February 26, 2017 sermon: Holiness Enthroned And Encountered

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

(Matthew 17:1-9)

The Lord is king; let the peoples tremble! He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted over all the peoples. Let them praise your great and awesome name. Holy is he! Mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob. Extol the Lord our God; worship at his footstool. Holy is he! Moses and Aaron were among his priests, Samuel also was among those who called on his name. They cried to the Lord, and he answered them. He spoke to them in the pillar of cloud; they kept his decrees, and the statutes that he gave them. O Lord our God, you answered them; you were a forgiving God to them, but an avenger of their wrongdoings. Extol the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy.

(Psalm 99:1-9)

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     I have to stand in front of you today and confess that basically I always struggle with what I’m supposed to do with the Transfiguration of Jesus. If you follow the Lectionary, the story comes up every year on the Sunday before Lent starts. Last year, I confess that I took the easy way out and just ignored the story completely. I didn’t want to do that two years in a row, though, so I was left with the question that always comes to me – what to do with the Transfiguration of Jesus? It’s a strange story;  baffling one in some ways. What does it mean for us today? What does it add to our faith? The Lectionary this year includes Psalm 99 as one of the other readings for today. The Psalms are often used as reflections on the theme for that particular Sunday, so I chose to look at Psalm 99 in that vein. Several times in Psalm 99 God is referred to as holy, and that is in fact an important word to use in connection with God. “Holy” is a word that’s used to emphasize the difference between God and humanity. God is pure; we are not. God is eternal; we are not. God is perfect; we are not. God is more than we are. The Creator is always more than the creation. As I read through this Psalm, what I see in my mind is an image of a God who is enthroned in heaven in such a way as to demonstrate divine authority, and yet – as powerful as God is, and as different as God is from creation – the Psalm affirms that God is not limited to heaven. While Psalm 99 stressed God’s transcendance, the author is also very deliberate in assuring us that the gap between God and humanity has been bridged – that God is not only transcendant, but also immanent. God reigns over us, but God is not remote from us. The Creator is not isolated from the creation. Instead, God is present with us and God rejoices when we approach. The Psalm tells us that God is “great in Zion” - which means that God’s authority is not exercised only over us, but also with us and through us. And it’s from within the midst of those who love God – you and I – that God’s grandeur, God’s holiness and God’s love reaches out to the whole of the world. If God is enthroned in heaven and surrounded by powerful cherubim, then God is also encountered on earth and surrounded by humble souls who accept the invitation to come near. This encounter we have with holiness is the centrepiece of our faith, because Christian faith is not just a set of beliefs, it’s an experience – a relationship of love with an Almighty God. And if that’s the commentary offered by the Psalm, then how do we see this combination of transcendance and immanence shown in the strange events of the Transfiguration of Jesus. This is where I want to go back to the gospel reading that Karen and I shared at the start of our service today, because that story illustrates both transcendance and immanence through Jesus.

     It struck me that the story of the Transfiguration begins with the words “after six days.” I had never thought of that before, but for some reason as I read the story earlier this week those are the words I began to focus on. They reminded me of the story of creation in the Book of Genesis – that God created in six days until all was complete. A lot of the Bible is symbolic, and numbers are very important in the Bible. Maybe I was making too much of this – it could, I suppose, have been a coincidence – but I do think there’s a point being made here. In John’s Gospel, the very first words of the Gospel are “in the beginning.” That seems to fulfil the same purpose – it ties Jesus to the story of creation. He was there, in the beginning, John tells us. In Matthew, it’s the Transfiguration that gets tied to creation. What’s the connecting point? Obviously, the story of creation is about the creative work of God. God has brought about something new. God has brought order to chaos. God has created everything from nothing. In a way creation itself is the most basic revelation of God that there is. Is the same point being made about the Transfiguration? Is this strange and baffling event the start of something new? Is it a turning point? Are the disciples suddenly confronted by a new revelation of God? I would say that the answer is “YES!” The Transfiguration – perhaps as much as anything – makes the point that Jesus is not just a rabbi or itinerant preacher or worker of miracles. Jesus himself is the revelation of God – God’s love suddenly active and present in the world; God’s glory suddenly revealed; God’s word suddenly made flesh. Because of Jesus, God could never be seen in the same way again.

