Lifting Up Serpents

M7

Num. 21:4-9
Ps 107:1-3,17-22
Eph. 2:1-10
Jn. 3:14-21

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life” John 3:14.

Look around you. Imagine that you are the people of Israel, because in a way you are. You left slavery in Egypt with sore backs and calloused hands. Beatings and hard labor made your joints so sore that you thought you could never escape the Pharaoh’s army. When the Red Sea swallowed up the finest warriors in the world, you wrote songs of celebration.

Fresh from this victory, breathing the clean air of freedom and with a new lightness in their steps the people of Israel passed quickly through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Before going into this land of Canaan you choose twelve people: Rachel Wagner, Alan Sarles, Laura Barker, Robert Pescosolido, Jim Snell, Maryetta Shriver, Clare Ledwith, Gloria Wing, Paula Matosian, Bob Stanfield, Paul Kojola and Bill Bien. You send them as spies to survey the land.

They arrive at harvest time and spend forty days traveling in secret through a place of overwhelming beauty. The twelve agree completely about the richness of this land of milk and honey. They cannot help but notice the severe contrast between it and the desert they just passed through. At the same time, ten of the spies (I won’t say who) have also noticed that the people who already live there seem stronger and larger than us (Numbers 13).

Two of the spies want to follow God’s command and find a place to live in the promised land. They make their case but the overwhelming majority of us are so afraid to go that we threaten to stone them to death. And so we all return to the desert for forty years, where each of the spies dies, except for the two who did not rebel against God.

Even though WE chose it, the harshness of desert life makes us complain about God. We say that he should have left us in Egypt. We seem to despise our own freedom. Nothing seems quite right to us although we probably grumble about our food the most. There is a kind of poison in our community and we will not be won over to God. So God sends poisonous snakes which kill our friends and our children. Imagine many of us dying, the rest of us bitten and waiting to die.

But again God sees our suffering and has mercy on us. He instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent on a high pole. The people who look at it will live. So Moses walks deliberately around our camp tents. He calls each of us out by name so that we can look and be saved. Moses cannot change the fact that we have been bitten. He cannot remove the poison, but through him God can make us live (Numbers 21).

We are the people of Israel. The same poison runs thick in our veins also.

In one summer month both of my grandfather’s sons moved to California. I’ll never forget the day we said goodbye, my hippie uncle telling my conservative father that he would meet us in the promised land. He was right. We live in the land of milk and honey, in these green hills between the richest agricultural valley in the world and the vast mystery of the Pacific Ocean.

At this time of year, in this mild climate, the wildflowers covering these hills seem like signs of God’s continuing grace. According to any measure from objective industrial productivity to the subjective beauty of our sunsets, California is rich.

We would notice this more if it we did not have the poison. All of us experience its effects in slightly different ways. We have conflict with people who we are supposed to love. We worry about the future. We have a vague sense that something is not right, that we are not keeping up, or living up to our potential. We also see signs that frighten us: this country’s steeply rising debt and our own, increasing healthcare costs, the declining quality of education, global climate change along with our political leaders’ vague threats of terrorism. Personally we feel vulnerable, that somehow we haven’t done enough to protect ourselves.

Alan Watts, a former Episcopal priest and teacher of Zen Buddhism points out that we will never be satisfied if our happiness depends on material things or on other people’s opinion of us. I have read Alan Watts’ books. I recognize this wisdom. At the same time I feel wounded by knowing that this was too hard for him and that he died young of alcoholism.

Watts never wrote openly about his own struggles with alcohol, but in a touching aside he writes anonymously about what seems to be his own experience. “In very many cases [the alcoholic] knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not being drunk is worse. It gives him “horrors” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.”

