Common to Everyone (1 Cor 10:1-13)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 28, 2016, Lent III)

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Sacraments Unseen

Water sprays up from the sprinkler, arcing back and forth under the hot sun. The individual drops capture the light in an unreal way. They give the illusion of light shooting up from the ground, of streams of brightness born from some subterranean furnace. Shouts of glee pierce the air. A boy, no more than thirteen, dashes through the sprinkler. The sunlit water breaks on his thirsty skin, splashing its shine in a halo about him, anointing him with joy.

He is a refugee recently arrived from God knows where, God knows what. Until now, no one has seen a smile on his face. But today is a party, a party for all the refugee children in the area, and so for the first time he is around others his age; for the first time in God knows how long, he is playing. For the first time, he can taste new life.

When the sun sets, the sprinklers are turned off. All achatter, the children stumble into the rec center, where plastic tables are lined with boxes of pizza and pitchers of lemonade. Still dripping, the boy takes a seat with several others and they dig in. To say the pizza tasted good, or the lemonade just perfect, would not do justice to the boy’s experience. What happened at that plastic table reached far beyond his stomach.

That night, life itself tasted good. Those moments in the sprinkler, those moments around the table would live on inside the boy for the rest of his life; they were nothing less than an oasis in the wilderness.[1]

“All Were Baptized…and Ate…and Drank”

Indeed, that sprinkler may have been nothing less than the waters of baptism, that table of pizza and lemonade nothing less than the table of our Lord. If that sounds outrageous, take it up with the Paul who wrote today’s scripture. It’s his idea more than mine. I must confess that I myself was surprised when I sat down with today’s text, when I read Paul’s incredible claim. If it weren’t crazy enough that he begins by calling the Jewish people the “ancestors” of the Corinthians, who were a primarily gentile (that is, non-Jewish) audience, what follows was sure to raise a few eyebrows. “All” of the Israelites delivered from Egypt, he says—and he uses this word “all” five times, to emphasize his point—all of them passed through the baptismal waters of the Red Sea into new life. All of them ate manna from the sky and drank water from the rock, which were but the equivalents of the bread and cup we eat at the Lord’s Supper.

This alone is a lesson worth remembering: that the baptismal waters and the table are God’s, not ours, that they are open to all, and that many indeed have already visited them outside the boundaries that we have prescribed.

The church has formalized the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, into a science. In more traditional churches than ours, the same words are recited every week before the same actions are performed in exactly the same way. All of which suggests that you must do certain things to qualify for God’s grace. But according to Paul, that’s not the case. No one sat the Israelites down and explained the mechanics of this baptism and this eucharist, these good gifts of God. They didn’t recite the catechism or go through communion class or confirmation class in order to receive their baptism into new life, in order to eat and drink from God’s own hand.

I don’t mean to water down baptism, or to dilute the Lord’s Supper, into some universal experience. And I don’t think Paul does either. For us Christ-followers, water and the bread and the cup will always captivate us in a special way, will always proclaim the foolishness and weakness of the cross, which is the upside-down wisdom and power of God. To say that all of Israel was baptized, or that an unsuspecting orphan may partake at the table, is only to say that God’s grace overflows the formal boundaries we draw in retrospect. It’s to say that the God who lives inside the church also lives outside these walls. It’s to say—as Jesus does in one of his parables—that sometimes the insiders miss the whole point and therefore miss out on the feast; and that when this happens, God is like a great dinner host who goes to the streets, inviting anyone with ears to join the feast.

“Once Saved, Always Saved”?

In the ivory towers where scholars with long robes and even longer titles sit together and theorize about God, and in not a few churches where folks like to debate the finer points of faith, there is a phrase bandied about that good Protestants such as ourselves might sometimes use: “Once saved, always saved.” In other words, just as you cannot earn your salvation, so too you cannot lose it. Either God’s grace swings low and carries you home. Or it doesn’t.