     Jesus appeared with Moses and Elijah – enthroned in a sense between two of the greatest figures in Israel’s history: Moses, the giver of the Law, and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets. Both the Law and the prophets were revelations of God: they were God’s will for God’s people and God’s word for God’s people. They Law showed God’s people how to live and the prophets told the people where they were coming up short. And then, all of a sudden, there is this vision: Jesus, between Moses and Elijah. Jesus transcends all other revelations of God and becomes THE revelation of God. Jesus becomes the one who holds the law and the prophets together. There had always been tension between Law and prophets. Many of God’s people fixated on the written word; others were far more concerned with the spoken word. One revelation had been given once and was fixed in stone; the other was a continual process of revelation guided by God’s Spirit. We still have that problem today in our own faith: the debate between those who see God’s word as basically ink on paper and interpret it literally and those who believe that God is always revealing new things and can’t be contained by a written word. But either without the other is incomplete. The Law and the prophets; the written word and the spoken word; a one time revelation and an ongoing revelation – these are not in competition; they are complementary. The sight of Jesus between Moses and Elijah points that out. There’s the quest of science for the theory of everything – for a single theory that explains everything that exists – and there’s also a quest of faith for something that will hold everything together. Christians believe that everything is held together and that God is finally and fully and perfectly revealed in Jesus, who on the day of the Transfiguration stands between Moses and Elijah and holds the Law and the prophets together and ushers in a new understanding of God. This is what those disciples encountered. Jesus – enthroned as the ultimate revelation of God is encountered by his disciples in the light of that vision.

     I’m struck by how they respond. I’m struck by it because it mirrors so much of how we ourselves respond to our own encounters with the divine in our lives. Jesus appeared with Moses and Elijah – and Moses and Elijah were long dead. How would you respond? It would be as if Donald Trump suddenly appeared with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Well. Maybe. A bit. The point is that it would be unexpected. For Peter and James and John this encounter was totally unexpected. We don’t know what they expected on that day when Jesus took them up a mountain. Maybe they thought it nothing more than a hike in the fresh air. But I don’t think they were expecting Moses and Elijah to suddenly show up. And what happened? Well, Peter was essentially speechless. Sometimes the Gospels are funny if you think about them. This is one of those times. Peter looks – he sees Jesus with his face shining as bright as the sun and with Moses and Elijah on either side of him. And, basically Peters says, “Oh. Well. Um. How ‘bout I pitch some tents for you three?” Was there much logic in Peter’s words? Was there anything especially thoughtful or insightful about them? No. Peter just didn’t know what to say and so he said whatever words popped into his head – even if they were inane. Often we don’t know how to react to Jesus, either. That’s why – if you get three Christians together – you’ll probably have at least five theories between them about who Jesus was. I have no sympathy for the idea that you have to turn your brain off to go to church. I think we’re called to learn and discern. Our brains are to be turned on. But maybe we have to learn to be satisfied – at least sometimes – with the revelation of God and the presence of Jesus, and we don’t have to have something to say about every encounter with Jesus that we have. Because half the time when we speak about Jesus – and I’m a preacher so I understand this danger – we probably don’t have anything deeper to say than what Peter offered on the mountain! So maybe we should just respond.

     That’s immediately what Peter and his companions did. They fell to the ground, overcome by fear. As always in the Bible, when we see the word “fear” we might wonder whether it means to actually be afraid. In the Bible, the word usually has a sense of “awe” to it. Perhaps they are awestruck and speechless more than afraid. Suddenly face to face with the holiness of God, they simply fall before Jesus, overcome by the experience. And maybe it wasn’t just that in this moment they encountered the holiness of God; maybe it was that in the presence of God’s holiness they were also confronted by their own lack of holiness – they suddenly realized that they weren’t worthy to be there; they weren’t worthy to have had this experience; they weren’t worthy to have had this great revelation. They fell because they suddenly found themselves unable to face this Jesus whom they had been following. A barrier had been torn away and they had seen Jesus for who he really was and they couldn’t face him. But Jesus – as he always does – said to them, “don’t be afraid.” Don’t be overwhelmed by Jesus or by the state of the world or by your present circumstances or by your failings or by your past. Don’t be overwhelmed; don’t think that there’s nothing you can do; don’t fall on the ground where you’ll be useful to no one. Get up, follow Jesus, move on. Do his work.

