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LORD, CAN WE JUST STAY HERE?

2/23/2020

Matthew 17:1-9 (The Message)

Six days later, three of them saw that glory. Jesus took Peter and the brothers, James and John, and led them up a high mountain. His appearance changed from the inside out, right before their eyes. Sunlight poured from his face. His clothes were filled with light. Then they realized that Moses and Elijah were also there in deep conversation with him.

Peter broke in, “Master, this is a great moment! What would you think if I built three shelters here on the mountain—one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah?”

While he was going on like this, babbling, a light-radiant cloud enveloped them, and sounding from deep in the cloud a voice: “This is my Son, marked by my love, focus of my delight. Listen to him.”

When the disciples heard it, they fell flat on their faces, scared to death. But Jesus came over and touched them. “Don’t be afraid.” When they opened their eyes and looked around all they saw was Jesus, only Jesus.

Coming down the mountain, Jesus swore them to secrecy. “Don’t breathe a word of what you’ve seen. After the Son of Man is raised from the dead, you are free to talk.”

Our reading today opened with “Six days later...” Later than what? Let’s take a minute to see. We are no longer on that mountain where we’ve been for the past few Sundays, listening to Jesus teach. That teaching continued for another 2 or 3 chapters, as Matthew has written it, but Jesus and those who followed him did eventually come down from that mountain and entered into a busy period of traveling, teaching, and healing.

Last week’s reading was from chapter five, this week we’re in chapter seventeen. You can see that a great deal has happened and time has passed The remaining disciples were called. John the Baptist was executed by Herod. The Pharisees began to come after Jesus. And there were many, many, many healings. I’m sure the lectionary will get back to these things in Ordinary time during the summer, when we’re finished with Easter and Pentecost, but for now we are closing out Epiphany, the season of light, and preparing to enter into Lent, a season that is gray, at best. We need to shift gears – from just starting out with Jesus to preparing for the end.

The last thing that happened before today’s reading begins is that Jesus told his disciples that he would have go to Jerusalem and be killed, and then rise again on the third day.

And so, six days later, we find ourselves on another mountain top. Jesus has taken Peter, James, and John up the mountain with him where he is enveloped in a blinding light shining out from himself. When the disciples regain their ability to see they realize that Moses and Elijah are also there, talking with Jesus.

This oversets the disciples’ wits entirely – an understandable response – and Peter begins babbling about building shelters and staying here forever. And they hear the voice of God speaking out of the cloud and the three mortal men fall to the ground – too terrified to think, act, or speak.

Then Jesus touches them and tells them not to be afraid – and when they look up there is only Jesus – looking like Jesus again -- there with them.

Jesus has revealed his true self to these three chosen ones, but they are forbidden to speak of what they have seen and heard until after Jesus has been killed and has risen again.

Now, since this is Matthew’s gospel, we have to expect this story to somehow tie back into traditional Jewish teaching, which it does – linking directly to Exodus 24 where Moses goes up another mountain to receive the Tablets of the Law:

Moses set out with his assistant Joshua, and went up into the mountain of God..... Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the LORD settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain. Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights.

There are many links here, not only to today’s reading – with going up on a mountain, and Moses taking his disciple Joshua with him, and then the presence of Elijah and the light and the cloud and the voice from the cloud – but also the forty days and nights reminding us of Jesus’ sojourn in the desert, and even that very specific six days at the very beginning of the Matthew reading.

So Matthew has made his point – not only about the relationship between Jesus and his father, but also about Jesus’ position both in the past and in the ongoing story of the Hebrew people as God’s chosen ones.

That’s very nice for Matthew, but what does this story mean for us, here, today? Leaving Moses and Elijah behind for the moment, the most striking point, for me, is Peter’s desire to just stay in that incredible moment forever. “Let me just build some shelters here and we’ll never leave.”

This is what we refer to as a “mountaintop experience” – that moment (or moments) that is so sublime we can’t bear to leave it and return to the banality of everyday existence.

But – we were not created to live in paradise. We were created and placed right here, with all the other ordinary people, in the midst of noise and messiness and injustice and ignorance and sometimes outright evil. This is where we are, and where we’re meant to be. We don’t get to stay on the mountaintop. We still get glimpses of that mountaintop from time to time, just enough to keep us going, but we don’t get to stay there – not yet.

We were placed down here, not to run off to that mountaintop, but to help create that mountaintop right here in all the noisy, ignorant messiness that is here and now.

But -- that doesn’t mean that we stay just where we are or just as we are. We were not created to sit in one spot forever. Peter and the others really liked where they were. It was glorious and comfortable there (once they got over the initial shock). But there was work to do, down in the lowlands.

