Sermon for Lent 2C

**this sermon is based, in large part, on an essay written by Kae Evensen in the 2.23.10 issue of The Christian Century

+I am no astronomer but I do know that the night sky, the beautiful wash of stars we see above are actually the stars as they existed thousands and in some cases millions of years ago, The light which emanates from these stars, most of which are millions of miles from earth can take many thousands of light years to reach earth. Now be careful…if you are anything like me, trying to wrap your brain around this information may make you dizzy. The bottom line is, the light produced by the stars Abram gazed upon? It quite possibly has not reached earth yet. The light, which holds that promise of God, has yet to arrive. God’s promise is still unfolding!! God was and is and is to come, and just when we think we’ve gotten a handle on what this whole God thing means to us, we hear something like the speed of light and what that means about the sky we think we are seeing as it is RIGHT now, and our whole perspective is blown to bits.
Homiletics professor and Lutheran pastor Kae Evensen says that the light of that sky, the sky of Abram and Sarai, the sky of Genesis, the sky of that promise, that first covenant of God, is the promise of things to come. All that has happened from Abraham and Sarah to Mary and Joseph to all our ancestors, to all those who have walked before us, fuels what is to come.
Even the doubts.
Abram, a man of deep faith who clearly had found favor with God, had doubts. The world, as he experienced it, was often overwhelming. We hear it today, after his encounter with God, when Abram falls into a deep sleep and a “deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.” Abram was scared out of his wits. Abram, was having a dark night of the soul. A night so dark, that even the promise of God couldn’t keep the fear at bay.
Oddly, I find this comforting. That all of who have come before, even the greatest prophets of all, had doubts. Jesus himself had doubts. The human condition promises that we’ll doubt, we’ll fear, that we’ll have our share of dark nights and terrifying dreams. And so, like many who have come before us, and, I’m sure, those who will come after, we try very hard to keep those fears and doubts ---which lurk just around the corner of our consciousness—at bay.
And we do this by being busy, by keeping the volume of our lives turned way up. We do this by avoiding silence, by resisting the quieting of our souls.
The nature of our humanity is to fear the silence, to resist the dark and to recoil from the reaching out of God’s embrace. But, as one author has put it: God’s habit is to draw near. God does not want to and will not stay out of reach in the heavens.
While it may be difficult for us to fathom the extent of God’s love for us, I think the metaphor of mother hen, which is used several times in scripture and is referenced by Jesus in today’s Gospel, is helpful. For whether you are a mother, or have witnessed the love a mother has for her children , this image rings true. Have you ever gotten in between a mother and her chicks, cubs, pups, child? Have you ever mistakenly suggested to a mother how she may better parent her child? Have you ever, whether inadvertently or not, ticked off a mother?
It isn’t pretty.
Because a mother’s love for her child is an instinctual gut level love. There isn’t anything intellectual about it. It just is.
God’s love for us is the same: God desires nothing more than to gather us—each of us---under the loving expanse of God’s wings, protecting us from harm, holding us close.
It’s warm under those wings, cozy….but before you know it, that warmth, that coziness begins to stifle, our own reach feels stymied and we struggle to break free and to wander out on our own. And God, like any loving parent, let’s us go because God knows that is just what we need to do….for God also knows that one day, when perhaps we’ve wandered just a tad too far and we no longer feel sure, when we’re engulfed in a deep darkness, when we no longer feel safe, we’ll come running back, eager to scurry under those outstretched wings, ready to feel the comforting embrace of our creator.
Jesus’ use of this image comes as he laments all that Jerusalem has seen all that Jerusalem has done, and all that has yet to happen there to him. Jesus cries this lament with his face firmly turned toward that city of his forebears, that city which destroys prophets, that city which has rejected God’s love time and time again. I don’t know how much Jesus knew about his fate in Jerusalem. Yes, he knew that he would be martyred there, and perhaps he even knew that his friends would abandon him one by one. But I wonder, did Jesus realize how much all of that would hurt? Did Jesus realize how painful abandonment is, how scary loneliness is, how dark the night would become in Gethsemene?
Did God know how much all of this would hurt Jesus? Did God know how much that hurt would pain Him?
Does any parent?
This vulnerable flesh and bones incarnation of God had a dark night. This God in the person of Jesus, felt the terror of Abram. Jesus felt the loneliness of an existence where God can seem so far away, so absent. And Jesus, this God made man, knew how terrifying silence could be. But Jesus also walked through that dark night. Jesus endured that silence and came out the other side. Jesus dove into the depths of death, emerging from it so that we, no matter how lost we may feel, no matter how scared we may be, no matter how mad we may act, can look into the night sky and remember that no matter how far we feel from God, God is, always has been and always will be right here. Sometimes we just have to get quiet enough, still enough and sometimes, scared enough, to notice.
In the darkest of nights, we need only look to the stars and realize that the light we see from those stars is the light of Abraham, it is the light of our ancestors. No matter how lost we may feel, how lonely it might seem how long and hard the road is, we have the company of all those who have gone before us, all those who, themselves, had many a dark and lonely night. And somewhere, through the darkness, they, too were warmed by the light of those who had gone before. +

Life Happens in the Valley TranSfiguration Sunday 2010

Today is a day of bookends. With the Transfiguration of Christ we have a glimpse-- along with Peter, James and John-- Christ’s glory, to be fully revealed on Easter morning. But with the Transfiguration and God’s proclamation that this Jesus is His Chosen and we are to listen to him reminds us of God’s anointing of Jesus at his baptism. On this last Sunday in Epiphany, the season of Christ manifested in the world, on this Sunday before Lent, our 40 day journey to Calvary; we look ahead, we glance behind and we take stock of where we are in our own faith journeys, considering how Christ’s glory is manifested in our daily lives.

