It’s Lent, the season for a Journey Inward.  Inward to quiet and reflection.  A time to understand more deeply God, ourselves, and others.  

To find that within each of us is all that we need. We can be filled with the Holy Spirit, Love Unending, the Transcendent. But to discover this, to really trust this, usually takes a journey. 

The “Inward” Journey during Lent. What does that mean for you? 

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All year we’ve used the Journey metaphor to capture something of our life here at King’s Chapel. It conveys the notion we feel that our spiritual lives are not “won/one and done,” some pinnacle we reach once, a single point in time when we’ve arrived.

We know that we journey, growing and changing throughout our lives, and that we treasure companions on the journey. At King’s Chapel we say,
 
“Whoever you are, and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.  Believer or doubter, skeptic or seeker, we’re all on the journey together.” 

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So this fall, we explored what it means to be journeying together – as the Hebrew people did throughout the Old Testament, a caravan journeying from one place to another, led by God. Abraham and Sarah, leaving their familiar home, journeying across the desert to “the promised land.”  Moses, leading the Exodus, the Hebrew people journeying again across a desert, finding they were given by God all they needed: manna when they were hungry, water from the rock when they thirsted, and in the end, the way back home to the promised land. 

Journey stories – the metaphors of the Bible – have a familiar ring.  As individuals we cross barren places in our own lives, hoping to get somewhere better.  As a congregation, we move forward, through hard times, trusting that God journeys alongside us. Today in this Lent season, we began a new tradition:  “Living Epistles,” when our members share from their own spiritual journeys. We are all on this journey of life, together.  

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Recently, the journeys that have received most of our attention have been our frustrating attempts to simply “journey” across Boston.  The T shuts down, commuter trains are delayed, cars sit bumper to bumper, hemmed in by towering walls of snow, and when all we want to do is get home at the end of a long, cold day, there are endless lines for the buses and gridlock at every downtown intersection.  

These “journeys” haven’t felt like progress towards a promised land; and they certainly haven’t evoked the image of an inward journey toward some enlightenment. The words that have sprung to mind about our recent commutes are, well…maybe it’s best to keep those particular journey metaphors to ourselves!

But despite these recent negative associations we’ve had with the “journey metaphor,” our blizzards may actually have primed us for a quiet journey inward this Lent.  We’re so worn to exhaustion, that a pause may sound especially inviting  this year. And the frustrations of this winter may make us yearn ever more for a calm center, a conviction grounded in our spiritual lives that everything really will be all right.  

We want assurance.  That, as was true for Jesus in his wilderness experience, when we are stuck in our deserts of snow, “tempted” to scream; when the “wild animals” of resentment and fury prowl close by us, like Jesus we will also have angels minister to us:  neighbors who help us shovel, or strangers who push us out of snow drifts. This winter, we seek assurance that in fact, in this Lenten, blizzard we might be the angels for others. 

Do you yearn for some period of quiet now, in these forty days before Lent? An inward journey? 

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Children show us how we humans always need both kinds of journeys in our lives:  the times of growth and change, and the times of slower reflection and integration, taking deep within us what we’re learning, internalizing the Spirit, Love, Light. 

As a young mother, it was a helpful to learn from the Gessell Institute at Yale, which postulated that stages of human development can be like a wide spiral upwards – a rapid phase of new skills developed then a plateau, where the child’s new discoveries and skills are integrated and taken deeply within.  Then another rapid spiral up to the next level, and a next plateau. 

Why wouldn’t it be the same in our spiritual lives, too? 

Think of “the toddler,” a stage aptly named:  the first steps a child takes are “toddles” aren’t they? Lurching little movements, as she concentrates intently on throwing one foot in front of the other, keeping her balance, falling down and then pushing herself up again, determined to cross the living room to the coffee table where some adult waits, sitting on the couch. 

For the little one, much is being rapidly learned, through experiments – trying this, trying that, and through practice, over and over and over, falling down and walking a few more steps.  

Then comes the plateau time, when our little girl integrates within, her growing understanding:  which floor surfaces will be slippery, how to bend her knees, the secrets of balance. Through practice, the hard wiring happens in her brain, the muscle memory grows, until she doesn’t have to be completely consumed with the effort of walking. To walk across a room becomes a common, ordinary skill, each step no longer applauded by the grownups or photographed.  

