Blinded by the Light

We’re all hoping for a dramatic change of season any day now, I’m sure. Really. Any day now, please.

Perhaps it might help to know that the seasons change on the church calendar this week. Hmm, no, didn’t warm me up much, either. But they do, with certainty and with a blaze of glory. Literally.

Since Christmas, we’ve been in the season of Epiphany, a time of light and enlightenment, and now we’re moving to Lent, a time of shadows and wondering. The story that wraps up Epiphany is the Transfiguration. It’s told in three of the four gospels and, this year, we’re hearing Luke’s version. The story goes like this.

Jesus takes three of the disciples with him to the top of a mountain.  While there, Jesus appears to be transfigured.  That is, his appearance is changed and he shines with a dazzling light - with “glory,” Luke says - and Moses and Elijah appear next to him.  The disciples want to build three “dwellings” for them, but suddenly there's a great cloud and a voice is heard saying “this is my son … listen to him.”  The disciples are fearful, Jesus is alone with them again, the moment passes and, when they go down the mountain, they don’t tell anyone what happened.

There’s a few bible studies’ worth to unpack there, but you can see right away why this is a good story with which to wrap up Epiphany. It’s the ultimate reveal for “The Son of God:” dazzling light, the voice of God (speaking from a cloud, as God is wont to do on mountain tops) and the appearance of two heavenly figures (Moses and Elijah, no less).

So, in this story is also a moment in which heaven and earth meet. Celtic spirituality refers to this as when the veil is thin between the two, a liminal moment, when an experience of God or heaven is possible. Here, the threshold is Jesus. The disciples witness the earthbound Jesus with the prophets they know to be in heaven. It’s no wonder they wanted to celebrate the moment, keep them there and, perhaps, keep the door open in that place.

But they can’t. They can’t stay on the mountain top. Neither can Jesus or the experience of heaven and God. The dazzling light, the “glory,” has to walk.

So they leave the mountain and, in Luke’s account, there’s a crowd and a boy that Jesus heals. And then Jesus moves on. In fact, the transfiguration story is the turning point in Jesus’ ministry, between the teaching and healing and the events that lead to the cross. Luke will say “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). The point is: forward. Forward with Jesus, forward with even more experiences of heaven on earth, more experiences of the power of God.

And that’s why we might want to go back to that moment of transfiguration and wonder if it isn’t something we experience, too. What if we understood this moment of light as not being about a change in appearance and what if it wasn’t just about Jesus? How about a revealing of Jesus as, simply, more Jesus, more of who Jesus really is in heart? And a revealing, a true epiphany for Jesus, but also the disciples and us.

Listen, as God says, to Jesus. If the love of God is in all of us, if Jesus is the Way we follow, we too will find moments of transfiguration, moments of meeting God, moments when the kingdom of heaven is right here. That same light, that “glory,” shines in you. Do you see it?

Caught up in love

I wonder what it feels like to be a fish. One day you’re swimming around, minding your own business, maybe hanging out with some other fish, just getting comfortable in a nice little eddy, snacking on stuff floating by, when - BAM! - you’re hooked. Next thing you know you’re eye up in a frying pan.

Oh sure, you can fight it. You might even break the line or dislodge the hook and get away, but you’ll always feel it. And the other fish will always be looking at you sideways and wondering if it might happen to them. Soon you’re off on a shoal by yourself wondering what happened to those lazy days in school.

I think that’s sometimes how people experience church. After all, didn’t Jesus call his first disciples - who were fishermen - to come and fish for people? For those who find themselves to be spiritual, but not religious, I wonder if this isn’t a key part of that - that they’re not interested in being “caught” with everyone else. And for those that used to attend church, have they found it to be as boring as being, well, dead in the frying pan, or have they been left scarred by the experience? For some, evangelism seems to mean that aggressive catching people, hook, line and sinker, who then become one of “us,” saved from the sea of the real world. Maybe they don’t see that kind of fishing as being saved.

But look at the story again and we might be able to describe the image a little differently. The fishermen Jesus called as his first disciples didn’t use hooks, they used a net. So what if we did that. Our net is the love of Jesus that we are all called to live out. If we live that kind of life, we bring love to the world. Not just the warm, fuzzy romantic stuff on Valentine’s Day, but the deep, difficult love that calls us to care for each other when it’s hardest, to be kind and compassionate even to our enemies and to love the seemingly unlovable, to raise up the poor, bring justice to the oppressed and care for the sick and broken.  And that’s the short list.

