The Woman by the Well: A Lenten Sermon

This sermon was given on Lent 3A (Sunday, 23 March 2014) at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard by the Rev. Luther Zeigler. The readings for the day can be found here.

“The Samaritan woman said to Jesus, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’”  John 4:15

One of the most meaningful parts of my recent trip to the Holy Land was the experience of just being in those places where Jesus had been.  We visited Nazareth, the utterly nondescript town where Jesus was raised as a little boy and, before that, where the archangel Gabriel greeted both Joseph and Mary to announce his arrival. We traveled to Bethlehem, and tried to imagine the location of the manger scene and the field of shepherds and angels off in the distance. We walked along the Sea of Galilee, where the brothers Peter and Andrew, and James and John, were called to be disciples.  We toured the ruins of the synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus taught.  We climbed the Mount of Beatitudes from where Jesus is believed to have preached the Sermon on the Mount.  We waded into the Jordan River, letting its water run through our fingers, just so we could touch the same living water into which Jesus himself was immersed.

Being in these various places – experiencing their sights, smells, and sounds – has reframed these pivotal biblical stories for me in profound ways.

One place that we did not get to visit was Sychar, the home of Jacob’s well, and the scene of today’s gospel story.  Sychar (today known as Nablus) is a small town about 40 miles north of Jerusalem in the region of Samaria in what is now known as the West Bank. 

As our group was traveling from the shores of the Galilee south toward Jerusalem, I asked our Israeli tour guide about whether we were going to stop at Jacob’s Well. “No,” Danny said, “that is not an easy place for us to see.”  “Why not?,” I asked innocently.  “It appears to be only a few miles off the main road.” 

“The ancient town of Sychar,” Danny explained to us, “is now one of the areas controlled by the Palestinian authority and the Israeli government won’t allow its citizens, even tour guides, to travel there.”  He explained that we, as American citizens, could visit, but that we would have to stop at the border crossing and then hire our own Palestinian guide to take us from there to the monastery that now houses the well.  Danny further explained that the town has been the site of a fair bit of violence over the last decade between Israelis and Palestinians and that it isn’t today the safest of places. And so, we just passed on by, not wanting to take that risk.

Danny’s decision to skip this holy site out of concern for his guests’ well-being was, of course, an understandable one, and probably a prudent choice.  But as I sat on the bus continuing our journey toward Jerusalem, I couldn’t help but feel the intense irony of this situation.

Some two thousand years ago, when Jesus traveled between the Galilee and Jerusalem, this region of Samaria was every bit as dangerous a place as it is now.  And yet, as John tells us in our gospel story today, when Jesus was making this same journey, he chooses to stop in this risky place, even though the Samaritans and Jews of his day were just as wary of one another as Palestinians and Jews are today.

And not only does Jesus enter this Samaritan town, but he goes to its very heart, the well in the center of town, and sits there in the noonday sun.  If we didn’t know better, it would seem as if Jesus is looking for trouble, daring some Samaritan boys from town to heckle this wandering rabbi, apparently so far from home.

But instead, Jesus is approached, not by a gang of Samaritan boys, but by a lone woman, who seems to match Jesus’ courage by coming toward him in plain public view, even though the moral standards of the day prohibited a woman from engaging so publicly with a man to whom she is not related. Perhaps she thinks she has nothing to lose. She is, after all, a woman with a complicated history.  But then again, perhaps she is drawn to Jesus because she senses on some deep level that he is different from other strangers wandering into town. For whatever reason, she comes forward.

As she does, Jesus asks her for a drink.  Surprised, the Samaritan woman immediately recognizes the social boundaries designed to keep her in her place, saying to Jesus, “how can you, a Jew, even be talking to me, a Samaritan woman, much less be asking me for a drink?”  When Jesus responds, somewhat opaquely, that she does not know to whom she is talking and that he is himself a source of living water, the woman doesn’t back down, but instead challenges Jesus:  “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well?”  She yearns to understand who he is and what he is claiming.

And that is when Jesus opens himself to her, sharing the good news of his life-giving presence:  “Everyone who drinks of this well water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I will give them will never be thirsty.  The water that I give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

It is no accident, of course that in John’s gospel this story comes immediately after Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus over the meaning of baptism and the purifying power of being bathed in the living waters of the Spirit. The Samaritan woman comes to this well in the middle of town thinking that it will quench her body’s thirst for water, but Jesus wants to offer her water from another source, a water that will fill her Spirit rather than her belly.

