Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Sermon for Ash Wednesday 2/22/12 Emmanuel, Mercer Island


I once heard a very wise person say that
            repentance is too important for God to leave it all up to us.

As the years go by I am seeing more clearly
            not only the truth of this statement
                        but also the implications.

Welcome to Lent!
            And as we begin this Lent I want to say something to you
                        that you may not have heard before.

Anyone who has been around the Episcopal Church for a few years
            and has shown up on Ash Wednesday
                        to get the ashes rubbed in the shape of a cross on the forehead
            will recognize the scripture readings.
These readings can become so familiar
            that we end up not looking at them more than at surface level,
and then people tend to fall into patterns and rituals for observing Lent
            that just plain miss the point altogether.
And this gets reinforced by the Ash Wednesday liturgy itself.

In this liturgy you will be told to observe a holy Lent
            by self-examination and repentance;
            by prayer, fasting, and self-denial;
            and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.

And what perennially happens is that people will think
            that the ashes on the forehead is the repentance part (but really it isn’t).
They may give up desserts or chocolate for their fasting and self-denial,
            and maybe they will read a devotional book
            and, to cover the prayer part, try to get to church more often.
All done in good Anglican moderation.

If this sounds anything like what you have known,
            then sit up and pay attention,
because I’m going to tell you what repentance really means.

You probably know that the word repent means “to turn around,”
to change course, reverse direction, return to your beginning point, the Source.
In other words, the way you are going is in the wrong direction,
            and you are getting farther away from what is life giving and holy.
Repentance is also about having a change of mind,
            and what does that mean?
There is a change in what I have held as my reality, my world view,
            when something happens and I experience a new reality,
                        a new perspective on life,
so that I can no longer think the way I used to,
            and as a corollary what I do changes too.

Well, how do we get to repentance?
Do I say to myself, “You’re going in the wrong direction.
            You should change your mind.
            Let’s try out a new take on reality.”
No.
            Repentance happens to us.
Something happens, we have an encounter or interchange with others,
            something that catches us up, sometimes with a devastating effect,
and we stand aghast at ourselves.
We did not initiate the repentance, we did not choose to repent,
            but now we find that we are very much in the midst of it.
Isn’t that much more like what really happens?

This, my friends, is God’s merciful intervention in our lives.
God is the giver of repentance.
It says so in the Bible in more than one place.
            Start with Acts 11:18 and Romans 2:4, for example.
            Look them up and then come talk to me about it.

God is the giver of repentance.
You see, repentance is much too important for God to leave it all up to us.

Lent is about having a season to prepare for Holy Week and Easter,
            a whole 40 days to get ready so that we will be able to better grasp
                        what Good Friday and the Feast of the Resurrection are all about.
That’s it. 
            That is all that Lent needs to be about.

If we can get it, if we can take in
            just what it is that Jesus did in going to the cross,
            how it was more than just sins that he was taking on,
how he took on all the suffering that ever was and ever will be,
            and released this huge power and energy of resurrection,
and made that all available to us by his continuing presence in the world
                        through the Holy Spirit.

But we don’t get it,
            so we need Lent.
We need 40 days or 40 years or a whole lifetime.
And even at that it takes God’s intervention in our lives
            to bring about real repentance.

HOWEVER we can cooperate.
            We can cooperate with this process off being repented.

Repentance is not about self-affliction and asceticism and breast beating.
Our part in repentance is making ourselves available,
            making ourselves available for God’s merciful act of repenting us.
It’s a matter of trust.
Can we trust God to have our best interests at heart?
            I’m going to risk that,
which means I will need to be open to considering
            that all events in life have the potential of being in my best interest,
                        events both lovely and gruesome.
It’s a matter of trust.

So do you want to know a way, a good Lenten practice
            for being open in trust to God’s merciful act of repenting us?
Meditate.
            You knew I’d say that.
Meditation is one way,
            I must say a particularly simple, accessible and efficiently effective way.

Do the praying, do the fasting, do the self-denial
            (by the way, meditation is a form of self-denial and fasting),
read the Bible –
            that’s the book the bishop recommends this year for Lenten reading.           
These are all ways in which we can be open
                                                                        to repentance happening in our lives.

Remember, the purpose of repentance is to return us to the Source of Life,
            to return us to the embrace of God,
who like the father in the parable about the prodigal son,
            has never ceased to watch for us,
who sees us from afar and runs to meet us,
who before we get through our litany of penitence
            has already killed the fatted calf and started the party.