Of course this is overly simplified, but it does capture some truth, doesn’t it:  the spirals that happen at each age. 

Young adults, in the years after schooling  – the first lurches forward we all take of renting apartments and paying monthly bills, the rapidly accelerating early loves, the first jobs– all things that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, just like making a beeline for the coffee table and finding ourselves tripped up, down on the floor, trying to muster the energy to push back up and get going again. 

It happens after a divorce or death, too, our lurching steps as we try to find equilibrium on our own again, instead of leaning on another or having them lean on us.  It happens with illness or job loss or retirement,when the plateau time stretches far too long, and we wish we could get going again, move on to the next phase, but can’t yet. 

It happens when you’ve been betrayed, or someone questions your motives.  When you or a loved one grapple with mental illness or suicide.  A common response is to “man up,” shoulder on, work even harder to prove your worth or repress the pain.  But over time, we find we can’t keep moving forwardunless we’ve first paused – to reflect, to sift and sort, to integrate internally our new reality.

Typically, if we don’t slow down volitionally, our body will make us do it – a breakdown or heart attack or sadness so pervasive we can’t get out of bed.  

Lent is a gift, I think.  A time for plateaus.  For resting and wondering and reconsidering.  And for practicing the new steps we’re learning, so they  become more engrained, like muscle memory, part of who we are in a profound way.

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If this is part of our journey physically and emotionally, why wouldn’t it be the same for our relationship with the Holy?  Haven’t there been times when something new seems to happen in your spiritual life, there are new journeys forward, spurts upward in our understanding, experiences demanding and exhilarating.  We’re lurching forward, with some excitement; we experience a lightness or warmth or even certainty that we are not alone, that there is a Transcendent who will care and nurture us somehow.  But then the ground under us shifts, the rug feels pulled out from under us, and we’re sprawling, like a toddler again. It takes energy to get back up and going. 

We need time to pause again, to go inward, to understand more about ourselves and our place in the Universe.  What is Truth?  In what can we trust? 

Might this Lent be the gift of time you’ve needed, to stop and reflect, to integrate what you’ve experienced, to deepen your relationship with the Holy? 

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That’s what happened to Jesus.  When our lesson from Mark opens, Jesus is about to start his teaching and preaching. He’s just pushed into a huge new stage of his life – leaving behind the familiar hometown, going out to the far border of the country, to the Jordan River, probably ready to become a disciple of John the Baptist.   It’s a huge spiral up, you might say, a rush of dedicating his life to a whole new journey and direction, but after this burst of change, Jesus needs plateau time, and the spirit drives him into the wilderness for forty days – a very long time. Only after his time in the wilderness, the desert plateau, can Jesus take the next spiral up, beginning his own work, apart from John.

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Tradition – which we so value here at King’s Chapel– gives us ways to follow in the spirit, and seek the truth. Here it is:    Set aside time of quiet, and stick to it.  

Last Lent, one couple chose to come to here every Wednesday for six weeks – to drive in regardless of the weather or competing invitations. They read together a daily devotional book. They built in a time of reflection, a plateau. 

This year, on Wednesday, a woman I’ve never seen here before came to our 6 PM service, and told me on the way out, “I’ll be back.  I haven’t been to church for a long time –things have been hectic – but I can at least come each week for six weeks during Lent.”

Another person has chosen to come faithfully every Wednesday for a whole year, following a Jewish tradition:  after the heart-breaking death of a loved one, the mourner worships every week for a year, in honor of the dead.  A forced time, a needed time, that the ancient Hebrew tradition knows is necessary to heal: week after week, in the presence of community, hearing the old words of scripture, singing the old, old hymns, praying the precious prayers.  A ritual, like sutures, that helps hold us together, allowing wounds to slowly heal, from the inside out.

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What could Lent look like for you this year? If you saw it not as an onerous obligation, but as a gift – the opportunity to quietly prepare for whatever lies ahead for you next?  