She bravely accepts his offer, saying:  “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty again.”  And as she opens herself to Jesus in faith, her whole previous identity comes spilling forth, this woman with five prior husbands, who is now with a man to whom she is not married.  In dialogue with Jesus, she acknowledges the emptiness of her past, and expresses a desire to find that which will give her life meaning. 

But notice this: Although Jesus knows everything about this woman's past, as indeed he knows each of us and the secrets we seek to hide, there is no mention of sin or sinfulness in this text, or even a gentle insistence that she change her life.  Jesus shows no interest in judging her.  He only wants to know her and to offer her his life-giving Spirit. And this, she gladly accepts.

The Samaritan woman demonstrates what can happen when we take the risk of encountering Jesus, when we approach him with our deepest questions and desires.  This woman by the well shows us that the life of faith, like the life of prayer, thrives on honest dialogue with God, and that it is in such vulnerable and real conversation that true growth and change comes. She teaches us that faith is about questioning, not about having all the answers. Indeed, if we think we have all the answers, if we are content with our own clever doctrinal formulations and pious practices, if we believe more in our own convictions than the possibility of revelation, it is then that we are at the greatest risk of fooling ourselves.  God comes to us in our seeking, when we strip ourselves of pretense and false piety, and are willing just to express our truest and simplest desire: “Lord, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty again.”

But notice this too:  the Samaritan woman doesn’t stop there, content with having been known and accepted and nourished by this holy man.  Even though she is not yet certain that he is the Messiah, she leaves her water jar by the well and runs into town so that she might share the news of this life-giving encounter with all of her townspeople. And, John tells us, they came to believe because of her testimony. This unnamed woman from Samaria is in so many ways a model of what the Church should look like:  unpretentious, courageous, questioning, vulnerable, trusting, and a humble witness to all.

I have very few regrets from my recent trip to the Holy Land. But one small one is that I did not summon the courage that day, as our bus was making its way from Galilee to Jerusalem, to say to Danny, our tour guide:  “I know it might be risky.  But why don’t you just drop us off at Sychar, let us cross over all the borders and boundaries we broken people have erected around this holy place, and see if we might not find this well of Jacob’s on our own?”  Who knows what, or whom, we may have discovered there.

Amen.

The Promise of the Desert

This sermon was given on Sunday by Seth Woody at Old North Church in the North End of Boston. Seth is a Life Together fellow living in our shared space at 2 Garden Street and working with Dorchester Bay Youth Force.

“Go from your country, and your kindred, and your fathers house to the land that I will show you. And I will bless you.” Leave everything you know, everything that gives you status and power and agency in this world, and believe that what I have to offer is greater than anything you might imagine, that you would be the father of many nations, because you have chosen to believe in this new promise. Step out into the desert of the absurd and believe that the kingdom is at hand.

Abraham’s story is in our spiritual bones. It lies at the foundation of who we claim to be as a people of the kingdom of God. It is the point of no return in some ways, a symbolic marker that at our origins, we claim to be a people that follows God into the irrational, absurd and impossible promise that in the midst of this desert of death, life is abundant. That in the midst of this world and its ever-present suffering, love is abundant. For what is more absurd, unknown, and impossible than then resurrection?

My journey into the desert took hold as a junior in college. I had spent the majority of my life being exposed to the promise of that absurd kingdom, mission trips, homeless shelters, parish communities in grief and growth, but it was never a promise for me. I am the son of a hospice chaplain and an Episcopal priest, and they were never lacking in demonstrating to me the life of one who believes in the promise. But being around kingdom seekers is quite different than actively becoming one, and it was not until I decided to spend a semester abroad, living in intentional community while learning about solidarity with the people of El Salvador, that I heard the call to “leave everything you know and believe in the promise.”

It was a young man, Giovani, who asked me to know that promise. I was granted the great privilege of living in solidarity with his family during my time in El Salvador. I wasn’t working on a project, or offering education, or even a decent conversation partner, my Spanish was and remains terrible. No, instead I was invited to sit and listen to a young man my age that knew much of this world.