Far be it from me to add a word to the longstanding debate about salvation. All I’d like to do is point out what Paul says in today’s scripture. Unlike many Christians today, Paul does not appear interested with systematizing salvation. He knows that sin and salvation are the stuff of one’s own experience and circumstance, not the stuff of science. Trying to draw a line that determines who’s in and out is like trying to draw a line in the water.[2]

And so Paul directs his audience’s attention to Exhibit A as proof of how a person can slip from salvation. All the Israelites were baptized into a new life, he says. All the Israelites received nourishment from God. Nevertheless, “most of them,” he points out, “were struck down in the wilderness.” He could have been more pointed. He could have said, “Out of the thousands who were baptized and who partook of God’s grace, only two—two!—entered the promised land.”[3]

And so Paul says, “Take care! Watch out! It could happen to anyone.” And that’s the sad truth. Of all the Hebrews whom God had delivered from Egypt, of all who entered the baptismal waters of new life and shared in the restoring food and drink of God—all but two of them sought their own way in the wilderness rather than God’s way. All but two of them followed their own inclinations, preferring to settle into their old, stale selves rather than to become something new. And it could happen to any of us, Paul practically shouts. The orphan who for a brief moment stepped through the sprinkler into new life, could just as easily step back, could just as easily lapse into the daily bread of this world: its selfish creeds, its belief in quick-fixes and cheap happiness, its dogma of easy living. The temptation is real. It’s as real as that orphan’s first job and first paycheck, as real as the first time you taste success, as real as the long-sought achievement that secures a person’s status in his or her own sphere of life.

The Lenten Journey

There is a thread, then, that unifies Paul’s message today, and it is a Lenten thread, a thread common to our Lenten journey. Deep within each word that Paul speaks today is the warning, “Don’t presume.” You have baptism and the Lord’s Supper? They are no privilege: they are God’s grace, the same grace common to everyone, given to all of the ancient Israelites in the wilderness. And if the ancient Israelites’ example is anything to go by, then, again, I say, “Don’t presume.” See what happened to them? They were saved one day. But the next, they decided they didn’t need saving. They decided they were just as happy becoming who they already were, rather than becoming a new creation under God.[4] It’s a temptation, he says, “common to everyone.”

And it’s common to everyone, I think, because everyone is a bit like the people of Israel: each of us is on a journey in the wilderness, a land full of dangers and full of grace.[5] Lent is the time when we acknowledge this officially. But its truth echoes in the other seasons of our life. Whatever the time or place, we are always faced with the dangers of the wilderness—the dangers that are visited upon us by the selfish deeds of others, and the dangers that tempt us to secure and strengthen ourselves. But the good news is that, as Paul says, “God is faithful.” The good news is that there is always a sprinkler for us to step through, a table lined with pizza and lemonade and smiling faces. The good news is that God’s grace dwells all around us. And if we would but embrace it and step outside of ourselves, we can be made anew.

Prayer

O God who is faithful,
Who travels with us in the wilderness:
You cleanse us in waters of new life when our lives have grown old and crusted,
You invite us to dinner when we are starving for a life outside our own.
When presumption washes over us,
When we eat and drink at parties that celebrate only ourselves,
Strike us down, if you must, but set us upright again,
On the wilderness way, the way of the cross, the way of life.
In the name of our pillar, our cloud, our light in the dark, Jesus Christ.
Amen.

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[1] This story is fictional. But like any story worth retelling, "fictional" or "non-fictional," it is inspired by the truth of lived experience. It is inspired, in part, by a portion from Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 31-32, in which a young couple are caught by a stream of “luminous water” when the boy tugs on a tree branch overhead. It is inspired also by my friendship with a young man who came to the United States as a Burmese refugee when he was thirteen.

[2] I daresay Peter would agree, who proudly proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah and saw the light of Jesus’ transfiguration, only to deny Jesus shortly thereafter and suffer the utter darkness of those hours of death.

[3] Cf. Num 32:11-12.

[4] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), ebook loc. 765: “It is not a matter of becoming who you already are but of becoming something new, a metanoia, a new creation, which eye has not seen nor ear heard nor the heart imagined, an openness to the coming of the other, which we don’t already possess.”

[5] There is a sense in which Paul’s interpretation restages Moses’ call to decision between death and life (Deut 30:1-20). To embrace God’s grace is to choose life. When Paul says that God will provide a “way out,” I interpret this figuratively along the lines that Paul outlines elsewhere in his thoughts on salvation. The “way” is “out” of our own selves. That is what God’s grace does: it leads us beyond ourselves, beyond the same, into the newness of life.

