Back to Reality: A sermon for 14 February 2010

Each time I read or hear the account of the transfiguration in Luke’s Gospel, I wish I could ask the writer a question. “Well,” I would say, “which was it? Were the disciples awake or asleep when Jesus had his chat with Moses and Elijah?”

It sounds like the writer was not sure. First he says they were heavy with sleep, then that they were awake. They see Jesus blazing with light and conversing with the two most prominent prophets of the Hebrew tradition: Moses and Elijah.

Those disciples, being practicing Jews, certainly knew the story of Moses’ own transfiguration experience, as told in today’s Old Testament lesson. But that account too gets a bit confusing, with all the veiling and unveiling of Moses' face. I lose track. When was his face veiled and when not? How did the Israelites know that Moses’ face was shining if he put a veil over it?

And why—given that the glow from his face signaled that he had been speaking with God… why did he hide it from the people anyway? Seems to me if I had that kind of visible proof that I spoke God’s true word, I would want everyone to see it… loud and clear!

The world of dreams and visions and mountaintop experiences is strange and mysterious. It seems to be poised somewhere between sound asleep and wide awake, somewhere between hard-nosed reality and pure hallucination. It’s probably not surprising that the Biblical accounts are not always clear about the details.

I imagine most of us have had at least one experience something like those described in today’s lessons—a mountaintop experience, a vision or dream that changed our life.  And we’re not sure afterward whether we were awake or asleep, whether it happened or we imagined it.

Of course, there are those among us who scoff at such things. They take pride in being realists; they believe that dreams are just dreams and visions always frauds, and that meaning can only come from what we apprehend with our human senses.

The human intellect is a wonderful thing and a great gift from God that we should use to its fullest capacity. But in comparison to the mind of God, human intellect is profoundly limited.

I am sorry for those who live so thoroughly inside their own cranium that they cannot find meaning in dreams, visions and mountaintop experiences. Their world is small. They are not available to be transformed by a close encounter with God!

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul certainly does not hesitate to find meaning in Moses’ transfiguration. In fact, he makes it almost entirely metaphoric. He says the veiling of Moses’ face stands for the closed minds of the Israelites, who could not enter into the mystery of Christ precisely because of their closed minds.

We are about to enter Lent, a time of reflection and listening for the voice of God. That requires an open mind. It requires letting go. It requires loosening our grip on the comfort and security of reality as we think we know it.

And that takes courage. If we enter into the presence of God with an open mind, we indeed put ourselves in the way of transformation, God’s transformation. Who knows what shifting of the tectonic plates of our world that might produce!

Now, I just made a reference to the natural phenomenon we know as “earthquake,” and it was purposeful. I bring news of Haiti today, but first I want to draw your attention to something that almost gets lost in our amazement at transfiguration. Notice that when Jesus comes down off the mountain fresh from his transfiguration experience, he goes right back to work. The first thing he does is to heal a sick child.

Today I bring news from Fr. Jean-Monique Bruno, who is hard at work responding to the needs of the people of Haiti. I met Fr. Bruno when I and several others from St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic a number of years ago.

Fr. Bruno is Haitian and has ministries in both Haiti and the DR, but right now he is devoting all of his energy and resources to addressing the profound needs of a country and people devastated beyond our imagining.

Fr. Bruno has been particularly successful in his ministry because he knows how to organize local leaders in the communities of displaced people that have formed everywhere. I’m not sure Fr. Bruno ever had training at the hands of an Interfaith type organizer, but it sure sounds like he did!

So now let me share Fr. Bruno’s most recent report, because I think there is no better way to illustrate why Jesus came down off the mountain and immediately went back to work.

February 7, 2010

Dear friends,
Greetings from the Northeast of Haiti! I will always praise the Lord who is using me as instrument for His work. I want to thank all of you who have given me the opportunity to serve my fellow citizens. Your prayers and generous contributions have made the relief work possible.

Since the beginning of the crisis we have been very active at all levels. We have helped in the areas of counseling, food distribution, and health care. Wherever people need help we manifest our presence. Today I want to give you a report of the work being done during the past three weeks.

First we have distributed the following items:
1. 45,000 pounds of rice
2. 10,000 pounds of beans
3. 3 000 pounds of dry fish
4. 4000 pounds of corn
5. 25,000 pounds of spaghetti
6. 4000 liters of oil
7. 1000 pounds of sardines
8. 3000 pounds of charcoal
9. Matches, candles, flash lights, water.
10. Air mattresses.