If anyone should be immune from this poison, the symptoms of which include our basic sense of insecurity, it should be graduates of Harvard Divinity School. They should be both intelligent and spiritual. Last June I heard Professor Kim Patton give the sermon at graduation. She addressed students applying to jobs and doctoral programs who were concerned about “gaps” in their resumes. She said, “Like the wider American culture, Harvard lionizes the loner, the brilliant individual who has won some high-level game of musical chairs where 150 players contend for 8 seats and the music is by Mahler.” She reassures them that, “[t]he gaps on the resumes are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God…”

The bad news is that everyone has the poison, we all just show different symptoms of the same disease. I pray about this because I believe that this poison leads many to misunderstand one of the most important things that Jesus ever said. This verse is a famous one. At football games people hold up signs that say “John 3:16.” In it Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Unfortunately a vast majority of Christians in this country interpret these words to mean that if you are not in their Jesus club, God will condemn you to eternal death. For them, unless you say certain words or think certain thoughts about Jesus, in the way that they do, you are what they call “unsaved.” This is not a biblical word so you may have trouble understanding it. But if you spend time with Christians like this you hear it all the time. They talk about their “saved” friends and their “unsaved” friends. And then the complicated world filled with our own poison suddenly seems a lot safer and simpler to them.

“Saved” Christians may not tell you this, but the context of Jesus’ remarks matter. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus a kind of first century theology professor who came to him secretly in the night. Nicodemus wants to know who Jesus is. And because like us both of them are people of Israel, Jesus answers by referring to a story about the time when the people of Israel chose to wander in the desert rather than follow God’s instructions.

Jesus says, “[j]ust as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” Unless you remember the story of Moses curing his snake-bitten people with the bronze snake pole, this can be one of Jesus’ most perplexing statements.

Even after reading both stories this might justifiably leave you lost. This is a prophetic symbol, in other words it is a sign to let you know what God is about to do before it is too late. We’re all familiar with symbols like this. We encounter them in secular contexts all the time. For instance, in the movie Titanic, we see the officers on the bridge drinking a cup of hot coffee on a cold night peering out into the fog. The camera pans all the way down the ship, as some ice floats by while the audience hears cellos make a low shimmering sound.

In ancient times people believed that when you saw something, a part of you went out from your eyes and touched the world. It sounds odd when Jesus compares being crucified to being lifted up like Moses’ bronze snake. But Nicodemus probably understood what Jesus means. Seeing the bronze snake could not take away the poison but it could restore life. In the same way, if we can be touched by a God who suffers on the cross, we can have life too. This does not mean that all the poison in the world instantly disappears. But Jesus does make it possible to survive, to really be alive again.

This is the central mystery and challenge of Christianity: letting go of a picture of a god who miraculously adjusts the world to meet the demands of our ego and embracing the real Jesus who suffers for you and with you and in you, who through you brings love into the world.

It is hard to keep an image of Jesus suffering on the cross at the center of our life. We want to substitute that picture with the Messiah king who uses overwhelming power to justify us and bring the kind of peace we want. But in the end it is the suffering Christ who can save us.

I wish I could speak at greater length about this, because I have seen so many miracles happen through Jesus’ love. Sometimes amazing grace comes out of terrible suffering.

Fred Craddock is one of the most distinguished preachers of our time. He tells the story about God’s persistence in calling his father. He says, “When the pastor used to come from my mother’s church to call on him, my father would say, “You don’t care about me. I know how churches are. You want another pledge… Isn’t that the whole point of church?”… My nervous mother would run into the kitchen crying for fear somebody’s feelings were hurt… I guess I heard it a thousand times.”

“One time he didn’t say it. He was at the Veteran’s Hospital. He was down to 74 pounds. They had taken out his throat, put in a metal tube, and said, “Mr. Craddock, you should have come in earlier. But this cancer is awfully far advanced. We’ll give radium, but we don’t know.” I went in to see him. In every window [were] potted plants and flowers. Everywhere there was place to set them – potted plants and flowers… There was by his bed a stack of cards. And I want to tell you, every card, every blossom, every potted plant [came] from groups, Sunday School classes, women’s groups, youth groups… of my mother’s church – every one of them.”

“My father saw me reading them. He could not speak, but he took a Kleenex box and wrote something on the side from Shakespeare’s Hamlet… He wrote…, “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.” I said, “What is your story, Daddy? And he wrote, “I was wrong.”