Sometimes we say that in Lent we’ll give up sugar or Starbucks, Facebook or chocolate – I’ve done that, too. But do you ever wonder how those practices really fit with what Jesus did out in the wilderness for forty days? 

We could say it’s our way to battle temptation, as Jesus did.  We do grow strong in the repeated denial of wine or sweet things, our obsession with how many “likes” we gotten for our posts. And those are good things – growing stronger, setting aside obsessions.  

But as we free ourselves from these little temptations, what do we free ourselves for? Remember that amazing collect of the day from our Prayerbook, printed at the top of our order of service:  

Almighty God, by whose power Jesus of Nazareth did fast in the wilderness for forty days and nights;  grant us power to employ such discipline as may free us from ourselves and for thy service, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What will we do with this Lent that might more deeply free us from ourselves and for God’s service? 

Jesus not only wrestled with temptations in the wilderness.  He also was cared for by the angels.  Fierce desert animals were around him, but he became convinced, he would be all right.  Jesus emerged from his wilderness time convinced to the core of his being that he never needed to be afraid, whatever lay ahead, because he was truly God’s beloved child. So are you. 

Imagine, what would happen this Lent if we were courageous enough to begin with a few days, in this first week of Lent, honestly assessing where we are on our own particular journeys, naming what it is that we are wrestling with, what’s really hard for us, right now. 

Realizing, for example, that we wrestle not just with a hunger for chocolate, so we’ll give that up.  But realizing that what we really hunger for is affirmation – for people to notice us, listen to us, thank us.  Then our Lenten quiet time may be this daily prayer:  Spirit of Truth and Love, help me know that I am worthy of notice, that you hear me, that you honor me for doing my best.  

What if you prayed or meditated or journaled each day, for forty minutes – or fifteen - on this question: how is God already giving me the affirmation for which I hunger, the manna I need in my wilderness? 

Writer Kate Braestrup was a young mother, perhaps she says, grappling with post partum depression, when she ran into a friend, a seasoned hospital chaplain, in the bookstore. He took one look at her face, and wrote out a prescription, line by line on a piece of paper, and said: “Take this, 3x a day, more if needed.” It was the 23rd Psalm, and daily she did read it –not 3 times, but ten. 

This Lent we might think we’re going to abstain from comfort food. But what if we dig deeper, seeing that what we really crave is the comfort of “security,” a trust that the future will be all right.  Then Lent spent considering the 23rd Psalm, line by line, day by day, slowly savoring the comfort of its lasting nourishment, could be what will heal us.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want [anything more]. 
I have all that I need.
Yea, when I walk through
the valley of the Shadow of Death,
even there I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me…. “

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Friends, I see Lent as a gift, a time to notice both what tempts us and the angels who minister to us, all around. 

I don’t know what is most hard for you, right now. What weighs you down.  What  stands between you and Love, or Courage, or Strength – your promised land.  But of this I am convinced:  God journeys with you across any wilderness, determined to give you the food you need, the refreshing water for which you thirst, and a safe path home.   

What do you think?  Is it worth trying out for 40 days?

In my closet is a purple wool jacket, part of a suit that used to be my grandmother’s.  It has a label from Marshall Field’s, the old department store in Chicago, where she was from. I loved my grandmother dearly, and have loved wearing that purple jacket. It’s as if I were wrapped in her love: warm -- and just slightly scratchy.

 Recently I took the jacket out from my closet and noticed a small hole on one sleeve where a moth must have had a snack. 

‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume…,’ said Jesus.  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21).

On Ash Wednesday, we go through our “closets,” to see what we have, what we need, what we can let go of.   What’s really important. 

All religions have days like this. In Judaism, it’s Yom Kippur. For Muslims, it’s the season of Ramadan. In our secular world, it can be New Year’s Day with its resolutions, or a birthday:  “Hmmm, 32, 52, 72 – did the year meet my dreams for it?” 

Today – Ash Wednesday – is another day for assessment, maybe the day for it. It’s hard to avoid assessing things.  We have ashes placed right on our forehead – in the middle of the face we present to the world, over our brains that give us thought - and we hear these words:  “You are ash, and to ash you will return.  Life is short. Life is fragile.  Here one day and gone the next.”

