NOTE: Here are my worship notes for this coming Sunday, February 15 the Feast of the Transfiguration.
I LOVE
Transfiguration Sunday: I love the
poetry and possibilities implied in our texts; I love
+ Lent is
serious business – for us personally and for the whole community of faith –
that’s why the brothers of the ecumenical monastery in Taize, France call it a
spiritual retreat for the whole Church. Left to ourselves, you see, we are
likely to remain confused and unaware of what God is telling us during
Lent.
+ Like Paul
said: we are speaking about God’s wisdom – a way of seeing and living
that is obscured and often hidden from our view – for God’s wisdom is that
which the eye has not seen, nor the ear heard but what the human heart knows to
be true. God’s wisdom has been conceived deep within us through the love of God
prepared for us since before the beginning of time.
It took St.
Paul at least three years of solitude, study and searching his heart to begin
to trust the wisdom of God’s love. One of the fascinating factoids in the
biblical account of Paul’s ministry is that after his life-changing encounter
with Jesus on the road to Damascus, Syria – an event that knocked him down with
humility and filled him with grace so that he turned everything in his life
upside down – he writes in Galatians that he had to go away to Arabia for a
while before returning to Damascus and Jerusalem to begin his new ministry.
+ Why Arabia?
New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, tells us that “Arabia” was an imprecise
term in Paul’s day – a way of speaking of the vast, empty desert to the south
and east of Palestine – that also included Mt. Sinai. And why is Mt. Sinai important to Paul – and
to his growth as a servant of grace?
+ Mt. Sinai is
where God’s servant Moses received the Torah – the 10 Commandments – the
law. It is also where Israel’s prophets
went to pray, to listen for God’s will and to argue with the Lord.
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The prophet Elijah also went to Mt. Sinai when he was most
perplexed. His story tells us that when Elijah was hounded by adversaries on
every side, when he was spiritually exhausted and emotionally spent, when the
corrupt King Ahab and Queen Jezebel sent assassins to murder him and he didn’t
know what else to do: Elijah ran away to the solitude of the Lord’s mountain where
he intended to resign from his commission as prophet. He crawled into a cave
and wanted to die but God was not in his feelings. He waited in the darkness
and “was met by earth quake, wind and fire, but the Lord God was in none of
them.”
Finally, in what the Scriptures call “the still small voice of God.”
he heard the Lord asking why he was hiding in the darkness? Elijah replied: I am all alone and my
adversaries seek my life. To which the Holy One replied: the time has come for
you to return through the wilderness of Arabia back to Damascus where you will
find allies – and a partner in ministry Elisha – together my way will be made
strong through you.
+ Paul, it
would seem, was acting much like Elijah the prophet – or Moses the law giver –
by going back to Mt. Sinai in Arabia. He was on the mountain to argue with the
Lord. He was on retreat to listen for
his true calling. He took time off to be in the wilderness to discern that the
still small voice of God would give direction and clarity to his ministry. He
was there, if you will, to prepare for the journey God wanted for him
rather than simply follow the way he thought life was supposed to
unfold.
+ And so we,
like Paul and Elijah and Moses, need our season to discern and trust God’s
wisdom. We need Lent in order to spend time in communion with Christ in the
desert – taking 40 days to strip down to the bare essentials of an embodied
faith – practices that include acts of compassion, moments of prayer and time
given over to contemplation rather than consumption.
As you know,
Lent leads us into the agony of the Passion but it is also the portal through
which we pass on our way to the blessings of Easter. From the point of view of
God’s upside-down kingdom, it seems that we need to get ourselves ready for
both the suffering and the joy that is to come because they are bound
inextricably one with the other. There is no Easter without the Cross of
Good Friday. There is no prophetic ministry of justice and compassion without
self-doubt and fear. And there is no hope in the Lord without an awareness of
our own inadequacy.