The Power of a Promise (Gen 15:1-12, 17-18)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 21, 2016, Lent II)

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“More to Life”

The old man—75 to be exact—tosses about in his tent. It is midnight. He is exhausted. But he cannot sleep. Something stirs restlessly within him, and from the unplumbable depths of his heart arises a stubborn question. “Why did I leave the comfort of the city, my family, my home, to come alone out here in the wilderness with my wife? Out here where the only thing I can call home is this lonely grove of oak trees?” Slowly his heart rewinds several months back, and he hears himself speaking the last words he spoke to his father: “I can’t say why I’m leaving. Not exactly. Only that I know there is more to life.” How vague those words sound now. “More to life”? What more? Did he think he would make a difference in this vast wilderness? That he would be anything other than a nuisance to the locals who stare at him the way they do a lost a sheep?

“More to life”? More worry, perhaps. More restless nights. Because not only are he and his wife wandering in the wilderness, they are a wilderness unto themselves: they are barren, unable to have children. That was bad enough anywhere, but out here where hardly anyone knew them, it was a life-threatening prospect. Who would look after them in the twilight of their life? Who would watch the livestock, barter with the cagey locals? Who would bury them?

As these doubts waft past him, one after the other, a strange whistle plays around the edge of his tent. A wild animal, perhaps? He sits up, stumbles to the tent’s entrance, and peers outside. Nothing. But he keeps looking. And a cool breeze brushes his fevered head, whispering an inscrutable consolation. His eyes come to rest on the dark horizon. Stars upon stars, their light gently kissing the sand around him.

He has no idea that thousands of years from now, his story will lie at the roots of millions of people’s faith. He does not know that his family will survive in this foreign land—much less grow. He has no inkling that his wandering, that this very moment, will inspire millions to put their trust in the elusive call that we call “God.” All he knows is the promise of the blanket of stars above him, the promise that there must be “more to life” and he must be a part of that “more.” All he knows is the promise that makes him restless, the promise that came out of nowhere and sent him wandering into the wilderness, into God knows where.

And so after a minute of looking at the stars—or it could have been an hour, as he completely lost track of time—he returns inside his tent. And what happens next is a bit of a blur. All he can remember, years later, is the vision of a flame. It could have been outside the tent; it could have been inside his heart. Wherever it was, he knew what it meant. It meant that the embers of life were white hot. It meant that here on this journey he was not alone. It meant that whatever goes on inside the name of God was going on inside his life, that whatever was getting promised by the name of God was getting promised in his journey through the wilderness.

Promise on Promise:
Nothing but God’s Word

I’ll confess that sometimes my imagination runs away with itself. So if this retelling of today’s scripture strikes you as a bit fanciful, feel free to strike it from your memory. But do allow me to pause for just one more moment on the words that inspired it, for I believe these words are fraught with faith and heavy with hope. I believe that in these words is contained the entire story of Abram, the entire story of Israel, and perhaps even the entire story of our faith. In verses five and six, the narrator says this: “[The Lord] brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward the sky and count the stars, if you are able.’ And he trusted the Lord.”

Just before this point in the story, there’s a funny dialogue between Abram and God. Abram essentially says, “How can I trust your promise?” And God essentially responds, “I promise you can trust my promise.” In other words, God just repeats the promise, layers promise upon promise. In the end, Abram is no closer to certainty than he was before. All he has is God’s word. For the more cynical among us, this should raise some eyebrows, if not red flags. How is God any different here than the shady used car salesman who has nothing more than hearsay to back his claims?

“The Lord Brought Him Outside…”

But everything changes for Abram when God “brought him outside” and showed him the stars. Then Abram trusted God. Why exactly? How did those stars relieve his doubts? We don’t know. But I’d wager that it’s precisely at this moment that Abram’s experience mirrors ours. Our lives, like Abram’s, are driven by a promise, whether we recognize it or not—an underlying sense that there is “more to life” than where we are right now, a deep desire for a goodness that we do not yet know.[1] And our lives, like Abram’s, are riddled with doubt. Has our sense of promise led us astray? Was it wrong to start a family when we did? Was it bad timing to make the move when we did?