On Ash Wednesday, with this ritual of ashes, it’s hard to escape that death will come. 

But even today, is there a small part of you, deep inside, wondering, “Really? Others might die, but maybe somehow I’ll be the exception”?  

That’s the thinking of the main character in Leo Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Illyich, an upright judge, has an illness that seems to be wasting him away, but he cannot grasp it, “cannot grasp it at all.”  

The logic he had learned as a lawyer – “that Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal” had always seemed correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself….Caius represented man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound, but he, Ivan Illych, was not an abstract man…Had Caius ever been little Vanya with mama and papa…Had  Caius ever known the smell of that little striped leather ball Vanya had loved so much? Had Caius ever kissed his mother’s hand so dearly, and had the silk folds of her dress ever rustled so for him? …[F]or him, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all his thoughts and feelings… it simply was not possible that he should have to die… 
He tried to dismiss the thought as false, unsound, morbid…tried to revert to a way of thinking that had obscured the thought of death from him in the past….He would say, “I’ll plunge into my work…” [But then IT would keep returning, before his mind.] (79-80)  

Today, on Ash Wednesday, with Ivan Ilyich, we end up with ashes pressed onto our forehead, and for at least a moment, are forced to think:  It is true.  My life is fleeting. 

I will die. You will die. 

There are two responses we can have to this, and they’re represented in our prayer book by the two different prayers given for Ash Wednesday.

One response is the one most of us associate with Ash Wednesday:  we are only ash, an insignificant pittance in relation to the Founder of the Universe. We always fall far short of The Truth represented by God, so we need to bewail our sins – the many ways we’ve failed - and beg God’s forgiveness.  

Friends, if this way of understanding Ash Wednesday – by acknowledging your sins  -- is what you most need to become whole and healthy again, then do confess, and you will be assured of God’s unbounded love of you.  

But there is a second way to respond to this reality: that your life is short and fragile. It’s to focus on how precious each and every moment of your life is. How marvelously made you are, made in God’s own image.  Your life is short and precious. You see, life is the gift of time enough to love.  

Life is the gift of time enough to love. 

When Jesus urges us to focus on what really matters, what won’t be eaten by moths or rust away, it’s to remind us of this gift we have.  What shall we do with it? As the Cape Cod poet Mary Oliver says in the final lines of The Summer Day,   “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Could it be, that in any day, among all the things on our long to-do list, what matters most is to give love to others?  And to receive love from God and others? 

So when you think about the traditional Lenten practices, of giving up chocolate or coffee or Facebook, please consider this.  Are you giving up something based on the first interpretation of Ash Wednesday  - that focuses on your sins – as if you need to punish yourself? Or are you doing it as a way to honor how precious your life is, what is most important, what the real treasures are? 

If you give up Starbucks, what can you do with those dollars saved that will shower love out into the world?  If you set aside Facebook, with that found time can you visit someone lonely, or spend some time with another so you won’t be as lonely?  Can you meditate or pray a bit more, soaking up God’s astonishing love for you?

I can give up my grandmother’s purple jacket, but still live in her love.

Life is short. And your life is precious to God, already a treasure! May you value it. 

May God bless you on this Ash Wednesday, in the way you most need. 

Imagine with me. You are in the water, with your head below the surface just a second or so, and you come back up, hair flat and soggy, water clogging your ears, your nose dripping.  Your instinct is to shake your head quickly, like a dog, to throw off the loose water drops. 

But while you’re doing that, a thought comes to you, clear as a bell:  God. Loves. Me. 

It’s not a voice that you hear outside, but an inner conviction – calm and steady and peaceful:  God loves me. 

You’re thinking about that voice, still wondering, ”What?” when another certainty is lodged in your mind, and you know it’s true: God is well pleased with me! Well pleased.  With me, right now. 

It’s straightforward: God loves me.    

God loves me. 

It’s very calm: God is well pleased with me.

And you shake your head, because it’s hard to believe.  But for a brief moment you know it’s true – you glimpse it’s true, like you glimpse a bird high above, wheeling in the blue sky, but when you look again, it’s out of view. Or was it even there? 

Your rational mind revs its engines with counterarguments.  God loves me? Sure…. 