His body is broken, paralyzed from the neck down; a result of a fall he took at 20 while working to feed his 5 younger siblings at a time when he had to decide between staying in school or feeding his family. Desert. He is stuck, now as he was then, in a chair on a hill overlooking the town of Tepecoyo.

In a passing moment of grace near the end of our time together, Giovanni took my hands into his, broken and unfeeling, and spoke love into my broken soul, so that I might begin to understand the call to live into the promise of Abraham, that there is life in the desert. He asked me to see the truth of his life and all life, that his body was truly broken and his options are severe and laced with death. This young man lives in the desert. He lives on the edge of the pit of despair and the most glorious hope. But he loves people, his family, his neighbors, and strangers like me, with an unceasing passion. And In his brokenness, In that truth and on that edge, he has chosen to believe in the promise and give the gift of life and love.

It is a cruel punishment for our broken souls to be invited, like I was, to see what truly lies in front of us. Because this world is painful, cruel, heart breaking, and full of every death we can dream. If we were to open the eyes of our hearts and really see, we might notice the men and women on our streets without shelter, we might see the specter of death that haunts cold nights, that hangs on the shadows of strangers with unknown intentions. We might see the young women trafficked in our city. We might see the young men murdered in our streets. We might see the visible lines of racial division in our city. We might see the broken bodies and souls of our brothers and sisters and ourselves. This world is crushing. It grinds us to dust.

The Apostle Paul knew this truth. He was an instrument of death in his early life, and he was witness to the power of death in his ministry. But he was a believer in the promise. He implores his brothers and sisters of Rome in the passage we read today, to look to the example of Abraham as the orienting story of their impossible belief. Of faith, that absurd relationship with God that presumes trust and openness in the face of death and despair in the desert. And no wonder he pointed them to that story, as this community in Rome was living into the real possibility of death for choosing to believe. They needed to be reminded that they too were in the presence of a God who “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

I work now, as a Life Together Fellow, with young men and women of Boston organizing for Youth Jobs. Similar to the community of believers in Rome, these young women and men are faced with the reality that the world in which they have been born considers them to be disposable, and perhaps regrettably, subject to death. They live in a reality that prevents access to abundance, that categorizes them as an unfortunate bye product of a regrettable history out of our control. They have every right to despair, every right to lash out in the injustice of their suffering. But they chose to believe in a promise, perhaps not of the same language of Abraham, but a promise nonetheless, that compels them to action. It compels them to seek justice in impossible conditions.

So what is this promise of the desert to us? What is this call to believe today? What compels these young men and women of Boston to justice? What are we asked to see here and now? First, as Giovanni invited me to see, we must truly know that we are broken and that the world is broken, and that we cannot believe in this promise of the kingdom if we don’t see first that there is no kingdom. Consider the words of Jesus to Nicademus today, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Very Truly I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”

Jesus says “A teacher of Israel”, as in, one who shares in the inheritance of Abraham and Moses and the prophets, how can you truly believe if you have failed to grasp the dire nature of our world? Have you forgotten the desert? Have you forgotten our slavery; have you failed to see the crushing realities of today? Have you not seen what I have been up to here? Look at us, we are dying in the dust of the road. And if you cannot see that, you truly cannot see the kingdom. For the kingdom, the promise I make with you and all people, is born of that death. It is born of the absurdity of this world. That in the midst of such suffering, in the midst of death… eternal life is brought forth. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

The promise, then and now, is resurrection. The promise is that within the desert of the absurd, there is an oasis that springs forth eternal water. The promise is that the kingdom is already here, and it is alive in the moment of death. It cannot be stopped. Failure is not only inconsequential; it is essential to the kingdom. Jesus died people. He “failed”. Palm Sunday was just a happy memory, a lost moment. We too are failures. I can do nothing for Giovanni, he will most likely remain stuck in his chair on that lonely hill. The young men and women I work with now will still face the denial of access and humanness throughout their lives. You and I will not employ every young person in Boston, and there will be more deaths this summer in our streets. The world is broken and we are broken, and we will surely fail. We must know this always. And it is in that moment of knowing that the kingdom promise abides. Because the kingdom is real in the hands of Giovanni passing love to me, it is alive and well in the courage and determination of those young women and men organizing their peers for justice, passing love and faith to politicians and teenagers alike. It is alive and well in this parish’s commitment to justice and access to employment, offering love and faith in 6 young men and women this summer. And it is alive and well in the resurrection.

