Absurd

Exodus 20:1-17 (JPS)

Elohim spoke all these words, saying: I am I AM, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage: You shall have no other elohim besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, I AM, your God, am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep my commandments. You shall not swear falsely by the name of I AM your God; for I AM will not clear one who swears falsely by His name. Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of I AM your God: you shall not do any work - you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days I AM made haven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore I AM blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother, that you may long endure on the land that I AM your God is assigning to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house: you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female slave, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s. All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. “You speak to us,” they said to Moses, “and we will obey; but let not Elohim speak to us, lest we die.” Moses answered the people, “Be not afraid; for Elohim has come only in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may be ever with you, so that you do not go astray.”

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 1:18-25 (ESV)

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will kill the wisdom of the wise, and the logic of the logical I will frustrate.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?  Has God not made dull the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the absurdity of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and absurdity to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the absurdity of God is wiser than humanity, and the weakness of God is stronger than humanity.

The Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

John 2:13-22 (ESV)

From the Holy Gospel according to John

Glory to you, O Lord.

The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of retail merchandise.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” Jesus answered them, “Demolish this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The Gospel of the Lord

Praise to you, O Christ.

***

The trouble with planning out preaching series and themes for a season is that sometimes after study and deeper preparation the key word for a day turns out not to be the word you want to use. This morning we’ve got the “A” from the word “prAying” to stand for “Amazed,” and I realize the “A” word I ought to have chosen is “Absurd.” Granted, the absurd is often amazing in its absurdity, and we go to the circus to be amazed by the absurd, with those sideshow acts and the like, not to mention the science fiction shows and fantasy stories we share. Translating today’s Corinthians letter included a nod to Spock, Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek character, who was always concerned with the logical, which seems to be wise. Faith, however, is not always wise. It is not logical to give our lives to a greater love without a clear plan of action... but I’m getting ahead of myself. Far, far ahead of myself. 

Because it doesn’t start with our deciding to give ourselves to anything. It doesn’t start with our decision, it starts with that greater love. Remember where we started with the first Sunday of Lent two weeks ago, when I read the creation story from the Jesus storybook Bible and God created everything just by saying hello to it, and then declared ‘you’re good!’ We could find logic in God’s decision to create in the first place, except then we messed up creation when we did the thing that got us kicked out of the garden, and while some say God has a plan, that doesn’t mean we’re living according to that plan. In fact, if God has a plan, we have a long history of telling God where to put that plan while we go off and make our own plans and do our own thing and keep messing up even our own best laid plans.

So we have the first reading here, the Exodus reading, the plan for living outside of slavery and into freedom. Here are the ten words that tell us what it means for us to be the people of God. We’re studying these commandments in the confirmation class currently, so if you have any questions about them, ask Robin or Liz Tucksmith since they’re in class this season. But be prepared to have a discussion about the complexities of these laws - they’re never as straightforward as they seem. Because relationships aren’t simply black and white, are they? Relationships are living and evolving and adapting and learning, and being in a covenant relationship with God means that our life together is also constantly shifting as we learn more about each other.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to observe how often we mess up on these simple ten basic commands, though. And when they’re boiled down to the heart of things, loving God and loving our neighbors, even then we can’t seem to get it right. God is ridiculously in love with us, and we keep turning away, abusing the promises, taking God for granted... who would put up with that in a human to human relationship? Yet God has a lot more patience, a lot more time, a lot more love, than we can imagine, and God just keeps on giving and giving and giving... it’s just not logical. It makes no sense, how often God goes out on a limb for us after all the times we spit in God’s face or ignore God completely.

Consider the ways we use marketing strategies to ‘grow the church.’ Church is not a place to collect money and look good and make ourselves feel good about being good people. Yet we market all sorts of programs that do just that in an effort to get more people in the doors, and if we fail to get more people in the doors we somehow translate that into feeling like we’ve failed at being a church! The system in Jesus’ day was rigged, too. People came from miles and miles around to worship in the one legitimized temple, which meant they had to give up time and resources to travel, they had to leave their fields and flocks to make the proper sacrifice to make God happy with them after all they had gotten wrong since the last sacrifice they had made. The only trouble was, they lived under a government that traded with different coins, with the images of whoever was the ruler of the hour on the face of those coins, and the law says ‘thou shalt not make for thyself any graven image,’ so they couldn’t use those coins for anything related to their faith. Traveling as far as they did to get to the temple for the sacrifice that would make God happy with them, or at least less angry, they couldn’t all afford to bring an animal or carry a grain offering, or maybe the priest would say it wasn’t good enough, so they’d have to trade the day-to-day coin for a temple-appropriate coin so they could buy the sacrifice-approved animal to offer back to the temple to slaughter and burn so that God would be happy with them, or at least less angry, and maybe this year their crops would grow enough to live on.