     I’m still not sure that I know entirely what to make of the Transfiguration.  But I might have figured it out a bit. When we encounter God, we discover holiness and grace, justice and mercy, judgement and salvation, righteous anger and divine forgiveness – all in perfect balance; all revealed to us by Jesus. And Psalm 99 reminds us that even in those times when we feel distant from God or overwhelmed by God or circumstances – God is still with us. Prayers are still heard and revelation is still given. Psalm 99 closes with the words “the Lord our God is holy.” There’s a relationship implied by those words – a relationship of intimacy. This God – so powerful, so transcendant, so holy – is our God. God is holy but God is not ashamed to be our God. “Get up, “Jesus said to his overwhelmed disciples, “and do not be afraid.” And he led them down the mountain, where the rest of the journey – leading to Jerusalem, a cross and an empty tomb - was about to begin; a journey that we are about to join.

A Thought For The Week Of February 20, 2017

"I give you a new command: Love each other. You must love each other as I have loved you." (John 13:34) One of the truly wonderful things about the Bible is that no matter how familiar you are with a particular verse or passage, every now and then the Holy Spirit surprises you by revealing something new about it. Take these words from our passage today as an example: "You must love each other as I have loved you." Obviously, Jesus is saying to his disciples that his love is an example to them. But I have always interpreted this verse in terms of the cross and the death of Jesus, so that to me it has always meant that Jesus gives his life or sacrifices for us, so that we who call ourselves Christians have to be willing to sacrifice for each other. Now, that's a noble concept surely, and I'm not saying that it's wrong, but as I was pondering these words today what occurred to me is that they're in the past tense. The crucifixion hasn't happened yet obviously, and so "as I have loved you" can't be a reference to Jesus' death. The words are in the past tense, and the crucifixion is in the future. When that leaped out at me - and it never had before - I found it puzzling and interesting. So, then, what does Jesus mean? What is he referring to? How has he loved the disciples (past tense)? As I worked with these words it finally occurred to me that basically Jesus has loved the disciples simply by calling them together and by making a community and even by making a form of family from a very diverse group of people. Isn't that love? Breaking down barriers, creating relationships, bonding people together? Isn't that love? At this point in his ministry, that's how Jesus had loved his disciples: by making the many into the one. Ultimately, that's our calling - perhaps it's what Paul meant when he spoke of the "ministry of reconciliation." Sacrifice may be (and, indeed, surely is) a part of that, but it's not the whole of it. As Jesus has loved us by breaking down the barriers between different peoples and between all people and God, so are we to love one another by working to do the same.

A Thought For The Week Of February 13, 2017

"Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked." (Psalm 97:10) It's often said that there's a fine line between love and hate. Both are very passionate emotions and both can lead us to do irrational things. That may, of course, be one of our problems: we choose to think of love and hate as merely human emotions rather than as spiritual forces. They are human emotions, of course, but there are varying degrees and natures to love and hate - and both do have a spiritual component to them. They are not simply of this world, and they do not simply flow from our hearts. As spiritual forces both love and hate go beyond anything that we might simply "feel" and they take possession of us. They become not only our feelings but our thoughts and our actions as well. We also, of course, think of them as polar opposites: completely different things that simply don't work together. And, of course, from a Christian perspective we think of hate as abhorrent: the antithesis of everything that Jesus taught. But it's not necessarily so. This verse seems to point out that in at least one way love leads to hate quite naturally. In fact, love and hate can support and complement each other. "Let those who love the Lord hate evil ..." What occurs to me here is that the true polar opposites are not love and hate but rather God and evil. In fact, God and evil are such polar opposites that if one is loved then the other must be hated. It's inevitable. You cannot love both God and evil. Nor can you hate both, for that matter. In the New Testament this concept gets a bit reframed as "you cannot love both God and money" and "the love of money is the root of all evil." The point is that whatever we truly love controls our lives and whatever tries to draw us away from the thing that we love we inevitably hate. We hate evil if we love God, but on the other hand if we choose to love that which is evil, the result is to hate God. Love and hate both have the power to change not only our own lives, but also the entire world. We see enough of the influence that hate has. May those who love God reveal ever more powerfully the difference that their love can make.

