for a rainy day or giving it to the poor – and getting at least a big, fat, tax write-off — he squandered it having fun!  He spent it on what Luke fastidiously called “dissolute living,” and what the older brother came right out and said were prostitutes. He went into some distant, gentile country and bought liquor and loose women. And I don't know about you, but I'm right there with the Pharisees, right there with my Presbyterian righteous indignation aflame in my heart! How dare he take his father's hard-earned money and blow it all! Not very decent, and certainly not in very good order. And as a final blow, he ends up right down there with the tax collectors, right down there with the sinners, because he goes to work slopping hogs, working for somebody who's obviously a gentile, and so he is outcast, unclean, somebody who no self-respecting Jew could eat with. He's feeding pigs!! He's the ultimate unclean – he's lower than unclean, he's the servant of pigs, he's the servant of the unclean!

And when he comes to his senses, when he realizes how low he can go, how low he has gone, he figures “Here's what I'll do. I'll say 'Father, I have sinned against heaven – I have become unclean – and in front of you! I'm not your son anymore, take me back, make me a hired hand, have mercy on me!' And maybe, at least, I'll get something to eat.” So he heads home, planning to do just that, but before he gets there, while he is just a speck on the horizon, his father rushes out to embrace him, to kiss him, so overjoyed is he to see his son! And his son says “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer fit to be your son . . .” and before he can finish, his father interrupts and sends for a fine robe, and beautiful shoes, and jewelry to shower upon his son, and most importantly, most importantly, he kills a fatted calf to feast with his son. He plans to eat with the outcast, to share table fellowship with his unclean son.

And so Jesus is telling his audience – and through this parable, Luke is telling his – that the father welcomes his unclean son, and will do the ultimate act of welcoming, the ultimate act of reconciliation. He will eat with his outcast child. And, like the Pharisees, we know who the father represents, he represents God. And who the older, more responsible son is as well – he is the Jewish religious establishment, the leaders of synagogue and temple. In other words, the oldest son represents Jesus' audience, the Pharisees.

And he says “Listen! For all these years I was a slave for you, and I've never disobeyed you; but you've never even given me a goat so I could party with friends. But when this son of yours came back, who wasted all your money on prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” The son is outraged that the father welcomes his errant children – children like the Romans, the tax collectors, even the hated Philistines – welcomes then with rejoicing. All these years and he'd obeyed all the rules and all the commandments in Torah, and his father welcomed the bad son back unconditionally. He didn't make him ritually purify himself or shovel manure out of the stables. He didn't even make him say ten hail Mary's or go to church. He threw open his arms wide and welcomed him back with tears of joy. The prodigal son was equal in the eyes of the father to the good, righteous son. He told him “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice,   because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

Like many parables this is an allegory, where elements in the story stand for things in real life. It's about the father – God – and how he treats his children. The responsible son represents the religious establishment, perhaps generalized to the Israelites as a people, and the prodigal son represents sinners like tax collectors and gentiles overall, who are excluded from temple practice.

And it was radical stuff back then – the Judaism of that day was a religion based on purity, and it excluded anyone not born Jewish, who could not prove ancestry through their mother's line. And there was good reason for it – over and over again, their very survival had hinged on it. When they were a rural peoples, farming the arid high country of Palestine, the purity laws in the Torah maintained their health and well-being. After the Babylonian exile, what kept the their people together was a return to a strict piety, a casting-away of anything that was not absolutely pure, not purely Jewish. And here Jesus comes along, consorting with sinners, eating with people who weren't pure, who weren't welcome in the temple, and it was an affront to their whole being, their whole sense of who they were as the people of God. It turned their world upside down.

And we congratulate ourselves that we're not like that, that we welcome anyone, that anyone can be a Christian, and we're right – nearly from the beginning, Christianity has welcomed all into its fold, anyone who, like the prodigal, comes to God in repentance. But I think that, for us, the Parable of the Forgiving Father is as radical in its own way as it was in Jesus' time, for his original audience. If it weren't, why do we so resolutely personalize it? Why do we focus in on the repentance of the younger son or the anger of the elder? Why do we ignore the context and make it just about sin and forgiveness, and not who's in or out of the kingdom of God?

Who are the outcasts of today? Who are outside the pale of our mainstream version of Christianity? We're tempted to say     “Why no one, of course – all are welcome in the house of the Lord.” But . . . is that really true? What if we substitute, say . . . crack dealers for the tax collectors? What if they came to church, sang our hymns and then went off to their street corners and resumed their trade in cocaine? Or what about, oh . . . what about child abusers? That strikes home for me . . . one of my best friends served time in Parchmen prison in Mississippi for sexually abusing his little girl.  Or, I should say, one of my former best friends, because I cut him loose just like the rest of the church when the stuff hit the fan. Only a courageous pastor who'd never known him outside of jail was able to be with him, and even she had to choose between him and the church. What if he were to walk right through that door over there, come on in and sit down in the front row, and started to listen to this sermon?  Well, if he's done his time . . . if he's paid the price . . . but what if he hasn't? What if I knew that he'd gotten away Scott free, without paying anything, and worse, that he might do it again, might endanger the sanity or health of somebody in this congregation?

The radical fact is, the father didn't require a price from his wayward son, didn't require him to pay him back, to make amends, or anything else that we require as a matter of course. And as the body of Christ on earth, as God's representatives, God's people on this planet hurtling through space, can we do any less? Can we require sinners to become upstanding before they come in here? Can we require them to pay for their sins before they can come before God?

Grace is radical stuff, folks, and make no mistake about it, it's grace we're talking about here. God's free, righteous grace that comes to sinners, the dregs of society, and frees them, makes them righteous and just before God. And we're sometimes offended by grace, like the religious leaders were by Jesus' even-handed table fellowship, like the son who was offended at his father's generosity. Grace is offensive to our tit-for-tat society, where you have to pay for what you get, pay your debts to society and to one another and to Sears and Roebuck.

And that's the really radical thing about this passage, the really subversive thing about the Parable of the Forgiving Father.  Grace is free – we don't have to pay for it. And if it got out that God was giving away eternal life for nothing, just giving away Scott-free freedom from death and bondage to sin, well, pretty soon, folks might want food for free, or medical care, or transportation or clothing, and our whole house of cards, our whole economy based on buying and selling and selling and selling, with its Doritos Super Bowl and Budweiser half-time show, might come fluttering down like an overheated house of cards.

But of course, what's amazing about grace is that it is so radical – it is free. Nobody has to pay for it, not the sinners, or the Pharisees, or the axe-murderers or the drug dealers. Not the college professors or the congressmen or the Methodists or even us. Jesus, who ate with child molesters and crack-addicts, who ate with biker gangs, bankers and wall street brokers, eats with us, and is here with us, and died on the cross for us. Even if we are faithless, God is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins.  And like the father in the parable, God is filled with joy when a lost child returns, and prepares a banquet fit for kings and queens and just plain old folks, like us.  Amen.

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.