Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

There is a depiction of Jesus, painted by a Canadian artist about forty years ago, which was originally called Jesus Christ, Liberator, but which most people these days refer to as “Laughing Jesus.” I suspect most of you will have seen this painting at one time or another, and it captures an image of a sort of Christ we’d like to think of: jovial and friendly. Now, I don’t think the bible ever tells us about Jesus laughing; the Gnostic Gospel of Judas does, but this should not inform our view of the Christ. Even so, while our Lord is shown in scripture to be a rather serious fellow, he was a human being, so I’m sure at some point he laughed. That’s not really the point I’m trying to make here. The point is, and the “Laughing Jesus” painting’s popularity serves as evidence of this, that we tend these days to think of and depict Jesus in ways which highlight his meekness and kindliness. We rarely get as off-base as “Buddy Christ” from the movie Dogma, but sometimes we get a bit close.

When we compare this serene, kindly Jesus of our imagination with today’s Gospel reading, then, we might experience some cognitive dissonance. Perhaps some of us might compare our own vision and experience of our Lord with today’s Gospel and find ourselves either confused or troubled. This is not the nice Jesus who goes round doing good deeds and having a good laugh with his “bros.”. The Jesus we see in today’s Gospel reading, the Jesus who fashions a whip of cords, who overturns the tables of the money-changers, seems angry and scary. This is not the Jesus we’re comfortable with.

This story has made some people uncomfortable enough to try to explain it away. Stanley Hauerwas, a noted pacifist scholar and professor at Duke Divinity School, has suggested that Jesus did not have a violent, visceral reaction at all in the temple that day. Rather, Hauerwas claims, that He was merely performing a careful, well-planned show in which he actually caused no harm to any person or property. This show was to make a point but there were no real consequences as such. Like many modern scholars who engage in trying to get a clearer picture of the historical Jesus, Hauerwas’ Jesus ends up looking eerily like Hauerwas.

But this is not fair to the story as we know it from scripture and it presents a very flat view of Jesus indeed. We have a desire, it seems to me, to fashion a God who affirms everything about us. We want a Jesus who only calls to us “softly and tenderly” when we’ve gone astray, not a Jesus who overturns tables; not a Jesus who uses both his staff and his rod, as the psalmist puts it, to comfort and correct us. We want to construct a God who is eminently palatable and comfortable and who doesn’t really want to change anything about us. But to envision God in this way is to build an idol. It is to ignore the words from today’s Old Testament lesson: “You shall not make for yourself an idol,” it says, “whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Yet we do fashion idols “in the form of [something] that is on the earth beneath.” We fashion idols out of ourselves, thus putting ourselves in the place of God.

The problem of the money changers, and of many of us, myself included, is not a lack of religion. Rather, the problem is the propagation of irreligion, bad religion. The money changers knew enough about their Jewish religion to pervert it. They knew that sacrifices were to be made in the temple, and they chose to capitalize on it. Just so, when we cast Jesus in our own image, we know enough about Christianity to pervert it, to turn it to our own ends. Whatever I do or say becomes God’s will and I can point to a distorted image of Jesus to justify it. We don’t even recognize that the Jesus we see looks strangely like ourselves.

So, this sermon has become a bit depressing, even for a Lenten sermon, for which I apologize. There is hope here, though. It is appropriate that we are hearing this hard Gospel reading during this Holy Season. Lent provides us a special opportunity to invite Jesus into the temples of our own hearts and lives so that he can turn over a few tables in each of us. Lent calls us to be open to a sort of spiritual renovation—a transformation in fact—which is not of our doing but is something Jesus works in us. That’s part of what all the prayer and fasting and penitence of these glorious forty days is about. They are not ends in themselves, much less are they schemes for self-improvement. Rather, they are meant as a preparation, so that Christ may fashion each of us into temples worthy of his abiding presence, and when He comes to dwell in us we may not perceive him as a little version of ourselves—with all the assumptions and bigotries and narcissistic tendencies that we have—but as the image of the true God.

Naturally, the process can be painful, as I said in last week’s sermon. There was upset and confusion and turmoil that morning in the temple, and so will there be upset and confusion and turmoil in our own hearts when Christ comes in to do his transforming work. Christ said, “take up your cross and follow me.” Being conformed to Our Lord instead of conforming our vision of the Lord to ourselves means sacrifice, which is hard. Even so, we know that the end of such suffering is a renewed relationship with the Father, and ultimately unending life in His presence.

All of this should give us hope that in the often painful exigencies of life God is at work making Himself known. This is Good News for all of us. Despite our confusion and pain, God is working His purpose out in ways which we cannot now imagine. Our response to this blessed truth should be openness and endurance. We must be open to God’s will even when we find it uncomfortable or perplexing. We must be open to Christ working in us, when He turns over the tables in our own lives, strong in the assurance that in conforming us (and the whole world) to Himself, He will put all things to rights for His faithful people.