A Thought For The Week Of February 6, 2017

"For my eyes have seen your salvation." (Luke 2:30) I wonder what the emotion was behind the words of this verse? "For my eyes have seen you salvation." Was it joy, relief, satisfaction? Something else? A combination? In the context of the passage actually it was probably assurance and peace. The words come from Simeon, who has just encountered the baby Jesus. Simeon was an old man who was close to death and basically his encounter with Jesus prepared him for death and made him able to look death in the face and be unafraid and at peace. And that's a valuable thing, because I doubt that there are very many things in life that are more uncomfortable than contemplating the inevitability of our own death. But somehow this encounter with Jesus made Simeon aware of God's plan for salvation. And it's significant that this took place while Jesus was a baby. This was before he taught anything to anyone. This was before his death and resurrection. There's no "Gospel" at this point. There's nothing but a helpless baby. But somehow there was something about this helpless baby that touched Simeon and changed him. There's something about Jesus. For us all. We don't have to understand everything about him, know the details of his life and teaching, ponder the mystery of Good Friday and Easter, or engage in spirited and in depth theological debate. None of that is necessary. As Simeon did - we can start just by encountering Jesus; by coming to the conviction (through divine revelation of some sort) that Jesus is with us. And that's enough to make a difference in how we look at life. It's just a start of course. But everything - even life giving and life changing faith - has to start somewhere. We start - as Simeon - by encountering in Jesus. The other things we can learn, and hopefully we will learn. But the most important thing is just in some way to see Jesus - to encounter him and to be confronted by him. That will make a difference. Seeing our salvation always makes a difference.

February 5, 2017 sermon - Our Part Of The Covenant

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

(Genesis 9:8-17)

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     Back in the early 1990's I was a student and I was serving my internship at a church in Fort Erie. My supervisor was a very experienced pastor who had also served as Personnel Minister for Hamilton Conference for several years before going back into parish ministry. He used to rail against Covenanting Services. You probably know what those are. When you call a new minister you have to have a covenanting service to mark the new relationship between them, the congregation and the Presbytery. So I've had a Covenanting Service here; Karen has had a Covenanting Service here. It's part of the process. But my supervisor despised them - or at least he despised the name. "Covenants involve God," he always used to say. "If you don't have God you don't have a covenant, so if it's the minister, the congregation and the presbytery then it's not a covenant - it's an agreement or a contract, but it's not a covenant, because covenants always involve God. They have to." I personally don't choose to get too worked up about the language - although I do agree that he had a point. Covenants (at least the ones we read about in the Bible) do involve God. If you don't have God involved, then you don't have a covenant - at least not in the Bible. That's a biblical pattern you see going back right to the beginning. Today we read about the very first covenant mentioned in the Bible - and it involved God. It was a covenant between God and humanity, but interestingly enough it really only speaks about God and God's obligations.

     It comes at the very last part of the story of Noah and the Ark. That’s an ugly story. You may never have thought about it that way because we’ve tended to turn it into a story for little children with pictures of a boat and cute little animal heads popping up over the deck – but Noah and the Ark is an ugly story. It depicts a God who is so out of control with anger over the actions of the human race that God created that the result is a divinely appointed destruction of humanity through a great flood. The picture of God in the overall story is interesting. God is angry, God is vengeful, God is upset, God is disappointed. All of these things work together and lead God to do a terrible thing – which, ultimately, even God seems to recognize was a terrible thing – and so the end result is this covenant between God and humanity and actually every living creature on earth. “Never again,” God says. “I will never do that again. I will never allow myself to get so angry that I take such vengeance again.” And, interestingly, God sets the rainbow in the sky as a reminder – to God – of this covenant. It’s as if God knew that humans were going to continue to do things that would test God’s patience and that would tempt God to take terrible vengeance, so God needed a reminder: “Oh right. I said I’d never do that again.” Seeing the rainbow seems to be the divine equivalent of taking a deep breath or counting to 10. I noticed that just a few days ago The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two and a half minutes to midnight – the closest it’s been since 1953 to a global catastrophe. We hope God continues to see the rainbow and remember the covenant!

