Close Encounters of the Holy Kind

St. Andrew's Church, Mer Rouge, La., 10 February 2013

Each time I read or hear the account of the transfiguration in Luke’s Gospel (9:28-43a, NRSV), 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. He says they were awake, but immediately that they were heavy with sleep. But they do see Jesus blazing with light and conversing with the two most prominent prophets of the Hebrew tradition: Moses and Elijah.

By the way, I totally identify with the plight of the disciples in this story. There they are, so tired from trekking around after Jesus that they can hardly keep their eyes open for a most glorious event to transpire in front of them!

As one who falls asleep at her computer with some regularity, I am completely sympathetic! But I wonder: How often do we miss one of God’s very special moments because of weariness or everyday distractions?

The disciples, being practicing Jews, certainly knew the story of Moses’ own transfiguration experience, as told in today’s Old Testament lesson (Exodus 34:29-35, NSV). 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!

The world of dreams and visions and mountaintop transfigurations 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 seem fuzzy on 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. 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 a close encounter of the holy kind!

In his second letter to the Corinthians (3:12 - 4:2, NRSV), 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.

I actually think that’s a bit of a cheap shot on the part of Paul, who perhaps got a bit carried away with making his case for the greater glory of Jesus. Moses clearly was transformed in visible ways by his encounter with God. Veiling his face can be readily understood as an act of humility, not to mention a practical move to avoid frightening the folks.

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 the experience that they couldn’t think straight. Luke says Peter didn’t even know what he was saying when he suggested they build shelters and stay inside the vision forever. I can identify with that, too. Who wants so glorious an experience to end? Don’t we all want to stay on the mountain top!

But moments later, there they are: The cloud lifts, the prophets have disappeared, Jesus isn't glowing anymore. Welcome back to reality. 

And here’s perhaps the most important part of this story: Reality has not changed. The world has not changed.

Now they 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, desperate people. Indeed, a sick child and a desperate father are waiting for Jesus at the foot of the mountain.

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.

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 on his hands and knees drinking water from a muddy, foul-looking drainage ditch. Lack of clean drinking water is a major problem in much of the world.

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?

Ruth Burrows is a Carmelite nun who has written several books about encounters with God through prayer and contemplation. In one of them called Before the Living God she says this:

If I let God take hold of me more and more; possess me, as fire possesses the burning log, then I give off light and heat to the whole world even though the influence be completely hidden. ( from Edge of the Enclosure, online 2/10/13)

May we be transformed by our own encounters of the holy kind this Lenten season.

AMEN

Isn't this Joseph's Son?

St. Andrew's Church, Mer Rouge & Church of the Redeemer, Oak Ridge, La., 3 February 2013

Today’s Gospel story (Luke 4:21-20) sounds to me like nothing so much as overheard gossip at a family reunion.. perhaps especially a family reunion here in the deep south, where family pedigree matters so much!

“Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” the great aunts and uncles cluck. “I mean, the son of the carpenter? Who’d ever have thought he’d turn out like this!”

This lesson is a continuation of last Sunday’s lesson, so we know the context. Jesus has returned home to Nazareth from being baptized by John in the Jordan River and spending 40 days in the wilderness in a meet up with both the devil and God.

In Nazareth, he goes to the synagogue in keeping with custom, stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah—a passage we today categorize as one of “the servant passages”—then proceeds to claim for himself the identity of The Servant as laid out in Isaiah.

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he says. And the hometown community beams with pride. Everyone is amazed that the carpenter’s son speaks so well.

View from "The Precipice" at Nazareth

But… how quickly the clucks of surprised approval from the small-town “family” turn into murderous rage! What in the world does Jesus say in those few intervening verses that his own people go from adoring family to angry mob?

Interestingly enough, all he does is tell them a couple of stories from their very own scriptures!

Who among us has never encountered people who want our Holy Scriptures to say particular things and not others? These are often the same folks who can quote the Bible chapter and verse to support their own preferred points of view—and often prejudices. And they typically are not happy when someone responds with a verse that counters that prejudice.

But, of course, we all have that tendency. We all focus on and know best those parts of the Bible that support our preferred beliefs and points of view, and we all tend to ignore or resist those passages that challenge our biases and favorite traditions.

The stories Jesus tells the locals in the synagogue at Nazareth don’t sound all that shocking or contentious to us. What, after all, is so problematic about Elijah helping the Widow of Zarephath with the miracle of oil and flour that would not run out while her country was in famine?  Or Elisha healing Naaman the Syrian of his leprosy?

Shouldn’t all humankind rejoice when one life is saved? Shouldn’t we be thankful when God’s grace and mercy is extended to another?

But, of course, the fact is, we aren’t! We do not always rejoice in another’s blessing. We are not always thankful for another’s gift from God.

See, the locals to whom Jesus was speaking in the synagogue at Nazareth were all, of course, Jews. And the Jews were God’s chosen people. And they had a deal with God. The Old Testament or Old Covenant we call it.

And that’s all fine and good. But then they made a very human, very understandable in many ways, but deeply flawed move. They got jealous of God! They concluded that because they were chosen and had a deal with God, therefore God could not possibly have chosen anyone else and could not have a deal with any other people.

That is, after all, how human minds work. We love “family values.” We love the concept of “community.” We want to be close to our families. We want to live in tight-knit, supportive communities.

And we like nothing more than being in charge of establishing the criteria for who counts as “family” and who “belongs” in our community!

And that’s precisely where we are most likely to part company with God! We are never quite ready for the expansiveness and inclusiveness of God’s love and grace and mercy.

We want to be God’s chosen, and dang it, we don’t want God to choose those Arabs or Palestinians or Africans or Asians as well.  We want a deal with God—blessings in exchange for good behavior. And we sure don’t want God showering blessings on the illegals, the jailbird, the poor—whom we are certain are mostly lazy and immoral or they wouldn’t be in their sorry circumstances.

Here’s an interesting side-note on today’s Gospel story. Some Biblical scholars think we should not include it in the contemporary lectionary. In other words, they prefer that this story NOT be read in our churches today.

And they have good reason. They point to the fact that a thread of anti-Semitism runs through the Gospels, and this story is part of that thread.

Jesus was a Jew preaching to Jews in their own synagogue in his hometown. And no sooner has he impressed them with his knowledge and skill than he insults them.

You think I’ve come here to be your servant, he says, and you will quote scripture to me to get me to heal those whom you deem worthy of being healed: your families, your community, your fellow Jews.

But I’ve got news for you that you won’t like, Jesus continues, and it comes from your very same scriptures. And the news is, God heals Gentiles too, even when Jews are left starving and dying.

Today we the Gentiles know that we’re chosen too! We’re God’s people too! We have a deal with God as well. We call it the New Covenant or New Testament.

So I think this is a valuable story for us to read today. It challenges us to recognize that we too do not get to turn our chosenness back on God and get angry that God chooses others as well. The challenge for us is accepting that having a deal with us does not limit or prevent God having deals with others.

And perhaps the greatest challenge of all is figuring out who are our “Gentiles.” In other words, who are the peoples we most want God to NOT choose and NOT have a deal with? Who are the people we are quite certain have not earned a place in God’s kingdom?

When we can face and come to terms with our own tendency to construct God in our image and to expect God to use our criteria for entrance into the kingdom, then we can begin to follow—not just believe in, but follow—Jesus into the servant ministry he chose for himself... and calls us to, every time he says, "Follow me."                                                                          

AMEN