Jerusalem

Transfiguration A: Transcendence

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Fog on mountaintopOLD TESTAMENT:  Exodus 24: 12-18

Read the passage from Exodus

According to tradition, the Book of Exodus is known as “the Second Book of Moses”.  The major themes of Exodus are identified as liberation, law, covenant, and presence.  The presence of God is exceedingly important.  God’s presence is seen as life-giving glory being concretely present in the world.  The assumption is that God yearns to be present, but that requires a community of generous faith, emptied of the worldly culture around it, which gives its best skills, disciplines, and goods for the housing of the holy.  The main theme of the passage that we read is communion in the presence of God.  This is prior to the making of the covenant.  We just have to bask in God’s overwhelming and exuding presence. The preceding verses have God inviting Moses back up the mountain.

Now…some background…in the understanding of this early community of faith, God was not to be seen.  God was the great I AM, one whose name could not be said, one whose power could not be beheld, one whose presence could not be seen. (It is in some way a better way to think of God—“lost in wonder and awe”– than the way we often view God as a great vending machine ready to tend to all of our wants and needs!  After all, it seems that it would be harder to take the great I AM for granted!)  But here, if one saw God, one died…But here God was!

So Moses goes farther up the mountain.  (Now remember too that for these ancient Israelites, the mountain was a source not only of grandeur, but also of divine revelation.  Mountain tops were sacred places.) He is with Joshua, who really plays no part.  It is noted that perhaps the narrator of the event is looking forward to that time when Joshua would be his successor and tries to legitimate that role.  But, finally, Moses is alone and, alone, walks into the cloud.  (Now keep in mind their understanding of seeing God. Their assumption would be that Moses was going to die.—Look at the language…”devouring fire). But here he waits in complete obedience to be addressed and to receive.  Think about this…to those in the world, to those standing and looking up at the mountain, God’s presence resembles a “devouring fire”, something that destructs and devours everything in its path, clearing the path before it.  God’s presence comes in and changes everything…and that is painful.  But, it says, Moses entered the cloud.  He goes where no one has ever gone before.  He leaves the zone of humanness and enters the sphere of God.  And then he stays.  No one thought he would ever return—consumed by that fiery inferno.  For God to come here, Moses must go there!  The truth is, Moses probably got a whole lot more of God than he every really wanted.

The Hebrews understood that no one could see God and live.  They were right.  No one can see God and remain unchanged.  We die to ourselves and emerge in the cloud.  We, too, probably don’t want “all of God”.  We’d rather control the way God enters and affects our lives.  But remember the words of the Isaac Watts hymn:  “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

 

  1. What does this passage mean for you?
  2. How would our understanding of God change if we thought of God as the “Great I AM”?
  3. What keeps us from realizing that God’s presence changes everything in our lives rather than merely affirming who we are?
  4. (OK…this is an odd question)…Do we really want as much of God as God is willing to share with us?  Do we really want a God that is “so amazing, so divine” that a relationship with that God “demands my soul, my life, my all?”

 

 

NEW TESTAMENT:  2 Peter 1: 16-21

Read the passage from 2 Peter

Although this epistle is often presented as the work of the Apostle known as Simon Peter, most scholars attribute it to an unknown author writing under the name of Peter.  (Keep in mind the tradition of honoring someone by using their name—this is not plagiarism!)   So this letter is looked upon as pseudonymous.  There doesn’t seem to be any real indication that even the first and second letters of Peter were written by the same author.  They vary quite a bit in style and form.

The recipients of the letter were apparently undesignated churches once addressed by the first letter of Peter as well as some of Paul’s epistles.  The writer was prompted by a presence of false teachers who had convinced weak or new Christians to accept their doctrine that claimed that Christ’s presence and coming was a myth.  To them, God was transcendent and unconcerned with humanity.  The idea of God coming and living in our midst was something that they just couldn’t fathom so they preached against it.  This went against the Apostles’ teaching of living a holy life while one waited for the glory of the coming of Christ; in other words, while one waited for what we humans had already figured out it would look like when God comes.