And, in the midst of such pain and confusion, we must heed the Apostle Paul’s mandate to “run the race with endurance”. We must endure in prayer and fasting and devotion, for these practices give us sustenance in our times of pain and confusion. And just as the angels ministered to Our Lord in the wilderness, so will God’s Word give us strength in the desert seasons of our lives. Just as God gave His people manna in the desert, so will the Body and Blood of Our Lord give us sustenance when we are wandering. And at the last, when surrounded by the light of Resurrection, we may look back on our own lives, and indeed on the whole sweep of history, and see that God was not absent even once, but was hard at work transforming this old, fallen world into His Kingdom.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I’ve heard it suggested that if the apostles were really listening to Jesus when he said “take up your cross, and follow me,” there would have been an extra twelve crucifixions on Calvary on that first Good Friday. No doubt this might at first strike us as hyperbolic. If all the apostles had died at the same time as Jesus, after all, they would not have then been able to be witnesses to the Resurrection and the early church’s efforts to spread the Good News would have been stymied. What’s more, all but two of the apostles–Judas the betrayer and John whom we believe to have died of old age in Ephesus sometime during the reign of Trajan–were, indeed, martyred for the faith. The point is well-taken, though. We are all awfully quick to claim that Jesus was speaking literally when we like what he has to say and metaphorically when we don’t, and we might assume the apostles were capable of the same rationalization.

To Peter’s credit, though he tried to deny Jesus’ hard words in this morning’s Gospel, at least he realized that he wasn’t speaking in mere metaphors about matters of life and death. That is why he rebuked Jesus; he did not want to see his Lord and master and friend die. Perhaps he was still convinced that Jesus was to be the kind of Messiah who fit the mold generally assumed among faithful first-century Jews–a warrior king who would push the Romans out, unseat the puppet regime of Herod and his family and reestablish the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem. Or maybe Peter’s reaction had less to do with his assumptions about Messianic expectation and Ancient Near Eastern geo-politics and more to do with his unwillingness to lose a friend.

In any even, while wildly missing the mark, we can probably appreciate Peter’s reaction, and we might find Jesus’ rebuke of Peter a bit disproportionate. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Remember, though, Jesus’ previous experience with Satan. During his forty day sojourn in the wilderness, Satan tempted Jesus with both power and escape from death. Here, Peter is doing the same thing: don’t let yourself get killed; become our earthly king instead. Whatever Peter’s intentions were, the sinless one was still a human; the second Adam could have theoretically given in to temptation, and here Jesus nips that possibility in the bud, as it were, just as he had done in the wilderness.

Now, lest we say “poor St. Peter got it wrong so much, and we know better” I think his reaction reflects our own unwillingness to take Jesus’ words and the reality of God’s plan for us more than we might like. One of the handful of dead horses I continue to beat from this pulpit is that we live in a death denying culture. I will spare you on this occasion from another recitation of all the ways in which we run away from death and pretend it’s not real. Peter seemed to suffer from this sort of death denial, even in an age in which death and decay were far more “in your face” than in our contemporary, rather sterile Western World. Peter rebuked Jesus for sharing the hard, but by this point rather obvious fact that he was going to die, as are we all, and if we’re following Jesus it may even be sooner than we’d like. Hear again Jesus’ words from today’s Gospel, and remember that at this point in the story Jesus was no longer speaking just to the twelve but had gathered everyone following him to hear these words:

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever shall lose his life for my safe and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.

We sometimes refer to a pinched nerve or an unpleasant neighbor or some other minor inconvenience as “our cross to bear”. That’s not what Jesus is saying. Our cross is the sacrifice of our lives to Christ and His Gospel. It means, quite literally, the courage and conviction to die in the service of the Gospel.

Now, as I said last week, the reality is that in the United States of America in the year of Our Lord 2024, none of us is likely to be called upon to die for our convictions. For most of us, the Cross will be a less literal, but nonetheless difficult death: a death to self-interest; a rejection of the modern idols of safety and security and success. If we’re not willing to experience that little death, we’ll certainly not be willing to literally die for the Gospel.

It is far too easy to equivocate while in the pulpit, far too easy to focus on comfort rather than challenge, but this, I firmly believe, is central to the Gospel. We must be willing to die for Christ and the Gospel if we are to follow Jesus’ mandate. This is not as a sign of despair but as a sign of hope. That none of us is likely to have to make that ultimate sacrifice is beside the point. Do we have the courage to follow our Lord to Calvary? If things were different, if we still lived in an Empire hellbent on hunting Christians down and feeding them to lions, would we stand up for Jesus in that final hour?

We must at some point ask this question of ourselves, not because it is likely (it’s not anymore), but because it will help us understand where our priorities lie and how we might be called to reorder them. That is a scary and uncomfortable proposition, but, believe me, it will put our lives in the proper perspective; this, my friends, is the hard work of this Holy Season. Be assured, though, that that work leads to life eternal.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Liturgical scholars will tell you that every Sunday of the church year is like a little Easter, an observance of the Resurrection regardless of the season in which it falls. This is true, though some Sundays are more “Easter-y” than others in practice. Today, the Sunday next before Lent, seems particularly so. We will share a celebratory meal together. You might notice that the hymns include as many “alleluias” as possible, since that word is verboten during the season of Lent. I don’t know if you’re like me in how you prepare for the changing church season at home, but in my weekly grocery shopping this week I made certain to get a goodly amount of meat, chocolate, and coca cola, all things that will not reappear in our kitchen between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. So, this “shrovetide”, as it’s traditionally called, is like a little Easter before entering the long season of self-denial into which we’re all about to enter.