Sounds ridiculously complicated, doesn’t it? And of course, where there is money involved there are people who don’t have enough, and people who know how to get more than they need, and people who are afraid, and people who are clueless... If somebody is seriously concerned that they get the best animal for sacrifice and they need only so much temple-approved coin and you’ve got the weights and measures to trade government money for church money and those religious folk just trust you to do what’s right, how long will it be until your weights and measures dip a little heavy or light or generally off-balance? And, worse yet, how long will it be until your connection to the temple is only for the sake of what you can get out of it? What you can do to earn God’s favor or make a bit more money to earn someone else’s favor? What ever happened to God’s promise that ‘my house shall be a house of prayer for all people’? God never said that only the rich and socially deserving would be allowed to be forgiven. God never said that there was an entrance fee into heaven. 

When Jesus arrived preaching in the wilderness, it was to say that the Kingdom of God has come near. It was not to say ‘step right up and get your tickets on the cheap.’ See, it makes a lot more sense, it’s easier to wrap our heads around it, if there are different classes of people, different sorts and types of who is welcome and who isn’t and how we can tell the difference. Expecting everyone to be able to afford to buy the perfectly approved sacrifice at whatever cost the market is demanding is one way we can keep out the ‘dirty undeserving poor.’ But then what happens when we ourselves are somebody else’s definition of the ‘dirty undeserving poor’? Never mind that. It shouldn’t come down to what happens when we are down on our luck. It doesn’t, in fact, come down to that. Even that makes too much sense.

'The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.' Why in the world would a perfect, almighty, strong, eternal, righteous God get so messy as to be angry, fleshy, sweaty, dirty, poor, persecuted, beaten and humiliated, on purpose? What sort of logic is it that the God we try so hard to please, so hard to be ‘good enough’ for, would take on life among the outcast as one we would never deem ‘good enough’? For anyone who has ever met God in an AA meeting or other recovery experience, it might seem that of course there is no other way for God to save us than to be there for us at rock bottom when we land there in all of our broken pieces. But who would want to admit they’ve been there? Who would want to boast about meeting God in their darkest, weakest, worst possible moments? That would be admitting that we’ve had those dark, weak, terrible times in our lives. ‘...but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.’ If we can only find God where life makes sense, then we aren’t looking through the right lens.

Absurd, isn’t it? We try so hard to be successful, to grow our ministries and programs by being strong and exciting and colorful and well-organized, and God insists on meeting us in the weak and boring and plain and messy daily living that far too often wears us down. Even this winter, as long and hard as it has been, as often as it has made us stop ‘normal’ daily routines entirely, is a place where God has been with us. Because the cross, the Savior whom we worship, is not concerned with market values and perfect sacrifices - Jesus IS the perfect sacrifice and has already taken care of that for all of humanity. The foolish absurdity of our salvation is that we are able to look fear and death in the face and find God even there. And if we can’t find God there, God finds us there. If we can’t come up with words or slogans to sell people on coming to church, well, that’s just fine, because God is not a relationship to be bought or sold or marketed. It is in our very failures that God finds us and loves us. And everything we use to prop ourselves up is discarded, everything we use to make ourselves look better than we feel is thrown out, everything that could ever get between our hearts and our God is demolished by the God who wants us and adores us just as we are. It is absurd, that God would seek us and find us and go through hell and back to keep us, but it is what God does, it is the sort of God whom we worship, it is precisely the foolishness of a love so deep and wide and high and long and vast and incomprehensible that all we can do about it is nothing.