In the passage that we read, the author refutes this whole incorrect belief with a proof from eyewitness testimony from those who witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration.  This whole problem came about because, in the minds of those in that day, God had not been true to God’s word of Christ’s return.  They thought it was going to be the next week or the next month or certainly by now!  It was easy to turn it into a myth.  (And, I suppose, remains that way for some people.)  But the writer encourages its hearers to remain faithful and build up their own faith.

The truth is, our faith is not a belief in what is said or taught but, rather, a belief in what is.  It is not a faith of following what is said or what is known but in listening to what is, to the God who calls us even now and walks with us down the mountain into the unknown.  It is believing in a God who walks with us into Life.

 

  1. What does this passage mean for you?
  2. What does the concept of Christ’s return mean for you?
  3. What gets in the way of your seeing that come to be in your own life?

 

 

GOSPEL:  Matthew 17: 1-9

Read the passage from The Gospel According to Matthew

The Greek for “transfigured” is, here, metamorphormai, or “to undergo a metamorphosis”.  In our terms (think of a butterfly—that’s sort of our “go to” symbol.), that means a change in form or character.  Here, Jesus glows with a transcendent glory reserved only for heavenly beings, which implies that he belongs to the divine world or at the very least was being showered and consumed by the very Divine.  The Gospel writer of Matthew depicts Jesus as being together with Moses and Elijah in a scene of transcendent glory, showing Jesus in continuity with the fulfillment of God’s work portrayed by the Old Testament.

As we read in our Old Testament reading, the heavenly voice and presence comes from the cloud.  Matthew has this same image of the cloud.  Peter’s response seems odd to us, almost as if he misses the whole point. (And probably makes us a bit uncomfortable with our own reaction!)  It sounds like he’s trying to control or contain the Christ.  But keep in mind that it was a response from his Jewish understanding.  He was offering lodging—a booth, a tent, a tabernacle—for the holy.  But he needed only to listen.  That is the proper response to such incredible holiness.

And somewhere in the depiction, Moses and Elijah drop out of sight.  In Old Testament Hebrew understanding, the tabernacle was the place where God was.  Here, in this moment, this changes.  Jesus stays with them alone.  Jesus—not Moses, not Elijah–IS the tabernacle, the reality of God’s presence in the world.  The disciples descend down the mountain into the world, full of pain and suffering and injustice.  But God’s presence remains with us.

In the Old Testament passage that we read, Moses descended the mountain with the law; in the depiction of the Transfiguration of Christ, Jesus descends with his own life and body given unto all.  Fred Craddock describes the account of the Transfiguration of Christ as “the shout heard round the world”, the glorious announcement of what happened in Bethlehem years before.  It IS the final Epiphany.

It says, though, that the disciples descended from the mountain.  That is the key.  We are not called to some sort of removed piety.  We must return to the world.  The Transfiguration leads directly into Lent.  Jesus descends and walks toward Jerusalem.  The Transfiguration leads us to Lent and at the same time gives us a taste of Easter glory.  But those who are present are told not to speak of it.  There is something about this that would never have been understood until it was placed in the context of what was to come next and, for now, we know more than those disciples what that is.  Jesus has gone onto Jerusalem.  Our response must be to follow—even into what we know.

 

After a person is baptized in an Episcopal Church, there is a prayer said for the newly baptized, which concludes like this:  “Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.”

The gift of joy and wonder in all your works.  We’ve lost many things over the years. Joy and wonder are two of them. It’s just so hard to conjure up wonder. As a parent, one of the parental goals I have for myself is to raise two girls with a sense of wonder. So, I take them to museums and cathedrals, and point out the intricacies and nuances of what they’re seeing. When I speak of God to them, I not only tell them that Jesus is their friend and with them all the time (which is good), but also that he made the sun, the moon and the stars. And manatee. And flamingos. And Cheetos.  OK, I definitely leave out the Cheetos…

 

As a priest, I try and conjure up for the parish I serve similar awe of the power of God, the minute and amazing details of the scriptures, and the movement of the Holy Spirit through the history of humanity and the Church.  Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve had too many experiences of taking youth into a grand nave of a wondrous, storied, cathedral or abbey… only to find them more interested in looking at their shoes and incoming text messages.  Those moments hurt my heart.

