It Is Good to Be Here; a sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

Matthew 17:1-9 (CEB)

Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them to the top of a very high mountain. 2 He was transformed in front of them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as light.

3 Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Jesus. 4 Peter reacted to all of this by saying to Jesus, “Lord, it’s good that we’re here. If you want, I’ll make three shrines: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

5 While he was still speaking, look, a bright cloud overshadowed them. A voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very pleased with him. Listen to him!” 6 Hearing this, the disciples fell on their faces, filled with awe.

7 But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” 8 When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Don’t tell anybody about the vision until the Human One is raised from the dead.”

Let the words of my mouth

    and the meditations of my heart

    be pleasing to you,

    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

I don’t have any idea what I’d do if I were PJ&J. This is a bonkers thing to happen. I’ve been to hospitals and through weird relationship stuff enough to recognize the miraculous as God’s usual MO, but this thing is just bizarro.

It’s so weird that the best comparison we can find prior to it is way back in Exodus:

12 The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain and wait there. I’ll give you the stone tablets with the instructions and the commandments that I’ve written in order to teach them.”

13 So Moses and his assistant Joshua got up, and Moses went up God’s mountain. 14 Moses had said to the elders, “Wait for us here until we come back to you. Aaron and Hur will be here with you. Whoever has a legal dispute may go to them.”

15 Then Moses went up the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. 16 The Lord’s glorious presence settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from the cloud. 17 To the Israelites, the Lord’s glorious presence looked like a blazing fire on top of the mountain. 18 Moses entered the cloud and went up the mountain. Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.

Six days of glory and cloud and creativity. Six days: see the connection? Six days for God to inscribe the Word that would set the children of Israel apart from all the other peoples around. Six days of crafting and creating, and then God calls Moses.

And on the seventh day, Moses joined God on the mountain.

I might have happily handed that job off to somebody else, except when God calls your name, there’s only so much hemming and hawing and avoiding you can realistically do.

Moses!

um. ok.

Can you even imagine?

That’s the flavor of extraordinary happening atop the mountain with Jesus and PJ&J. It’s no wonder they don’t have any idea what to make of it. It’s just another day, as far as they’re concerned. I mean, some pretty wild stuff had just happened: Peter had his inspired confession of Christ, was promised the keys of the kingdom, and promptly scolded Jesus for saying he was going to die. They sat on that for six days…

six days…

and then they went for a hike and this happened.

At least they had a little time for it something to sink in. Or maybe Jesus was spending six days reconnecting to that written Word he had come to fulfill. My favorite recent take is from a colleague I haven’t met yet.

That’s when Peter busts in.

And, y’all, I wonder a little if he’s just being impetuous, knee-jerking, speak-before-you-think Peter; or if he and James and John are elbowing each other: “say something!” “No, you say something!” “What am I supposed to say?” “How should I know?”

“Wow, Jesus. This is… wow. We should… do a thing… a booth! We can build a booth, a tabernacle… er… pile up some rocks…”

Do y’all ever just smile and shake your head at Peter? Poor Peter. He tries so hard. He has such a good heart.

Oh, wait, that’s where we use that phrase:

Bless his heart.

That, I’m convinced, is exactly what goes through the Divine One’s mind when the heavens send a glowing cloud and a voice mercifully interrupts Peter:

This is my Son whom I dearly love. I am very pleased with him. Listen to him!

And they fall on their faces and the whole thing ends, quickly as it came.

This probably would have gone a lot better if Peter had just stopped at, “It is good to be here.”

He didn’t have to react. He didn’t have to fumble through ideas, looking for something in their tradition, in his experience for this one-off extraordinary moment to connect with.

This was never going to connect with anything in his experience.

And, you know, Jesus didn’t have to invite them along, either. He doesn’t need the company. He doesn’t need their approval. Bringing them isn’t for him. It’s for them. He isn’t looking for an appropriately religious reaction. He is giving them a gift.

I suppose we’re not very good at recognizing that.

What we’re doing now is a gift. This community surrounding us is a gift. But the temptation we face is not just to take it for granted, but to go so far as to curse it.

These stubborn and rebellious people… these argumentative people… these mean people… these people who don’t understand what scripture clearly says… I wish they’d just go away, leave me alone, find somebody else to bother…

Do you recognize that as the language of cursing? All that we do that divides us from each other is cursing. God’s blessing always brings healing and community. Harm and division are always curses.