     But the most interesting thing about this covenant is that it puts no obligations on anyone other than God. God says “I’ll never do this again,” but asks for nothing in return. It’s as if God realized that this act of wholesale destruction was so ungodly that there could be nothing asked for in return – this was just something that God could not do and would not do again. But that does leave me wondering what God’s expectations of us are? Do we have an unstated part to the covenant? In return for God’s promise are there expectations on us? I would say that there clearly are. If nothing else I would say that our part of the covenant is to strive to live in a way that honours and reflects God – the God who in essence repented after an act of wanton destruction. If we are to learn anything from the story of this first covenant, perhaps it is that we too are going to be tempted to turn away from the rainbow covenant, which is at its heart a covenant of peace and love and reconciliation, and that when we do, we too are to repent of our actions and to strive to never repeat them. But there is more. There is what we call the new covenant – the covenant that Christians believe came into force with the coming of Jesus.

     The new covenant revolves around two things: grace and love. God grants us grace and loves us without reservation. It’s a logical follow-up to that first covenant described in Genesis. We in turn are called to live by grace, to show grace to those around us and to overflow with love for all those we encounter. In the light of events in Quebec City and elsewhere over the past week, we might want to reflect on how best we can actually fulfil our part of the covenant. But there’s one more aspect to the covenant we have with God that we need to be aware of, and it’s highlighted for us today as we prepare to celebrate Holy Communion.

     This is the honouring of the new covenant – the fulfilment of any and all covenants that God has made with humanity over the centuries. And this covenant is marked not just by love – but by agape, by sacrifice. It is in the bread and the wine that we see true sacrifice: Jesus giving of himself. I have some mixed feelings about the idea that Jesus died FOR human sin, because I have my doubts that God – who has no needs – actually needed a sacrifice in order to forgive; but I have no doubt that Jesus died BECAUSE of human sin. His death was the result of human evil, and in that way Jesus stands with all of us – and even with those who are the most vulnerable and the most at risk. But whether Jesus died for our sin or because of our sin, either way we are intimately connected with Jesus by this sacrament of sacrifice, and because of that connection we also are called to service and to sacrifice – not of our life, perhaps – but of our lives. We are called to give of ourselves – all that we have, all that we are, all that we will be – for the sake of those around us in the hope of making the world around us a better place.

     This is the last of a short series of sermons on stewardship that I’ve offered. And I think it appropriately ends on a Communion Sunday when the focus is on sacrifice – because that’s what real stewardship is. It’s about our willingness to truly give of ourselves for others; it’s a symbolic way of saying that we will follow the way of Jesus – the way of the cross – the way of giving – the way of sacrifice. Surely, when you get right down to it – that’s our part of the covenant.

A Thought For The Week Of January 30, 2017

"Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble." (1 Peter 3:8) Our society tends toward individualism, in that we generally focus on ourselves: our own needs, our own wants, our own goals. Even in our lives of faith it's often what we believe as individuals that takes priority rather than any common set of doctrinal points. Creeds for many people have become almost anathema. Life - both secular and spiritual - has become fixated on what you might call self-actualization. All that matters is what something does for ME. I've seen that sort of attitude repeatedly in the church. All that matters is what I like. If the style of worship isn't what I like I'll complain, and if I don't get my way I'll just quit - without stopping to think that the style I don't like might be an invaluable support to someone else sitting in the same sanctuary. Those attitudes I'm all too familiar with. So I thought that this verse was an important one. It seems to speak of faith not from merely an individualistic perspective but also from a corporate perspective. It's not about me, it's about us. The goal of faith is to "be like-minded" and that apparently expresses itself mostly in our attitudes and actions toward others. There may be areas where we have the flexibility to put our own spin on the faith (and perhaps our doctrine is one of those areas) but certain qualities must be present in us and must be shown through us: sympathy, love, compassion and humility. These things are non-negotiable in a life of faith. Any life that does not display those qualities is not a faithful life - or at least it isn't one that pleases God. There is room for us to put our own spin on what it means to be a Christian, but there are also certain values that have to be present in a Christian life. It's not all just a matter of anything goes.