A sermon for St. Peter Lutheran Church, Oran; and St. John Lutheran, Buck Creek
The Gospel this morning begins by
saying “About eight days after these sayings, Jesus took with him Peter and
John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.” It begs the question: What
were the sayings Luke was referring to?
It is worth noting what drove Jesus
up the mountain, because when we pull one story out of Luke 9, the break-neck
speed at which everything is happening quickly becomes evident. In Luke,
chapter 9 alone, we begin with Jesus giving the disciples power to heal
diseases and sending them to proclaim the kingdom of God, while ordering them
to do so without taking any payment. Then, Herod shows up, wondering who this
Jesus is. Then, Jesus feeds five thousand people; he asks the disciples who
they think he is; foretells his rejection; and tells them what the kingdom of
God will look like. Then, we have the transfiguration reading today. After this
story, Jesus heals a boy, proclaims he will be betrayed, breaks up an argument
between the disciples about who is the greatest, gets rejected trying to enter
a Samaritan village, and finally says a whole lot of cryptic phrases that
nobody really understands.
That is not a recap of the entire
Gospel—just Luke 9. There is so much going on all at once in Jesus’ ministry. It’s
a chaotic storm of activity. The only time things slow down—the only time they ever
slow down—is when he heads up the mountain.
I feel that in my bones when I look
at the world today. Everything is moving at breakneck speed. Things are hectic;
they are scary; they are uncertain. Our lives are lived on the high speeds of
the internet and the high speeds of the highway, receiving information and watching
things fly by faster than ever. By the time we can digest what is happening now,
it is gone. And as everything speeds up, requests turn to obligations, and
obligations turn to orders.
That is one loud story, but it is
not the story we hear on the mountain top.
Of course, the disciples don’t get it even when they see it face to face! Instead of marveling at what is holy, they make their encounter with God into an excuse for shrine-building, which is the danger what can happen at the mountain.
I come to you today from Ewalu,
which is for many people the metaphorical mountain top. At Ewalu, our tag line
is “a place apart,” which speaks to generations of campers who have come to
know our special place apart as a space for prayer—where campers encounter God
and lives are changed each and every summer and often in-between. On the one
hand, there is nothing special about the mountain-top. It is just another place
God created. But on the other hand, we so desperately need those places where
we can get away and slow down and listen for the voice of God sometimes
whispering in our ears and sometimes as obvious as the transfiguration.
Still, it is not good enough to
linger on the mountain top. We have to come down. We have to take what we have experienced
on the mountain and apply it to the rest of our lives. This is the tension with
camp if we believe we are only a place apart for your renewal. That
renewal has to look like a change in the way we react to a busy world—in many
ways, it is a revolution. That is what it was to be for Peter and John. They
wanted to build shrines. God had to break them out of their ruts—not with a
gentle suggestion but with a booming voice from on high. “This is my son, my
Chosen, listen to him!” And their response is telling: Silence. They were
finally quiet.
Our job as Christians is not to add
to the noise. Instead, it is to serve. Specifically, it is to serve the most
vulnerable—the poor and the hungry and the oppressed. We don’t need to save the
world—we can’t do it anyway; that is why Jesus had to come—but we can humbly
serve one another. That is what a busy world cannot stand.
I am reminded of a great poem by
Wendell Berry entitled Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, which
includes a stanza that reads:
“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love
the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.”
I’ll stop
the stanza there, but if you’re curious, I suggest you look it up in your own
time. If I read more, I may be in trouble—which is tempting as the guest
preacher, but I like Pr. Kyle enough to not do that to him. Like most folks, I
don’t relish being accused of being political. Yet, there is no way to be a
Christian but to follow Christ and to follow Christ is to be his hands and feet
in a way that does not make sense to a busy and harried world. It will always
be political: God’s politics. Not noise and fury but joy and love for a world
that desperately needs it.
We must
come down the mountain and bring the joy that we found up there to fuel
ourselves for the challenges we find down here. The world is working hard to
sap your joy—that’s why we need prayer; not to satisfy the God who does not
need our praise, but for ourselves so that we may rediscover the joy that is
stolen from us when we are confronted by the pain of people we love. This
Christian faith isn’t hard until it is lived with one another. Then, it becomes
not just hard but impossible. So, we yearn for a better world, for a world
where my children can grow up to be exactly who God created them to be. But
that is also not the end of the story.
Good news
remains. Really, there is the best news of all. To follow Christ is not about building
shrines, because Jesus came not to be worshiped by to save. Jesus came not as
the king that the people wanted but as the one they needed. All the
machinations of the busy world that were angling to put Jesus on the throne of
Jerusalem were misled by the saving power of God that would be accomplished by
the cross. They thought he was after power, but ultimately, he was after love.
And love cannot be defeated by wars and rumors of wars. Love cannot be
harnessed and curtailed by law. Press love into a box and it will burst out of
every seam.
Love shows up, especially when we
hurt.
A week ago,
my six-year-old son, Elias (the one who is not here this morning), broke his
collarbone at a birthday party, playing with friends. I took him to the
hospital and looked after him the rest of the weekend. Then, on Monday morning,
I drove him to school so he wouldn’t have to ride the bus with its stairs and
his backpack. As we walked down the hallway to his classroom, another boy
stopped and said “Hi, Elias”—a boy I didn’t recognize. He handed Elias a sheet
of paper folded in quarters. Elias smiled slightly. Inside the paper, there was
a hand-drawn card with some hearts and a short message: “You rock, Elias. Feel better. Love, Parker.”
That is
what the Kingdom of God looks like, folks. Just a couple six-year-olds showing
the rest of us what’s up.
In the end,
I don’t think this Christian faith is hard at all. It’s just spreading love all
over the place when the world demands there is no time for that. Instead, to be
Christian is to laugh and to cry and to shout with joy and to do all the things
I so often tell my kids not to do in church. But we have to come down that
mountain crying out or none of it really matters! We have to love when the
machine demands we hate. We have to pray when we are told we have no time. We
have to do as Jesus did and live a life of paradox—in this world but bound to
another. In short, we have to be a six-year-old who is unashamed to say it how
it is. I love you. Better yet, God does too, so much so that he sent Jesus for
a world full of machines, toiling away faster and faster and faster until their
cogs all die, but that is just when the magic begins.
Jesus went
up the mountain, then came down to save it. May we feel the love of God who
walked that road, and may we show that love for one another like a couple
six-year-olds who don’t know any better.
Amen.
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