Look around you. Imagine that you are people of Jesus, because you are. In your veins you have the same poison that is killing others all around you. But somewhere in your heart God has revealed his suffering for you. In our shared Eucharist his love becomes eternal life in you.
_____________

This part of The Wisdom of Insecurity is quoted in Monica Furlong, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2001), 150.
Kimberly C. Patton, “When the Wounded Emerge as Healers,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2006, 57
This whole paragraph comes from a conversation with Rick Fabian who is preparing this material for a lecture at Sewanee on the open table.
Cited in Jim Fitzgerald’s sermon, “Serpents, Penguins and Crosses,” Preacher’s Magazine Lent/Easter 2006. http://www.preachersmagazine.org/webmar26.htm

Divine Gifts

M6

Gen. 17:1-7, 15-6
Ps 22:22-30
Rom. 4:13-25
Mk. 8:31-8

“Indeed what can they give in return for their life?” Mark 1

Once there was a young shoemaker so down on his luck that he only had enough leather to make one pair of shoes. By the time he finished cutting the leather, it was time for him to go to bed. He left the pieces on his workbench planning to sew them into shoes the next day. In the night two naked elves come and build the shoes. The shoemaker is astonished by what he discovers. He has never seen such perfectly stitched shoes.

The first customer who enters his shop recognizes the amazing workmanship and buys the shoes with so much money that the shoemaker is able to get enough leather to build two pairs of shoes. Again he cuts the leather and goes to bed. In the morning he finds two absolutely perfect pairs. The shoes sell for such a high price that he is able to buy enough leather for four pairs of shoes. Over time the shoemaker attains tremendous success.

Before Christmas, he and his wife start wondering who is making these extraordinary shoes. So they leave a candle burning in the shop and hide while the elves do their work. The next day his wife says, “there must be some way for us to thank these little men who have made us so rich. They look cold. I’m going to sew them warm clothes. Why don’t you make them some little shoes?”

When the clothes are finished the shoemaker and his wife leave out the small suits and shoes, and hide themselves again. The elves are delighted to find the clothes. They put them on and sing, “Looking cool and smooth, we’re out the door / We will not build shoes anymore!” They dance a jig around the room and leave forever. But by this time the shoemaker has learned this fine craftsmanship himself and continues to prosper.

I want to give this story a little more time to sink in before I come back to it. This week Heidi and I were working in the kitchen when a song by Marvin Gaye came on the radio. I said, “Do you remember when we used to listen to that album?” and we shared a moment of awkward silence.

Thirteen years ago after visiting our families in the West over Christmas, we returned to our Boston apartment in zero degree weather. The first thing I noticed as the cab cruised up to our apartment was the black ash in the high snowdrifts. A man was boarding up our place with sheets of plywood. “Heidi we’re going to be okay, but we may still need the cab,” I said. That night our home had burned. The water that put out the fire had frozen as it ran down our walls and all of our rugs were under three inches of dirty ice. Pretty much everything we owned was destroyed, all Heidi’s clothes, my books and our Marvin Gaye album.

Not too long after this I served a church in which a third of the parish lost everything in the Oakland Fire. These kinds of catastrophes remind us that what we are to ourselves is fluid. Things do not just belong to you, to a certain extent they are you. Memory isn’t something that just happens in your head. Many of the memories that define our identity are embedded in objects like photographs, art, a particular church pew, even your spouse’s favorite coffee mug or a collection of record albums. Anyone who has lost someone they love realizes this. Physical objects extend our memory, they give us the power to listen or speak to distant selves.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 B.C.) in Nicomachean Ethics tried to describe what freedom means to human beings. He starts with a definition of individual happiness. He points out that this depends on the well-being of others. Not only does this make suffering unavoidable it implies that in some sense our self includes others, that it is distributed beyond our body in this way too. Who we are does not just depend on individuals it also depends on groups of people: republicans, Giants fans, Americans, Roman Catholics, Vietnamese immigrants, Los Altans and Rotarians.

If the self includes our things, other people and our sense of group identity, what we are will always be a deeply spiritual question for us. In today’s gospel Peter isn’t thinking of this when he confronts Jesus. What Peter believes he is makes Jesus’ teaching completely unsettling for him.