And it’s at these moments of doubt, I believe, that we are led to see a sign that reassures us. God brings Abram outside and asks him to count the stars, if he can. And so God brings each of us outside, or inside, to reflect on the divine promises we have followed. God brings the single mother inside to look over her sleeping child and asks her to measure the worth of those breaths, if she can. God brings the unmotivated man into the presence of others who awaken a sleeping passion within him and asks him to calculate the worth of his own smile, if he can. God brings the teenager into an inspiring teacher’s classroom and asks her to imagine the future, if she can.

And what about us? What about you? What divine promise has been inspiring your life—perhaps even unbeknownst to you? Has God taken you outside, or inside, to look at the stars or the sand or something in which you can see the infinite depths of possibility? I remember such a moment in my own life. In a time when I doubted the path I was on, God brought me into the company of a certain friend, and asked me see myself reflected in the eyes of this companion. I saw a better person than I expected to see, a person unjaded and unencumbered by insecurity. I saw the promise of a “me” who could bless others even, or especially, through his own brokenness and weakness.

The God Who Promises

The word “promise” literally means “to send forward,” and I think it’s hard to find a better word to describe God. God is a God of promise, a God of possibilities, a God of things that do not yet exist (cf. 1 Cor 1:28). God is a God who “sends [us] forward” into a future that we cannot foresee. God’s promise is no certainty, no easy-odds bet. It is a push, a prompt, a provocation, that propels us beyond the boundary of ourselves and into the untamable wilderness of other people’s lives.

This God of promise cuts a curious and perhaps unexpected figure in the book of Genesis. We see God saying a lot—from the words that stir creation into its colorful existence, to the promises that are made to Abram, Isaac, and Jacob—but not doing much. Which isn’t to say that God doesn’t do things. It’s only to say something, I think, about how God does things. It’s only to say something about the way God moves about in our world, the sort of power God exercises.

God’s power is not the power of a strong arm, of coercion and compulsion; it’s not the kind of power that turns us into pawns, that belittles our sufferings and our trials. God’s power is quite the opposite. The gospel of Abram’s story is the same gospel of Jesus Christ. Its good news is the power of a promise, a word, a call, an invitation, a power that empowers rather than overpowers, that animates us into the fullness of life, of living for others and blessing their lives. The good news of Abram and Israel is none other than the good news of Jesus: it is the good news of a promise, a God of promise, a God whose word of unconditional affection and encouragement transforms our wilderness difficulties into redeeming possibilities.

Prayer

O God who lives among us,
Whose promise takes on our own flesh,
And the flesh of those around us:
When we doubt the path
On which you have sent us forward,
Bring us outside, inside, wherever—
To look upon the goodness
Toward which your promise points desiringly.
Be known among us.
In the name of the promise who took on flesh fully: Christ Jesus. Amen.

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[1] It is a theological idea within biblical and Christian tradition that God’s promise is the inspiration of our desire. If we mine our desire deeply enough, we will find that it is one and the same with God’s desire. E.g., Rom 8:26. In later Christian tradition, see Anselm’s “Prayer to Christ”: “Give me what you have made me want…. I praise and thank you for the desire that you have inspired…. Perfect what you have begun, and grant me what you have made me long for.”

Lips and Hearts (Rom 10:8b-13)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 14, 2016, Lent I)

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On a Day Such As Today

“Be mine.” “Yes dear.” “Hug me.” “XOXO.” Or today, you may find: “Text me.” “Friend me.” “Tweet me.” Thus read the candy hearts that will be consumed by countless Valentine’s Day celebrants today. Maybe you’ve already had a few yourself. I haven’t. But even so, they’ve been on my mind as I read today’s text….

Maybe it’s just because today is Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’s just because today is a day when millions of people will exchange heart-shaped gifts and confess their love with their lips. Whatever the reason is, when I read today’s familiar passage, I am struck by a couple of unfamiliar repetitions within it. “Lips.” “Hearts.” Two images in the passage that had never struck me before. But on a day such as today, I cannot help but notice them. And on a day such as today, they cannot help but conjure up two helpless individuals gazing into each other’s eyes, two hearts somehow breaking through their protective ribcages and straining toward one another, two pairs of lips spouting sweetness or silliness…or doing whatever else lips do.