God’s well pleased?  Only if he doesn’t know me…

God’s pleased right now?  Well, that’s not going to last…
 
God? That’s my own voice, my own fantasy.  Who knows if God even exists?.... 

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Is it imaginable – God loving you? Did you really see the dove swooping against the white clouds, but now your eye can’t find it in the sun and vast sky? Could the voice have been meant for you, and not just Jesus?  

“You are my beloved child.
With you I am well pleased.”

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I think it was hard even for Jesus to believe that the words were meant for him. 
It took him 40 days, out by himself in the wilderness, before it could really sink in.   

Forty days – the number the Bible always uses to convey a very long time. Remember, for forty days and forty nights, the rain fell onto Noah’s ark,with its frightened passengers huddled inside.  

For forty years, Moses and the Hebrew people wandered lost through the wilderness before they made it back to the promised land. 

For forty days, Jesus is alone in the wilderness after his baptism, before he’s ready to start up his ministry.

It’s not just you and me: it always takes humans a long time -- forty days or nights or years - before we’re convinced that God will keep us afloat over the deepest floodwaters. That God will lead us home though we feel utterly lost, wandering aimlessly.   That God will give us all we need each time God asks something of us, as he did of Jesus, like showing other people that they are loved by God, too. 

Yes, even Jesus had to spend forty days in the wilderness before he could do any of what God had asked of him. He couldn’t start healing and teaching and preaching, until he’d spent the forty days in the wilderness, learning to trust that God’s love really was true. That God was well pleased with him, already, before Jesus had done one thing. Before Jesus had ever healed one person, preached one beatitude, confronted one injustice, God had already said to Jesus, “You are my beloved. In you, I am well pleased.” 

It took forty days for it to sink in that God’s love of Jesus, and of you and of me, is because of who God is, not because of what we do or fail to do. God loves us because God is loving, not because we are.   

It takes a long time for these things to sink in, for all of us. Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime.  

So thank heaven that every year we get a season of Lent, 40 days for us, too, to try to wrap our minds around this truth: that God says to you, “You are my beloved child. In you I am well pleased. “

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There are wild animals in our wilderness.  The wild animals of fear and doubt and despair circling, circling around us, especially at night when it’s darkest. 

Alone, in the darkness, we hear the prowling sounds so close  – “You think you’re safe in God’s love? Hah!  You are so vulnerable….”

And we practice saying, as we will later in this service, “Nothing can separate me from God’s love, not even death.”  We say the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me”. 

And slowly, as night after night passes and we rise another morning, the quiet calm voice can lodge a bit deeper inside us: God does love me.  More of the psalms, the stories, the tunes we’ll sing tonight become our story, our song, too: “What wondrous love is this, oh my soul, oh my soul? What wondrous love is this, O my soul…!”

Forty days to take it deep within. To lay your firm foundation on which you can build everything else that will follow. Forty days to set aside your own quiet, desert time – maybe four minutes a day, or forty, just to hear these words:  

God loves me.
I am God’s beloved child, 
with whom God is well pleased, already.

Imagine the difference in our world if all of us trusted that we are already loved; and that every other person we meet is, too.  God’s beloved. 

Then, what would the world be like? What would you be like?

Mark 1:16-20 -   Jesus said to them, “Follow me…”

When this church was searching for a new minister just a few short years ago, the summary description of King’s Chapel sent out by this congregation was to this effect:  

King’s Chapel is Anglican in worship style, Christian Unitarian in theology, and Congregational in governance.

Three ways of being – Anglican, Unitarian and Congregational. No other church in the whole world is like King’s Chapel, utterly unique.

And what do these three descriptors mean - Anglican in worship style; Christian Unitarian in our understanding of God; Congregational in how we make decisions?

What’s the history behind this church, founded in 1686, begun as the English King’s Chapel, which 100 years later became the very first Unitarian Church in the New World?

We’ll be exploring these questions over the next several months  – looking at our history as we move into our future.

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The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see…Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes….Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.” They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
John 9:1-41, excerpts
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What a difference when we can see possibilities! 