To be this love to each other is to cast the kind of a net that holds people but doesn’t hold them back, that embraces them but doesn’t imprison them, that includes all and excludes none.  Isn’t that what evangelism is all about: to share the good news of Jesus, to tell the story and to live it, too.  In sharing that experience with the world, we build on a net of love that connects people with each other and with God.

And we do it on porpoise ...

Under the Sea

How deep is your love?

When we think of the story of Jesus calling the first disciples, we might remember that they were fishermen and the classic line about him calling them to come and “fish for people.” That story is in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. In Luke’s account, Jesus goes to the lakeshore and meets Peter and the others returning from a day of fishing in which they didn’t catch much. He sends them out again and they return with boats overloaded with fish. When he calls them to follow him on land, they give up their sea life to do so (Luke 5:1-11).

On the surface, it’s a simple story of call. On the surface. That’s really the key to the story: in my “surface” retelling of the story, I left out the crucial part. When Jesus sends the disciples back out, he tells them to “put out into the deep water” (Luke 5:4). And when he calls them to follow him on land, he calls them to the same depths.

We are also called to the deep. In our relationships with each other, with the world around us and with God, we go to the deep. Or we should.

The ocean is a great metaphor for this. Stay on the surface and we can’t see the richness which is underneath. We might float along on the surface, or paddle around in the water, but to go any deeper is much more of a challenge. It becomes harder to see, so we might need a light, and we definitely need help breathing, but there are amazing things down there: fish, plant life, corral - a whole world, even, a whole world of experiences that make our lives so much richer.

Of course, there’s some pretty scary things, too. And dangerous things. And we can’t stay down there for too long. You have to come up for air sometime. And it’s easy to lose our sense of direction and get lost, too.

So it’s important to remember that God goes with us. In Jesus, there is a light for our way, the Spirit is our breath, the stories of faith in the bible help us navigate what is true. God is always with us, whether we sense it in ourselves or in the people around us. And even in the creation around us. When our relationships are true, we love as Jesus taught. That takes us beyond the surface, to the deepest depths we are able.

The Sum of its Parts

Body image has really become an issue lately.

Nope. I misspoke. Body image has always been an issue. Thankfully, more and more people - especially young people - are speaking out and drawing attention to the profound impact your perception of your appearance can have on your wellbeing. That perception is skewed by society, social media, advertising and a host of other factors, all of which seem to have more influence than the truth: you are a perfect child of God, just as you are. You being you should be more important than being someone else’s idea of you. And that’s a struggle for us.

I wonder why we don’t talk more about body image in church?

Thanks to the apostle Paul, “the body” is an image we use frequently to describe the followers of Jesus. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ ... Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 27).  And it’s a good metaphor, mostly.  It acknowledges our diversity and embraces it. Everyone, in their own unique way, is a part of making the body whole. It celebrates our relationships, our interconnectedness, our need to be in community, our need to be active in being Christ-like - to be the hands and feet of Christ in doing, the eyes in seeing, the ears in listening, the mouth in proclaiming and so on.  Most important of all, to be a part of the heart of Christ in our living.

It raises a couple of questions worth thinking about, though.

Like, which body part are you? It’s easy to think that we’d like to be the brains or the hands or the heart, but somebody’s got to be the parts we’d rather not mention. You know, those parts we’d rather hide, that we often use to label someone else’s behaviour in a derogatory way. We don’t really need those parts, do we?

Every part matters, says Paul. Even the parts we think need to be hidden, even the parts we think less worthy, even the parts we don’t like or think we can do without, those should be lifted up and honoured. Wholeness isn’t about having only the best parts, it’s about all things sharing in their connectedness to support the whole. The same is true of parts that are broken, old or lost. Jesus calls us to reach out to them and Paul’s image reminds us that our interconnectedness is why: “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it” (1 Cor. 12:26).

Just like our own body, a community will have a sense of self-esteem and its own perception of what it’s capable - and not - of doing.  So a community of faith - a church - will have a sense of body image.  And a good, healthy body image in the church body isn’t about appearance.  It’s about our acceptance of each other for who we are and understanding that we each have unique gifts that we bring to share with our community.  The sharing of those gifts is what makes the body what it is, a synergy: that “we who are many, and come from many places, are one.”

