Sermon, Transfiguration Sunday, "Work in the valley"

 

C Transfiguration Pilg 2022

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

February 27, 2022

 

           The transfiguration of Jesus is a weird story, right?  Even with the miraculous nature of the gospels, Jesus is just hanging out with three of his disciples . . . and praying . . . and all of a sudden--he is different.  The same . . . yet different.  The author of Luke says his clothes became “dazzling”—not unlike the clothes of the angel upon the Resurrection of Christ.  Jesus was a sensation, appearing this way right along with the Jewish icons Moses and Elijah.  Some scholars think the transfiguration of Jesus belongs grouped with the resurrection appearances and that, somehow, it got folded back into the middle of the gospels.

But there too, in the resurrected body, Jesus’s essential values don’t change, his mission doesn’t change.  Still, in the transfiguration, Jesus is decidedly different, unique, maybe even hard to put in a box.

           That’s the first thing the disciples want to do, right?  Peter wants to build three shrines for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.  Let’s try to capture this mountaintop moment.  And Jesus will have none of it.  He comes right out of the mountaintop moment to exorcise a demon from a child, get the disciples ready for the difficult journey to Jerusalem, teach radical discipleship, and then send the disciples out to local communities to teach and heal.  He wants to use the energy of the mountaintop moment to do the necessary work in the valley.

           Transfiguration Sunday should be about using some of those mountaintop experiences, where we see something different and dazzling, as energy for work in the valley.  I know in some of the churches I served, we would use Transfiguration Sunday as a way to talk about the necessary conversation many faith communities need to have around gender and sexuality.  For many churches in the United Church of Christ, they celebrate the transformative moment, that mountaintop moment, when they announce to the world that they are Open and Affirming.  And then they stop there.  They get to the mountaintop.  And Jesus is urging these churches to do work in the valley.  And the church is back there somewhere trying to build shrines to the glory of their romantic past.  We even had such discussions recently in the Southwest Association Clergy Group.  How do we take what it means to be Open and Affirming to the everyday work in the valley.

           I remember how much I was challenged to do my work in the valley on gender and sexuality issues in, of all places, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  Church of the Open Arms in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, began as a United Methodist Church with a United Methodist Church pastor.  When their pastor was brought up on charges for officiating at gay and lesbian weddings, the pastor and church had a decision to make.  Should they stay and fight in a system that required them to pay all of the expenses for the trial?  Or should they find a place elsewhere? 

           Their pastor left for the United Church of Christ.  And the congregation followed. 

I was honored to be asked as a speaker for their work on inclusive and expansive language.  It was a mountaintop experience for me.  I remember being embraced by all these people while I was going through a gut-wrenching divorce, my wife at the time a Conference Minister.  They offered their church and their home as sanctuary for me, sympathized with my pain, and let me know that I, as their visitor, was loved.

           I did less teaching the weekend I was there and more learning, and, hopefully, growing.  Their pastor helped me to understand gender and sexuality as a spectrum rather than as two distinct, binary poles.  Intellectually, I was excited by these new learnings.  I was transformed. 

The real test in the valley came the next day when we greeted members of the congregation.  And a person I can only describe as looking like Abe Vigoda, the actor who played Fish on Barney Miller, came up to me and shook my hand.  She had on high heels and a long, blond wig.  She looked me directly in the eye, thanked me for my presentation, and waited to see if I would maintain eye contact.  I’m not sure that I did. 

           I think there was a hope that I might be different.  I doubt that I was.  Could I look beyond the trappings to see the image of God found in this person?

           It’s hard for me.  Questions about sexuality have haunted me for what feels like my whole life.  Though I learn, I never feel like I arrive.  And my daughter and other young adults are working with me to understand the diversity of gender so much better. Will I get it sometime down the road?  I doubt it.  But as I learn, I believe I am opening up to divine and dazzling gifts I would have never known before.

           On the island in the harbor of Bombay is a cave one enters from a bright sky.  Moving into the darkness, you lose your sight as your eyes adjust.  But you keep on walking and encounter this huge piece of art from around the 8^th Century—19 feet high and 19 feet across.  It is a gigantic mask.  From straight on, one sees only the central head, a head or a mask.

           When looking straight on, one cannot tell whether the mask is male or female or both male and female.  It is the mask of God, the mask of eternity.  Through this mask, we are to learn that eternity is to be experienced as radiance.