Those articles went to different people in all parts in the country: 6 communities in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital; a farming village called Gros Morne; the cities of Gonaives and Leogane partly destroyed in the south; and finally Terrier Rouge in the Northeast, where we have our Center of operations. For some of those places we have used the channel of many friends who are leaders of the tent camps established in the affected areas. A total of 2000 families were beneficiaries of those donations.

Our truck has brought back from Port-au-Prince around 80 people who could not find transportation or did not have the means to get to their native village.

Every single day we face new challenges. According to a census made by a Committee of crisis, more than 300 families have moved to our town. I have been working with the Roman Catholic Priest and the members of the Committee providing food and counseling to the people. Last Sunday those who arrived in Terrier Rouge met with a psychologist who taught them some basic principles to adapt themselves to the present situation, since most of them are suffering from deep traumas. I met with the Committee twice to analyze the situation, and decide on the way we can help the people on a short term basis. We also did some planning for the long range.

Many of them have told us that they are not going back to Port-au-Prince - at least for the time being. We are trying to answer some urgent problems like: nutrition, shelter, schooling for the elementary and high school students, new College enrollment for the college students, sportive and cultural activities, and so on. The solution to some of these problems is not too difficult. Our organization is feeding them. Our school, Saint Barthélémy, has already made space available for the integration of the new elementary students. We will find schools for the High school students. But what about the College students, as we do not have Colleges in the area? We were thinking about teaching some short courses in marketable skills using the existing facilities, language courses, and so on. For lodging we talked about building some very light houses which will allow people to find a place to stay temporarily. We are referring the sick and the injured to the two health facilities of the community, our “Clinique Esperance & Vie” and the Government’s.

Another dimension of our relief effort consists in answering calls from people in the Dominican Republic and in the USA who have their relatives in Port-au-Prince. Some through Bethlehem Ministry have asked us to locate their loved ones and to provide some help to them. We have reached around 30 families that way.

We Haitians are survivors. We have known very difficult time as a people. We continue to fight with the grace of God and the aid of our brothers and sisters. We have survived because of our spirit of solidarity. When I mention earlier that we have given food to 2000 families, it means that at least 6000 families have eaten. When the neighbor prepares a meal, he or she shares it with the others.

I am here on the ground doing the work with our volunteers. Every week we make two or three trips to Port-au-Prince taking supplies to the needy. We are working with the community and the Government authorities which facilitate our endeavor. We are available at any time. The relief work continues. Our truck left early this morning with another load of food for Port-au-Prince.

With my best regards,
Jean Monique Bruno+

AMEN.

Called, but... to do what?: A sermon for February 7, 2010

When I was a child, perhaps 8 years old, the pastor of the Mennonite church my family attended retired. I do not remember the details of how a pool of candidates to replace him was chosen. But the culmination of the process is etched in my memory.

Five men stand at the front of the church. An elder of the church holds up to each man a row of matchsticks, all appearing to be identical. Concealed by his hand is the fact that one of the matchsticks is way shorter than the others. Each of the five takes a matchstick, and the man who chooses the short one is thereby “called” to be our next pastor.

Casting lots to determine God’s call was standard practice in Mennonite churches at that time. And it was based on scripture—specifically, the story in Acts 1 of how Mathias was chosen from between two candidates to replace Judas among the apostles.

Today’s lessons provide three examples of God calling humankind. The scene described by Isaiah (6:1-8) is high drama indeed. It appears to have been staged, not for Isaiah’s benefit, but to proclaim the glory of the Lord. Only when Isaiah realizes and proclaims the profound implication of what he is witnessing does one of the seraphs come with a glowing ember.

Every time I hear this story, I shiver in awe and apprehension. What must Isaiah have experienced in that vision to describe it as being touched on the mouth with a live coal!

Whatever it was, Isaiah is purified, his sins wiped out. And then he hears God’s call, and his answer reverberates through the centuries: “Here am I; send me!”

Simon, also called Peter, and his partners, James and John, receive their call from Jesus in person (Luke 5:1-11). The drama on this occasion surely makes the hearts of many a resident of this Sportsman’s Paradise, Louisiana, beat just a little faster: nets so full of fish that the boat begins to sink. Wow! What a catch!