Lent
documents that there is no true humility or gratitude for grace without a season
of wandering through the wilderness of our own delusions of grandeur. Over
time, those wiser than ourselves have learned that we need the harsh clarity of
Lent in order to see that within the darkness there still shines that small
light of the Lord that the darkness cannot overcome. This is why Paul speaks to
us of the foolishness of the Cross. And before pushing on, let me see if you’re
still with me here for there are two insights that are crucial:
+ The first has to do with the
symbolic, mystical meaning of Elijah and Moses – representatives of God’s
prophets and holy law – joining together with Jesus in prayer.
Not only is the whole tradition being summarized here, but their stories
are being linked to Christ’s and our own. We are going to wrestle with doubts
and fears these characters tell us. We are going to be tested and tempted, too.
What’s more, like each of these spiritual giants, our direction in life is
going to be called into question and even turned on its head: So fear not, all
of this is part of the journey. That’s one truth I want to claim, so is that
part of the story clear?
+ The second is that we all need to
prepare for this journey: we can’t expect to head
out to Mt. Sinai and survive without the right tools. We can’t expect to discern
the still small voice of the Lord’s love without making time. And we cannot grasp the obscure wisdom of God
without nourishing the essence of grace in our own hearts. In Lent we’re asked
to do this by using three specific practices for they are the time-tested tools
necessary for going to the desert or the mountain: 1) acts of compassion; 2)
moments of prayer; 3) time given over to contemplation rather than consumption.
Do you have any thoughts, questions or concerns about what I’ve shared here?
What’s going
on, I hope you see, is the way the tradition links all of these
spiritual giants – including Jesus – to an encounter with humility. It is only
when these great souls find themselves confronted with their fears and failings
that they are open to God’s healing grace and transforming power. It is NOT when they are full of themselves.
It is not when they are young hot shots who think they have the world by the
tail. It is not when they rely upon the authority of their tradition or the
logic of the academy or the market place.
No, God’s
wisdom is revealed and encountered in a transformative way when they realize
they are confused – afraid – perplexed, tired and even angry about their own
mortality. It is when they have fallen on their faces – or bottoms – that God
shows them a love greater than self.
Paul puts it
like this: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and demolish the discernment
of the discerning… so that we might trust that God’s foolishness is wiser than
human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Now let me be very clear: nobody accepts Paul’s
pronouncement at face value. Nobody. We all believe that we are the
exception to the rule. “Sure, that Bible
stuff is probably true for those losers over there,” we think. “They are such
morons. But me… I’m ok – I don’t need to
be humiliated or fail to get what God is saying. I can take care of things just
fine because I get it.” There are hundreds of examples of this fallacy
presented to us every waking moment:
+ There are
world leaders who think they can solve problems that have been defying the best
minds in creation for centuries; so time and again, in the East and the West,
they arrogantly plow into the chaos – spending billions of tax dollars that
could better be used for infrastructure and education – leaving behind
thousands of innocent dead they conveniently call collateral damage without
fixing one freakin’ thing.
+ What about
those who refuse to have their children immunized and threaten our social
contract by jeopardizing the public’s health primarily because they are certain
they are the exception to the rule?
Perhaps the
most poignant example of St. Paul’s hard won insight comes, how-ever, from the
writer Anne Lamott in her reflection on the mess NBC news anchor, Brian
Williams, has gotten himself into by lying about what happened on a helicopter
in Iraq. Do you know the controversy? It
is all over the press and everyone wants a piece of this guy. Not because he’s
the only person in power who ever lied about Iraq: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and
Donald Rumsfeld are just a few of those who come to mind having a whole lot
more to atone for than Brian Williams.
But, as Lamott writes: “Brian
Williams is our new Old Testament scapegoat… It's hard to turn away (from his fall from grace) and a part of
me, the dark part of me with bad self esteem, is cheered. The handsomest,
richest, most perfect guy turned out to have truthiness issues… so now he’s our
sin offering… and each worsening detail is like a self-esteem ATM.”