Righteousness & Rejection

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Psalm 22:23-31

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. It seems to be a constant struggle, figuring out these two things. Those who we deem ‘self-righteous’ often reach that status by rejecting a lot of other people. And yet those who we would off-handedly reject for one reason or another are often those held up as models of righteousness. Think of the poor, hungry, homeless, sick… those named in Jesus’ sermon on the mount as ‘blessed.’ Or, since we’ve got a bit of their story today, think of Abram and Sarai, who by all appearances were rejected, because they had no offspring, no heir, no future, no children to carry their name forward. In ancient times, barren women were often seen as deserving their childless-ness for having done something unrighteous. Any illness or misfortune, really, was seen as a sign of God having rejected the person on account of sin, and the rest of the ‘healthy’ neighbors would cut them off, point out their misfortune with a shake of the head and maybe a bit of that ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. This morning’s Psalm contains both, if we had read it entirely from its beginning. We only got the happy ending in the lectionary portion today, but the number of today’s Psalm is 22. The 23rd Psalm is the Shepherd Psalm, and the 22nd is the one we pray on Maundy Thursday while stripping the altar. You might remember the opening line for this Psalm from Jesus’ words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Guessing from the way the Psalm ends, one might never know it started off from such a place of barrenness. Such a despairing, empty, painful prayer as it begins, Psalm 22 lays out the fullness of the poet’s sense of rejection, works its way through all of those nasty uncomfortable feelings that we certainly don’t talk about in church, and then resolves in this triumphant word of hope: all who live, and all who ever have lived, will kneel before the Lord and declare to generations yet to come that Adonai has acted!

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. Jesus’ disciples are following him on his way to Jerusalem, amazed at the feedings and healing and miracles and still not quite understanding what they mean when they use the word “Messiah” about their teacher. “Who is this,” they ask, “that even the wind and the waves obey him?” They argue about who might sit at his right and left hand in his glory, they talk about his reputation as a powerful prophet, then he hits them - again - with the foretelling of his impending arrest, humiliation, and crucifixion. They see him as righteous and powerful, he tells them he will soon be rejected, and they can’t handle it. 

Righteousness and rejection. Rejection and righteousness. Following Jesus means that we will be rejected, too. “Take up your cross,” he says. And he didn’t mean just live with that horrible relationship or that terrible economic situation and suffer through because it’s ‘just your cross to bear.’ This is not Jesus’ way of saying be nice to the most annoying people in your life and give up a latte now and then so you can donate an extra five dollars to the hunger appeal. This is the hard work of discipleship. This is the answer to those who say being a Christian is an easy, low-risk, high-profile, every day is sunshine and roses sort of thing. It wouldn’t be honest to try and grow a church by telling people there’s nothing difficult about living in community and learning together how to more deeply love the world we live in. Loving deeply means sacrifice. Loving deeply means giving and giving. Loving deeply means there is a cost, and that love may not be reciprocal.

Righteousness and rejection, after all, are all tied up in this loving deeply. The word ‘righteous’ means ‘in right relationship.’ And since God is a God of deep and abiding love, to be in relationship with God means being loved deeply and eternally. And since we are a people, a humanity, infected by sin, it means we are of a habit of rejecting that love simply on the basis of proving ourselves and having a preference toward pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, thank you very much.

Yet when we look at the rest of the Jesus story, after he tells his disciples to take up their crosses, to openly bear those things others would likely shame them for, to wear their hearts and their hurts on their sleeves, he reminds them that this is the best and only way to truly live. Endlessly striving to save our lives, to protect ourselves from pain by hiding behind our work or our accomplishments or our wealth or the sin we point out in others, will only shrivel our hearts and keep us from truly living. Those who seek to save their lives, he says, will lose them. But to live openly, honestly, whole-heartedly, in such a way that risks rejection from the world, brings us more deeply into the great company of saints before and around us. To live truly is to give our hearts and our lives away in loving deeply, in living the Gospel that is the truth of God’s never-ending love for all of creation.

And even in those moments when the disciples fail, when we fail, to carry our cross and live as deeply as we were created to live, to love as openly as truly makes us alive, even then, Jesus does not fail to carry his cross for us. Jesus undergoes all that he said he would, the betrayal and beating and death unto resurrection, out of a deep and abiding love for us! For every time that we fail to follow, Jesus comes to walk beside us. Every time we fail to love, Jesus loves us anyhow. Every time we miss the mark, get in over our heads, feel abandoned and start to despair, Jesus comes and carries us - his love and his life - through every death and on into eternal life. 

Christ Jesus, who is Righteousness, lived through every deepest rejection the world has to offer,  to restore us all to righteousness.