The response of those Galilean fishermen was amazement, of course, mixed with a bit of apprehension. But most importantly, Peter falls to his knees and, like Isaiah centuries earlier, declares his unworthiness. Only then does Jesus first reassure him then issue the call.

I’m not sure why—perhaps because enough food for the table was never a sure thing when I was a kid—but I’ve always enjoyed imagining the peasants who had gathered to hear Jesus helping themselves to the boatloads of fish abandoned by the new apostles who went off to follow Jesus.

The reading we just heard from 1st Corinthians (15:1-11) does not describe Paul’s conversion, but we know that story. Paul is struck down by the light of Christ, the Resurrected One, and is left temporarily blind by the experience.

In his letter to the Corinthians, he too emphasizes his unfitness for The Call. But he emphasizes even more the divine source of his ability to answer the call. “But by the grace of God, I am what I am,” says Paul, “and his grace toward me has not been in vain” (NRSV).

The Bible offers many stories of God’s call to various people. In contrast to the drama of today’s three lessons, God’s call to the boy Samuel was so subtle that Samuel thought it was the old man in the next room. Perhaps it is only grown-ups who require supernatural phenomena to get their attention!

Or, more accurately, perhaps, when we actually hear God speaking to us, we experience it as supernatural. Back when I was in the process of discerning a call to the diaconate, I parked my vehicle one day in the middle of a Louisiana thunderstorm. Just as I opened the door and began to get out, thunder clapped… right in my face, so close and loud the sound waves pushed me back onto the seat of my car.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m listening, I’m listening!”

It is also clear from these stories that feelings of unworthiness in the face of God’s call have a long and honorable history. Nevertheless, those feelings do not constitute justification for avoiding that call. God’s grace is sufficient for all, and working through imperfect, unworthy vehicles like us is precisely the plan. Clutching our sins and gazing at God in disbelief is never a substitute for answering the call.

Now, at this point in building this sermon, I considered spending a few minutes on how Paul, the reluctant and by his own designation the “least” of the apostles, teaches us that ALL are called. Not just those who can prophesy and those who can preach, but also those who serve in the most humble capacity. All are called. And by the grace of God, all have something to offer God’s work in the world.

I also considered spending a few minutes on making a connection between “showing forth,” the theme of this season, and “going forth” in response to God’s call. And that would have made a decent sermon for this Fifth Sunday after the Eiphany.

But this week’s breaking news compels me to go briefly in another direction. Today, ten Baptist missionaries from the United States sit in a jail in Haiti, charged with kidnapping. They had gone to a remote area of Haiti and gathered up a busload of Haitian children. They were stopped by authorities as they were about to cross the border into the Dominican Republic.

The details of the story are not yet fully known. At least one version I read suggests the children, and perhaps some of their parents who were still alive, were seduced by pictures of a beautiful hotel with swimming pool and visions of a relatively luxurious future for the children.

But the part of the story that most gives me pause and compels me to speak to it today is the insistence of the missionaries that they were called by God to save those children by taking them away from their ruined homes and out of their traumatized country.

I believe them to be sincere. I believe they thought they were following God’s call. They might well have known what they were doing was illegal but took the risk willingly in their zeal to follow what they understood to be God’s call.

Countless times throughout human history, human beings have inflicted great cruelty and suffering upon each other in the name of God’s call. We do it because we are no less human for having been called. And so our own human motives, like piety, righteousness, and wanting our own answers to the mysteries of God to be the only answers—these things and more get all tangled up in our sense of God’s call.

Yes, we are called, but how do we know what we are called to do? How do we separate our own rich imagination, our arrogance, our wishful thinking about who we are… from our response to the needs of a hurting world?

As usual, it’s easier to come up with the questions than the answers. But one thing we can do to avoid going down a wrong-headed path is to test our sense of call in a community of faith. Today, not even the Mennonites use the system of casting lots to determine who is called to what. Both our individual calls to ministry and our ministries as a congregation merit discussion and evaluation from various points of view.

Another thing we can do is to bring those we would help to the table to participate in decision-making about how we can help them. It has too often been the vanity of developed nations and well-established religions to impose their beliefs and practices along with the charity they hand out. Bringing people to the table to change the way decisions get made requires a good bit more courage and faith in both God and humankind.

And so today let us give thanks for God’s call, let us accept the grace that enables us to respond to that call, and let us pray for wisdom in discerning how we are to carry out that call in ministering to the needs of the world.

AMEN.