There are people who can walk into a space, and instantly envision how it could be reconfigured - a wall moved here, color added there, and voila, the former shoe store is transformed to a new restaurant; the battered old dresser stashed for years in the attic corner is refinished and admired - its delicate inlaid wood patterns now able to be seen again.  But who could have imagined that possibility? 

How good are you at seeing possibilities? 

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I’ve been struck in the last several weeks at the imagination – the way of seeing new possibilities – that enabled the recent scientific discoveries regarding the creation of our universe.   Once unfathomable possibilities, that someone was able to envision, long before it could be proven…
As the New York Times  reported two weeks ago, physicist Alan Guth 30 years ago was struggling to understand why some things he should be able to see in the universe weren’t there. Why was there no trace of some exotic particles that should have been created in the Big Bang?

Then a new possibility occurred to him, as he labored over his equations:  what if there had been an enormous blooming of the universe, faster than the speed of light for a fraction of an instant. If that were the case then what he sought wasn’t missing; it was diluted, like a drop of rain in the ocean. The huge explosive reaction he  postulated came to be called the theory of “inflation” at the time of the Big  Bang. 

Thirty years later, the Times published this front page story: 

Radio astronomers at the South Pole reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that Guth’s hypothesis looked right.

…Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time  with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Alan Guth had seen the possibility before technology allowed anyone to observe it. He’d seen – not yet with his eyes - but in his brilliant imagination.  And even now, what Kovac and others say they see – backwards into time - isn’t it astonishing, what we might even call “miraculous.”