We had a clergy day a few weeks back with Mike Gecan, the author of “Going Public.” He talked about going into his child’s Kindergarten class and seeing a bulletin board illustrating what the students wanted to learn in school that year. Most of the statements were like, “behave,” “learn to sit still,” “follow the rules,” “listen to the teacher better.”

One child said “I want to know why the ocean shines like fire.”  Holy smoke.  I mean HOLY smoke! Now that the kids mentions it… I want to know why the ocean shines like fire too.  There’s a kid who has the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.

We can say a lot about the Tranfiguration. And given it’s prevalent use in the lectionary from year to year, we get to say a lot about it.  But, if there’s ever a “WOW” moment in Jesus’ earthly ministry, this is it. Jesus took his three chosen disciples up on a mountain to do many things. One of them, was to blow their sandals off.  And, whatever shortcomings they have, and however paltry Peter’s words are, they at least do the appropriate thing and fall on their faces before the Presence of the Glory of God and His Son.  This is an intimate encounter, for only a few, on an un-named mountaintop. And so, I have to believe that this isn’t just a historical tale of one of Jesus’ afternoon excursions, but is a model of Christian life.

We are to look around and search for those places and events where God knocks our socks off. And we’re to fully soak in the WOW of the moment. And maybe even fall on our faces.  It reminds us of God’s power and glory and splendor. And it reminds us of our appropriate, faithful, response: worship.  And, once we experience wonder – and help others do the same – maybe we can put the incoming-text-message-machines down… and experience joy too.  Why does Jesus shine like fire? Let’s see for ourselves, and invite others along.  When is the last time you let God blow your socks off? (From “A Garden Path”, a blog by R.M.C. Morley, available at http://www.rmcmorley.com/a-garden-path/2011/02/last-epiphany-a-shining-like-fire.html, accessed 1 March, 2011.)

 

  1. What does this passage mean for you?
  2. What does this depiction of God’s presence mean to us?
  3. In what ways, then, should we see the presence of God, or Jesus, differently?
  4. What effect does that have on how we view our own practices of faith?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

People only see what they are prepared to see. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

All over this magnificent world God calls us to extend [God’s] kingdom of shalom—peace and wholeness—of justice, of goodness, of compassion, of caring, or sharing, of laughter, of joy, of reconciliation.  God is transfiguring the world right this very moment through us because God believes in us and because God loves us.  What can separate us from the love of God?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And as we share God’s love with our brothers and sisters, God’s other children, there is no tyrant who can resist us, no opposition that cannot be ended, no hunger that cannot be fed, no wound that cannot be healed, no hatred that cannot be turned into love, no dream that cannot be fulfilled.  (Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream)

Change your ways, give yourself a fresh coat of paint, convert yourself.  Do all this, and you’ll find the cross before it finds you. (Thomas A’ Kempis, The Imitation of Christ)

 

Closing

 

A Prayer for Transfiguration Sunday

Let’s go up the mountain.  Let’s go up to the place where the land meets the sky where the earth touches the heavens, to the place of meeting, to the place of mists, to the place of voices and conversations, to the place of listening:

 

O God, We open our eyes and we see Jesus, the months of ministry transfigured to a beam of light, the light of the world, your light. May your light shine upon us. We open our eyes and we see Moses and Elijah, your word restoring us, showing us the way,
telling a story, your story, his story, our story. May your word speak to us.  We open our eyes and we see mist, the cloud of your presence which assures us of all we do not know
and that we do not need to fear that. Teach us to trust.  We open our eyes and we see Peter’s constructions, his best plans, our best plans, our missing the point, our missing the way.  Forgive our foolishness and sin.

 

We open our eyes and we see Jesus, not casting us off, but leading us down, leading us out – to ministry, to people. Your love endures forever. We open our ears and we hear your voice, ‘This is my beloved Son, listen to him!’ And we give you thanks. Amen

(Prayer by William Loader, 02/2001, available at http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/TransfigurationPrayer.htm, accessed 1 March, 2011)

Palm/Passion A: At The Gate

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This week is a little different.  I did both the Palm Liturgy Gospel passage and the Passion Liturgy Old Testament and Epistle.  Rather than writing reflections for the Passion Gospel, I’ll post a separate post for the Holy Week lectionary.