Your Table Is Ready

Back in 2017, there was an obscure and not well received movie called Table 19. Few people saw it, still more than critics thought it deserved, but it had an interesting premise. It’s about a group of people who all end up seated together at a wedding at Table 19. It’s the table furthest from the head table, an odd assortment of people that don’t know each other, with distant associations with the wedding couple and they didn’t know where else to put them. One of them quotes the bride’s aunt describing it as “the guests who should have known to send regrets, but not before sending something nice off the registry.”

That sounds mean. Even at a wedding, it’s likely there’ll be people who don’t know others or aren’t as social as others. I’ve never had to do that “where do you seat people” thing. I imagine it can be difficult. If you’re seating people in small groups, do you put people who know each other together or mix them up a bit? Do you put people together you think will have things in common and hope for the best? Do you try and put the real “partiers” all together and the more reserved at their own table? Maybe you don’t worry about it and let them seat themselves.

Things were a lot simpler in Jesus’ day. A wedding was a whole community event that everyone attended and it could last for a week. Everyone came together to celebrate with ritual, feasting and dancing and a lot of drinking. That’s a pretty critical piece of the first miracle story in the gospel of John. Attending a wedding in Cana, Jesus famously turns water into wine and saves the hosts the embarrassment of running out.

That’s not the only reason he does it, of course. This story is the first of seven “signs” in John’s gospel, miracle stories that point to something important about Jesus. In this one, Jesus attends a wedding with his disciples, His mother comes to tell him that they’re out of wine. He tells the servants to fill six huge stone jars, normally used for purification rites, with water, then serve it to the chief steward. Not only has the water become wine (and a lot of it in those six jars), but the steward congratulates the groom for saving the best wine until now. Only the servants knew what Jesus had done. And apparently the disciples did, too, because “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11).

Traditionally, the sign simply points to Jesus and the faith of the disciples. We might also want to consider that when it feels as though the wine has run out in our lives, metaphorically speaking, it is replenished by the abundant grace of God brought by Jesus, which is not only freely given, but given abundantly and is “the best.”

While you’re pondering that, though, here’s something else worth wondering about. Earlier, in chapter 1, John says “he was in the world … yet the world did not know him.” Do we hold Jesus at a distance, here but set apart, or do we seek ways to relate to him?

Right out of the gate, after calling some disciples, the first story John tells of Jesus is about going to a party and bringing the wine. This is the gospel of the incarnation, that the Word became flesh, that love become a human being, divine engaging humanity. We often wonder about Jesus’ appearance, but what was he really like? Where would you seat him at the wedding?

Was he the quiet, solemn type who sat at a table in the corner and didn’t say much? (But when he did, it was awesome.) Or was he engrossed in animated conversation with his friends? Was he the one with that broad belly laugh who told the best jokes or awkwardly sat at the “wallflower” table? Was he playing with the children? Did he like to dance? Or have a drink or two? Did he hang out with the band or work the room? Did he like to get out there and engage people or wait for them to come to him?

I don’t know, but I’d like to sit at his table and find out.

Remember your baptism

In the weeks between Christmas and Lent, many churches observe the season of Epiphany. Epiphany means a revealing or a knowing of the meaning of something in a way which has a profound impact. When one has an epiphany, it’s more than a moment of enlightenment, it can lead to something life changing.

No surprise then, that the first story of epiphany (after the arrival of the magi which marks its beginning) is the first appearance of the adult Jesus, coming to be baptized. The story of the baptism of Jesus appears in three of the four gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke each put their own spin on it, but the essential ingredients of the story are Jesus being baptized by John in the Jordan River followed by the Holy Spirit appearing to descend on Jesus in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven saying “this is my beloved son with whom I am pleased.”

The fourth gospel, John, has no baptism story, but includes the appearance of the Holy Spirit as a dove coming to Jesus.

That seems to be the critical part of the story - the apparent “revealing,” even - that Jesus receives the Holy Spirit and is announced as God’s son. Many scholars, like John Crossan, suggest that the idea of Jesus being baptized by John would have been scandalous and an embarrassment to early Christians. John was the announcer, the messenger calling people to repent and be baptized to prepare for Jesus, “the one who is more powerful than I” (Luke 3:16). Matthew even describes a short exchange in which John says he’s not worthy to baptize Jesus. It wouldn’t be right for the lesser John to baptize the greater Jesus. And John had his own followers who might interpret that in favour of their teacher. Most importantly, John called people to repent from sin and be baptized. If Jesus, the Son of God, is without sin, why would he need to be baptized?