A few years ago on this Sunday I introduced you to a term which I’d like to remind you of this year. The word is prolepsis. It’s from a Greek root pro-lambanein which means anticipation, and it means the breaking-in of a reality before it has been accomplished in the time-line as we perceive it.

Prolepsis is not simple foreshadowing. Most of us know what foreshadowing is. It is a literary device that hints at what is to come. Prolepsis, though, is not about merely hinting at the future, not simply suggesting what is about to take place. It is rather when the future in some more substantive sense breaks into the present, is made manifest outside the normal flow of time as we perceive it.

As Christians we live proleptically; we allow the sure and certain future of the Kingdom of God to break in to the present. We cannot fully perceive the Kingdom of God, it hasn’t been fully accomplished in our time-line, and yet the Kingdom of the world to come is made real and present at the altar. From our human perspective, the dead have not yet been raised to enjoy eternal life with God, but from the perspective of God, who functions outside of time as much as within it, the faithful departed are already in His presence. It can get confusing, but it will suffice to say that the mystery of redemption is beyond our capability to perceive because our minds simply cannot function without positing the passage of time. More about that in a minute.

This morning’s Gospel reading is an example of prolepsis. What happened on the Mount of Transfiguration was in fact an incursion of the future into the present. Specifically, the reality of the Resurrection was not just foreshadowed, but made really present in Christ’s miraculous mountaintop transformation.

Let’s take a closer look at the text. The scene occurs a week after Peter’s confession that Jesus was the Christ (our translation says “six days later”, though ancient people reckoned time inclusively, which is a bit confusing to us, but just understand that the Transfiguration happens a week after Peter’s Confession). This is significant. God created the world in seven days and as Christians we believe that in some sense He recreated it, He changed everything, on one day: the day of Resurrection. Throughout Christian history in fact, and especially in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Easter has been referred to as “the eighth day”. The Gospel writers were likely trying to make the connection between the Transfiguration and the Resurrection clear simply by making a point to say that is happened a week later.

When on the mountain top, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white. Mark’s account of the story is even more descriptive than the other Gospels, which is surprising given what we learned last week about Mark’s usual practice of removing details to get the story out quickly: “[Jeseus’] garments became glistening,” he wrote, “intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” Even somebody whose whole livelihood was to bleach clothes, a fuller, couldn’t have got any clothes this white. This should stir up in our minds the men at the tomb on the day of Resurrection, whose clothes are described by all of the Gospel writers as being extraordinarily white.

Likewise, we learn in the other accounts that at the Transfiguration “the appearance of [Jesus’] face changed.” This is what “transfiguration” literally means, to change appearance. Compare this with all of those accounts of the Resurrection, where Jesus is not recognized. Mary Magdalene didn’t recognize Jesus until he called her by name; the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize him until he broke bread with them; the apostles didn’t recognize him until he said “peace be with you.”

All of this is to suggest that though Christ was still on his way to Calvary, though he had not yet even died, he and his disciples experienced a foretaste of the Resurrection that day on the mountain. God wasn’t simply foreshadowing what was going to happen after Jesus’ death; rather, God let a little bit of the future, a little bit of the greatest event in history, impinge upon the present of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus had a “little resurrection” that day which was intimately connected to the resurrection as it was to take place several days later. Perhaps it was to give hope to the apostles. Perhaps it was to give Jesus himself the strength to suffer the agonies of the Cross, knowing that the transforming power of the Resurrection would ultimately triumph.

In any event, we have something to learn from this. We still live in a world beset by sin and suffering. We still live in a world where death is a reality. We still need forty days of Lent—that ever looming church season which commences Wednesday—to remind us.

But we can nonetheless experience hints of the Resurrection and the Kingdom of God among these things that are passing away. We acknowledge the “not yet” nature of the Resurrection and the Kingdom. We still have a shift in verbs in the Creed. “We believe in one God” and so forth, while we “look for”, or prosdokō- “await”, the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. They are still future events, but we Christians are proleptic people. We look for the Resurrection of the dead, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in Baptism. We look for the life of the world to come, but we also experience it in the here-and-now. We experience it in the Eucharist, a foretaste of the eternal feast.

We should be open to experiencing the risen life, but we must also live in the real world, and we can hold these two truths together. Like Peter, we might want to build huts for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; we may want to remain in the joy we experience in the risen life made so real and present in the Sacraments and in our lives as Christians, but like Jesus and like the disciples, we’ll eventually have to go back down the mountain. We shall all have to go back out into the world to love and serve the Lord, and humbly walk the way of the Cross. The mountain-top experiences are fleeting, but like Jesus and the disciples they give us strength. They give us the strength to do God’s work in a broken world, to live lives of sacrifice, knowing that some day we will experience the risen life, the life of the Kingdom, uninterrupted and in perpetuity. May we hold on to that blessed hope, and thus be strengthened to live in love and do God’s work with even more resolve.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.