We, too, may be very comfortable right where we are. I just read something by Pope Francis that really makes this point for us:

"To put it simply: the Holy Spirit bothers us. Because he moves us, he makes us walk, he pushes the Church to go forward. And we are like Peter at the Transfiguration: 'Ah, how wonderful it is to be here like this, all together!'...But don't bother us. We want the Holy Spirit to doze off...we want to domesticate the Holy Spirit. And that's no good. because the Spirit is God, the Spirit is that wind which comes and goes and you don't know where. It is the power of God, the one who gives us consolation and strength to move forward. But: to move forward! And this bothers us. It's so much nicer to be comfortable."

It is nice. It’s comfy. But nice and comfy rarely push the church forward. Rarely spur us to growth. Nice and comfy will not build the city of God. We will, each of us doing our part in the place where God leads us.

Doing our parts, moving where we need to move, these will, in time, lead us back up the mountain, to transcendence. But we must be willing to get up out of our comfort zone and move when the Spirit says move.

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MURDER

2/16/2020

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Matthew 5:21-26

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

"Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet."   These wise words come, not from scripture, but from the poet Maya Angelou, but they very much apply to our reading today.

I doubt there are too many preachers who really relish speaking on this scripture. It is a pretty harsh teaching, but we can’t just ignore it because it makes us feel uncomfortable. This is still Matthew’s gospel, remember, and Matthew’s primary agenda is to establish for the Jewish people that Jesus was and is the fulfillment of hundreds of years of Jewish prophecy. Jesus must therefore stand firmly on a base of Jewish Law.

This is also still the same story we’ve been reading for the past couple of weeks – still the same hillside, still the same group of listeners who just heard the Beatitudes explained to them – same day, same time, same channel.

To go from the gentle blessings of the Beatitudes to these harsh threats of hellfire (here against hatred and scorn, and in the three other brief teachings that follow, similar dire punishments for divorce done badly, adultery, and lying under oath) seems like such a huge leap. How do we get from “blessed are the meek,” to “you’ll burn in hell for calling someone a fool”?

Every one of these examples begins from the point of the most serious charge and therefore, the most serious punishment. It then proceeds to explain that even what seem to us as minor infractions are still very serious business to God.

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” This takes the most serious version of this violation and then offers the judgment found in Jewish law and – bingo – there you are with hellfire.

But then Jesus, as usual, takes this further – way further – and tells us that if we even call someone a fool we are risking that same hellfire. As far as God is concerned there is no variation by degree from really bad – murder, to not so bad (to us) – calling someone a name. The punishment is the same.

Now, as luck would have it, I had to go into the Sacramento area yesterday for a funeral, and when I left home in the morning, this message was only half written and I didn’t really know how I might finish it. It’s a 2.5 to 3 hour drive both ways so we were on the road a long time.

And it was a day for idiot drivers. [You can see that I’m in trouble already.] Most of the drivers were just going along trying to get there and back again alive – and then there were the idiots. You know the kind I mean – the ones who drive 90+ on the freeway; the ones who cut in and out through the traffic forcing others to slam on their brakes to avoid being hit. There was one gem who – while in the middle of the freeway construction zone in Petaluma – was so determined to pass the car ahead of him – let me repeat, in the construction zone, that he forced his way into the coned-off, torn-up area and passed the other car on the right. And what did he gain from this maneuver? One car length. That’s it – one car length in a line of cars already crawling at slow speed.

Idiots.

The funeral we were going to was for a dearly loved, long-time friend so we were already heartbroken, edgy, and a little sleep deprived. To while away the tedium of the drive we spent much of our time discussing the idiocy levels of some of the drivers around us, in a half joking/half serious sort of way.

And all the while I’m calling names and discussing what idiots such people are, this reading was running through the back of my thoughts. You know, when someone cuts you off in traffic, forcing you to slam your brakes and skid sideways, it’s really hard to remember this scripture. But ..... I’m pretty sure that God would like us to remember it.

Because, these erstwhile idiots are, first and foremost -- beloved children of God – just like me ... just like us -- however hard that may be for us to believe. My flashes of anger and my judgmental stance are, in truth, me stripping them of their name as child of God. Setting them somehow outside the boundaries of “us.”

Coming up with names to call someone is not the sin. Stripping them of their humanity, is. If we strip away someone’s humanity it is a form of murder – and that carries a consequence we can’t shrug off as “just name calling.”

More than any other thing, Jesus calls us – all throughout his teachings – over and over and over -- to live in community with each other, and to live that community well To care for each other, to share with each other, to love the weak and broken among us – as God loves them; to take the lower seat at the table, to not think ourselves better than anyone else. To be merciful. To be peacemakers.   To love our brothers and sisters as Jesus loves us.

Hard to pull off if you’re thinking of them as idiots.

For all I know these drivers were under stress I knew nothing about – either that or they were just rude and unthinking. None of that matters -- they were not mine to judge. We are told quite clearly that the role of judge does not belong to us. That’s God’s job, not mine.