           Now in turning to the left, one other figure emerges.  And slightly to the right another figure emerges.  This slight turn to the left or right moves the onlooker out of the perspective of transcendence to the field of opposites.  One mask is clearly made to represent the female.  The turn in the other direction is clearly made to represent the male.  Moving out of the field of transcendence takes us out of our eternal unity to differences that too often are found to be against one another:  male and female, light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong.[1]

           In a movie produced and promoted by the United Church of Christ about the life and struggles of a transgendered young man, "Call Me Malcolm," Pastor Emily relates her Biblical understanding of what it means to be transgendered.  She recalls the first creation story to talk about humanity being created both male and female, in the image of God.  "So," she summarizes, "if you are looking for someone who incarnates the most clear and whole vision of who God, well-based on our Scriptural tradition, that it has to be a transgendered person who has experienced both male and female.  That is the most whole vision of the sacred that we are going to get."2

           Indeed, while the second story of creation in Genesis 2 has God creating Adam and Eve.  In Genesis, chapter 1, Adam alone is created as “male and female.”  Adam is created in the image of God, an androgyne.  Found both in the Jewish and Christian mythology is this understanding that Eden, Paradise, would only return when gender was transcended or disappeared.  That culminates in the earliest baptismal formula of the church from Paul’s letter to the political associations in Galatia:  “In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.”  In other words, the newly baptized person returns to the primordial perfection found in the first creation story.[3]

           It is one of the reasons we use inclusive and expansive language for the Divine.  We say that God is both this and that.  We say that God transcends both this and that.  In that understanding, we recognize the spectrum, the diversity through which God operates in the world in our sexuality and gender.

           In the passage from 2 Corinthians today, Paul, a Jew, is speaking to other Jews who use law and order to punish rather than enliven.  Paul is really speaking to any group of people who have so long used any law, rule, idea, or standard that has calcified over time such that it is now used as a weapon against your enemies.  Biblical scholar, Stephen J. Patterson, writes about this passage, sympathizing with Paul.  “Reading the Bible can harden your mind.  Sad but true, Paul, sad but true.”[4]  In each age, as Paul did, we are trying to figure out what new thing God is doing, how we break open our hardened minds and hearts.

           In the passage, Christ removes the veil so that everyone, not just Christ, might know themselves as reflecting, mirroring the image of God.  We may present as male or female but two somethings deeper there is the image of God that is created both male and female.

           Native American theology contemplates something similar with a recognition that there are more than two genders.  “Two Spirit” people became a term coined to united the LGBTQ+ Native community.  “Many two spirit, historically, were keepers of traditions, tellers of the stories of creation, and healers.  Many of the great visionaries, dreamers, shamans, or medicine givers were two-spirit people.”[5]

           Among the Crow, Woman Jim was not only known as a prolific warrior in the 1870s, but Woman Jim also made large tipis and leather goods intricately decorated with quill and beadwork.[6]

           One of my very best friends in Billings, Montana, was Ann Hanson, the person who had been the Minister for Sexuality and Justice in the United Church of Christ in Cleveland for several years.  But Billings was home for her.  She had spent so much time in Cleveland that she became a huge LeBron James fan but when she retired she came home to Billings where I was blessed to meet and know her.  And that woman loved to cuss.  And laugh.  Both requirements for someone I call friend.  Oh, she loved to cause trouble and push edges.

           Her kids would have her take the grandkids for a weekend to teach them sexual health.  While they were too embarrassed or nervous to cover these topics, they knew Grandma Ann might help them to better accept themselves, as not either/or but as gloriously divine wherever they were on the spectrum.  They could then also accept others with the matter-of-fact way she engaged them in discussions about sexuality.

           I remember going to the seminar she taught across town about the newly-minted module for sexuality and older adults.  The room was packed.  People could not stop asking questions—some were clearly out of curiosity, some others felt like questions that were about hanging on for dear life, hoping that God saw them too. 

           She loved being an educator for the award-winning United Church of Christ Our Whole Lives curriculum.  This curriculum not only helps children, young people, their parents, and now older adults to become aware of how God may be moving in ways that transcend gender and sexuality, but also in ways that reflect God’s profound love for our sexual and gender diversity.  I am sure Ann saved so many lives.  She saved lives of someone struggling at school, in their workplace, or in their wider community.  Such welcome could bring incredible gifts to the fore that may very well save us.  Ann Hanson knew how to work in the valley.

           May that salvation become wider and broader so that all people created in the image of God, male and female, know love and justice.  And be seen for who they really are—on the mountaintop or when we come down to do our necessary work in the valley.  Amen. 

---

[1] “Ep 1:  Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth—‘The Message of the Myth’ in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” Moyers and Company, May 30, 1988.  http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/.

[2] “Call Me Malcolm,” United Church of Christ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh4Pv10IFyc.