A How-to for Getting into Heaven?

Never before today did these starry-eyed visions visit me when I read this passage. Before today, this passage was simply a set of instructions for salvation, a how-to for getting into heaven. I cannot tell you how many times I memorized one of its verses in youth group: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (10:9).

Before Valentine’s Day gate-crashed my reading of today’s scripture, before its “lips” and “hearts” infiltrated my interpretation, this passage explained membership in God’s club. It outlined the initiation rite for Christianity. Many Christians trace the birth of their faith back to the moment when they said “the prayer,” a prayer which may well have included some of today’s passage. And for many Christians, “the prayer” really is like an induction. A leader says, “Now repeat after me,” and carefully planned phrase by carefully planned phrase, you would confess Jesus as Lord.

At the Heart of Faith Is a Heart

Which is a bit odd, to be honest, because this sort of programmed faith seems to have been precisely what Paul was trying to get away from when he wrote this text. In today’s text, he’s trying to jailbreak faith, to get it away from the law, from the idea that you have to fulfill some requirement in order to be saved. He’s trying to say, “You don’t have to complete a holy merit project or say a certain sacred password in order to receive life.”[1]

Readers have traditionally been quick to point out that Paul is criticizing the legalistic Jews of his day, the ones who followed the law but had forgotten why, who had lost the spirit behind the law. But in fact what Paul says cuts both ways. If some Jewish believers had been guilty of reducing faith to a set of laws, then some Christian believers have been equally guilty of reducing faith to a set of beliefs. So what really is at the heart of faith, if not laws or beliefs? “The word [of faith],” Paul says, quoting the Jewish scriptures approvingly, “is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (10:8). At the heart of faith is—what else?—but a heart.

A Confession of Love

I guess what Valentine’s Day and its imagery of hearts and lips have helped me to see in today’s scripture is that our faith is not some abstract idea held at a distance from our bodies. It is forged, rather, in the passionate furnace of our bodies, where we feel things, where our inspiration comes from, where the truest words our lips will ever speak come from. The picture Paul is painting is not of raised hands and solemn oaths. It is, rather, a picture of lips and hearts. It is not the confession of a creed (or the completion of a deed) and subsequent initiation into a club. It is a confession of love. It has a lot more to do with the way a parent kisses a child goodnight and says, “I love you,” or the way a couple share the depths of their hearts through trembling lips. These are the scenes that reflect the heart, that reveal an undying commitment.

What is this word of faith? Does it sound more like, “I believe in God, the Father almighty?” Or does it sound more like, “I do”? More like “I take this one…for better or worse…in sickness and health”? What is this word that is near us, this word of faith on our lips and in our hearts, if not a word of love?

John writes, “We love because he first loved us,” and so as I reread today’s scripture, I cannot help but envision two lovers, or a parent and a child, or a child and her beloved dog—two individuals in love with one another. This story is two-sided. It is a dialogue. The word first trembled on God’s lips, first stirred in God’s heart. God believes in us with all the divine heart (cf. 1 Cor 13:7), confesses an undying love for us with trembling divine lips. Today’s story is less about a creed that binds us to a master, less about a peace treaty between conqueror and conquered, and more about a call and response between lover and beloved.

If our confession of faith is indeed a confession of lips and hearts, then it really is a confession of love.

A Confession That Stirs on All Lips, in All Hearts

And while it is a confession that may be contained in the church, it is by no means contained by the church. This confession of faith, this confession of love, is one that, I would wager, everyone makes from time to time, one that we cannot help but make if we are living in the world with all our heart. It is not “lip service” that we pay because we have to. (Unfortunately that’s what a church service or a pledge of allegiance or other such programmed confessions often become.) Our confession of faith and love is the free and unplanned response of the soul, a response to God’s own confession of love for us. God’s confession of love and our response—this back-and-forth is nothing more than the hearts and lips that Paul paints for us: two hearts breaking out of their protective ribcage, two lips trembling with words that cannot do justice to the depths of feeling within.

