A Life-Changing Event (The Transfiguration, March 2 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Epiphany Last, March 2 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ex 24.12-18, Ps 99, 2 Pet 1.16-21, Mt 17.1-9

“A Life-Changing Event”

“Jesus took with him Peter, John and James up the mountain.  And right before their very eyes he was transfigured, his face shining like the sun, his clothes becoming dazzling white and there appeared with him Moses and Elijah.”

Whatever it was that happened to Jesus on that mountain top, we know that for Peter, this was a life-changing event.  It was what we sometimes call a “mountain-top” or a “peak” experience, something that Peter would look back on as foundational for his life from that point on.  We know that it had this effect on Peter because in our reading from the letter of Peter, we hear the words that he spoke near the end of his life, a summing up of his experience for those who would carry on after him.  In those final words, Peter looks back to this event, to this moment when he heard the voice on the mountain, as the key, as the moment that transformed him, the moment he could look back on as the foundation for all that followed.

Have you ever had a moment like that?  How many of you have experienced a life changing event?  Perhaps it was what we might call a “mountain top experience”.  Perhaps it was more mundane, a joyful or a tragic event that shaped you into the person you are today.  Perhaps it was a simple moment of clarity.

About ten years ago, I was teaching a Sunday School class to a group of ten to twelve year olds.  In that Sunday School program we were using the Sunday readings each week, and this reading of the transfiguration from Matthew came up.  At first I didn’t know what to do with it.  Finally, as about 8 of us gathered together, I asked the youth the same question I just asked you.  Have you ever had a life changing event?  And then I was simply blown away as these young people, one after the other, shared the stories of their life changing moments.  There were tragic stories, stories of car accidents and family breakdown, and there were hopeful stories, stories of family gatherings and moments of joy.  But in each case the young people who spoke were able, like Peter, to remember particular moments that had transformed them into the people that they had become.

What were your life-changing moments?  How do you remember them?  How do you understand them?

There was a movie that came out in the 90’s called Pulp Fiction, about two mob hit men named Jules and Vincent.  It wasn’t a particularly uplifting film, not one I would normally use for sermon illustrations.  But near the end of the film, these two hit men are ambushed by one of their rivals, who shoots at them from point blank range.  Somehow all of the bullets miss them, and they survive.  That afternoon we find them in a diner, talking about what just happened.

Jules: Man, I just been sitting here thinking.

Vincent: About what?

Jules: About the miracle we just witnessed.

Vincent: The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence.

Jules: What is a miracle, Vincent?

Vincent: An act of God.

Jules: And what's an act of God?

Vincent: When, um … God makes the impossible possible … but this morning I don't think it qualifies.

Jules: Hey, Vincent, don't you see? That stuff don't matter. You're judging this the wrong way. I mean, it could be that God stopped the bullets, or He changed Coke to Pepsi, or He found my car keys. You don't judge stuff like this based on merit. Now, whether or not what we experienced was an "according to Hoyle" miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.

Both Vincent and Jules witnessed the same event, but their response to it was very different.  As a result of that event, Jules goes straight.  He gives up the life of a mob hit man.  Why?  Because in that life changing moment, he felt the touch of God, he sensed somehow that God got involved and that he was being called to something new.

What about you?  When these moments, these freak occurrences, happen in your life, do you feel the touch of God?  Are there times in your life when you sense that God got involved?

There was a survey done in Canada by sociologist Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge.  In that survey, people were asked if they believed that they have experienced God’s presence.  43% of Canadians replied yes, they believe they have experienced God’s presence.

When I read that statistic the first time, it surprised me.  After all, only 20% of us go to religious services regularly, so having 43% say they have had a direct experience of God seems like a lot.  I think that the figure also surprised me because most people don’t talk about these things.  We tend to keep our “religious experiences” to ourselves, perhaps because we don’t have the words to describe them, perhaps because we’re afraid of how others might react.  Perhaps it’s also because these experiences can be disorienting and it can be difficult and take years to figure out what just happened.

We get a sense of this by observing Peter in today’s gospel.  When he sees Jesus transfigured on the mountain top, the dazzling clothes and brilliant face, and when he sees Moses and Elijah appear, his first reaction is to try to do something.  He tries to stabilize the situation, to control it, to fit it into his belief system.  “Good thing I’m here,” he says.  “I’ll make three little shelters here, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  And while he is still speaking, while Peter is babbling on about what he’s going to do, all of a sudden he’s overshadowed by a bright cloud and a voice interrupts him, as if to say “Peter, enough already, stop babbling.”  The voice interrupts all of Peter’s plots and plans and announces that Jesus is none other than God’s Beloved Son and what Peter really needs to do is to be quiet and listen to him.

Peter, overwhelmed to be in the powerful presence of the living God, does stop talking.  In fact he immediately collapses to the ground in fear. 

And then Jesus comes and touches him.  He says to him “do not fear”, and he raises him up.