It is a mistake to project our own political identities back on ancient peoples. What we mean by Jewish today is not exactly how Peter understood himself. As a person suffering under the Roman occupation he grew up in a society which prayed for a great ethnic, political and religious leader called the Messiah. The Messiah would lead his people in military campaigns that would atone for their all of their humiliations.

This picture of a Messiah is so powerful that we still have it with us today. My son Micah found a Christian fundamentalist comic book at Christ Church about “the Lion of Judah.” This heavily muscled Jesus wears a knight’s armor and rides a huge black stallion. He protects people from evil by the exercise of overwhelming force. Our “shock and awe” images of Christ as the King invariably refer back to this sort of picture.

But when Peter evokes this tempting image of great force on our side, Jesus rebukes him. Jesus redefines what we mean by Messiah and this changes who we are. If God does not just destroy our enemies but suffers for us, this changes everything. Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel will save it” (Mk. 8).

Jesus criticizes what we think of as our life, as our self. We are often wrong in what we think is most authentically ours or us. Jesus points out this truth by saying that we actually lose our life when we try most fervently to protect it. In many respects this already seems obvious to us.

This summer my friend Mark was out at night in the North Beach district of San Francisco when he ran into Jay, another old friend. At first Mark barely recognized Jay. He had a beard and his hair was tangled. You could see Jay’s toes sticking out of his shoes and his clothes looked old and worn. Mark has always been one of my most generous friends and he immediately invited him to stay at his house for a few days. Jay smelled terrible and Mark’s girlfriend didn’t like having a homeless heroin addict in her apartment. Jay grew up in a town just like Los Altos but somewhere along the line he had lost himself.

We all know so many examples of people who are losing their lives in order to gain something else. Because we are here in Silicon Valley we especially see people who have given themselves over completely to a business idea or a new technology. This culture affects every aspect of our life here from the way we raise children to city planning. John Calvin (1509-1564) wrote about this in a different way saying that the human mind is a “factory of idols” (Inst.). As creatures made to worship we persist in venerating the wrong things.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes about what he calls the “consumerization” of the church. He asserts that too often these days the church merely assimilates the worldly values of our culture into its doctrines and practices. He worries that we treat faith as merely a matter of “personal style.” To address this, he believes Christians need to keep God’s eventual judgment at the center of their faith. Although fundamentalists talk about salvation as a matter of simply believing in Jesus (in the way that they do), Williams reminds us that in the Bible Jesus tells stories about judgment based not on our system of belief but on our actions in helping people who are in need. This is how God separates the sheep from the goats.

I too believe in the judgment of God, but for me this is not something that only happens in a distant future. Jesus overthrows the idea of a messiah as world dictator and the one whose primary relation to us has mostly to do with judgment. What is far more central to Christianity is our experience of life and faith as a gift. God gives us life and Christ gives us a life that transcends fear. The problem is that both of these can be difficult for us to receive.

Because we live in an age dominated by the global economy we do not understand gifts very well and this makes it harder for us to love God. Twentieth century anthropologists who study societies in history and around the globe identify certain characteristics of gift exchange that differentiates it from barter or trade.

By now most people know where the term “Indian giver” comes from. Imagine it is 1638 and an Englishman is visiting the lodge of a Pequot Indian. The host shares a pipe of tobacco to make his guest feel welcome and then offers him the pipe that it has been smoked in. This peace pipe has circulated among the Pequots for generations. The Englishman recognizes its value puts it on his mantelpiece to save as a family heirloom.

Later, a different group of Pequots visit the Englishman’s house and he is surprised by their expectation that they will smoke together and that he will give them the pipe. They are angry that he is taking something out of circulation, something that should be shared. He is hurt to realize that some gifts aren’t privately owned in the way he imagined and come with certain expectations.

According to anthropologists, what makes given objects and sold products different is that we do not get a gift through our own efforts. Gifts also create communities and relationships. Gifts that are removed from circulation cease to be gifts. It is in exactly this sense that I understand Jesus who says, “For what will it profit to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” Our life and the salvation we find in Jesus cease to exist when we stop giving it away.