40 days with a liar

Occasionally the pastor will preach without a manuscript, or read from other sources, and so the sermon will not be readily available in a blog-worthy format. Nevertheless, the notes one might take from this morning's sermon may go something like the following:

Genesis 9:8–17
Psalm 25:1–10
1 Peter 3:18–22
Mark 1:9–15

Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, with the wild animals, where the angels waited on him, and where he strove with Satan. Just after hearing from God those long-awaited words 'you are my Son, the Beloved,' Jesus is thrown into the wilderness by the Spirit, where that very word of God is tested by the accuser, which, in Hebrew, is pronounced 'ha-satan,' and that's where we get the word 'Satan.' No, the Accuser is not a red devil with horns and a tail and a pitchfork. But the images of Satan have changed throughout time, so it might be helpful to remind ourselves what Jesus was up against in that wilderness.

At this time, the pastor read the first two stories out of what is called "The Jesus Bible Storybook." It's a wonderful resource, fully illustrated re-telling of the major Scripture passages. Those first two stories, then, are the retelling of the first, well-ordered Creation narrative, where God finishes up each day by saying to creation, "you're good!" and it is. Over and over again, each and every day, God wraps up the work by saying 'you're good!' and it is. Lovely because God loves it all. And when God creates people, it's like they're going to live happily ever after, because now creation is perfect for that Never Ending Love Story... until the second story, that is. The second story where Satan creeps in, disguised as a serpent, and poisons it all. The problem isn't that Adam and Eve disobeyed. The problem is that they didn't trust God's word of love, that the serpent knew that eating the fruit would mean Adam and Eve would try to make themselves good enough on their own and think they didn't need God to live, and not only did their eating the fruit break the entire world, it broke God's heart. Which is a great image, that God's heart is the entire world, and that the entire world is God's heart. In any case, the story continues with Adam and Eve leaving the garden, and God promising to come and Rescue them, to come and live with them, so that they would Never Ever be apart.

Which brings us back to Jesus in the wilderness of that first chapter of Mark. Jesus is God as Rescuer, God Among Us, Beside Us, With Us. And Jesus goes into that wilderness to face down Satan and stand up to each of those accusations, and, as the letter to Peter reminds us today, to give us a clean conscience about where we stand with God. Because nothing, NOTHING, will get in God's way when it comes to getting back to us. No lies about who we are and what we're worth. No accusations about what we've done wrong and how hard it will be for us to 'earn' God's love back again. God in Jesus is reconciling the world to God's Self, ultimately dissolving those accusations and erasing those lies that have kept us running from God for so long. Jesus faces Satan's accusations about himself, and about us, and calls them what they are: lies. Jesus alone is the ultimate Truth, the living, breathing, Love of a God who will never EVER let us go.

Dusty Death

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

Psalm 51:1-17

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Dust. In the creation story, that’s how we begin. As dust. And not the sort of dust we’ll get on our faces tonight, but the sort that flies up in the air when you bang together chalkboard erasers. Light, fluffy, feathery stuff that’s easy to sneeze at. Scientists will tell you now that we’re made of stardust, and I’m not going to contradict them on that one. As old as the universe is, as immensely vast and diverse and interconnected, I have no qualms saying that we’re made of stardust. And the dust of dinosaurs. And of the dust of our parents. We are dust, and to dust we shall return, each and every living thing among us.

We just don’t usually announce our mortality to the world. It’s a sign of proper upbringing to wash behind our ears, scrub our fingernails, and have a properly cleaned shirt on for church. Not usually the place we go to get smudges on our faces. It’s how we separate the working class from the upper class. Manners and cleanliness, which is next to godliness. Or is it?

I’m not saying we ought to give up hygiene for Lent. I do not want to deny a hot bath to someone on days as snowy and cold as we’ve been having. But the fact of Jesus Christ is not that cleanliness is next to godliness, but that God is next to us. Jesus didn’t come down the mountain and hover just a centimeter above the ground his entire life. He was born in a cave surrounded by piles of animal feed, before and after it had been digested. He, too, was a dustling, with skin and fingernails, hair and sinuses, intestines and kneecaps. He who is God voluntarily took on our mortality - so why do we keep running from it?