And this back-and-forth confession of love, God’s for us and ours for God, is unique, different each time, catching us by surprise each time, arising as it does from the heart. It is the morning sunrise that God embraces you with, and in response a word dances on your lips, a belief in your heart, “How beautiful.” It is the smile of a grandchild with which God says to you, “I love you,” in a way that no words could ever express, and a word weightlessly rises to your lips, a belief in your heart, “Oh….” It is a silent hug of consolation, or forgiveness, through which God’s loving tears wet your face, and a word quivers on your lips, a belief in your heart, “Thank God.”

Salvation—Or the Embrace of God

To restage what has traditionally been read merely as a confession of faith, as more fully a confession of love—as Valentine’s Day and its lips and hearts have unwittingly helped us to do[2]—also means to restage what Paul says comes next: salvation. To “be saved” in the Greek means literally to be made safe. And what is the greatest anxiety of any love-stricken person if not the fear of rejection, the fear that his or her love will not be held safe in the heart of the beloved, but will be loosely handled, dropped, shattered on the hard ground? And so what else is salvation but being held safe in the embrace of God, being hugged into wholeness by the God who is invisible in all things? What else is salvation but knowing that the moment of beating hearts and trembling lips is not an exception, not just a blip in our lives, but is rather a kiss from the God who dwelt fully in Christ and seeks to dwell fully in all things, an undying promise that this God loves you and will always love you and nothing—“neither death, nor life…nor anything else in all creation” (Rom 8:38-39)—nothing will ever separate you from that love.

Prayer

Tender but insistent God, the word was first on your lips, first in your heart. It was a word of love. We have all heard its echo in our lives—most fully in the person of Christ, whose love allures us, enthralls us, fills us with desire, and brings the word to our lips and our hearts. May our confessions of faith be unique and heartfelt confessions of love for you. For it is in this love that we are truly saved. In the name of Christ. Amen.

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[1] Cf. 10:5, 8: “[T]he righteousness that comes from the law [says], ‘the person who does these things will live by them.’” The righteousness that comes from faith, however, says, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” In other words, salvation is not earned through the law, through doing a certain deed or saying a certain word. It is received through faith, through what is said and done in the heart.

[2] Valentine’s Day was an uninvited guest in today’s lectionary. And yet a strange thing has happened. It has added depth to today’s text, even as today’s text has added depth to it. Love, if Paul has anything to say about it, has to do with more than candy hearts. And faith, if we truly allow it the “lips” and “hearts” that Paul gives it, has to do with a lot more than disembodied confessions.

Death in the Shape of a Cross (Ps 51)

(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on Feb 10, 2016, Ash Wednesday)

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Smudged with Death

To walk through the church doors and have ash smudged upon your forehead: it is one of the strangest things we do all year. And perhaps one of the truest too. When we are born into this world, we are smudged with mortality, marked with the certainty that one day we will die. It’s not fashionable, of course, to say this in our world. Much of our lives are built around the illusion that we are in control. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Ash Wednesday is so important. For once, we drop the masks—literally, if we’ve been out celebrating Mardi Gras!—and we acknowledge the truth. We are not in control. We never have been. No one asked us to sign off on our entry into this world. No one will solicit our signature for our exit.

And it’s not only death over which we have no control. It’s also life itself. We fail sometimes. We knowingly do what is wrong sometimes. We make mistakes sometimes. Inside church walls, we call this stuff that robs us of life, “sin.” Outside, people just call it “brokenness.” Whatever we call it, it is the vicious truth that death is not only a physical reality over which we have no control. It is also a spiritual reality. The zombies on our television screens are not the only “walking dead.” We join their ranks whenever sin and brokenness have drained us of the goodness of life.

What then are we to do, smudged as we are with death? Much of our world simply lives in denial. Which is to say, much of our world is simply dying.

Smudged with Love

On Ash Wednesday, we confront the death and brokenness that terrorizes our world. And we do not deny it. On the contrary. We firmly rub the ash into our skin.