There are moments in each of our lives when we are taken by surprise, moments of joy and moments of sadness, moments that comfort and moments that disorient.  Our first impulse in these moments is often like Peter’s, an attempt to re-assert our control over what’s happening, and to reconcile what we’re experiencing with our usual way of doing and thinking.  But when our experiences are too powerful to be tamed in this way, we can be overwhelmed.  Perhaps we fall like Peter.  And sometimes it’s at that moment that we feel God’s touch, it’s at that moment that God gets involved, tells us not to be afraid, and raises us up to something new.

Let me tell you about one of my life-changing moments.  Eight years ago, I spent a summer as a student chaplain in the Royal Ottawa Psychiatric Hospital, trying to learn to provide spiritual care to patients with severe mental illness.  It was a challenging time in my life.  There were some serious health issues in the family.  I had just finished my first year of seminary and was trying to figure out if I should continue on the path towards ordination.   In the hospital I encountered despair and darkness like I’d never seen before in the lives of many men and women, and most of the time there wasn’t much if anything that I could do to help them.  It was a time of waiting, a time of waiting for test results, a time of waiting for patients to stop their slide into despair.  It was a time of questioning, a time when I wondered if I “had what it takes” to become an ordained minister, a time when I questioned whether I was going down the right path.

On the floor where I was working, there was a woman who spent virtually the whole day moaning in a near catatonic state.  I had yet to go into her room, afraid I guess, that I wouldn’t be able to do anything for her.  One afternoon, for whatever reason, I decided to go into her room and I sat beside her.  I tried talking to her but that didn’t get me too far. I tried just sitting in silence.  No apparent awareness that I was there.  I was just about to give up and leave when the idea came to me that I could try humming.  So I hummed a few bars of Amazing Grace.  And to my amazement, the woman stopped moaning, straightened a bit and started singing Amazing Grace in a beautiful clear voice.

A few moments later, I was walking down the hall past the room of another woman who screamed non-stop.  Again, it was someone I’d never summoned up the courage to visit.  As I walked past, the screaming was particularly loud and agitated.  One of the nurses stormed out of the room, looked at me, and said “Go in there and do something.”  So, I walked through the doorway, glanced at the name on the way in, squatted down in front of the woman and said “Hi Angie.”  And again to my amazement, she stopped screaming, looked up at me and started talking to me calmly.  We talked a bit, and then I left.

That afternoon was a life-changing moment for me.  It was a moment for me when God got involved, when I felt God’s touch, when I was told to get up and not be afraid.  It was the moment that I realized that I didn’t have to worry about whether I had what it takes to minister in difficult situations, because it is God who raises us up for ministry.

Have you ever had a life-changing event?  And did you get the sense that God was involved?  Let’s talk about that in our open space together.

Amen.

A Doorway to Life (Sermon on the Mount part 3, Feb 16 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Proper 6, Feb 16 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Deut 30:15-20; Ps 119:1-8; 1 Cor 3:1-9; Mt 5:21-37

A Doorway to Life

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Which do you choose?  Now, like Moses in Deuteronomy, I’m not talking simply about biological life, about whether your heart continues to beat or not, or how many days you’ve got left.  No, I’m talking about really living.  Life lived to the fullest.  The life we were created to live.  Abundant life, life that demands more and promises more.  The new life that Jesus is calling us to in today’s gospel, in his sermon on the mount.  He calls it life in the kingdom of heaven.  We’ve had glimpses of it in the gospels these past few weeks.  A life which is based on compassion and mercy, peacemaking and justice.  Living as salt and light.  Life in right relationship with God and with others, life in the kingdom of heaven.

Two weeks ago, as we began this series of readings on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we recognized Jesus words as a call to revolution, to a world in which the economy of exchange is replaced by the economy of grace.  Jesus begins by blessing people who have no claim on God’s blessing.  God offers us his grace, his blessing, his favour, his love, as pure gift.  Throughout history, and especially throughout the history of religion, many people have found this idea of grace to be disturbing.  Because if we don’t have to earn God’s favour, does it matter how we live?  What then is the point of all these ethical and religious rules and practices, what we usually refer to as “the Law”?  Is Jesus telling us to ignore the Law, that we can just get rid of it?

Not even close.  In last week’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples, “I have not come to abolish the law. I’ve come to fulfill it.”  In today’s gospel, he starts to show us what that means.  You see, the disciples that Jesus was talking to were concerned about the law, those rules and commandments that had been given to Moses and had been passed down to them by their ancestors.   The established teachers of Jesus’ day taught that the key to life was obeying the law.  And they had codified that law into a total of 613 rules which they followed, scrupulously. 

The problem is that living life by simply following the rules is not enough.  It may be good, but it’s not good enough.  It’s not life-giving, in fact if following the rules becomes a matter of simply going through the motions or taking pride in our ethical accomplishments, it can even become life-draining.  Rules are meant to be pointers, they’re meant to guide us.  They point us in the right direction, but they’re not meant to be ends in themselves.