Episcopal priest Adam Thomas, writing in a recent issue of the Christian Century magazine, says that the Transfiguration isn’t so much about the change in Jesus’ appearance, or about the appearance of Moses and Elijah, or even about the proclamation of God in the cloud. …instead, says Thomas, the Transfiguration is about how a glimpse of the Holy, an experience of the Divine, transformed the disciples, and how it can transform us. There is no doubt that exposure to the Holy, to the Divine, casts a physical change—Moses’ skin shone, Jesus’ face and clothes glisten with a whiteness beyond description—but the real change, the everlasting change, is what happens internally, spiritually, when one confronts the sacred--is in the presence of the Holy. What matters is how that experience changes us, how we carry that experience with us in our day-to-day lives.
According to Biblical scholar Fred Craddock, mountain top experiences are fine and dandy , but where the rubber really meets the road is what happens when we come down off the mountain, when we enter the valley; where the light has faded, the sheen dulled and the dirt and grime of daily life takes over.
Craddock and Thomas are on to something here…because Christianity isn’t about mountaintops, it’s about valleys. If it was about mountaintops then Jesus wouldn’t have been born in a barn, to peasant parents from a backwater town. If our faith was about mountaintops Jesus would not have been executed like a common criminal, hung on a tree, mocked and scourged. If our faith was all about mountaintops Jesus’ followers wouldn’t have been a doubting band of disciples who fell asleep at a drop of a hat, doubted at the slightest turn of fortune or denied their teacher in times of greatest need. No this faith of ours is definitely the faith of the valley. This faith of ours gets lived out in our day-to-day lives because Christianity is less about fancy and more about simple.

Unfortunately we often forget that even down here in the valley, sacred things happen all the time. The Holy can pop up anywhere.
The retired Bishop of Maine, Chilton Knudsen, recently posted an article about her visit with Rev. Fernande Sanon Pierre-Louis, the only woman priest in Haiti, principal of Holy Trinity School and a survivor of last month’s earthquake. Bishop Chilton visited Mother Fernande in Montreal where she is recuperating at her son’s home. Chilton remarked that, while visiting this woman of grace and courage, she felt as if she should remove her shoes, for surely, to quote Bp Chilton, it was Holy Ground where this simple unassuming woman of God walked. The sacred isn’t usually glamorous and the Holy needn’t be in some transfigured glory. Usually, God is just right here, walking with us on our journey through the valley of life.
But, who can blame Peter for wanting to erect tents, to freeze the moment of glory atop the mountain, to linger in the wisdom and wonder of Elijah, Moses and Jesus? That’s far more appealing than going back down among the demanding, misunderstanding crowds. Peter must think—this is it…Jesus will be crowned King and soon all the oppressors, the high priests, the governor and the emperor will be brought down to their knees and they, this rag tag band of tentmakers, fishermen tax collectors and women will rise to glory, led by the King of Kings. Once again Peter says the right thing but then does the wrong thing. Because Peter, just like all of us, sees the Transfiguration but fails to feel the transformation.

Everyone has experienced this in one form or another---we have some momentous experience—a moment when we feel that we have been truly touched by God and we swear, we swear that this is it, we will change our ways, we’ll never forget this, we’ll turn over a new leaf…but it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last because the high of that moment, the amazing moment of awareness that shining moment of enlightenment cannot be sustained. It can’t be sustained because it isn’t on the mountaintop where life happens, it’s down in the valley.

That’s why our Gospel reading today is so long. The designers of our lectionary allow us to end the Gospel reading just as Jesus James John and Peter are heading down the mountain, but today we keep going, we listen to the “rest of the story. “ They arrive at the foot of the moment to a throng of people, especially a father crying out to Jesus to heal his demon-afflicted son. A healing the other disciples had been unable to achieve.

And it is here, at this point of our Gospel lesson, that the true meaning of transformation becomes clear. All the experiences of the Holy, all the sacred feelings, all the Transfigurations will not heal this world. What heals this world is a people who do as God directed on the mountain, to Listen to His Son, his Chosen One. We are to love one another as he loves us, we are to love our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind. We are to find the sacred in the mundane, we are to find the holy in the ordinary and we are to be transformed by the routine. For our faith is not the faith of royalty, it is the faith of peasants. Ours is not the faith of the powerful, it is the faith of the weak and it is not the faith of the mountaintop it is the faith of the valley.
So today we put our alleluias away for awhile and we live into the fullness of the incarnation as we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem, the cross and the tomb. Today we climb off the mountaintop of the nativity and the Epiphany to walk this walk in the valley, not a walk of despair and hopelessness but a walk of faith, faith that we are following the Chosen One and that we, along with him, are God’s beloved.

Amen