I think there’s more to be revealed here.

Jesus comes to John just as everyone else does, as one of us: “now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized” writes Luke as if Jesus had just done what was expected of anyone. Jesus identifies himself with us. There is not now, and won’t be, anything that Jesus asks of us that he wouldn’t do. Perhaps, in remembering our own baptism, we should remember that we share the water with each other and with Jesus. Like Jesus, we are already worthy. Baptism acknowledges in ritual what we already know to be true: we are all children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus.

I wonder, too, if this isn’t also a moment to remember that Jesus didn’t come quietly by himself to see John and be baptized in private. He came with everyone and participated with everyone. It is best when we do these things together.

John calls everyone to repent - to turn, not just from sin, but to good - and be baptized. The baptism story leads to the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. It’s a turning point, even, from a life unrecorded (either preparing himself or so ordinary that it wasn’t worth describing) to a life of healing, teaching and loving - the fullness of his life in ministry recorded in the gospels. I don’t think the baptism itself made him holier or empowered him (the Spirit did that, perhaps), but it certainly seems to have reoriented him. Can it be the same for us?

Jesus lived into his baptism everyday and so can we. On the Sunday when we hear this story, we’ll remind people to “remember your baptism.” Not the actual moment of the event (so many are baptized as infants), but the intent of the promises made, promises meant to be lived out everyday. Of all the words we say when we baptize in our community of faith, I always hope these will be remembered: “You are a child of God and Jesusʼ friend: may you be love for all around you, always.”

Tis the season

January 6 is Epiphany on the church calendar, the day set aside to celebrate the arrival of the magi to see Jesus.  The magi, or "wise men" or, traditionally, the Three Kings, followed the star to Bethlehem, seeking the prophesied King. The story appears in Matthew 2:1-12.

Well, spoiler alert: there's a load of issues about the story as we traditionally tell it. The bible doesn't give them names or say exactly where they're from, tradition does, and the names vary in western and eastern cultures. It also doesn't say that they were kings. Nor does the bible specify how many there were. We assumed that - and made them kings - based on the three very valuable gifts the bible says that they brought: gold, frankincense and myrrh.  And, on top of all that - the big one - they couldn't have arrived at the manger on Christmas night, not if they followed a star from the east. In fact, the bible story says that they found Jesus, Mary and Joseph in a house. The next part of the bible story, again only in Matthew, tells about King Herod ordering all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two be killed and that’s not something that contributes to a happy Christmas story.  So we tell it a little differently and we have them arrive at the manger with everyone else.

There are really interesting things to explore in this story as Matthew tells it. There’s many a sermon in wondering where they came from or  why only the magi could see the star while Herod appears to not know where it is.  Or wondering about the journey the magi made and where they went when they went "home by another way." And what about Herod and his fear - shouldn’t he have known about the prophecy? Or the fulfilment of the various prophesies Matthew refers to or what about the escape to Egypt. Yes, they’re refugees. There's a lot there.

But what really is "true" about the story, what's the real heart of it? Isn't it their "Epiphany?" The word "epiphany" comes from a Greek word meaning manifestation, a sudden revealing or an immediate enlightening realization. This child, born in a little backwater town, in a stable, of poor parents, this little child is the King they were seeking.  They may have set out with a different expectation - others certainly expected a different kind of Messiah - but this child was revealed to them as the fulfilment of the prophesy, the one who was promised.

Our expectations can often get in the way of seeing what's really true. But it's also possible that the ways in which tell a story, where and when and how we place that central truth, may bring us to a more fulfilling understanding of it. In other words, might we not find this truth in telling a story of comfort and joy as readily as one of challenge and hardship, or even doubt and fear?

There is time for stories that illuminate and enlighten. Epiphany is, in fact, more than one day in most churches. It's a whole season of stories revealing Jesus to us. The first Sunday after Epiphany we hear the story of the baptism of Jesus, in which Jesus is revealed by the Spirit in the shape of a dove and "a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased'" (Luke 3:22).  Then the story of the wedding in Cana and Jesus' first miracle, the reading in the synagogue and the fulfilment of scripture, and the mountain top transfiguration.

All of these stories reveal something about Jesus to us: that, in Jesus, God is come among us. And in telling those stories, we look to reveal something about us, too.