Think about when you sent your children off to school for the first time.  Did you give them any rules?  Of course you did.  Stay on the school grounds, don’t fight, be quiet when the teacher is talking and so on and so on.  Now, think about why you gave those rules to your children.  Was the purpose so that they could learn to obey rules?  Not really.  Learning to obey rules might be a good thing, following the rules might be a good thing, but the real purpose was to teach them how to be in a good relationship with their classmates and their teachers.  You see, the primary function of rules is to act as pointers.  The rules are there to point to and guide us to the things that are really important, things beyond the rules themselves.

Jesus gives us some examples.  Let’s have a look at the first one.  “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not murder.’  That’s one of the ten commandments, it’s one of the biggies.  Now, I’m pleased to tell you that I haven’t murdered anyone today.  So I’m in compliance with the rule.  But before I get too smug, Jesus says to us wait, there’s much more to it than that.  What’s the commandment pointing to?  Why is it that we shouldn’t murder? 

We shouldn’t murder another person because that other person is a human being created by God in God’s own image, someone who is loved by God and was brought into life for a reason, someone who is God’s own child and therefore my brother or sister.  And if that’s who the other is, not only should we not murder our brother or sister, but we shouldn’t diss him, and we shouldn’t bear grudges, and we shouldn’t be angry with her, or insult her or call him a fool or put him down in any way.  In fact if anything gets in the way of my relationship with another, my first priority should be reconciliation.  I need to go sort out whatever’s gone wrong and get our relationship back on track.

That’s what the commandment ‘you shall not murder’ is pointing towards.  It’s guiding us into a relationship with others, it’s pointing us towards a new way of living.  Sometimes we can make the mistake of thinking that all Jesus is doing here is extending the law by creating more rules.  It’s certainly true that Jesus is extending the law’s application.  But he’s not simply adding “you shall not insult your brother or sister” to the existing 613 rules.  He’s going way beyond this.  In Jesus’ teaching, the law becomes a doorway, a portal into something much bigger.  It becomes our entry point into a new life, to a way of living that’s not just focused on right behaviour but rather a life oriented toward love, to being in loving relationship with God and with others.

Let’s take Jesus’ second example.  “You have heard that it was said, ‘you shall not commit adultery.’”

Now every so often I get couples coming to me to talk about their marriage.  Imagine if you will that one day a couple comes in to see me, they sit down in my office, and the husband says to me, “You know, Rev. Mark, we have a wonderful marriage.”

“Oh, yes,” the wife agrees, “we’ve never committed adultery!”

Well I don’t know about you, but if I heard that, there would be red flags going up all over the place.  Because marriage is about a lot more than not committing adultery.  It’s about a relationship, about a relationship which was woven by God into the very fabric of creation when he created male and female and blessed their union.  It is about a life-long, committed, loving and faithful relationship which is much much bigger than not committing adultery, or filling out the right paperwork when you get divorced.  That’s what the law is pointing us to.  You see, the law is good, but the purpose of the law is to point towards the relationship, to guide us into a life which is oriented toward love.  

Jesus said, “I have come not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.”  And the fulfillment of the law is not more law, but something which is beyond law.  It’s life itself, it’s the life that God is calling us to, a life grounded in love, the life of the kingdom of heaven which is available for us right here, right now. 

Sometimes, like the people of Jesus own time, we get focused on the rules.  Sometimes we get focused on behaving the right way.  These aren’t bad things, they’re not to be abolished; but Jesus is calling us to much, much more than this.

This past week I had the opportunity to preach at the funeral of a friend.  He had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer a year before he died, and we had some really good conversations about what it means to choose life and not death in those difficult circumstances.  One of the things he learned was something I repeated in my homily:  to value relationships over accomplishments.  

That was a phrase that resonated with people.  So simple yet so easy to ignore. 

I’ve been watching the Olympics a lot this past week.  And I don’t know about you, but the Olympic moments that are going to stick with me are the ones that involve relationships:  a coach providing a ski to a competitor so that he could finish his race with dignity; two sisters holding hands while the third sister cheers; a speedskater giving up his spot so another could race in his place; Alex and Frederic Bilodeau arm in arm.

Some of you may have already heard the story of the Texan friend I met when I was on course preparing for an internship I did in the Seychelles seven years ago.  During that week long training program we would do bible studies and lecture sessions and site visits and group discussions and all sorts of things.  And after every session, no matter what it was about, or what was said, my Texan friend would lean back, look at the rest of us and say, “Well y’all know what?  It’s all about relationships”

Well y’all know what?  Today’s gospel is all about relationships.  It’s about choosing to live a life in relationship with God and with each other.  The law, all the rules that govern our behaviour, all our religious practices, even coming to church on a Sunday morning, all of this serves as a doorway that we can step through into the new life that Jesus models for us.

Later on in Mathew’s gospel, when Jesus is asked which of the 613 rules is the most important, he replies that it all comes down to this:  “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s all about relationship.

Today I am setting before you life and death.  Jesus is not giving us more rules to follow.  He’s not urging us to behave better.  No, it’s way more important than that. Jesus is calling us today to new life. Life lived to its fullest, abundant life. 

The life of the kingdom of heaven.  Here, on earth.

Amen.