We do not deny our vulnerability and weakness. Instead we do a strange thing. We celebrate it. We hold our helpless hands up in surrender, trusting in the sacred Spirit from which life sprang in the first place, hoping against hope that a power deeper than death and brokenness will lift us up again; will “wash” us and “cleanse” us (Ps 51:2, 7), “create in [us] a clean heart,” “a new and right spirit” (Ps 51:10); will grant us rebirth. We firmly rub the ash into our skin. And we rub it in the shape of a cross—a symbol not only of death but of a love that triumphs over death and inspires new life.

On this Ash Wednesday, we are smudged with death. But death in the shape of a cross. Which means that, deep beneath that ashen cross, we are smudged with love. We are smudged with the promise of new life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Weight of Glory (Luke 9:28-36)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 7, 2016, Transfiguration Sunday)

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A Mountaintop Experience

What happens on a mountaintop?

Today’s story certainly has something to say in response to this question. But we don’t even have to crack the pages of our Bible to start talking about what happens on a mountaintop, because we’ve all been there ourselves, at one time or another. That’s why we can throw around an expression like “mountaintop experience.” It’s a common and familiar enough experience to all, even if it is also in some ways all-too-rare. It suggests that matchless moment of joy that lifts our spirits to heights immemorial and unforeseeable. It can be that moment of discovery that seems to make sense of everything, that “eureka” moment. It can be a moment of great achievement. It can be that moment when our love is returned.

It’s that feeling of oneness that happens upon us unexpectedly, when for one split second the universe does not feel cold and aloof but rather warm with compassion.

For some, the mountaintop is the moment of ultimate victory, a moment that will visit itself upon one team of football players tonight, and perhaps also upon their most diehard fans. (Speaking of which…it is hard for me to forget the night from a few years ago when I was in the pub with my friend Stephen. Liverpool had just won the League Cup, and as a diehard fan himself, Stephen was on the mountaintop.  He broke out into just about every Liverpool song he knew. If you want to embarrass me, take a page from Stephen’s book. Just attract the attention of strangers in a public setting and watch as I crawl under the table.)

What happens on a mountaintop?

We all know a mountaintop experience when we’ve had one, yet they remain nearly impossible to describe. That doesn’t stop our story today from trying. When Peter, John, and James ascend the mountain, our story tells us, they see things differently. We’re told that “the appearance of [Jesus’] face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” The story then says it more simply. Peter and John and James saw “glory,” the glory of Christ and Moses and Elijah (vv. 31-32).

In the Old Testament, the glory of God is occasionally compared to a fire (cf. Ex 24:17). It’s a rich, suggestive image. It conjures up the great fire that warms our souls and this world, that makes the world glow with love and hope, that burns away the impurities of this life. And in this particular mountaintop moment, I think, Peter and his companions catch a glimpse of this glory, this fire. It’s as though the surface of reality has cracked momentarily, and through the cracks they can see the source of all the heat and glimmer, the inexhaustible flame of love that warms the world.

The Glory of the Mountaintop

What happens on a mountaintop?

If anyone would know, it would be the two who are speaking with Jesus: Moses and Elijah. The two had eerily similar mountaintop experiences (Deut 4:10-14; 1 Kgs 19:8, 11-18). Both were standing on Mount Horeb when the cosmos cracked open and they heard or saw within it, when reality splintered and they encountered the mystery of God in flames and voice.[1]

And both Moses and Elijah learned that the glory of the mountaintop looks different down below. Both discovered that mountaintop glory means a demanding story, a future heavy with responsibility. Moses would descend the mountaintop yoked with a responsibility that would rival the most difficult of bus-driving jobs, as he would lead a grumbling group of tired and hungry Israelites—asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”—through the desert for forty years. Elijah would leave the mountaintop saddled with the dangerous diplomacy assignment of meddling in the affairs of cutthroat kings (1 Kgs 19:15-18).

So when today’s story says that Moses and Elijah talked to Jesus about what he was to accomplish in Jerusalem,[2] I wonder what they told him. Jesus was already anticipating a rough time in the capital (cf. Luke 9:22). So when I imagine the story, Moses and Elijah aren’t telling Jesus what he already knows. They’re just doing what good friends do in times of difficulty. They’re putting a hand on his shoulder, encouraging him, saying things like, “You’re not alone—not really. We’ve walked a few of these steps too, and they’re difficult, and they’re never quite what you’d expect. But they are also part of the glory of God.”