And calling it “joking” doesn’t get us off the hook either.

"Hate (or scorn) it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet."

Lord, forgive me. Forgive my hasty tongue and forgive my messy temper. Forgive my willingness – however fleeting – to shut someone out beyond the pale. Help me to remember when I do that it is only myself I’m shutting out – outside the community of God’s beloved children – and that’s the worst kind of hellfire.

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GOING PUBLIC

2/9/2020

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Matthew 5:13-16 (The Message)
“Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? Without flavor you’ve lost your usefulness.
“Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father-God in heaven.”

Today’s reading, like last week’s Beatitudes, is one of the more commonly known parables in the New Testament – salt and light, flavor and clarity. We’ve got to be salty to keep things flavorful – OK, but what does that actually mean?

From the very earliest human times salt has been used as both a flavoring agent and a food preservative. It’s a popular (and addictive) flavor on its own but in small amounts it also enhances both sweet and spicy flavors. Besides being tasty it is necessary to keep the human body in chemical balance, something especially important in dry semi-desert areas, like Israel/Judah. Because Israel/Judah had its own salt source in the lake we today call the Dead Sea, it was also a major trading commodity with regions without their own sources. Salt was and is a big deal.

Jesus’s stories tend to use examples taken from the everyday lives of those he spoke with – vines, sheep, leaven ... and salt.

The other example from today’s reading is light – an everyday necessity just as salt is. We today love our lights, but even we are starting to complain about light pollution and the loss to our vision of many celestial events, weakened or sometimes lost entirely to our sight because of too much light reflecting up from our town and cities.

But our world is not the one Jesus and his followers lived in. It was dark in that world at nighttime with only smoky oil lamps to hold the darkness at bay.

One thing to add here before we go any further – this story comes immediately after the Beatitudes we discussed last week. Jesus is still talking to the same people – ones who are likely seen by the world as on the bottom of the pile, the ones with little to claim as their own – the ones Jesus has just informed that God loves and blesses them every moment, indeed, God loves them best.

So – we, like they, are called to be both salt and light – flavor and visibility. It’s interesting that these two commodities each only require a small amount to do their thing. A pinch of salt can change the flavor of an entire dish, changing it from something bland to something tasty and desirable. In a world of darkness, a single flame can be seen over vast distances.

What this suggests to us is that we are none of us expected to do tremendous deeds and turn the world upside down singlehandedly. We may think that our light is very faint against the world’s darkness, but there are many, many of us, and if each one contributes his or her own light, together we can light up the world. Together we can make light enough to show the world the earthly realm that Jesus came to proclaim – a realm, not of greed and selfishness, but one of caring and sharing. A realm illuminated by God’s love for all humankind.

Author Anne Lamott has a beautiful line about light that I have always loved: "The thing about light is that it really isn't yours; it's what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself." We do not provide the light, we merely reflect the light that is God.

Jesus here is telling us who we are – not who we could become but who we were created to be – who we are. We are salt and we are light and every small bit we do adds to the brightness and the savor. One voice speaking truth can change the world because that one voice will soon find other voices speaking the same truth. One hand reaching out to care for a stranger will find other hands also reaching out.

We are a very small church and to the world it probably looks as if we have little to offer – and yet we support Christ’s realm here in this community in ways both large and small. We just need to be a little better at letting the world know it. We need to shine a little brighter – as individuals and as a church.

What is it you value about being a part of this church community? Can you name it? Have you ever said it out loud? Do your friends and family know you value being a part of what we do here?

What if one day all of us who trust in God’s love – not just us here but people everywhere – said so out loud – in words or actions or both? What a message to the world that could be.

We were reminded last week that we are blessed – even when we feel our weakest, our most lost, our most helpless – blessed – God says so. What if we each took our blessing every day and shared it with others in God’s world? With the poor and the exhausted, the frightened and the confused, the angry and the hopeless, the rich and the friendless?

How do we do that? I don’t know. We can only know when the need presents itself. The world is full of people who need other people. Children being bullied in their schools; the unemployed who have come to the end of their rope; those who have been disappointed one too many times and have given up; people lost in drugs and mental illness; people running from violence and just seeking a place of safety; those who feel abandoned by everyone – including God.

The needs of God’s children are endless. I’m somehow convinced that if we make ourselves willing and available, God will provide the opportunities – and then make sure we recognize them as such.

I just know there is so much need. There is too much darkness so I need to shine a little brighter. There is too much that is flavorless and blah in this world so I need to be a little saltier. What’s that going to look like? Darned if I know. I have a lovely little faith that I mostly keep to myself except for sharing with you here. I think it’s time I go public. I just know I am called to show up and report for duty.

Thanks be to God.