The promise, of Abraham, of Giovanni, of young organizers, of our God today, is that in death there is life, and that we will surely fail, only to find that our failure brought about the kingdom. Let us live into that promise, let us march into the desert of the absurd, hands empty and hearts broken open. I implore you, continue to act in this hopeful promise. Continue to live on the edge of the absurd, the impossible and the foolish. Give freely and look deeply into everyone around you. Seek eternal life, the life in all things, all times, all spaces. If you are a mother, love as a mother to all. If you are senior, impart your wisdom to every soul you meet. If you are a business owner, act in that business as a proprietor of the kingdom, where all are employed, all are served, and all are welcome. If you are a citizen of this promise people, bestow that promise on all the people you meet. Seek to believe in the impossible. Leave behind what you know, that the world is cruel and destined for death, and chose instead to live in the presence of a God that brings life to that death, and calls into existence the things that do not exist. For we shall surely fail, ….. and the kingdom is born anew. AMEN.

Suggestion, Delight, and Consent: A Sermon for the First Week in Lent

This sermon was given by our Kellogg Fellow, Emily Garcia, on March 9th at the Episcopal Chaplaincy's service for the first Sunday in Lent. The readings for the day can be found here. 

Good evening, and welcome to Lent! This is my favorite season. Each season of the church year lifts up different aspects of our relationship with God. During Lent, we slow down a little, and pay more attention to the difference between our nature and God’s nature: namely, that God is perfect, infinite, perfect love, holy, and righteous—and we are not. We are finite, our world is broken and hurt in some way, and we are not perfect—we’re human. God's love reaches across that distance, but the difference remains, and that’s part of what Lent is about.

Our Gospel today shows us both sides of this, in showing us how human Jesus was, and how very much he was God. After his baptism, Jesus is led by God’s Spirit into the wilderness, and he’s there for forty days and forty nights. At the end, “famished,” the tempter comes to him. Jesus is presented with three temptations, each of which he apparently rebuffs with only his good memory of Scriptures. On the surface of the story, there is no indication of struggle. But if we believe that Jesus was in fact tempted, then there was a moment when Jesus considered saying yes to the tempter. A moment when he actually made a choice, when he may have said either yes or no. Gregory the Great in the sixth century said that temptation proceeds by suggestion, then taking delight in the suggestion, and then by consent. If Jesus was tempted, then he must have considered consenting.

          But Jesus was and is God, and was able to resist temptation his entire life. We are not God, but we are also faced with many choices—as the Collect says, “assaulted by many temptations,” and “weak”, each in our own way. And although our temptations look very different from Jesus’s, some of the essential qualities are the same as these three.* I have seen many rocks without ever once feeling the urge to change them to bread—but I have wanted to use my God-given gifts simply for my own nourishment—for me and only me. I’ve never been tempted to be caught by angels in front of a crowd, but I have been tempted to be apparently the most holy one in a room, to be seen as the closest to God. I’ve never been offered kingdoms and splendor, but I have had some chances at acclaim, the ears and attention of many, power.

Most of us have faced and will face temptations like this—opportunities for satiety, attention, and power, which although they could be used for the greater glory of God, are often acquired and used for our own satisfaction.

Now, temptation itself is not a sin.

Many of our feelings and thoughts come to us from our bodies, our neurochemistry, our subconscious. These are the “suggestions” that Gregory the Great talked about, and hearing them, finding them appealing even, is not a sin at all. 

The first temptations that I always think of are anger and selfishness. I am often tempted by a sudden rush of feeling that comes unbidden—as if someone flipped a switch in my brain, and all of the lights and alarms in my head go off. If I’m angry, I feel like I want to shout at someone, or kick something. If it’s selfishness, I want what I think is mine, what I think I deserve, and I don’t want to wait and I don’t want to share.