I’m aware that we’re reeling from division. I’m aware that we’re reeling from harm. I’m aware of what I’ve done and said that has added to that, and I’m trying to be aware of what has been out of my control. We each have to live with the consequences of our actions. That guilt weighs heavily. But we each have to realize that we can’t control each other. Other people make choices, too. To best respect each other, we have to let each other make our own choices. It is rarely ever a good choice to try to control someone else’s actions.

Control of others is not ours to take. Control of every situation is never ours to take.

Peter is lucky when he tries to take control of the situation atop the mountain. It was so far out of his league that what he suggests goes essentially unheard and unnoticed.

We aren’t always so lucky when we try to wrest control out of others’ hands. Sometimes God will actually let us, and that rarely, if ever, goes well.

We need to learn to let go. We need to learn to recognize the gift that God is giving us. Even in the midst of division and decline and strife, there is blessing to be recognized. There is transformation being revealed to us. Even in the midst of everything going wrong, the kinship of God is shining through the cracks in our walls.

And in every place and time and relationship in which that is happening, which is everywhere and with everyone, it is good to be here.

Pay attention. Something glorious is happening right near you. I guarantee you want to be a part of it.

It is good to be here.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Great Thanksgiving for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany, Year A

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

Chemist of Creation, you separate water from water

and leave vast beds of salt

that your creatures might taste and see your goodness.

Light of the World, you separate day from night

and promise to be light to us

no matter how dark our souls.

Throughout time, you have been our goodness and our light,

but we prefer the dark and bitterness

of our misguidance and anger.

So, generation after generation,

you have chosen a remnant

to remind us the value of true fasting,

the freedom of our siblings,

fasting from want and danger,

that all may be safe and whole.

When still we glutted ourselves

and ignored our neighbors,

you sent us the true Light

to remind us how to shine.

And so, with your people across creation

and all the host of the heavens,

we join in their ceaseless song of praise:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might!

All creation rings with your praise:

Hosanna in the highest!

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest!

We acclaim you, Holy One,

and we bow to your Light, the Word fulfilling all words.

He offered to us more wisdom

than anyone could possibly remember,

more healing

than anyone could possibly recount.

His goodness nourishes and keeps us

and his truth is our light.

Everything he is, he gives to us;

a practice so hard to palate

that we quarreled and fought

   and struck him with wicked fists

until the Light went dim on a tree

and the Word became silent.

But still, your mystery whispered to us,

and we hear and join today:

Christ died, and the cosmos turned dark;

Christ has risen at the break of the day;

Christ will come again, a delicious healing balm for all.

On the eve of the darkest hour of creation,

he sat with his friends

to share a meal they all knew,

all of history bound up

in one hurried moment.

He took the ancient loaf,

gave thanks to you,

shared it with his disciples,

and renamed it:

“Take this and take it in.

This is my body I give for you.

Do this. Remember me.”

At the end of the meal he took the old cup,

gave thanks to you,

shared it with his disciples,

and gave it a new name:

“Drink from this, each of you.

This is my blood, emptied for you.

Every time you do this, remember me.”

Pour out your Spirit on us here,

and on these gifts we have brought:

yeasty, salty bread

and sweet, simple juice.

Make them be all we need:

your body and your life-giving blood,

that we may be for all

the body of the Savior, made perfect by his blood.

Make us one, as you are One,

so we may together shine your light,

refracting through us.

Make us together the seasoning of your world,

until the world is complete

and all everywhere and together

sing your praise,

our Light, our Joy, our Peace,

holy in One.

Amen.

My Child, the Beloved; a sermon for Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Matthew 3:13-17 (NRSV)

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ ¹⁵But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. ¹⁶And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. ¹⁷And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Let the words of my mouth

    and the meditations of my heart

    be pleasing to you,

    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Here, my friends, is another story about Jesus that’s chock full of weirdness that we’ve normalized over the passing millennia. Set aside the geographic unfamiliarity we encounter hearing locations like Galilee and the Jordan. It gets odder as we dive in.

We already know the Jesus guy and the John guy. They’ve been introduced, but maybe not as fully by Matthew as by Luke. We know who they are. Via Luke we know they’re cousins. They’re very close in age. So we’ve got all that.