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IT'S ALL GOING TO BE OKAY

2/2/2020

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Matthew 5:1-9 (The Message)

When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions.

This is what he said:
“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
“You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
“You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.
“You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
“You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family."

First thing here, I have to admit I stole the title for this message from my daughter who is preaching elder at her church this week. But before I get into why this title struck me, let me set the stage for just where we are in Jesus’ beginning journey.

Last week we read the calling of the first disciples, according to Matthew. Matthew doesn’t give us a time line for what came next but it doesn’t seem as if it was a tremendously long time. Jesus and the disciples traveled all around the region around Galilee, teaching all the people. The Message translation puts it this way: God’s kingdom was his theme—that beginning right now they were under God’s government, a good government!

He not only taught them this, he healed everyone who came to him, and word began to spread and folks came from as far away as Jerusalem to see and hear him. And that's where today’s reading picks up the story.

This is obviously the passage we generally refer to as The Beatitudes. Now, the Beatitudes are fine – some of Jesus’ most important teaching – but we’ve heard them so many times, and we are so used to hearing them in the words of the Revised Standard Version that, for me at least, they have become something set aside, “Holy Words,” so familiar that it’s hard to even hear them anymore.

I really did want to “hear” the reading today but I just couldn’t get past the sameness of the NRSV – and so I turned to The Message to see if I could hear it better there. And t worked for me. I hope it works for you.

And then when I was skimming my daughter’s notes and came on the phrase “it’s all going to be okay,” I discovered I could hear Jesus speaking those actual words. “I know it isn’t easy. We have foreign soldiers in our land, and many of you are just barely scraping out a living, and all the religious authorities just tell you to obey the rules while they live in comfort and really don’t care what becomes of you. But ... it’s all going to be okay.”

So why is it going to be okay? Well, because: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
Or: “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you, that’s when you can be embraced by the One most dear to you.

For the first time in, oh, maybe forever, I heard the Beatitudes as living, breathing conversation, not as sterile, holy words written in a holy book, about something that happened a long, long time ago. This is Jesus talking to us as the human-beings we are. None of us are saints, none are angels. We are what we are -- and Jesus is here with us.

These are words that are spoken to us now, about the lives that we are living now. Because that is where God is, right here, right now, always, in the midst of our not-even-close-to-perfect lives. And the promises here are not some quid-pro-quo – you do what I tell you and then somewhere down the line you will be blessed – oh, no, these promises are already given and filled.

If you are at the end of your rope you are already blessed because God is right there with you.

If you find yourself able to care about others then, not only are you blessed by that, but you will find yourself cared for as well, because God is right there with you, loving you like crazy. Already happening, not a vague promise for the future. You’re blessed right now.

Oftentimes we miss those blessings, they don’t get a chance to stick, because we are so oblivious that we simply don’t notice them. If life is going badly, then we can be so caught up in our misery that we don’t see or feel the love that is wrapped around us right in the moment of our deepest despair. We are so sure that we are so lost and abandoned that we can’t see or hear anything but ourselves.

If things are going well enough then we usually attribute it all to our own cleverness, again never noticing that someone is there with us, blessing us with all this goodness.

What the Beatitudes do is turn the prevailing wisdom of the present day on its head. They tell us that it isn’t the rich or the successful or the mighty who are blessed, it’s the poor, the broken, the peace-lovers. It’s all of us who feel we have no special value in this world; those who do not have the world knocking on our door who are blessed.

It’s the poor, the grieving, the ordinary among us who are truly blessed because God blesses us exactly because we are poor, grieving and ever so ordinary.

We had a kitten many years ago, her name was Willie. Willie came to live with us by a miracle. She was just weeks old; her eyes were still cloudy; so tiny she could curl up in the palm of my hand. And somewhere in the two or three weeks before she found us she had been mistreated. We never knew if it was starvation or some physical damage but Willie was never entirely “sharp.” She would try to jump left and end up going right. She would aim to jump on the couch and just fall over backwards – in slow motion. She was just never entirely on point.

We all adored Willie and loved her probably more than our other cats simply because she needed extra love and care from us. And she gave us so much in return. She taught us so much about gentleness and goodness and trusting. She was with us for nineteen years and we were never the same people again.

It’s not that God doesn’t care for the rich or the movers and shakers of the world. But they take care of themselves. God gives Godself to those who need love and comfort and strength and hope because they get too little of it from this world.

We are all connected to God. Therefore, we are all connected to each other. The rich and the poor, the successful and the struggling, the strong and the weak. God, in the person of Jesus, lives among us all, reminding us that we are all related – brothers and sisters, children of God. Every one of us.

And ... it’s all going to be okay.

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LORD, CAN WE JUST STAY HERE?

MURDER

GOING PUBLIC

IT'S ALL GOING TO BE OKAY

Rev. Cherie Marckx

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