From: For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann. Copyright 1963, 1970, 1972, 1973, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press
...Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely the enemy to be destroyed, and not a ‘mystery’ to be explained. Religion and secularism, by explaining death, give it a ‘status,’ a rationale, make it ‘normal.’ Only Christianity proclaims it to be abnormal and, therefore, truly horrible. At the grave of Lazarus Christ wept, and when His own hour to die approached, ‘he began to be sore amazed and very heavy.’ In the light of Christ, thisworld, this life are lost and beyond mere ‘help,’ not because there is fear of death in them, but because they have accepted and normalized death. To accept God’s world as a cosmic cemetery which is to be abolished and replaced by an ‘other world’ which looks like a cemetery (‘eternal rest’) and to call this religion, to live in a cosmic cemetery and to
‘dispose’ every day of thousands of corpses and to get excited about a ‘just society’ and to be happy! – this is the fall of man. It is not the immorality or the crimes of man that reveal him as a fallen being; it is his ‘positive idea’ – religious or secular – and his satisfaction with this ideal. This fall, however, can be truly revealed only by Christ, because only in Christ is the fullness of life revealed to us, and death, therefore, becomes ‘awful,’ the very fall from life, the enemy. It is this world (and not any ‘other world’), it is this life (and not some ‘other life’) that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by ‘transforming’ them into communion with God that man was to be. The horror of death is, therefore, not in its being the ‘end’ and not in physical destruction. By being separation from the world and life, it is separation from God. The dead cannot glorify God. It is, in other words, when Christ reveals Life to us that we can hear the Christian message about death as the enemy of God. It is when Life weeps at the grave of the friend, when it contemplates the horror of death, that the victory over death begins. Second Sunday of Lent
Eastminster Presbyterian Church, Evansville IN
Year C (Revised Common Lectionary)
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Luke 13:31-35
Cindy Bernardin, DMin
We can thank the lectionary for offering us plenty of trouble today
On this 2nd Sunday of Lent
We have complaining patriarchs
animals sliced in two
and Smoking fire pots
Added to that we have
An almost desperately lamenting Jesus
An aggressive Herod
And foxes and hens…
Remember the saying:
“There is a fox guarding the henhouse”
This is not a good thing
But in the end…
I think today…especially today
The lectionary offers us a Word
a Gospel Word that speaks into our “Now”
Our Genesis text narrates the enactment of a covenant ritual
Bloody and completely foreign to our sensibilities
But funny thing…
There is a linguistic remnant…even today
You know how we say…“to cut a deal”
nothing actually gets cut…it’s a remnant;)
3 chapters ago…in Genesis 12
God makes his covenant with Abram
And there are a lot of big promises made
God says “GO”
And Abram picks up everything and leaves the security of his home and tribe
10 years pass and lots of stuff happens
But…not everything God promised
Now it is Chapter 15
And Abram at the age of 85
is getting…well a bit whiney
This is an honest lament to God…
by a tired, but up to this point, faithful, old man
“I’m trying to hold on Lord
But you haven’t kept your promise
about an heir
Eliezer just won’t do!”
It seems to Abram that time is darn near up.
There’s trouble.
We have trouble in the Gospel too
Again, we need to zoom out to see some context
The first thing to notice, as we zoom out, is that we are in Luke
In this liturgical year…elegantly called Year C
We are reading from the Gospel of Luke
And seeing Jesus from Luke’s vantage point
We are seeing him from the lens of that community’s needs and concerns.
This means that certain Lucan themes and characteristics
are woven throughout the unfolding gospel story
Two of these are at work in today’s short passage.
The first is Jerusalem
Jerusalem is mentioned in Luke’s gospel 23 times
About as many times as all of the other Gospels combined
The Gospel starts in Jerusalem and ends in Jerusalem
For Luke, Jerusalem is both a place and a character…
He gets angry at Jerusalem and weeps over Jerusalem.
Midway through Luke’s narrative Jesus “sets his face toward Jerusalem”
And from then on it is like a constant drumbeat…toward Jerusalem
And that drumbeat is foretelling the cross
The -salem part is SHALOM…peace
Jerusalem…The city of Peace
Which, then as now,
Can seem like a bad joke
Jerusalem
The center, the heartbeat, of Jesus’ world
Full of fickle crowds
Fox-like kings
Corrupt leaders
Fomenting revolutionaries
and occupying soldiers
It is a combustible hotbed
The 2nd theme is found in the consistent use of a gathering and scattering motif.