What happens on a mountaintop?

In today’s world, photos—and lots of them. We snap picture after picture, in a desperate effort to capture the glory of the moment. We’re a little bit like Peter, who wants to preserve the moment by building three dwellings for Jesus and his glowing companions.

Like Peter—who according to Luke didn’t really know what he was saying—we mistake glory for a fixed moment in time rather than for the ever-burning flame that gives birth to that moment just as surely as it will consume it and move on to something new. We mistake glory for a feeling rather than what inspired that feeling and what will continue to inspire us, if we allow it.

A Tale of Two Mountains

What happens on a mountaintop?

Well—and here’s where things get tricky—it depends on which mountaintop you’re talking about. Because almost immediately after Jesus descends this mountain, he begins a long climb up the road to Jerusalem and a very different kind of mountain.[3] Whereas on one mountain he is shining, on the other mountain he hangs in darkness. Whereas on one mountain God’s voice comes through loud and clear, on the other mountain there is no voice other than a dying man’s last words.

Two mountaintops. Two very different experiences. It is easy to see the glory in one and not in the other. But that’s not how Jesus sees it. For Jesus, the two mountains are one and the same. As he says elsewhere, and in different words, the glory of God’s love is not separate from the cross (cf. Mark 10:37-38; John 12:23); if anything, it dwells most fully there.

The Weight of a Cross

What happens on a mountaintop?

In one word? Glory. But this glory is a double-edged knife. This glory is both a promise and a peril. The ancient Hebrew word for glory comes from the word kaved, which literally means “to be heavy,” though it can also be used to refer to splendor and radiance. It is a curious and colorful translation that captures just what we see in today’s story. On the one hand, glory is revealed in the lightness of those moments when we see the fire behind the world, when the world stops and we step into eternity, when we can easily see the promise that brings us new life. But on the other hand, this very same glory is the heaviness that dwells in the most difficult moments of love. It is what weighs us down with responsibility. Will we allow the flame of love to burn in us and heat the coldest, most unfeeling corners of the world? Will we allow the light of God to lead us into the darkest shadows where it is needed most?

The weight of glory is not just the weightless radiance that nearly eclipses us on the mountaintop. It is also the heavy cross we carry up a hill. It is both the selfless joy that we cannot contain when we see the fire behind reality, and the selfless love that somehow lives through us in the heaviest moments when we cannot see a thing.

As much of the world focuses on a thin sort of glory tonight, today’s story reminds us of a much thicker, livelier, heartier glory, a glory that lives within the best and worst of times. It is a glory that dwells within the radiance of smiles and high-fives as much as it does in giving a ride to a person in need or saying hello to a pair of lonesome eyes. It is a glory that dwells within weightless laughter and beaming faces as much as it does in the weighty words of forgiveness and the heavy cross from which they are spoken.

Prayer

We have glimpsed your glory, God, from many different mountaintops. Even as we desire to revisit these peaks, we hear your voice, “This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him.” And so on that day when his way leads us from a mountain of joy to a mountain of darkness and difficulty, when we must deny ourselves and take up the cross: burn brightly within us, Holy Flame behind the universe. May we know your glory whatever its weight, and may we live according to the sacred fire of love ablaze in our hearts. Amen.

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[1] It is true that, in Elijah’s experience, “the Lord was not in the fire.” Even so, the fire prefaces the silence in which Elijah hears God’s voice. The fact that, like Moses, Elijah encounters fire on Mount Horeb before receiving the word of God suggests that fire is a foundational image used to describe encounters with God. The “changed” face of Jesus (was it glowing like Moses’ in Ex 34:29?) and his “dazzling white” clothes corroborates this use of fire imagery.

[2] The Greek is much more suggestive than most English translations. It says that they discussed his exodos—commonly diluted to “departure” (Luke 9:31)—which would appear to draw a parallel between the exodus and either Jesus’ death or his resurrection and ascension. Just as Moses led the people of Israel from captivity to freedom, so too Jesus in his death and new life leads his followers from captivity to freedom, from sin to grace, from death to new life.

[3] Cf. Luke 9:51, where he sets his face toward Jerusalem.