          So you can probably hear why I work with kids! Most of my temptations are very kid-like temptations! But for many of us grown-ups, our temptations come on a bit more slowly, or a bit more quietly. They’re the sneaky unspoken assumptions beneath our choices. It’s when we find ourselves thinking, “I don’t want to listen to this; I don’t have to; their feelings don’t especially matter.” Or, “I’m in a hurry—it’s fine if I’m a little pushy with this person, I’m busy and he doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere important.” Or, “I know what’s best—why should I consider what these people think?” Or, “I’m obviously the most important person here—people should be listening to me.” Or, “This person is kind of weird—I’m going to let them know I think they’re out of place.”

Temptations like this often build incrementally, over time. We feel that initial rush of emotion that I mentioned, or we hear these quiet little voices, and we get used to them, and our initial resistance starts to fade as we get used to it, and one day we say Yes, and it gets easier to say Yes—and eventually consenting to this appealing suggestion, giving into temptation, becomes a habit.

Temptation, that first suggestion, isn’t a sin—but it presents us with a choice. Will we turn towards God, and away from our impulse? Or will we stay there, our backs to God, making ourselves at home in our little space of selfishness, or anger, or arrogance?

          Me, I normally choose that latter course. I let myself feel so justified in whatever petty feeling comes up that I just stay there, stewing in it, and it keeps boiling away in my thoughts, stinking up the day—and then it comes out of me as thoughtless actions, or mean words.

I love the lines in the confession of sin that say, “thought, word, or deed—things done or left undone.” These are all ways of giving into temptation. And in the older confession, it says, “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” I wonder what the devices and desires of your heart are? I wonder what thoughts, words, and deeds you are tempted by? I know that I do follow too much the devices of my own heart. Most of us do, I think.

          BUT! Here’s the good news! It doesn’t always have to be like that! (That’s the good news of Christ all around—it doesn’t always have to be like that!)

We can resist temptation—and we can get better and better at resisting temptation. We do this with God’s grace. Or rather, GOD does this IN us with God’s grace.

God’s grace is a free gift, like Paul says. Sometimes it works in us like lightning—a sudden strike from nowhere and a person is transformed. Paul himself is a good example, and maybe you know someone else with a similar story. I have a friend who gave up an addiction after a sudden moment in which he felt God offered him love and healing, and my friend accepted it in his heart—and has been a different person ever since.

But for most of us, God’s grace is incremental. It’s a grace of mountains and snails instead of lightning. We change slowly over the days and years of our lives, growing closer and closer to God. Sometimes we see it; most of the time we don’t. But over time our thoughts, words, and deeds are transformed. And the devices and desires of our hearts are themselves changed.

Since this grace is a free gift, you have to say YES to it! God isn’t a bully—he’s not going to shove the gift into your face. He’s going to wait, and keep offering, until you say yes to him. And since for most of us it’s an incremental grace, we have to keep saying yes!

          I think there are two main ways we keep saying yes to God’s grace, that we receive this grace that allows us to change.

          The first is in relationships with other people, and in loving communities with each other. We are born with our own natural virtues as well as our own natural weaknesses, and God has given us each other so that we can learn from each other’s witness. We also learn simply by being in relationships with other people. Sometimes these loving communities are in and around church services—but often they’re not! Grace is not, praise God, confined to the sanctuary walls.

          The second way we keep saying yes to God’s grace is in prayer. Not just in common worship—but in time spent carefully listening to what God has to say about our lives. Sometimes Episcopalians forget that prayer doesn’t mean “words put together in a beautiful cadenced order”—that’s the BCP! PRAYER means TALKING WITH GOD. Talking with—so both speaking, and listening. Time spent with God is like time spent with other loved ones—the more time you spend with someone, the more they rub off on you, the more you hear their voice in your head or know how they might react to a situation. The difference is—this is the creator of the universe who wants to talk with you, and their way of being that’s going to rub off on you is perfection and goodness itself.

The more we are in loving relationships with other people, and the more time we spend listening for God’s voice, the more we find that the devices and desires of our hearts are being changed. The more we say YES to God’s free gift of grace, the less we hear the whispers or shouts of our temptations. The more we say YES to God, the clearer his voice comes to our ears.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, we are weak, but you are strong. We are tempted, like you were tempted; help us to say yes to your free gift of grace, and transform the desires of our hearts to a desire for you and your love.  In your Holy Name we pray,

Amen.

*I'm grateful for this analysis and similar comparisons from Br. David Vryhof, in his Workshop on Discernment in Prayer.