A very strange thing happened to me last night. After being too busy to write a sermon all week I left an outline on my desk. When I woke up, I discovered a whole sermon carefully typed into my computer. Those naked men started it with the familiar story of the “Shoemaker and the Elves.” This parable has been used many times to describe the experience of creating art.

A mentor takes time to pass on the skill of composing music or drawing or ceramic tile work. At first the learner is in no position to repay anyone. It takes time to receive the gift. Eventually, although the student’s art is influenced by the master, it becomes individual and unique. Then for this gift to have value it must be practiced and passed on.

I don’t mean to equate God with a naked elf but I believe that Christianity is like this. It is learning to receive a gift by beginning to give ourselves. It is saving the one thing that is truly ours by giving it away. So we give not out of fear that God will judge us but because we are made in the image of a God who pours himself into the world and gives himself away.
_________________
This version is heavily based on Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 48.
Rowan Williams, “The Judgment of the World,” On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (NY: Vintage Books, 1983), 3.
This work originated in Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift which I cannot find on my shelves right now. For this summary see Ibid., xiv.

Voices from Heaven

M5

Gen. 9:8-17
Ps 25:1-9
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mk. 1:9-15

“And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased…” Mark 1

I know for sure only that it was ordinary time and that angels were there. Colored light on a summer afternoon streamed through stained glass windows in patterns on the floor. The people in the world who most loved me handed me back and forth. Then my grandfather held me in his large hands and looked into my eyes (in the way I have come to be blessed by the newly baptized myself). Then he poured water on my forehead and God’s song entered my heart.

I have to be honest with you. There have been times when I have not heard that song. There have been periods in my life when I could only hear the demands of my own ego, times when my anxieties and fears made me not listen to this song. I have done things that have made me not want to believe in God or at least that made me try to forget God’s justice. Like you perhaps there have been moments when I have been so tempted by despair that this melody sounds infinitely distant. Tragedy with my lack of faith has made me forget that in every place God brings forth the new.

But that song has never left me. It makes me more likely to notice what is good and beautiful. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose. The greatest things I accomplish in my life arise out of that song. I have been blessed by my godparents and by other Christians who fill in for them. They have learned this song so well that when I am lost they help me to find my place in the music.

Today’s gospel has haunted me this whole week. Using the simplest Greek words Mark has compressed lifetimes of symbolic meaning into only five short sentences. What is heaven, repentance, belief, the dove, baptism or Satan? What does the father’s voice sound like? What does the spirit look like? Was Jesus surprised? What does it mean to fulfill time or that the kingdom is at hand? How can Jesus be tempted and why is it in a wilderness with wild animals and angels? How did he feel when he learned that his cousin John had been arrested? What does Jesus’ proclamation of the good news have to do with us?

The song, your hopes at baptism and this story all concern what makes us spiritual beings. And this has a real effect as we decide who we are trying to become. Many people do not believe in the spiritual life or that at baptism God puts a song into our hearts.

I wonder if Thomas Midgley, Jr. believed in this song. Midgley has the dubious distinction of being the single living organism that has had the most destructive influence on the global environment. In the 1920’s refrigerators killed people because they used toxic gases. Midgley worked to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive and safe to breathe. He brought the world chlorofluorocarbons or CFC’s. Overnight CFC’s came to be used in thousands of different products from aerosol sprays to car air conditioners.

It took fifty years to realize that CFC’s were completely destroying the ozone layer of the earth’s protective atmosphere. We only now understand the fragility of the processes that sustain life on this planet. If the ozone that we depend on was distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere this layer would only be one eighth of an inch thick. The problem is that one pound of CFC’s destroys seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. At the time of his death we didn’t understand this, but Midgley did comprehend the dangers of his other invention.

God must see some amazing connections and coincidences in the human carnival. One of the most extraordinary is that the same person who invented CFC’s also brought us the idea of adding lead to gasoline. Because the dangers of lead were already well known this was a controversial move from the very beginning (that was why they called the gasoline additive ethyl rather than lead).