But look at the other stuff in the story.

Imagine being in the crowd (because John apparently drew crowds) and having everyday conversations, or trying to make small talk to folks from some other town who’ve traveled to find John out here in the wilderness. People are going down toward John one at a time. No way does anybody hear the interaction between the cousins. There’s too much else going on. But suddenly:

• the heavens were opened (what does that even mean?)
• a ghostly dove thing falls from the sky and lands on the dude who just came out of the water
• a voice booms from heaven

And if that’s all normalized for you and doesn’t feel weird enough, or if you have grown to expect that what the gospels offer are the extraordinary and the miraculous, let me offer this one:

• Jesus is concerned with what’s proper.

We don’t find out until later on in the gospel how bizarre that is. We don’t learn about Jesus turning things on their heads as a matter of practice until farther in.

I am convinced that we don’t spend enough effort understanding how weird these stories are, and how weird are some of the things we claim and practice.

I believe in the resurrection of the dead.

How foolish are we if we think that our bodies will last until Jesus comes? How foolish are we to think we don’t revert back into the global carbon cycle? The dust of our ancestors is the nourishment of the tomatoes we eat.

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,

one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world

One with each other… fat chance.

Make them be, for us, the body and blood of Christ

This is the claim that had the Roman world convinced that the followers of the way were cannibals eating the flesh of their leader. Also, the Latin for “this is the body,” hoc est corpus is the locus of “hocus pocus.”

Maybe if it’s weird, you’re on the right track, baby; you’re reborn this way.

Hey.

It’s no wonder Nicodemus had such a hard time with Jesus’s “born again” language. He’s totally right: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bizarre. It’s absurd.

And still we trust in it.

Wait. Strike that. Revise it.

We trust in the One whose power works through it.

And we don’t have to understand everything that One is doing through the sacrament, either. Nicodemus didn’t get it. John didn’t get it. I think we’d be lucky to grasp one of the Spirit’s miracles in baptism in any given moment. Bath and resurrection and forgiveness and initiation and adoption and remembrance…

Sometimes the best thing to do is just to open up and let God.

You are not in control here. The more you try to be in control, the more the power of God’s Spirit is going to slip through your grip. You lack the imagination and the power and the perspective to have control here.

Let go.

John thought he knew what he was doing. He held on to an idea of righteousness that got him absolutely furious at the Temple hierarchy. And I think there’s room for that righteous anger. And I think we have a prophetic duty to speak and act and maybe shout truth to human power and its structures.

But John seems to forget the nature of the Servant that Isaiah speaks centuries earlier:

He won’t cry out or shout aloud

    or make his voice heard in public.

He won’t break a bruised reed;

    he won’t extinguish a faint wick,

    but he will surely bring justice.

When Jesus came along to show John and his followers that this was appropriate for the Human One, too; that Jesus, the son of a woman, needed this sacrament, too; John’s mind went boom.

It’s okay that we don’t get it. But there’s one part of the sacrament, one part of the story that echoes to each one of us today.

a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

That’s not just a proclamation about Jesus, y’all. That is the proclamation of the Creator of the Cosmos to every single one of us. As each of us comes up out of the water of our baptism, whether our clothes are sopping wet or there’s just a faint trickle tickling its way down toward our forehead, that same booming voice from heaven is grinning from nebula to supernova and whispering to each of us:

You are my child, the beloved.

If you can’t hold on to anything else, hold on to that. It’s essential. It’s central. It’s everything.

You are my child, the beloved.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer for Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Great Spirit who hovered over primal waters,

you are beginning and ending,

all in all:

Return your creation to unity with you,

not with devastating flood,

but with the patience of the stream

that smooths rocks and cleanses wounds.

Nourish us today

with all that grows from your living water:

food for the body

and grace for the soul.

Cleanse us of all that defiles

until the swimming hole we share

runs sparkling clear,

so all your children

may play together in joy and safety.

For we trust you,

whose power we hear in the thunder

and whose mercy falls like rain

until in your temple all cry, “Glory!”

and your praise echoes through eternity.

Amen.

Your Light Has Come: a sermon for Epiphany Sunday

Matthew 2:1-12 (CEB)

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the territory of Judea during the rule of King Herod, magi came from the east to Jerusalem. 2 They asked, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.”