Jerusalem Eastern Gate.pngLITURGY OF THE PALMS:

 

GOSPEL: Luke 19: 28-40

To read the Palm Sunday Gospel passage

It is interesting that half of this story is about getting the mode of transportation—where to go to find the animal, what to do, what to say. You can imagine what the disciples were thinking. For this we left our fishing nets? Surely they imagined a grander assignment. But this seems to be an important thing in every account of this story. Perhaps it is a reminder that sometimes following Jesus means doing mundane tasks that, alone, do not seem important, but in the grand scheme of things, are paramount to the story. There is some significance, though, to the idea of him riding a colt that has never been ridden. (Similar to coming into the world through a virgin womb.) Jesus is different. It has never been done this way before.

Here, though, Jesus is in the bustling capital city. He is no longer in the villages and open country of his home. The celebratory parade is also a protest march. The disciples should have known what was happening. Jesus had already laid it out for them. But they still did not comprehend what he had said. At this moment Jesus begins the sharp descent down the Mt. of Olives, winding his way toward Jerusalem. The road is a steep decline into the Garden of Gethsemane and then begins to ascend toward Mt. Moriah and the place of the temple.

At this moment, the crowd sees him as a king, as one who will get them out of where they are. So this is a parade that befits a king. “Hosanna”, “the Coming One”, the one who restores Jerusalem. He enters. This is the moment. This is it. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus brought them something that they had never had before—peace, truth, justice, and love. What they didn’t recognize is that Jesus had indeed come to restore them not to what was but to what should’ve been all along.

But in this account, the ones who are the “religious ones”, the leaders, seem embarrassed at this show of affection. “Make them stop,” they order Jesus. (“Be quiet”, “mind your manners”, “act in a way befitting and acceptable of a rabbi”.) The response: “If they were silent, the stones themselves would shout out.” In other words, if we do not speak, if we do not change, the stones would bear marks of the result. (And they did. In the days when this Gospel would have been written, the stones of the temple and the courtyard would have borne the marks of its destruction.) It is a call to cry out, even when there are those in the world and those in the church who want to silence you.

The miracle of the Red Sea,” the rabbis taught, “is not the parting of the waters. The miracle of the Red Sea is that with a wall of water on each side of him, the first Jew walked through.” The implications are clear: God is not in this alone. Yes, God may be all-powerful and eternally unfailing, but that’s not the point. The real key to the coming of the reign of God on earth, the rabbis imply, is not God’s fidelity. The real determinant between what ought to be and what will be in this world is the mettle of our own unflagging faith that the God who leads us to a point of holy wakefulness stays with us through it to the end. The key to what happens on earth does not lie in God’s will. All God can do is part the waters. It lies in the courage we bring to the parting of them. It lies in deciding whether or not we will walk through the parting waters of our own lives today. Just as surely as there was need for courage at the Red Sea, just as surely as there was need for courage on Jesus’ last trip to Jerusalem, there is need for it here and now, as well.

The Waters part all around us, too, now. The road to Jerusalem is clear. We are surrounded by situations that have solutions without solvers with the political will to resolve them: The old cannot afford their prescriptions. The young have no food. The middle-aged work two jobs and slip silently into poverty whatever their efforts. The globe turns warmer and more vulnerable by the day…Racism, sexism and homophobia destroy families and poison relationships. The mighty buy more guns. The powerful pay fewer taxes. The national infrastructure slips into disrepair. Fundamentalist groups and governments everywhere seek to suppress opposition, to deny questions, to resist change, to block development. We are all on the road to Jerusalem again; some of us dedicated to restoring a long lost past; others committed to creating a better future…

But there are those others who keep on shouting, who keep on telling the story even to those with no ears to hear. Over and over again they cry out. But is it worth it? And does it work? Did the disciples on the road to Jerusalem make any difference at all? Well, look at it this way: It got our attention, didn’t it? So whose turn is it to cry out this time? ( Sr. Joan Chittister, “The Road to Jerusalem is Clear: Meditations on Lent”, National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001, available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_22_37/ai_72960610/?tag=content;col1, accessed 24 March, 2010.)