To celebrate finishing my taxes, I got myself this lovely new toy, a FitBit Charge. It counts my steps every day, monitors my sleep each night, syncs with my phone to help me track what I eat and how often I go to the gym, and, the best part, it’s also a watch! With this lovely device I can earn wellness dollars through our ELCA health plan to help me pay for basic doctor, dentist, and medication fees, as they come up through the year. It’s here to improve my quality of living. To help me lose those pesky extra pounds and make the most of every step every day. Or something like that. But I’ll tell you one thing they’ll never invent a new tech toy for - keeping me from dying one day. Because no matter what I do to keep track of my health, no matter what vitamins, exercise, or care crossing the street, I am made of dust, and I will some day die. No idea when or what from. My next door neighbor dropped dead of a heart attack in his mid-40s. My grandfather had a heart so strong he lived much longer than the doctors thought he would once his Parkinsons took its final hold. It’s a mystery, what keeps us alive, why our hearts start beating and keep beating after the beatings they take. Loss and joy, birthdays and breakups, worry and expectation, all parts of life which both add to and take a toll on us.

I don’t say this to frighten you. Just to remind us all of what we already know - when it comes down to it, there is nothing that can ultimately keep anyone from dying, no amount of money, no club membership, no skin color, nationality, or political party. We are all the same. We are all mortal.

There was a king who wanted from his wise counselors a phrase he could wear on a ring which would at once keep him humble and keep him encouraged. The counselors conferred and brought him his ring. It read: “This, too, shall pass.” And it shall. Whatever pleasure, whatever pain, whatever hunger, whatever abundance, the constant which remains the same is that everything is always changing. 

We are still dust. We will once again become dust. Specks. Grains of sand. Stars in the sky. Made out of the same stuff as Jesus Christ himself who came to get dusty with us. Who mixed up the dust with the blood, sweat, and tears of living. Who first breathed into dust, in the garden of creation, that Spirit which animates all life.

Our Sundays in Lent will be focusing on PRAYING. I’ve hung the word on our back wall, with each week’s particular theme written on each letter. We’re going to be practicing different types of prayers, different postures, different voices. Because praying is relationship with God. Sometimes we do all the talking, sometimes all we hear is silence, sometimes we feel a prayer or its answer in our bones. As dustlings, we are already living, breathing, prayers, because that creation story in the garden is one where God breathes life into the dust so that we can live. God breathes God’s Self into us to bring us to life. Just by existing, we are prayer, we are relationship with God, because God lives and moves in and around us.

This evening we are marked with the dusty cross, which begins our Lenten journey, and the other end of the story will meet us in 40 days at Maundy Thursday, when Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and when we hear God’s word of forgiveness and feel it in the healing oil of another cross on our foreheads. This talk of dying is just the beginning of the journey into new life. Like a caterpillar entering its cocoon, we enter into Lent with all signs pointing to death, but trusting that we will emerge as something new. And we will. Jesus entered the wilderness and emerged proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near. We enter the wilderness with Jesus and find that Kingdom of God already breathing and alive within us. For we are God’s very own dust.

Mountain of heartache (Happy Valentine's Day Weekend!)

2 Kings 2:1-14

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9: 2-9

Since it’s Valentine’s Day weekend, we’re going to start with the first testament reading this morning. Elijah and Elisha. It’s like the saddest break-up story ever. Elisha has been following and learning from Elijah, they’ve been through some stuff, and now while Elijah is on his way to the end of his life on earth, Elisha goes as far as he is able with his mentor. It seems everywhere they go there are other prophets reminding Elisha that Elijah is going to be leaving him. “Shut up, I know. Leave me alone!” he tells them. Don’t want to think about his leaving, thank you very much. Don’t want to think about the end. Elijah himself tells him that he’s being sent farther and farther away. Three times, he’s told, three times he covers his ears. “As you live and as the Lord lives, I will not leave you!” Heartbreaking, right? It’s similar to what Ruth tells Naomi: “Where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people, your God will be my God.” Often this is read at weddings, these words spoken between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law, both of whom have lost dear men in their lives. What a happy Valentine’s Day weekend reading, isn’t it?

Jesus tells his disciples again and again throughout the Gospel of Mark that the son of humanity will be delivered up to die and then three days later rise. They hear the words coming out of his mouth, but they just don’t make sense. “Surely this will never happen to you!” they exclaim. “Don’t worry, we’ve got your back, we won’t let the big bad Romans make a public spectacle of you.” Peter even goes as far as to say ‘even if everyone else should forsake you, I would gladly even die for you.’ We know how well that worked out for poor Peter.