3 When King Herod heard this, he was troubled, and everyone in Jerusalem was troubled with him. 4 He gathered all the chief priests and the legal experts and asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 They said, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for this is what the prophet wrote:

6 You, Bethlehem, land of Judah,

        by no means are you least among the rulers of Judah,

            because from you will come one who governs,

            who will shepherd my people Israel.”

7 Then Herod secretly called for the magi and found out from them the time when the star had first appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search carefully for the child. When you’ve found him, report to me so that I too may go and honor him.” 9 When they heard the king, they went; and look, the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were filled with joy. 11 They entered the house and saw the child with Mary his mother. Falling to their knees, they honored him. Then they opened their treasure chests and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 Because they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they went back to their own country by another route.

Let the words of my mouth

    and the meditations of my heart

    be pleasing to you,

    Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Y’all, I am generally a morning person. I am pretty nonfunctional by the end of the day, but in the morning I can generally get up and moving and — fueled by a good double shot of espresso — be a fully functioning human being. Generally. I have my mornings when that’s a bit more difficult.

So when Isaiah says,

Arise! Shine!

I’m generally pretty good to go.

Some of y’all are morning people, too. I’d invite you to read Isaiah’s song from that kind of perspective. We could approach it metaphorically, but let’s live into the scene instead. I feel like it’s informative.

Especially in this season, when we’re just beginning to pull away from the longest night, and the sun is still pinking the clouds at half past seven, early risers like me find ourselves in the darkness for a while.

Though darkness covers the earth

    and gloom the nations,

    the Lord will shine upon you;

    God’s glory will appear over you.

When it’s early and dark, I do what I can to make sure I’m being quiet so the rest of the house can sleep. I turn off the alarm quickly, tread softly to the bathroom — I’ve made a point, the night before, to mark where things are I might kick and make a ruckus. I shut the door and turn on a gentle light. When I go down the hallway, it’s in silence. Every noise in the night, when you’re sleeping in the quiet, sounds ten times louder than it does during the day. I don’t want to startle anyone. I want to let them sleep.

When I dress to run, I barely crack the bathroom door enough to make out which way my socks fit. All I need is the light around me. I don’t need to illuminate the room.

Darkness covers the house.

Nations will come to your light

    and kings to your dawning radiance.

It doesn’t really take much light to make out what we need to. We have, I think, grown accustomed to being flooded with electric light all the time. Most of us, I’m sure, grew up with the convenience of having a light switch in every doorway that worked around the clock. It’s a convenience that we depend on so much that we view it as a right.

That troubles me.

At Buffalo Mountain Camp and at Camp Wesley Woods, one of our regularly programmed activities was a night hike. Campers left their flashlights in their bunks, and we led them on a single-file hike silently up a trail. We helped them discover how much more of the world they could experience when they opened up their range of vision beyond what a flashlight can illuminate. It is astounding how much you can see by the light of stars and moon. It is also inspiring to realize how much more you can experience when your other senses are sharpened.

It is also necessary to rid ourselves of our more redundant and distracting lights in order to find the light we’re looking for.

The magi were students of the stars and what wisdom their movements could impart upon observant people. It was an early science, one that we find laughable today. I wonder how much of our science will be laughable in fifty or five hundred years. We do our best with the tools and the collected knowledge we have available to us, just as the magi did two millennia ago. And it would seem that, regardless of the primitiveness of our science, the Holy Spirit is able to use our science to gift us with revelation.

By the way, isn’t it amazing that God is willing to self-reveal to us in our foolishness? God doesn’t make fun of our foolishness or dismiss it for the bungling effort that it is. God uses it. In fact, I’m going to be so bold as to say that the presence of God that we observe in our foolish attempts at comprehending the world around us validates and affirms our those attempts that we do make.

God isn’t asking us to get our science and art and study absolutely perfect. God doesn’t even seem to care that what we’re finding isn’t necessarily wholly true or factual or sound. It would appear that what God is concerned with is that we’re making an effort.

Which, by the way, is not the same as either not making an effort or obfuscating a genuine effort at finding truth. God is not going to bless or affirm our attempts to promote falsehood and deceit. That is chaff that God is going to burn with the rest of the garbage.

But our genuine, well-intentioned efforts God will affirm.