 

  • What meaning does this hold for you?
  • Where would you have been in the parade?
  • What does Palm Sunday mean for you?
  • What do you think of the notion of this being a “protest march”?

 

 

LITURGY OF THE PASSION:

 

OLD TESTAMENT: Isaiah 50: 4-9

To read the Passion Liturgy Old Testament reading

Chapters 40-55 of the book that we know as Isaiah probably address a time late in the Babylonian exile, when the prophet proclaims that God wants the people to return to Jerusalem. Keep in mind, though, that it has been years since the beginning of the exile. Most of the older generation, those who remember the way it was before, are gone. The next generation had created a new life here. They were settled, comfortable, and many had established themselves and even grown their wealth. And now they’re being asked to return to a city that is in complete desolation. There is nothing there. There was really nothing to which they could return.

This passage is known as the third of the Servant Songs, declaring what the task of the servant should be. The servant speaks straight after God has made the claims that he has the power to deliver Israel from their unfaithfulness. In contradiction to the unfaithful and unhearing Israel, the servant declares that he is obedient and listens to the Lord. The servant is totally confident that God is with him despite all those who have been actively opposed to his ministry and the consequent adversity. This supreme confidence in the presence of God allows the servant to face any future adversity. The call of the servant is to make sense of what happened so that the people will again hear and return to faithfulness. There is a lot here about both teaching and hearing. They go together.

The prophet or servant has been faithful in teaching what has been transmitted to him and that teaching will sustain the weary. In spite of the fact that many insist that this is a precursor passage to the Christ event, we have no clear answers about the identity of the servant in Isaiah 40-55 and can only wonder if his message was so unpopular that he suffered because of it. Certainly other prophets, such as Jeremiah, suffered. His suffering and response is depicted in a different way – Jeremiah gets angry with God and wants his adversaries punished. Many Biblical scholars claim that the servant is the embodiment of Israel herself, both the land and the people; in other words, the servant is indicative of any servant of God (including, then, us). The servant, the people, in fact, WE, are called to confront the evil and suffering of the world rather than dismiss it as not “of God”. It is to these parts of Creation that we are called to help bring redemption and new life.

As we are celebrating Palm Sunday there is no doubt that we can identify Jesus with the words of the Isaiah 50:4-9 in which Jesus has had to face and will face his tormentors. He sets his face towards Jerusalem, riding in with the knowledge that the crowds could easily be fickle. Jesus has relied on God to sustain him and he continues to rely on the help of God. But even in the face of adversaries, God sustains him. It is not that God “fixes” it, but rather walks with us through it.

 

  • What is your response to this passage?
  • What vision of the future does that give for your own life?
  • How often do we really believe this or do we assume that God will “fix” it? What is the difference for our faith?
  • If you interpret the servant as the embodiment of all servants of God, what does that mean for you?

 

 

NEW TESTAMENT: Philippians 2: 5-11

To read the Passion Liturgy Epistle reading

On the surface, being of the “same mind” as Jesus would mean to be like Jesus, or to think like Jesus. But it means more than that. It is a call, rather, to enter the very essence that is Jesus. It is a call to pattern our lives after Christ.

It appears here that “being in the form of God” may be opposite from “being in the form of a slave”. Essentially, Jesus emptied himself and became dependent upon God, fully surrendered, a servant of God. He became fully human. He surrendered self-advancement and instead became fully human, fully made in God’s image.

This passage is the story of salvation in three parts—emptying and incarnation, obedience and death, exaltation and resurrection. Jesus sees his equality with God not as Lordship to be used over others, but as an offering for others. We are to have the same mind of Christ the humbled, Christ the crucified, rather than the crucifiers. We are to, once again, walk through shame and suffering knowing that the Lord is with us. And we are to do it with a rhythm that is unfamiliar to the world.