[3] Stephen J. Patterson, “it’s Trans Sunday,” http://www.stephenpatterson.org/posts/2015/2/13/its-trans-sunday: Galatians 3:26-28.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Zachary Pullin, “Two Spirit:  The Story of a Movement Unfolds,” Native Peoples Magazine, May-June 2014, https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/two-spirit-the-story-of-a-movement-unfolds/

[6] Ibid.

Wisdom Series 10, Jonah, "The parable of the prophet"

 

B Wisdom 10 Pilg 2021 Jonah

Jonah 1; Luke 11:29-30

November 7, 2021

The Bible has echoes of other stories that always tell us how we should read the next story.  For example, God calls to the prophet, and the prophet responds by saying, “Here I am,” as a way of saying I am fully present, I will show up, and it is time to get to work.  This statement always comes with the prophet’s disqualifying characteristic--the prophet is not a good speaker, is too young, or too young and too female.  God is unconcerned by these disqualifications.  God is a non-anxious presence in the heart of what will be inevitable conflict for the prophet and their mission. This happens with Moses in the Exodus story.  This happens with Mary of Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke story.

As the celebrated literature teacher, Joseph Campbell might tell us, myth constructs worldview.   And within myth are verbal, visual, or auditory clues that open us up to a wider story of values, implicit understandings, and behaviors.  The cues also develop expectations.  Like a joke might begin with, “A priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar,” or “Knock, knock.”  With these beginnings, we have a hint how things are going to go when we hear or read certain words.   We hear or read the words, “Here I am” and we know that we are in the midst of a story about the call of a prophet. 

Parable, on the other hand, subverts worldview.  It takes the common story and upends expectations.  Jesus of Nazareth would teach with parables to upend worldview with the hope that space might open up in the heart of the listener and transform what the listener thought they already knew.

Within parables are these absurdities, comedies that help us see the world wholly different. 

Today we have before us the call of the prophet parable.  God calls the prophet Jonah, and Jonah does not show up.  Instead, Jonah hops on a boat that takes him in the direction toward the furthest known point away from the holy land.  Certainly, Jonah must reason, God’s presence and activity will not be known in Tarshish.

In Jewish mythology, the sea and the sea monster are part of the chaos that fall outside the purview of God’s love, grace, and salvation.  But here they are, the sea and the sea monster, smack dab in the middle of this parable, as agents of God’s mercy and salvation. 

The prophet, the one who is supposed to be the faithful messenger of God’s broad and wide love and compassion, is the one who chooses not to show up, not to be present, and not to do the work given.  God’s will is not done through the prophet.  God’s will is done through the agents of chaos, the sea and the sea monster.

I think Biblical stories seep into our culture in ways that we do not often see in the modern world because we rarely engage the Bible like we once did.  For good or ill, though, I see them undergirding the stories we still tell in modern culture.

 You may remember the TV show from the early 90s, “Northern Exposure.”  The show was about a Jewish doctor from New York who was sent, unwillingly, to the wilds of Cicely, Alaska, to pay off his accumulated student loans.  Ironically, my sister, Dr. Elizabeth Mulberry, was sent to Bethel, Alaska, to pay off her medical school loans.  She felt a little bit like Dr. Joel Fleischman.

“Northern Exposure” told the story of Dr. Joel Fleischman and his grouchy and grumbling attempt to make sense of Cicely, Alaska, where he was exposed to an uncounted number of quirky personalities and cultural clashes.  The show won almost every award possible for the way it loved all of its characters, their diverse personalities and habits, and the resulting humor from their interaction.  Salvation could be found in Cicely, Alaska—just not through Dr. Fleishcman, who came to Alaska thinking he had a corner on salvation and healing.   In the show, he was often the one being taught and saved.  In his critique of the personalities and settings found in Alaska, the learned Dr. Fleischman was also often the subject of satire. 

That is where comedy is often found.  Not because someone can tell a good joke, but because they take themselves so seriously that they cannot see the panoply of color and beauty and goodness found within their reach.  In his inability to know that beauty and goodness, Dr. Fleischman always seemed to be the most miserable, god-forsaken person on the show. 

Much to my Biblically geeky delight, in one of the episodes the writers placed the Jewish Dr. Fleischman in the belly of a great whale, contemplating the meaning of his life.  Here he was, a doctor ready to offer the small town of Cicely salvation with his gifts, and almost nobody seemed beholden to the salvation he was offering.

Jesus says in the gospels that the only sign this evil and adulterous nation shall receive is the sign of Jonah.  So we best be figuring out what that sign is to know the meaning of Jesus. 