In human beings lead lasts forever. Lead that you swallow or breathe is not excreted but becomes more and more concentrated in your bones and blood. It is a neurotoxin. Symptoms of overexposure include blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer and convulsions. In acute forms it produces terrifying hallucinations and madness.

Immediately after its introduction, workers in lead gasoline additive plants started suffering from lead poisoning. In only five consecutive production days at one plant five workers died and another thirty-five were permanently afflicted with brain damage. When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions a company official disingenuously told reporters that, “These men probably went insane from working too hard.”

For forty years the only scientific studies on the effects of lead on human beings were funded by manufacturers of lead additives. Perhaps this is part of the reason we failed to realize what we were doing. Before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere. Since then quantities of lead in our air have sky-rocketed. Almost ninety percent of it came from automobile tailpipes. When lead was removed from all gasoline in 1986 lead blood levels in America fell by 80 percent. But because lead lasts forever most of us still have 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.

The inventor of ethyl additives Thomas Midgley did understand the effect of lead. He himself had been poisoned only a few months before he gave a demonstration of lead’s safety at a press conference. He poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, held a beaker of it up to his nose for sixty seconds claiming that he could repeat this daily without any harm. The truth was that Midgley recognized the danger of his invention and stayed away from it when reporters weren’t around.

If you don’t believe in the song that God puts into your heart at baptism it makes it a lot harder to hear your conscience. I try to imagine what led Midgley to lie so blatantly in order to cover up the danger of a compound that he was about to introduce into the tissues of every animal on the planet. Perhaps he feared being called a failure. Maybe like all of us, he just wanted people to admire him. We do this all the time. We become gods to our self.

One of the most famous teachers at Harvard Divinity School was Henri Nouwen. He gave up the prestige of academic and public life to live with and care for mentally disabled people at L’Arche community of Daybreak in Toronto. He once said that many of the people he lived with there heard voices. These voices said, “If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving.” I hear that voice and I wonder if Thomas Midgley did too. Nouwen goes on to describe the spiritual life as a process of gradually learning to listen to the voice that says instead, “You are my Beloved.” This is the song and the promise given to us at baptism.

The Buddha in his teaching draws our attention to this phenomenon. He believed that we would be happier if we acted as if we did not have a self that needed to be pampered, protected and asserted. He reasoned that without an overriding consciousness of the self we would no longer hate or feel greed or be anxious about our status and survival.

He called this state of nonattachment, nirvana. Nirvana means literally “blowing out,” like a candle after supper. It signifies the extinction of the ego, total freedom from the self that is the source of all unhappiness.

I might be inclined to more fully believe this if I didn’t hear the song first given to me at baptism. That music whispers to me that I do not need to extinguish my self, but that I don’t need to protect it either. Everything I have, everything I am, comes as a gift from God. That gift becomes real when I give out of that life to others.

On Friday our children Micah and Melia and I were leaving Cooper Park when they saw a woman struggling painfully with crutches. Our daughter asked her at great length what had happened. And after she finished explaining, I could see that my children wanted so badly to help her. Our son spoke right up and told her that I was a priest and could give her a blessing.

It was an amazing moment for me. I love what I do. I feel awed and humbled in that moment when I pronounce a blessing. Somewhere along the line our children have learned what this means to me.

But this calling from God does not come to me alone. All of us through baptism receive the song that will change the world. The barrier separating you from heaven is torn away. God’s spirit dwells in you. You are the location where God happens to other people.

In conclusion, I have tried to express what this song means to me and the way that ignoring or hearing it changes our lives and the world. When it comes to this music all of us are part Thomas Midgley, part Buddha, part Henri Nouwen, part Micah Young. I believe that listening to this song and living it is what Jesus means when he calls us to repent.