Our main problem is that surrender is really pretty foreign to us. We tend to equate it with losing and we never want to do that in our world of win-win. The notion of “surrender” is uncomfortable for us. Literally, it means to give up one’s self, to resign or yield to another. It could even mean to suffer. That is against our grain. That doesn’t fit in with our dreams of pursuing security and success. That doesn’t reconcile with a society driven by competition and power and “getting ahead”. Surrender…doesn’t that mean to lose control? What will happen then?

Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote that “what God requires of the soul is the essence of self-surrender…[and] what the soul desires to do is done as in the sight of God.” The 18th century mystic understood that one’s physical being and one’s spiritual being, indeed one’s body and one’s soul, could not be separated. The two were interminably intertwined and, then, the essence and status of one affected the other directly.

So what does that mean? We sing the old song “I Surrender All” with all of the harmonic gesture we can muster. And we truly do want to surrender to God—as long as we can hold on to the grain of our own individualism, to that which we think makes us who we are. But de Caussade is claiming that it is our soul that truly makes us who we are and that in order to be whole, our soul desires God with all of its being. So, in all truth, that must mean that most of us live our lives with a certain dissonance between our physical and spiritual being. We want to be with God. We love God. We need God. But total surrender? But that is what our soul desires and in order for there to be that harmony in our lives, our physical beings must follow suit.

Lent teaches us that. This season of emptying, of fasting, of stripping away those things that separate us from God, this season of turning around is the season that teaches us how to finally listen to our soul. It is the season that teaches us that surrendering to God is not out of weakness or last resignation, but out of desire for God and the realization that it is there that we belong. In an article entitled “Moving From Solitude to Community to Ministry”, Henri Nouwen tells the story of a river:

The little river said, “I can become a big river.” It worked hard, but there was a big rock. The river said, “I’m going to get around this rock.” The little river pushed and pushed, and since it had a lot of strength, it got itself around the rock. Soon the river faced a big wall, and the river kept pushing this wall. Eventually, the river made a canyon and carved a way through. The growing river said, “I can do it. I can push it. I am not going to let down for anything.” Then there was an enormous forest. The river said, “I’ll go ahead anyway and just force these trees down.” And the river did. The river, now powerful, stood on the edge of an enormous desert with the sun beating down. The river said, “I’m going to go through this desert.” But the hot sand soon began to soak up the whole river. The river said, “Oh, no. I’m going to do it. I’m going to get myself through this desert.” But the river soon had drained into the sand until it was only a small mud pool. Then the river heard a voice from above: “Just surrender. Let me lift you up. Let me take over.” The river said, “Here I am.” The sun then lifted up the river and made the river into a huge cloud. He carried the river right over the desert and let the cloud rain down and made the fields far away fruitful and rich.

There is a moment in our life when we stand before the desert and want to do it ourselves. But there is the voice that comes, “Let go. Surrender. I will make you fruitful. Yes, trust me. Give yourself to me.”  

  • What meaning does this passage hold for you?
  • What, for you, does it mean to assume the mind of Jesus?
  • What does it mean to surrender to God? Why is that so difficult for us?
  • What does this passage say to you about humility?
  • What does this passage say to you about power?

 

 

Some Quotes for Further Reflection:

 

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. (Bishop Desmond Tutu)

 

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander. (Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C.)

 

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence. (Henri-Frederic Amiel, 19th cent.)

 

He drew a circle that shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win, We drew a circle that took him in. (Edward Markham)

 

Closing

 

We’re good at planning! Give us a task force and a project and we’re off and running! No trouble at all! Going to the village and finding the colt, even negotiating with the owners is right down our alley. And how we love a parade! In a frenzy of celebration we gladly focus on Jesus and generously throw our coats and palms in his path. And we can shout praise loudly enough to make the Pharisees complain. It’s all so good!

 

It’s between parades that we don’t do we well. From Sunday to Sunday we forget our hosannas. Between parades the stones will have to shout because we don’t. (“Between Parades”, Ann Weems, Kneeling in Jerusalem, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.), 69.)

 

Lord, forgive. Amen.