I love the story of Jonah because it reminds me of the fractured fairy tales I would watch on Saturday morning TV when I was growing up.  Fractured fairy tales had a way of telling the stories we grew up with with absurd, modern twists.  As Callie Plunket Brown writes of Jonah’s story: 

There is much that is absurd in the book of Jonah:  a man gets swallowed by a fish; animals don sackcloth, and a prophet gets so angry over the death of a bush that he wishes he were dead.  But the questions the story provokes are quite serious.  Is God clueless or just terribly irresponsible?  How can justice be served in the face of such mercy?  How on earth can human beings hope to make sense of such a deity?

 

It is easy to make fun of Jonah in a context so far removed from the big fish story.  For the Jewish people, however, there would have been a strong identification with his plight—the fear and anger that had built over the years of the Exile and toward Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire.  In historical context, the humor of Jonah had an edge.

Scholars date the book of Jonah to the 6^th or 5^th Century BCE when the people of Israel were still smarting from the real pain of the Exile and its aftermath.  In relating a metaphor for the Jewish experience of Exile, the prophet Ezekiel has us envision a killing field full of the dry bones of the Jewish people, a people laid waste, an image of genocide.  In Exile many of the Jewish touchstones for faith were violently stripped from them.  The Temple—the habitation for God and place for pilgrimage—razed to the ground.  Their leaders—the representative for God on earth—had been murdered or carted off in chains to serve a foreign ruler.  The land—the place of covenantal promise and ancestral heritage—was no longer their own and had become wasteland or desert.  One of the responses to the Exile was to circle the Jewish wagon of identity and close ranks around Jewish tradition so that outside threats could not, would not eradicate all of what it meant to be Jewish from the earth.  In some quarters, this gave rise to a nationalism that condemned close contact with people who were not Jews, punched up part of the Jewish moral code that prohibited intermarriage, and offered strong critique of anyone or anything that saw God outside of Judaism.  The book of Jonah then is a parable, a satirical story, which unseats insular nationalism, an ethnocentrism that believes our people have the market on truth and God’s blessing and mercy.

While the call of the prophet story is certainly true, we also know this story of Jonah to be true.  Jonah may run from God to avoid his call, but there are times in our lives when God tracks us down, is on the hunt for us. 

Representative John Lewis was one of our terrible losses in 2020.  You may remember him as one of the people who made pilgrimage without Dr. King on the first march to Selma and was the first person beaten unconscious on the bridge leading into town.   Lewis related that Dr. King would talk about the feeling that God was tracking us down to do the necessary work.  Lewis said,

You have been caught up. You have been led. You have been not necessarily forced, but something caught up with you and said, "John Lewis, you too can do something, you too can make a contribution, you too can get in the way, but if you're going to do it, do it full and with love, peace, nonviolence, and that element of faith.

There are times when we are the prophet that says, reluctantly, “Here I am,” but there are other times when we try to run, seek to get away from the necessary work that has to be done, and God tracks us, catches up with us, to let us know it is ours to do in full love.

Not only does the Jonah story diverge from the faithful story of the prophet but also from what happens when the prophet speaks truth to power.  Jesus gives voice to it when he says to his own holy city, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets . . .”  This is the usual plight of the prophet—they are scoffed at, ridiculed, thrown in prison, or murdered.  In the book of Jonah, miraculously, the prophet succeeds and the people of Nineveh repent.    

Again, we might think Jonah without compassion to not want to go and preach a word of repentance to the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh.  Think about what the Exile must have done to the Jewish psyche, how the violence caused them to with withdraw as a people.  And Assyria was a byword for brutality in the ancient world.  Hebrew Scripture scholar, Beth Tanner, states that Assyria was, “[T]he nation that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal for almost one hundred years.  Assyria was more than an enemy; it was a brutal occupying force that forever changed Israel’s fortunes.”

The Assyrian Chronicles describe horrendous acts of torture which were employed to create fear and, thus, submission in the enemies of the empire.  The text says that its pagan sinfulness was legendary, as was its cruelty.  “It was the people which scorched its enemies alive to decorate its walls and pyramids with their skin.”

 Here is the thing though.  It is a part of every people that they seem to be able to recount the horrors and cruelty of their enemy but are seemingly unable to see even worse horror and cruelty among the citizens of their own nation, among their friends, and among their family.  It is one kind of love to wish love and mercy for your own people and kin.  It is a strange and unusual kind of love that says love and mercy should be extended to your enemies.

This is the sign of Jonah.  And it reveals a God who is actively seeking to save all of creation.  And that love is far wider and broader than even those who claim to be God’s chosen.  The work is ours to do.  And God is tracking us, to unseat the conventional wisdom, and reveal to the world a God who is wider and broader and longer and deeper than we could have ever imagined.  Amen.