If you dare, I invite you to shut your eyes and imagine the song that God put into your heart. It is not loud because it is intimate, in the deepest part of you. It sounds like this: “You are perfectly loved as my beloved child. You belong to me, and I belong to you. I give everything to save you and draw you to myself. You will be safe. Trust this gift that you are to the world.” Amen.
_____________

Although this idea comes from a google search of Midgley, the rest comes from Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), Chapter 10.
“The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow… by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.” Ibid., 159.
Henri Nouwen, “The Life of the Beloved,” 30 Good Minutes, Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1991. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/nouwen_3502.htm
Karen Armstrong, “Is Immortality Important?” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Vol. 34, No. 1 (December 2006), p. 24.
This arises out of Henri Nouwen’s “The Life of the Beloved.”

Good to Be Here

M4

1 Kings 19:9-18
Ps 27
2 Peter 1:16-19(20-1)
Mk. 9:2-9

It Is Good for Us to Be Here
“Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here…” Mark 9

It is good for us to be here! It is good to be with the Stirling sisters who have missed only a handful of Sundays here over six decades (the bars they gave for Sunday School attendance would be a mile long for each of them), with Helen Connolly who has never just walked past me but has given me a hug on my best days and my worst. It is good to be with the Old Testament prophet Fritz Schneider, with our self-effacing bishop Dick Millard and Debra Ting who has the most holy smile I can imagine. It is good to be in the place where you can find the infectious laughter both of June Barlow and Patrick Brown and little Jimmy Snell.

On any given Sunday most of us here, along with a little boredom, discover a glimpse of what is holy. But every week one or two of us has the lid ripped right off, God lifts the veil and we see him face to face. This is not a slick or polished church. We make a lot of mistakes. We ring a huge bell in your ear if you are a minute late. Perhaps this makes it seem even more remarkable how often the holy overwhelms us here.

When Jesus goes up to the mountaintop to pray with his three closest friends it happens there too. Jesus is transfigured before them in a dazzling white glow. The unbearable glory and light behind everything in the universe appears. The chronology of ordinary time is broken open. Suddenly the two men who for readers of the Bible have most indisputably seen God, Elijah and Moses, appear before them. Then Jesus’ most bold friend Peter says, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” The author then speaks up to defend Peter writing, “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”

Most biblical interpreters seem to pretty much agree on two things about Peter. First, he betrayed his friend and teacher Jesus in the final hour. Second, that in the face of the sudden appearance of the holy, Peter couldn’t help but say something stupid. In defense of Peter, I think all of us have been guilty of talking too much when we should have let a moment speak for itself. The scholars forget that one remarkable thing about being human is that sometimes when we say, “it is good for us to be here,” we actually make the moment better. Somehow being with someone and saying, “this surf is great,” feels better than enjoying it alone. I imagine this may be true of our mountaintop experiences too.

Every year the beauty of spring in California takes me by surprise. I can’t help but remember that spring when Heidi and I fell in love. You’ve all probably heard the story too many times. Heidi was a delightfully perky college student with a yellow daisy behind her ear. I was an always over-dressed, overly-serious university administrator. I sent her love poems over the campus mail system.

But dating me never was easy. That spring I invited Heidi to walk with me from UC Irvine’s campus over the hills to her aunt’s house in Laguna Beach. It’s about ten miles as the crow flies. The problem is that we’re not crows. I had walked about a quarter of the way there myself, but there are no real trails, so I wasn’t completely sure where to go.

At the halfway point we came to a barbed wire fence. On the other side, there in the middle of nowhere, stood a mean-looking bull. Heidi doesn’t even like suspicious dogs but there was no way to go around. Our plan was to have me jump the fence in front of it and distract the animal while Heidi walked quickly behind him over to the next ridge. The bull made a few menacing gestures but we got by it.

Within an hour as the adrenaline trailed off, we reached the top of the mountain. Surrounded by acres of wildflowers and rich grasses, alone on top of the world we seemed so far above the distant desert, the suburban sprawl and the infinite blue Pacific. The air was so clear we could see snow on the mountains beyond L.A. and our whole future seemed spread out before us. We felt God blessing us and in that moment something of who we are today came into being. The holiness we experienced there will always be part of my soul. It was good for us to be there.