So if revelation is what we’re after; if truth is what we’re after; if seeing God is what we’re after, then maybe what we need to be doing is spending more time and effort eliminating all the distractions around us and opening ourselves to the possibility that God is already present. Maybe it’s time to take a night hike, leave the flashlight and the phone and the pager behind, out of sight and out of sound, and open our eyes and ears and heart and mind to the wider world of God’s presence everywhere in our natural and social environment.

Arise! Shine! Your light has come;

    the Lord’s glory has shone upon you.

A lot of our images of the magi show them heavy with rich fabrics and bejeweled headgear, grasping at the silly old idea that they were kings of some sort. We would do well to make our scientists kings, I think. But I want to invite you to focus not on the magi themselves, but rather on the light they were pursuing.

Find a way to let go of all the distraction and rediscover that light. It is all around you and it is within you. It is leading you to the only one truly worth finding.

Your light has come.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It Is Good: a Great Thanksgiving for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Lord is here.

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

Open yourself wide to God’s presence.

With open spirits we feast on Christ’s goodness!

Let’s proclaim our thankfulness together.

Yes! Thankfulness is a good thing to do.

It is good and joyful to give you thanks,

Loving God, who kneaded primordial waters

and called your creation good.

It is good to remember

that your hand created us out of the dry land

and your Spirit inspired our spirits to start singing.

It is good and loving of you

to seek us out in our darkest times

and giving us the good word of your prophets

whose word from ages ago

still proclaims

    good news to the poor, 

    release to the prisoners 

    and recovery of sight to the blind, 

    liberation of the oppressed, 

     and the arrival of the year of the Lord’s favor.

It is good of us, then, to join our voices

with the prophets and all the company of heaven

who forever praise your name and sing their endless hymn:

Holy! Holy! Holy are you, God of goodness and power!

All creation is full of your glory;

Let hosannas ring everywhere!

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Let hosannas ring out into all the ages!

Holy are you, and blessed is your son, Jesus Christ,

who comes to us as your age breaks in,

showing us himself in the children on the margins:

the poor, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant,

the anathematized of every community.

It is good that you sit us with them

to feast on your goodness together.

It is so good that he told us to do it

every time we gather:

To take the good gift of the grain,

to thank you for it,

to break it and share it,

and to hear his words again:

“This is my body, living bread, broken for you.

Take it in. Eat it up. Remember me.”

To take the good gift of the cup,

thank you for it,

share it with each other,

and hear the shocking proclamation:

“This is my blood.

It’s a brand-new promise.

It’ll give you real life.

Take it in. Drink it up. Remember me.”

So we remember, and as you offer yourself

wholly, completely,

we pour ourselves out to you,

and proclaim the mystery that is faith:

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

In your goodness, Lord,

you pour yourself out on us, gathered here,

and on these table gifts we bring.

Make them be your goodness for us;

your body, your blood,

and make us what we eat:

the body of Christ, sanctified by his blood.

It is good that you’ve drawn us together;

now bind us together, and draw us to you,

to love your world as you do

until all the world, all creation, shares your love.

Your love is good.

It is good.

Amen.

Philippians 4:1-9

Loved ones, I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to come to an agreement in the Lord. Yes, and I’m also asking you, loyal friend, to help these women who have struggled together with me in the ministry of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my coworkers whose names are in the scroll of life.

We Wesleyan Christians have a long history of finding ways to live together even in the midst of disagreement. Finding middle ground and developing intentional space to converse civilly is a point of pride for us as a denomination.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that healthy dialogue occurs in every local context. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had to sit through surrounded by colleagues or parishioners whose ideology is entirely opposite mine but who agree on all their own points. Those conversations turn quickly vitriolic, and it is painfully clear that no argument will convince anyone that there is another point of view worth considering.

I realize that I’ve compelled people to sit through the same thing when I find an ally and begin venting off pent-up frustration.

I realize now, and I typically realize at the time, that my own vitriol completely fails to win hearts and minds, and only serves to make the atmosphere more toxic.

I realize that when I do that, I’m only feeding the fire that’s burning out of control in today’s polarizing culture.

What I wonder, then, is how to read what Paul suggests to the church in Phillipi. Are we to aim for complete agreement, which is probably an impossible task today, or are we to learn to live in disagreement and focus on those points on which we find common ground?

What is the healthy way for the Body of Christ to live?