Lenten Reflections from Jerusalem

Some thoughts from our Chaplain, the Reverend Luther Zeigler, who is currently away on his first trip to the Holy Land. This piece was written from Jerusalem on Tuesday evening, March 11, 2014. The photo is from the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

We landed in Tel Aviv on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday. While most of my fellow priests in the States were busy with traditional Ash Wednesday services, here I was thousands of miles from home trying to stay awake after hours in the air and in airports. We had made our way from Boston, through Frankfurt, finally arriving in the city whose name is taken from the Book of Ezekiel and combines elements of both the old and the new. Aviv is Hebrew for "spring", symbolizing renewal, and tel is a man-made mound accumulating layers of civilization built one over the other and symbolizing the ancient. To be sure, I missed participating in the services that mark the beginning of Lent, but yet it felt entirely right to be experiencing Lent this year in a different way by visiting this holiest of lands.

Over the ensuing five days, we travelled all over Israel, taking in both the old and the new:  In Tel Aviv, we learned of the dramatically courageous birth of the nation in 1948 in Independence Hall, listening to the recorded voice of David Ben-Gurion announce the establishment of Israel to choruses of Hatikvah; we went to the coastal town of Caesarea built by Herod the Great where Paul was imprisoned and the first Gentile (Cornelius) converted to the faith; we visited the head spring of the Jordan River at Caesarea Philippi where I had the chance to collect some holy water; we stayed in a kibbutz on the Israel/Lebanon border where we experienced a distinctively Israeli form of communal living; we toured the Golan Heights, feeling the tensions of life in this country as we peered into both Syria and Lebanon from Mount Bental; then we headed south to the Galilee, where most of Jesus' public ministry occurred, visiting Peter's home in Capernaum, the ruins of the synagogue where Jesus challenged the Pharisees, and the Mount of Beatitudes from which he preached the Sermon on the Mount; we crossed over to Nazareth, touring the Church of the Annunciation and St. Joseph's Chapel, where the great story all started; then, we headed south along the Jordan River, stopping at the site traditionally associated with Jesus' baptism, as well as the spot where Jacob wrestled the angel near where the Jabbok and Jordan Rivers come together; and then, finally, yesterday we arrived in the magnificent city of Jerusalem, where we now begin four days of exploration.

It is difficult to identify any single highlight of the trip thus far, as all of this has been an extraordinary experience for different reasons. But I will say that our tour this morning of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum, left me emotionally overwhelmed. I have studied the Holocaust a great deal and toured the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, many times; but Yad Vashem is something more. While it is impossible to capture the enormity of the evil perpetrated upon the Jewish people in the Holocaust, this museum comes as close as humanly possible to conveying the pain, the suffering, and the death of that tragic era. At the same time, Yad Vashem also is a monument to hope, resilience, and faith. It is something to be experienced.

Thus, as I sit here in my Jerusalem hotel this night, my prayers are filled with a complex mix of emotions: enormous gratitude for this opportunity to visit the Holy Land; great humility in standing amidst such history; a true sense of wonder and awe at what has happened here; mournful lament at all the violence that has plagued this region and its people; but also a sense of hope that, even in the midst of such conflict and loss, God is still imploring us all toward that place of reconciliation that is the New Jerusalem. Dear Lord, deliver us.

A Sermon for the Transfiguration

The following sermon was given by the Revd. Luther Zeigler on Transfiguration Sunday (March 2, 2014) at the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard. The readings for the day are available here.

Mountains are holy places.  They are high places, where the earth and heavens seem to touch. The air is clearer, thinner, invigorating.  We are closer to the brightness of the sun during the day and the illuminating array of stars at night.  On mountaintops we gain perspective. We go to the mountains to retreat from the craziness of our daily lives.  We are able to see more clearly whence we have come and what lies ahead.  Mountains are holy places.

It is no wonder that mountains figure so prominently in the Bible as places where people meet God.  In Exodus, Moses goes to the mountain in Sinai to receive the law, and it is on another mountaintop that Moses sees the Promised Land just as he is about to die.  In First Kings, Elijah, the great prophet and forerunner of the messiah, goes to the holy mountain to hear the still small voice of God in the sheer silence of the mountain pass.  And today, in our gospel reading, it is on the mountaintop that Jesus is transfigured before his inner disciples – Peter, James, and John.  Matthew tells us that Jesus’ face shines like the sun, his clothes become dazzling white, and that the voice of his father comes out of the heavens, telling all who are there that this is his beloved Son, with whom He is pleased.

