Face Time

Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

My son has a girl friend. Like an amazing number of young couples today, they met online—on Twitter, to be precise. She lives two states away. But that does not prevent them from “hanging out,” watching television together, even playing video games together.

How do they do that? It’s called “face time.” And it’s possible because phones today have video cameras built into them. And it helps that “long distance” calling is now no different than calling the house next door.

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 (Exodus 24:12-18 & Matthew 17:1-9, NRSV).  “Face time” with God, if you will, and you don’t have to go to a geographic mountain to experience it.

Of course, there are those among us who scoff at such things. Those who take pride in being realists. Those who believe that dreams are just dreams and visions always frauds, and nothing is real save what we apprehend with our human senses and rational minds.

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 face time with God!

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!

The disciples were so rattled by their experience that they couldn’t think straight. Peter suggests that they build shelters and stay inside the vision forever. I can identify with that. Who wants so glorious an experience to end? Don’t we all want to stay on the mountaintop!

But moments later, they must head back down the mountain, back to reality. I’ve always believed that Jesus tells Peter, James and John to keep the vision secret because he knew people—maybe even the other nine disciples—would think the three who had shared the vision were crazy!

In other words, reality has not changed. The world has not changed. Other people have not changed.

Now, Jesus and his disciples must head for Jerusalem, and we all know what happens there. Jesus still must die. The world is still hurting. Still full of sick people, poor people, lonely people, desperate people.

And what does Jesus do when he comes down off the mountain fresh from his transfiguration experience? He goes right back to work. The first thing he does is heal a sick child.

Our passage today ends with verse nine, but in verse 14 of the same chapter, Jesus has reached the foot of the mountain where the crowd awaits. He is immediately confronted with a man whose son is an epileptic with uncontrolled seizures that cause him to fall into fires and water. And Jesus heals the boy.

You see, close encounters with God are NOT for the purpose of making the world a rosy place for us. They are not designed to transform the world. They are designed to transform us.

Not long ago, I was perusing the stream of photos I access daily through the online social network called Google+. I happened across an image someone had found online and re-shared. It was a photograph of a small, dark-skinned boy drinking water from a muddy, foul-looking drainage ditch.

Someone had posed a question below the photo: Why does God allow this?

I was quick to respond: God doesn’t allow this, I wrote. We do.

Why do we keep expecting God to take care of what we’ve been put in charge of? How much of our prayer life do we spend asking God to fix the world, rather than inviting and being open to God transforming us… so that we go about fixing the world?

Every Sunday morning is not a mountaintop experience like the transfiguration. But it is a bit of face time with God!

We come into this beautiful space to sing, pray, see the powerful symbols of our faith in brass and stained glass. We come expecting God to be here.

Most Sunday mornings, we come to share in Christ’s body and blood, for he is known to us in the breaking of the bread.

All too often, I fear, we try to leave God here. Our face time with God feeds only us, and not the world through us.

But our very theology of Holy Eucharist is that we are fed so that we may feed the world. In general, I am not a fan of Rite I. But the Rite I post-communion prayer is the best statement of our Eucharistic theology that I know of.

So grab a prayer book and turn to p. 339 (BCP, 1979). We begin by giving thanks:

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee that thou dost feed us…with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood….

And now skip down to the petition:

And we humbly beseech thee…so to assist us with thy grace, that we may…do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in…

Please note, this is not about throwing a few extra alms in a basket. It’s not about spending an hour or two a week of spare time volunteering at the Shepherd Center.

It is about living our life as a way God has prepared for us to walk in. It is as if God says, “Walk this way,” and shows us how through Jesus the Christ. And that way is the way of being God’s love in the world.

May we be transformed by our face time with God, today and every day. May we discern the way God calls us to walk in, in our own time and place.

AMEN