And I wonder if today’s story was what Peter was thinking of when he said that. Not the Elijah/Elisha story, but the bright and glorious mountaintop experience Peter, James, and John had been witnesses to. I mean, if a guy goes up on a mountain in scripture, it’s to talk with God. If a guy goes up a mountain and there’s a bright light, there’s definitely something holy there, like when Moses spent 40 days on the mountain receiving the ten commandments. Moses had to wear a veil over his face when he came back, his face shone so brightly. It terrified the Israelites to no end. Not to mention that when Moses did come back down the mountain, the people had made themselves a golden calf to worship and there was a huge mess of folks who got killed for it. The Moses-in-the-wilderness-with-the-people story is gory and exciting and treacherous and full of miracles. I may have mentioned before that Game of Thrones has got nothing on the stories of the First Testament.

So Jesus is on the mountain, talking with Moses and Elijah. We’ve heard a bit of the Elijah story this morning, but his prophetic ministry is fascinating. He’s the one who called down three years of famine because of the terrible king Ahab and his terrible queen Jezebel. He’s the one who stayed with the widow and kept her jar of flour from running out during the famine. He raised that widow’s son back to life when he died, and he contended against 50 prophets of Ba’al on the mountain where God swallowed up the sacrifices with fire from heaven.

And it’s this Elijah who is on the mountain with Jesus and Moses, while Peter, James, and John look on. Elijah who represents the prophetic tradition, and Moses who represents the law. The defining characters of Jewish history and tradition and practice, right up there in plain sight, conferring with Jesus, when this great cloud covers them, the glory of the Lord, and they hear it spoken that “This is my Beloved Son. Listen to him!” No wonder Peter is overwhelmed. And wouldn’t it be great to stay up on that mountain where God’s glory is evident, where the founders of our faith are right there to teach us, where the rest of the world is down the mountain and has to come to where we are to experience this miracle.

No wonder Peter thought it would be a hayride from here on out. Seeing Jesus in that incredible light, it’s like falling head-over-heels in love and wanting to stay forever on your first date. The all-consuming awe of seeing the absolute best reality of the other person would give anyone a woozy head. But Jesus has already been telling them that he will be handed over and flogged. Jesus has already been telling them that the Son of Humanity came to serve, not to be served. Jesus has already been telling them that the Kingdom of God has come near, even before they had this vision. 

Then Jesus comes down the mountain with them and tells them to keep quiet about the event until after he is raised from the dead. Which means he is going to die. Moses and Elijah don’t have any recording of their death. Moses just sort of disappeared, and Elijah was taken up in that swing low, sweet chariot. But Jesus will not be taken up until he has descended as far down as it is possible to descend. Jesus will next be held up for the world to see as a bloody corpse nailed to a couple of pieces of lumber. Hardly the glorious vision we have today. But that is the paradox. To know Jesus is to know him in both extremes. The glory and the pain. Life and death. Resurrected and walking among us.

We talk a bit about this when we confess in the words of the Nicene Creed. On this last Sunday of Epiphany, as we consider how Jesus has been revealed to us, we confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” Our historical creeds kind of skip over the preaching and healing and jump right from incarnation, being truly human from the Holy Spirit and the virgin, Mary, right into the suffering and death. From the mountain of glory to the mountain of the cross. Most folks in Jesus’ day would climb a mountain to get closer to God, but from that mountain, Jesus comes down into our valleys to get closer to us. He does not require us to bleach ourselves dazzlingly clean before we approach. He does not sit on a high and mighty throne and dole out blessings and curses from a far off distance. He does not tell Peter to go ahead and stay on that mountain with him. He goes down the mountain with Peter, James, and John, and continues to teach, to heal, to feed the hungry multitudes, and to lead the disciples in doing that same work.

When Elijah was ready to be taken up to heaven, he asked his faithful friend Elisha what he would desire as a parting gift. Elisha asked for a double share of Elijah’s spirit. The strength to continue on with the work he had begun with his mentor. And he received that gift. Just as we received the gift of the Holy Spirit in our baptisms, the Spirit of Jesus, to continue the Kingdom work he had begun, not in a distant place of glory, but right here among us. As Jesus walks down the mountain with us, into the valley of Lent, on the road to Easter, we rejoice in his presence, we struggle with his presence, we live in his presence, day-to-day. And on this Valentine’s Day weekend we reflect on the glory Jesus left behind out of his love for us, the life-consuming, life-giving love, which brought him down the mountain so that nothing ever again could come between us. Thanks be to God.