Moses and Elijah are there too.  At the outset of the Sermon on the Mount, earlier in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus had told his disciples that he had come not to abolish the law or the prophets, but to fulfill them.  We now can see what he means, as Jesus stands in the company of Moses and Elijah, the iconic representatives of the Law and the Prophets.  At first, they are all together, God’s three chosen messengers, but only Jesus is transfigured, only Jesus is claimed as the beloved Son, and as the story closes, only Jesus remains standing.

Peter does what most of us might do in the face of this awesome disclosure of divine truth and beauty.  He wants to capture the moment.  He wants to make a memorial.  He wants to build a house, a tabernacle.  He knows, as he says, that it is “good for him to be here.”  And so, he wants more than anything to make a place where he can always go to be with God, just as the Israelites wandered the wilderness carrying with them the Ark of the Covenant, making a tent of meeting where they could always reliably encounter God.  It is such a human thing to do and to want.

But it is in the midst of Peter saying these things that God interrupts him, as if to say:  your job is not to fence my beloved Son in, so that you can keep him for yourself and your friends.  Rather, your job is to listen to this beloved Son of mine and to follow him.  His destiny is not to stay safely in place, but to venture down the mountain into the world.

Importantly, the Transfiguration story in Matthew comes immediately after Jesus’ first passion prediction to his disciples, when he first tells them that he must go to Jerusalem to undergo great suffering, even to the point of death, and then on the third day to be raised.  The disciples refuse to believe this, of course, but Jesus rebukes them, and says that if they truly want to be his followers, they too must take up their cross and follow.

It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Father’s own voice comes from the heavens confirming that this Teacher of theirs is indeed the beloved Son to whom they must listen, the disciples are overcome with fear and fall to the ground.  Again, how utterly human:  hearing God himself speak, seeing his radiant Son, and being told they must listen and follow, the disciples become afraid and fall.

But then comes one of the most tenderly beautiful moments in all of the gospels.  Jesus approaches the fallen disciples, reaches out, and touches them.  Don’t be afraid, he says.  And he invites them to get up.  Except the Greek is not just “get up” – it’s “be raised,” the same word used later by the angel at the tomb to describe Jesus’ resurrection.

For this reason, some commentators have called this scene a “displaced resurrection story”:  the dazzling white, the invitation to be raised, the injunction to fear not.  The Transfiguration parallels the resurrection scene except here it is not Jesus’ resurrection but that of the disciples, as they are pulled from their fear and failure to new life and courage.  And notice that Jesus doesn’t, at least at this moment, rebuke them for their failure, or call them to repentance, or grant them forgiveness. Rather, like a loving parent, when he sees that they have fallen, he reaches out, raises them up, calms their fears, and sends them forth into life restored and renewed.

Each year we hear the Transfiguration story on this last Sunday of Epiphany. It is the quintessential “epiphany” story, gathering up the various themes we have been exploring these past many weeks:  themes of light, of God’s illuminating presence in the world, and of the fulfillment of the law and the prophets in the Incarnation.  Yet, the story also looks forward, as we have just heard, to Lent:  to the call to follow Jesus into the world, to bear its pain and suffering, and to journey to and through the Cross, to the glorious resurrection that awaits on the other side of Easter.  Transfiguration Sunday is one of those “hinge days” in the liturgical year, that looks both backwards to where we have come and forward to where we are headed, as if we too were on a mountaintop.

As we pause this Sunday to prepare ourselves for the Lenten journey that awaits us, I invite you to pray on this story, and especially the promise of its beautiful ending.  To listen to Jesus, and to follow him, is hard stuff.  And were we left to our own devices, it is almost certain that we too would stumble and fall, trembling with fear.  But it is precisely in these moments of self-doubt and failure that Jesus is most present to us, if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  Look for his radiant presence.  Listen for his voice.  Feel his touch.  Take his hand and let him raise you up, so that together we might follow him without fear, filled with a peace that passes all understanding.  Amen.