It is an emphasis unique to Luke…a few examples:
-He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud… (1:51)
-His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat…3:17
-Whoever does not gather with me, scatters. (11:23)
And while not the exact same word,but with the same root…
this motif is echoed in the “Lost and Found” parables of Luke 15,
the coin, the sheep, the prodigal son… scattering and gathering, lost and found.
Scattering is what foxes do
This is Herod’s style of wielding power.
So…the trouble in the Gospel is kinda plain to see
But there is Grace too
In fact
To borrow some words from St Paul
Where sin abounds
Grace abounds all the more
The grace in our Genesis text
Is revealed in a quiet little detail
A deep sleep fell upon Abram…well, he was 85
He can be excused for a couple daily naps
(And he did just spend 10 years walking 1000 miles!)
He is in a deep sleep
When the ritual is actualized
When the covenant is sealed…Abram is asleep
It is God alone who enacts it
It’s not like us “cutting” a deal with a handshake between equals
This is not that kind of partnership
God takes on all the heavy lifting!
If God doesn’t fulfill God’s promises
Well…He will be like those animals…cut in half…smoking fire pot!!!!
God is quite confident though
We will fall asleep
God won’t
We will forget
God won’t
I want this God as a covenant partner;)
The grace in our Gospel text is a bit harder to discern
Jesus may be frustrated with Jerusalem
…angry even
But there is no denying
The palpable tenderness…The love and the concern
that Jesus communicates
Through the image of the mother hen
My guess is that there are many here
…maybe even most of us
Who, at one time or another,
have loved someone that they couldn’t protect
Try calling that to mind
Calling that to mind
Can help us feel the anguish in Jesus’ lament
The fox scatters…by stealth and trickery
The hen gathers in love and protection
gathering and scattering
The hen gathers her brood
She shelters them in her out-stretched wings
Just doing it physically…try it…
…arms back, chest open and vulnerable
This is not a very subtle allusion to the cross!
This IS the cross!
The mother hen would rather die than
Let the fox get at her chicks
The fox’s hunger WILL be satisfied
by the hen…
The chicks have a chance
If we have been baptized into Christ
Into his likeness
And called to live a life of discipleship
In imitation of Jesus
Then…well…
It’s a hen-likeness that we are after
Not a lion, a tiger or a bear;)
All this week
Like most everyone around the world
I have been pre-occupied by the Russian invasion of Ukraine
I am no expert on foreign affairs
But I see in the President of Ukraine
An example of Hen-likeness
He didn’t scatter for his own safety
He stayed
And gathered the brood
And spread his wings
And it may very well cost him his life
And Putin…that fox
Whose true character is unfolding daily
in the trauma and tragedy and brutality of this war
I catch myself daydreaming about what I would do if I lived in Ukraine.
And then I think…
The better question is…
How am I doing here
In my own community? In my own family?
What does my hen-likeness look like?
What kind of gathering do I promote?
With my life?
With the way I walk, and talk and act in the world
And in the spirit of Lent
Can I name how I contribute to scattering?
Can I name it and ask for healing?
Here we are today
Gathered together in this space…sacred space
Gathered from our scattered households
To remember who we are
And whose we are
This physical gathering isn’t just important
It is vital
We human beings need to tell our story together
So that we can help each other find our place in it
…just like the patriarchs,
the prophets of old,
and the ever-growing communion of saints
This unfolding love story of God and God’s people
That we call the Bible
Is our story…
it belongs to each of us individually
and all of us comunally
We call on the power of the Holy Spirit
Present as promised
And alive in this gathering
to change us, heal us, and re-new us
toward whatever hen-likeness might look like for each of us,
and for this congregation as a community
And, my friends,
I believe
it is no exaggeration
to say that we do this
for the very life of the world!
Thanks be to God!
Stay with me
And then I shall begin to shine as though shinest:
So to shine as to be a light to others
The light, O Jesus,
Will be all from thee
None of it will be mine
No merit to me
It will be thou
Shinest through me upon others
O let me thus praise thee
In the way which thou dost love best
By shining on all those around me
Give light to them as well as to me
Teach me to follow forth thy praise, thy truth, thy will
Make me preach thee without preaching
---not by words
But by my example and the catching force
The sympathetic influence,
Of what I do
---by my visible resemblance to thy saints,
And the evident fullness of the love which my heart bears to thee.
John Henry Newman
Feast of the Transfiguration
Last Sunday of Epiphany
February 27, 2022
Luke 9: 28b - 36
It is the Feast of the Transfiguration
And isn’t this just a weird episode?
Weird…Unexplainable…Mysterious…Evocative!