What we are doing today in this liturgy
            is to set us up for 40 days of spiritual practice
so that when we get to Easter we just may realize the immensity of it all.

And this year I would encourage you
            to take home with you the worship booklet and read again Psalm 103.
This Psalm gets overlooked with everything else happening
                        in the Ash Wednesday liturgy.
We’re more likely to remember Psalm 51 which we will be reciting shortly
            than Psalm 103 that we read after the Joel passage.

Here’s the Easter goal for us:

    1   Bless the LORD, O my soul, *
          and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.

    2   Bless the LORD, O my soul, *
          and forget not all his benefits.

    3   He forgives all your sins *
          and heals all your infirmities;

    4   He redeems your life from the grave *
          and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness;

    5   He satisfies you with good things, *
          and your youth is renewed like an eagle's.

    8   The LORD is full of compassion and mercy, *
          slow to anger and of great kindness.

    9   He will not always accuse us, *
          nor will he keep his anger for ever.

    10  He has not dealt with us according to our sins, *
          nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.

    11  For as the heavens are high above the earth, *
          so is his mercy great upon those who fear him.

    12  As far as the east is from the west, *
          so far has he removed our sins from us.

    13  As a father cares for his children, *
          so does the LORD care for those who fear him.

And now here is the segue into what comes next in the liturgy:
    14  For he himself knows whereof we are made; *
          he remembers that we are but dust.

    15  Our days are like the grass; *
          we flourish like a flower of the field;

    16  When the wind goes over it, it is gone, *
          and its place shall know it no more.

If there is anything that can bring us to repentance,
            it would be death, the reminder of our own mortality.
Death is a gift that makes us look at the precious gift of life we have been given.

You know, we all have to face this sometime;
            none of us get of here alive.

Welcome to Lent.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Sermon for Last Epiphany 2/19/12 Emmanuel, Mercer Island


O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son
                        revealed his glory upon the holy mountain:
            Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance,
                        may be strengthened to bear our cross,
                        and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory;
                                    through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.


This is the last Sunday in the Epiphany season,
                        and it’s always the same Gospel reading:
            the story of the Transfiguration paralleled in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The Transfiguration, we can say, is the ultimate expression
            of what the word Epiphany means:
Epiphany meaning manifestation – the revelation of God through Jesus.
Epiphany is the season of light:
                        Jesus as the Light of the world
From starlight leading gentile wise men to Bethlehem
            to the heavens parting at the baptism
                        and God’s voice declaring,
                                    “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him,”
            through each Sunday in Epiphany with a representative story
                        about the Kingdom of God revealed and manifested in Jesus,
            finally to this event of glory and radiance
                        with the dead raised and standing and talking with Jesus.

I love preaching on the Transfiguration.
It is one of my favorite stories.
It’s one of my favorite stories because
            there are so many different directions one can go in exploring it.

I’m sure you all remember each of the sermons on the Transfiguration
            that I’ve already preached here at Emmanuel!
So this year I will go off in a different direction.  There is always new material.
I’m recently back from a retreat,
            my usual winter 2 week silent meditation retreat,
                        which is such an important resource for anyone
            who claims to instruct others in meditation.

Meditation is very practical;
            besides the usually touted benefits of relaxation and stress relief,
it’s about self-awareness – how I respond to life situations and relationships.
            It’s about becoming more aware of reactivity and response-ability.
It’s about the veil being lifted and seeing the truth and telling the truth,
            and when that happens you can’t go back to ignorance about yourself,
                        so you can’t be the way you were before.

Meditation is transformative.
That is what I have found.
This is one way we can be “changed into his likeness from glory to glory”
            as the collect for the day puts it  --  becoming more like Jesus.

But transformation is not a self-improvement project;
            actually it’s a process of self-forgetting.
Because transformation is not my work
but the healing work of God’s mercy and love moving in the individual.

Hence in meditation it is important to cease doing,
            to sit still and awake and aware in utmost trust,
            breaking through the illusion of who’s really in control
                        and who am I.

But transformation, you might see, is a different spiritual process
            than transfiguration.

Look at the Gospel account of transfiguration:
Jesus is transfigured and begins radiating intense, bright light,
            and who shows up?  Moses and Elijah,
                        the two key figures representing all the Law and the Prophets,
                        figures who represent the full revelation of God
                                                and of God’s relationship with humankind.
One can only imagine what sort of incredible conversation is going on
            between Jesus and these extraordinary personages.
Then Peter bursts into the conversation, interrupts,
            and what does Peter say?
“Rabbi, it is good for us to be here.  Let’s make 3 dwellings.”
Let’s enshrine this extraordinary event.
Let’s contain it and preserve it, capture and cage it.