I am going to give you an extended does of Lamott’s
theological rant because it is both so well constructed and oh, so true for
each of us if we’re at all honest. She continues: I'm watching talking heads on the
biggest news stations come down on Brian Williams and I know some of these most
famous men to have been unfaithful, and worse--way worse, with children…
The sweeter part of me, the child, the girl in her
little blue kilt, the mom, the nana, the
The sober people I know began sobriety by minimizing how bad
their drinking and drug use was; by the end of the first year, they're copping
to the most graphic, disgusting behavior you can imagine. This was definitely
my case; I started out mentioning that maybe I had a few too many a couple
times a week, to the truth, which was that I was insane, trying to buy opiates,
guys, the random RPG. Of course, Brian Williams did not do nearly as socially
repellant things as my addict brothers and sisters did. In our defense, though,
we rarely said we had been struck by RPG's. So it's sort of a wash. The truth
eventually set me free. It's the "eventually" that gets ya. But it
did. I hurt a lot of people, mostly other women, but with a lot of help and
solidarity, I told my truth, and there was great healing, for them and me; and
what I did still sucked. Some times, they still do.
Take, for instance, the words for which I am probably most
semi-famous, besides that my bad thoughts make Jesus want to drink gin straight
out of the cat dish. The words were not even mine: it was my wild Jesuit friend
Tom Weston's word who actually said that you can tell you've created God in
your own image when He hates the same people you do. Father Tom said it in
a lecture 23 years ago at a small gathering. The first few times I quoted it
-probably at Salon and possibly in my book Bird by Bird – I attributed it to
him. Then the next few times, I didn't. I just shoe-horned it into conversation
as if I'd just thought of it that minute; brilliant daring me. And not exactly
in a "conversation." More like, "While being interviewed."
Then, it got picked up, and it was everywhere and I started
trying to correct the lie at a big public level. In print and on Kurt
Andersen's gigantic show, Studio 360 on WNYC, New York City's NPR. It was the
childhood dream of going to school naked. But I did it. The line is frequently
quoted, as mine. It's a great line; it says it all. But now I'm sick of
cringing and saying I borrowed it. Okay: I stole it. Fine. Me and one of our
greatest historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin, right? Do we say, as people are
saying now about Mr. Williams, "Well, we wouldn't be able to trust Goodwin
after she plagiarized?" No. We absolutely trust her. We decided to. She
earned our trust back.
The point is we are gigantically flawed. Oh, my God, such
screw-ups. We can be such total morons. And if you're in the public eye, like
Brian Williams, or in the public baby toe, like me, it goes viral. We do the
best we can. Sigh. Some days go better than others. We get to start our new 24
hours every time we remember. I'm also remembering the old wisdom story about
the elder who tells a young girl that inside him, inside all humans, are two
dogs, a good dog and an aggressive dog. They're always at war. The girl asks
him which dog usually wins. He thinks about it, and says, "The one I feed
the most." So today I am going to feed my kinder side, forgive and trust
Brian Williams, me, and, sight unseen, you. His story will play out however it
does, almost entirely based on NBC's financial considerations. In the meantime,
we can wish him and his family well.
In another place St. Paul says:
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All. Not just me.
Not just you. All of us because there are NO exceptions to the rule. And if you are open to trusting the obscure,
often hidden, mysterious and totally upside down wisdom of God, that is good
news. Because it means that ALL of us – not just the smart or wealthy or
talented or good looking – but all of us can experience the embrace of God’s
grace.
Lent is a choice to practice falling on our face BEFORE it
happens. It is GOING to happen – there are NO exceptions – so why not get
ready? Why not learn what humility is all about? Why not open yourself to the
upside down blessing and get in on the goodness before it really hurts? There
are three practices we’re asked to make our own during Lent – three ways of
practicing falling on our face so that we can do so with vigor – sharing
compassion – making time to pray to the Lord – and resting in contemplation
rather than consuming.
Compassion means that we know we’re not at the center of the
universe. Prayer means that we know we’re not God. And contemplation means that
we can be in the world and accept it as it is without trying to control or
devour it. Such is the foolishness of
the Cross, a stumbling block to some and a scandal to others. But to those who
are being made whole it is our way into the wisdom of God.
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