As it stands alone
It’s difficult to know what to do with it
Except maybe
Just let it be
But if we look at where it sits in the liturgical year
and where it sits in the masterful storytelling of Luke’s Gospel
The Transfiguration is
PIVOTAL
Today’s Feast always ends the Season of Epiphany
[Epiphany…meaning the manifestation of the Messiah to the whole world]
The End of Epiphany and
Leaning into Lent
Up to this point in the Gospel
We have the incarnation and Jesus’ public ministry
We have had signs and wonders and healings
Its at this point that the pivot says:
“Yes! But there is more to it than that.”
Leaning into Lent
Which begins Wednesday
We pivot and look ahead for a fuller picture of glory
The fullness of glory
Which will be revealed by the cross and resurrection.
There are a couple of pivot-hints in the story
1) There is that line (that one line) in the strange conversation between Moses, Elijah and Jesus:
“They appeared in Glory and were speaking of his departure”
…his departure
The word translated ‘departure’ is EXODUS
Luke is pointing the hearers…us…to the cross and resurrection
He is foreshadowing.
And we can dig a bit deeper and notice the urgency of this pivot
Moses: the law giver
Yes…But there is more to it
Elijah:
The most famous story about Elijah
From 1 Kings
Is about the time he showed up the priests of Baal
at the Mt Carmel God competition
Both sides set up altars
And the one spontaneously consumed by fire
Well that would be a clear indication that the true God
Is on their side
Elijah even throws a bucket of water on his altar
That is how confident he was in Yahweh
And Yahweh came out on top…no surprise there
We usually stop right there when we recall this story
But Peter surely remembered
the climax of the story in the next line
Elijah commanded
“Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.”
Then they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the River,
And killed them there… (all 450 of them).
I know…gruesome
A quick ASIDE:
No doubt Elijah THOUGHT that he was pleasing God
And this is so honest of the biblical authors
These ancient stories are the honest working out
of just who God is
and who we are as a people of God.
2) Besides the foreshadowing In the today’s storytelling
There are echoes back
Back to the only other time God speaks from the heavens
At the Baptism God says
“You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”
And today God says
“This is my Son, my chosen, Listen to him”
I can see it
God…a sort Michelangelo God
With that long arm and finger stretched out
He says LISTEN
And he slowly moves that finger
Finds Moses
“Not him”
Finds Elijah
“not him”
Then his finger rests on Jesus…
HIM…listen to HIM
And the others disappear
Jesus is calling Peter, James and John to sttend to their deep-seeded notions of God
SO THAT
They might make a 90 degree pivot.
Jesus, Peter, James and John come down from the mountain
They don’t pitch tents and bask in the glory-dazzle
Jesus leads them as he turns his face resolutely to Jerusalem
Where in 10 chapters
There will be another mountain
Golgotha
And Jesus will face crowds of people
Just like Elijah did
But instead of Evil for Evil
Jesus lets them kill him
As he pronounces mercy from the Cross
“Father forgive them…
SO WHAT does this strange story have to say to us?
Its still a tough pivot to make
Its hard to keep God grounded in love and forgiveness
I know that I lapse
I presume we are all lapsers from time to time
The clue…the nudge for me
Comes when I realize that
God has become a very easy and convenient conversation partner
He…helps me justify my decisions
He…agrees that I ought to hold on to that grudge a bit longer
Which will certainly benefit the other;)
He…understands that I NEED a tight hold on my security
And when I worry about war, violence, and global upheaval
He allows me to focus on my own pocketbook and potential inconveniences
And then
On Friday afternoon
While I fell into a little catnap on the sofa
“weighed down with sleep” like Peter
I was able to be aware of my sleepy but vivid daydream
I was dreaming that I was me
With everything the same about my life and my family
Only…I lived in Kiev
I think this dream was a kind of glimpse of glory
One that asks me to pivot
…to examine my convenient notion of God that I’ve let creep in
Glimpses of glory
Can be both dazzling and challenging
I imagine we need both
Where DO we… glimpse God’s glory?
In mountains, rivers, forests, skies?
In the Love of God that shines when we care for neighbor, friend, earth and all her creatures?
Are we glimpsing God’s glory right now…here in each other’s company?
Whenever we offer or receive loving forgiveness?
Are we glimpsing God’s glory in his relentless invitation to be transfigured?
I’d like to...Id like us to...enter Lent
with this heightened sense of pivoting toward the fullness of God’s Glory
Which always includes the cross
But never lets go of the hope of the resurrection
Happy Ash Wednesday
Happy Lent