Homily

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-11, 20c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

I want to tell you a story. Mostly I want to hear that poem from the prophet Isaiah again. When I was on my gap year in the middle of college, touring with a family-oriented Christian youth band, we had a camp song recapping the last half of this morning’s reading. It was easy to play on guitar and had a few harmonies that were easy to pick up on. Whenever I read or hear this morning’s portion of Isaiah I get the song stuck in my head, so I thought I’d share. <teach song> “Why do you say, O Jacob, and proclaim, O Israel, ‘my way is hidden from the Lord’? Do you not know, have you not heard, the Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth, He will not grow tired or weary. And His understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary, and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary. Young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not, not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. Halleluia.”

It’s that first part, about saying our ways are hidden from God, that catches me every time. Isaiah was written in a time when people worshiped gods who were attached to their land. It would be like worshiping the god of New York here in Chatham and crossing the border to the east to worship the god of Massachusetts. Granted, after the build-up to the Super Bowl it seemed for a weekend we were doing something like that, and discovered which football gods reigned supreme this year, but it was life and death in the early 530s BC, Isaiah’s days, when neighboring empires overran their borders and scattered the people of God like so much dust on the wind. It’s no wonder they began to doubt God’s supremacy when they had been ripped from their homes and suffered so much by the hands of their Babylonian captors.

The prophet speaks to that suffering and exile in the chapters leading up to today’s reading. But this morning we hear words of the prophet from the days of the people’s return to their old home. It has been a very long time since they had seen Jerusalem in all its glory, and there is not much glory left to it since the conquering armies had their way with it. Not many among them remember firsthand the greatness of that city Jerusalem, they have been away for too long. They have gotten old and their weak knees and cloudy eyes could not rest on the safety of those great buildings and beautiful living spaces they had known as children. But the Lord has promised to renew their strength, that the old may run as well as the young to rebuild and, more importantly, to BE rebuilt. 

This is a story we know well. How often have we cried out that God surely must neither see nor care about what we are doing or what is being done to us? “My way is hidden from the Lord.” How many times have we seen other gods vying for power, other pressures on our lives to be other than God made us to be, other powers fighting to have the last word about what we are worth.

This is why I like Isaiah the prophet so much. He shows us God’s interactions with and promises to God’s own people through their ups and downs, their injustices and their healings. They may have lives three thousand years ago, but the history of God’s people is not unlike our own. History tends to repeat itself over and over, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, cycles of violence and destruction, pain and healing, when we think life is great and then something awful happens, or when the awful has been awful for so long that there’s nothing to look forward to, this is a history we are part of, a story we are not the first to tell. But over and over again in it, there is the presence of God among us, the promise of faithfulness, the prophet’s words that, yes, God sees and knows and cares. 

Our hope is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Our peace is in the broken Savior, Jesus, who could have very well stayed safe and secure in heaven but chose freely to come among us and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Our healing is in that blessed community where Jesus comes to us all, where we are, and restores us one to another. Just as he went to the home of Simon and Andrew with James and John, took Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up, Jesus comes with us into our homes, into our daily lives, not to remove us from them but to bring us to more fully live in them.

Why do you say your way is hidden from the Lord? God sees. God knows. You are not overlooked. You are never forgotten.

Peace, Be Still

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

Jesus’ first act after calling his disciples is to teach with authority in the local parish, and immediately he is challenged by the people’s anxiety about change. Imagine being there, listening to this teacher who knows the Scripture inside and out and teaches it as one who is intimately familiar with the God of whom it speaks. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s fresh and suddenly certainly true in ways we had always seen but still been oblivious about, and we all wonder at who this new teacher might be, when suddenly there is a disturbance in the Force. I mean, a disturbance in the congregation. A rabble-rouser. The town drunk. A quiet, well-dressed man usually friendly who seems suddenly besot with a bout of insanity. We don’t get more information than the fact he is a man, and his appearance of being under the power of an unclean spirit. How long he has been like this, we don’t know. What was the cause of his situation, we aren’t told. But the words he has to say are startling: ’Holy One of God’ and ‘come to destroy us.’ This is no theatrical trick, either. There is some power behind his words, something which strikes a chord in the hearts of those who hear, something which Jesus silences immediately.