The point is
Peter is pulling back from this stupendous display of Light and glory,
            this revelation of Divine Presence
                        that outstrips all that Peter had previously considered Jesus to be.
It’s too much and he can’t bear it going any farther.

This is so typical, and we all do this –
            to pull back in our experiences of the Divine,
            self-contraction in the presence of such huge expansiveness of Being.
Even when we intend not to,
            the fear of the loss of self into the Divine is so great.
Truly, you cannot see the Face of God and live.

But this Epiphany continues to expand.
Now a cloud engulfs them -
            a cloud that connects to the stories of old from the sacred texts,
                        the cloud that led the Children of Israel through the Sinai desert,                                     the cloud that engulfed the Tent of Meeting,
                        the cloud that, in Isaiah 6, engulfed the Temple of Solomon.

And the Voice that speaks says,
            “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”
The Word of God from the 1st Sunday in Epiphany
                                    at the baptism of our Lord in the Jordan
                        is repeated on this last Sunday in Epiphany:
            “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  Hear him!

At the heart of the Jewish faith is the Shema:
Deut. 6:4 Hear [listen], O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.
Deut. 6:5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your might.

This is what is written on the door posts and placed in the phylacteries
            and recited daily.

And now
            in the words spoken by the Divine Voice, the Voice of the Creator,
there has been a colossal appropriation of biblical history made here,
shifting from Moses and the Shema to Jesus.

Jesus is much more than Rabbi or Teacher,
            not containable by any of the known titles we give him
                        out of our limited experience of him.

The Transfigured Jesus is an ultimate Epiphany of Divine Presence,
            and, we could say, if God were to fully self-manifest,
            the world would be destroyed, disintegrated, blown away,
for if you see God face to face, you die.

One can see this as true when we examine what happens in meditation:
            when awareness expands in meditation,
            it can be like a revelation of God in that the self disappears.
The idea of an identified and distinct self disappears.

Now we should note, however,
            that Transfiguration is not unique to Jesus
There is the story about Moses and his face shining
            when he comes down from Mount Sinai after being face to face with God.
Elisha witnessed Elijah carried off in a sudden flash of radiance
            that Elisha could only describe as a fiery, speeding chariot.

Part of the spiritual tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church
            is the Prayer of the Heart, or the Jesus Prayer,
                        from which the Prayer of the Lamb derives,
            in which tradition, transfiguration was known.
There are stories of this from the Desert Fathers.
Then there is St. Seraphim of Sarov
[b. July 19, 1759, Kursk, Russia – d. January 2, 1833]
We have a verifiable eye-witness account of his transfiguration.

This is sharing in the inheritance of the saints in Light – Col. 1:12
or 1 Thess. 5:5 says that, “We are the children of Light.”
and in Eph. 5:8 we are told to walk as children of Light –
Some, a very few, like St. Seraphim of Sarov,
                        have actually walked as children of Light.

Well, very few of us – none that I have encountered –
            radiate Transfiguration Light.
I haven’t seen anyone literally “aglow with the Spirit” in that way.

Although some radiate to those around them such love or aliveness or joy
            that this can be perceived and recognized as extraordinary,
                        imparting spiritual light.
Some, very few,
            because when we encounter this in anyone, it is quite unforgettable.

We have not lived up to our inheritance of the saints in Light.
We have not so emulated Jesus in our lives
            that we also radiate Source Light manifesting the Divine to others.
But, and this may be of some relief,
            transfiguration is different from transformation.

The One who appeared transfigured in the energy of brilliant Light,
            is the One whose revealing presence
brings transformation to those who turn to him and follow him.

We prayed in the collect for today that
            “we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance,
            may be strengthened to bear our cross,
                        and changed into his likeness from glory to glory.”

Lent starts on Wednesday.
Lent is a good time to draw near to God,
            to be more willing to have Divine Presence revealed,
            to let Jesus touch and heal our lives,
                        transform us and change us,
            so that we may, at the last, be able to behold his glory,
                        to look into the radiance of transfiguration Light,
                                    Source Light, Divine Light,
            and be blown away in the best possible sense,
and be changed into his likeness,…

            …be changed.