I know that there are places in your life where it was good to be, when God’s glory flashed before you and left you speechless. You have enriched my life by telling me about your moments of transfiguration. Many of us in such an instant have been changed forever by God. These stories become so central to how we understand ourselves, it is almost hard to realize how many others have had these mystical experiences too.

One of my favorite writers, the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) collected dozens and dozens of mountaintop experiences in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. He writes, “there are moments of sentimental and mystical experience… that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination when they come…” James believed that scientists should not ignore these transformative experiences. He reports that even people who do not believe in God can have them.

I want to give an example of what James means. He quotes a Swiss person who wrote the following on a hiking trip. “I was in perfect health… I can best describe the condition I was in by calling it a state of equilibrium. When all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised above myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it – as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. The throb of emotion was so violent that I could barely tell the boys to pass on and not wait for me. I then sat down on a stone, unable to stand any longer, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him, that he sustained my life… I felt his reply.”

The Bible reports on this experience too. The prophet Elijah was running for his life and hiding out from the king’s army in a cave. God didn’t appear to him in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but in a sound of sheer silence. Like Elijah God has called to you. Like Elijah God has a purpose for you and it will probably be clearest in the moments when he seems most near to you.

Christianity involves more than the joy that we experience when God comes to us on the mountaintop. Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This Wednesday we enter the holy season of Lent. Six weeks later on the last Sunday of Lent we read a story very much like the one we have today. Jesus goes off again with Peter, James and John to pray in Gethsemane on the night he is arrested. He says, “I am deeply grieved” and asks them to stay awake with him, but they cannot. These two stories share in common the prayer, the holy mystery of God’s actions, the scared friends at a loss for what to say.

These two stories are like bookends which contain Lent. We as Christians live both out of these stories and between them. We know the enlightening joy of being transfigured by God and the darkness of Gethsemane. This week I stayed with a friend during an examination after doctors discovered that she had cancer. I learned that a man I love will have to have surgery a fifth time because all the other efforts to cure him have failed. I talked with a couple I know going through the wasteland of divorce.

I know that darkness has touched you this week too. Maybe you feel lonely or vulnerable or you worry about the future. Perhaps you feel betrayed or see no way to be reconciled to someone who you are supposed to love. We are all well-acquainted with darkness.

This is hard to explain but our relation to the darkness is part of what defines us as Christians. Other religions and philosophies of life seem mostly to avoid the darkness. Their gods seem distant and pure, uninvolved or oblivious to the pain of the world. But this is not the way of the Christ. Jesus chooses to be betrayed and humiliated. He chooses to suffer terrible pain all for the sake of love. In fact, as Christians we believe that there is something about this world that can only be cured by the self-sacrifice of God.

The Gospel of John frequently describes the crucifixion of Jesus as his glorification. For us Jesus transforms the darkness of failure and suffering and despair. The light of his transfiguration and our own transformation always remind us that the darkness will not overcome us. But his example does not just transform our experience of death and suffering.

Through him we experience the light in a new way too. Those mountaintop experiences when we have seen God face to face become more than just a comfort to us. They provide us with the peace and confidence to take the risks and make the sacrifices demanded by love.

By now everyone has probably heard the old preacher’s story about the abbot of an Egyptian monastery. A visitor asks him, “Do you believe in miracles?” The monk pauses and replies, “It depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people say it is a miracle when God does what the people want him to do. We say it is a miracle when the people do what God wants them to do.”

In conclusion, I pray that you will have a holy Lent, that you will visit the mountaintop and create the space in your life that will make it possible to hear God’s call to you. I pray that you will discover within yourself the glory and joy of transfiguration along with the power that love’s sacrifices demand. I am grateful that we share each other’s company in our travels as we pass through the valleys of darkness and the mountaintops of clear light. I feel thankful that Jesus is our guide. Like Heidi and I on top of Signal Hill we get a glimpse of the future of God’s kingdom when we gather together. It is good for us to be here!



William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 in Writings 1902-1910 (NY: Library of America, 1987), 23.
Ibid., 68.
For this comparison I am indebted to the more articulate Rowan Williams, “Sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, March 2, 2003. http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2003/030302.html