This silencing Jesus does here, it’s recorded elsewhere in the Gospel of Mark as the silencing of the storm at sea. It’s an odd mirror to this tale, for in the midst of the storm, the disciples cry out “do you not care that we are being destroyed?” and in this story the man with the unclean spirit claims Jesus is threatening to destroy them. Both counts are answered with the word of Jesus bringing peace, casting out the unclean spirit and calming the storm.

These two stories are not, after all, so dissimilar as they may seem.

We are still in the season of Epiphany, still discovering who this Jesus is who was born to us in a stable little over a month ago, revealed in the wilderness baptism of John and the Spirit only weeks ago. Today we get the first sign of Jesus’ ministry, after his calling the disciples and beginning to teach. Perhaps his teaching should have been centrally remembered, but this disruption stole the show, so to speak, and the signs seem to stick in our memory more than the words alone, like object lessons we use to teach the kids. The disciples have been called to follow him, and they do, and when they enter the synagogue for study of the Word of God they are interrupted by someone who feels threatened. Somebody who knows they cannot take this teaching seriously and remain the same. Somebody a lot like us.

The mystics know that to be loved as totally and entirely as God loves us would utterly undo us. The people in Deuteronomy were right when they asked for a prophet to be the go-between for God and them, so they might not be destroyed by the sight of God’s face and the sound of God’s voice. God promised such a prophet, like Moses but after Moses. That prophet will be given such devastating news to share with the people that it must be spoken, must be taken seriously, must not be toyed with or taken lightly, or else that prophet will die.

When people come to the faith newly converted, rather than growing up in the tradition and with the stories as they might become rote memorization, they tend to be more zealous, more passionate, more openly curious and experimental in searching for the appropriate ways to live in response to this amazing grace which saved a wretch like me. For some, the power of that conversion moment wears thin over time and gets lost in the middle of the muddle of daily living. Others find themselves newly converted time and again throughout their lives, rediscovering the power of the Good News of Jesus Christ in recovery or by the power of the Spirit poured out in unexpected moments of grace. It may feel like new birth, like a new way of experiencing the world, like a death of the old ways, even if those new year’s resolutions didn’t stick.

And we fight against it, tooth and nail, to retain the old ways. I don’t mean the old ways of traditions which feed the soul and honor the faith of departed saints. I mean the old ways of sick habits which isolate us one from another and offer us empty promises of standing tall by our own might and power. Cycles of abuse, for example, or the classism, racism, sexism, able-ism, age-ism, homophobia, which perpetuate the lies that some lives are worth more love than others because they’ve earned it or were born entitled to it.

When that unclean spirit cries out that it knows who Jesus is, the holy one of God, it speaks truth for once. Lest we come to rely on it for our truths, Jesus silences that unclean spirit and casts it out, freeing that man to leave a life of comfort behind for the journey of discipleship ahead. Because, yes, for the things that unclean spirit represents, Jesus has come to destroy it. To destroy all that holds sway over our hearts and lives. To destroy those distractions which pull us every which way and seek to break us into dozens of pieces all serving different gods. Jesus casts out the unclean spirit and restores a clean slate for that man who carried those uncertain fears for so long, and forgiving, renewing, restoring the man to life.

And all of that bright, shiny-new space can be unsettling. All of that clean can make us frightened of doing anything else which might make a mess. But God knows this process of becoming who Jesus calls us to be is a long and arduous journey, full of mistakes and experiments and learning and fighting and being put back together over and over again. In so many ways Jesus has come to destroy this world’s power of fear and anxiety, and in so many ways Jesus has come to speak the kind of peace which springs up from the depths of God’s love. Jesus speaks that peace with the authority that makes it so. The unclean spirit was silenced, the storm calmed, the sinner forgiven.

This is what Jesus does with his authority, the first sign we have of who he is and chooses to be. He instructs his people in the word of God and commands more authority than our fears. He plants in us the Spirit of life, and dies with us each time we die, and raises us up to new life. Where have you heard Jesus speak peace in your life? Where have you known Christ to turn your worldview inside out? And don’t worry if you can’t put your finger on it. Oftentimes God is sneaky in getting to our hearts with that love above all loves. Primarily Jesus lives it out boldly one moment at a time, and on this side of the resurrection of Christ, while we await our own resurrections, the Spirit is the one working those small wonders among us. With stories like today’s Gospel, we grow to know and to trust that Jesus works healing and peace within and among us, even when we fight against it. May it ever be so.