What a difference when we can see possibilities!
When all of us together, here at King’s Chapel, can.  When we’re willing to even imagine things most people would label Miraculous.
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All our scriptures today are about this:  whether we live seeing possibilities or whether we prefer to remain blind.  The great prophet Samuel – known literally as a “see-er,” looks for a King who is tall and strapping, evaluating each of Jesse’s mature and seasoned sons, but he comes up empty.  God sees the possibilities in the smallest little brother David, who wasn’t even in the room yet: David, fresh from the field, with dung on his sandals and a stray pieces of grass in his hair, because he slept outside at night. God saw possibilities in David that even the experienced prophet missed.
What possibilities does God see for King’s Chapel – possibilities that aren’t even in the room yet, that we’ve not even thought of, maybe haven’t been willing to voice, because they’d be so preposterous.  Ideas that might seem to come with a whiff of dung, or a bit grass-stained?  
What possibilities does God see for you – especially when you feel small, just a little David who’s been left out in the field, not even called into the room to meet the visiting prophet.  
God does not see you as the world does, because God doesn’t need a diamond already polished.  God sees diamonds in the rough.
What’s important is not how we see ourselves, or how others see us, but how God does.  What are God’s dreams for you, this Sunday morning?  For us?
 “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
What a difference when we can see possibilities!
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I am the kind of person who can sometimes focus too much on outward appearances.  This blindness is deep in me, probably because I am a minister’s kid.  It was never spoken to me that I can recall, but I learned early on that it was important how I appeared, how I behaved, how I acted.  My outward appearance would have an impact on how my father was evaluated in his role as minister.  
At home, we put importance on looking tidy, on the appearances.  The rest of the house might be a disaster, but the public space – the entry hall or living room -  where a parishioner might arrive unexpectedly, needed to be neat and clean. 
This struck me several years ago as I gathered for a birthday of a neighbor, whom I’ll call Miriam.  Miriam is not someone who worries about outward appearances.  She dresses casually and comfortably, and her home and car are rarely neat. It’s just not that important to her. Once there was a fire in her home, and the insurance company later assumed that a huge tossed up pile of junk in the corner of her bedroom had been caused by the firefighters needing to upend things as they put out the fire.  Nope, Miriam told the insurance adjuster, that jumble has been in that corner for years. 
Miriam’s son and mine were fast friends, so both families were together the night of the birthday. For our present, each of us there shared something about Miriam that we loved.  When it came to my boy’s turn, he told her: “You’re always so glad to see me. Every time I come to your house, you always make me feel special.” 
Miriam always saw my child’s heart – how each of us yearns to be seen, to feel special.  And for my boy, the outward appearances -  the jumble in her house – was completely invisible.
Miriam acts as God does:  seeing into our hearts, loving you, seeing you as special.
What a difference if we can see that possibility!
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Jesus was good at seeing people, too, according to today’s text from John.  The very first words that Karen read are these:  “As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.” 
Jesus saw him. 
It wasn’t the same for the townspeople. It was as it they’d never really seen the blind man before, though they’d passed by him many times. When the man returns from washing his eyes, John writes: 
The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” Some were saying, “It is he.”  Others were saying, “No but it is someone like him.”  He kept saying, “I am the man.”
The townspeople had seen him “before as a beggar,” as his illness, his limitations, reduced to a label: Beggar. Homeless. Loose cannon.  Troublemaker. They hadn’t seen the man, his face, his possibilities. But Jesus did.   
What a difference when we see one another – with eyes no longer blinded. What a difference when we can see one another’s possibilities!
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But there is even more to this story, to all the stories this morning.
Remember Dr. Guth:  developing his new theory of the big bang required him to see new possibilities.  But it also required him to imagine that the power behind the universe could act in an wholly unexpected, improbable way. 
So, too, our Bible stories are not just about what God saw in David, what God through Jesus saw in the blind man, what the Holy is able to see in all of us -- our possibilities.
These stories are also about our ability to see God’s possibilities. All the things God can do through and within us.
How do we see God? What blinds us to what God can do -- God’s possibilities?
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John’s Gospel today names three things that blind people to God’s possibilities:  Blame. Fear. And certainty we’re right. 
Blame, fear and certainty we’re right – well, thank goodness we never experience those things!
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Did you notice?  The disciples see the blind man and immediately focus on blame: “Jesus, who’s to blame for the man being born blind – was it his parents who sinned or the man himself who sinned?” Those were the prevalent religious theories of that time, to explain tragedy – a human must have done something wrong, that caused the woe.
Jesus responds to them: “The issue isn’t who is to blame; the issue is what God can do!”  When the disciples focus on blame, Jesus shifts the focus to possibilities.  
Every organization that’s fallen on hard times, every business or church or family, can fall into this trap.  We do need to learn from our past, but at some point, the focus on who’s at fault for the troubles we’re in, strips away our energy to look ahead, toward the possibilities, for what God is able to do, moving forward. 
Playing the blame game blinds the disciples from seeing what God could do going forward.
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For the man’s parents, it is fear that blinds them to the miracle that has happened.  Can you imagine having a child blind from birth who now is seeing? Wouldn’t you want to know how it happened, who had cured him, what made all this possible? Of course!  
Unless, that is, you’ve learned that it’s safer to lay low, to stay out of the limelight, to avoid speaking up, because you fear being rejected by your community, as the parents did.  They had a lot to lose if they were thrown out of their place of worship, a synagogue that accepted them, people who didn’t make them the scapegoat for their son’s blindness. If the parents took a stand, if they saw – recognized -- the possibility that God had acted through Jesus to cure their son - they’d worried that they’d lose what they had.  
But oh, what might they have gained?  
What is the possibility of God acting in some new way, making us like new, if we weren’t so afraid?
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“Certainty that they knew best” -- that was the stumbling block for the religious authorities.  It’s understandable at one level, isn’t it?  The authorities were certain that God had given them the Ten Commandments, so when Jesus violates one – when Jesus fails to honor the Sabbath by curing a man on that day – the authorities are certain that Jesus is a sinner.  And this certainty blinds them to other possibilities. 
They were so angry about their law being broken, that they couldn’t stop to see beyond what they knew. They couldn’t see that the good thing they’d been taught to follow – the commandments – might now blind them to a possibility even better.  A possibility that God could break open their religious lives and shine within them with even more light, more joy. 
So on the debate went -- as fear or certainty or the blame-game or old labels and limits prevented nearly everyone  -- the disciples, townsfolk, religious authorities, and parents of the man – all from seeing the forest for the trees:  that God had acted right in front of them, that very day, in their own sight.  
The blind man cut through it all:  “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
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What a difference when we can live open enough to see the possibility of what God can do – what God wants to do – in our lives: to take some place where we have been blind, and let us see!  To move us from darkness into new light!  From utter impossibility into reality!  Though I was blind, now I see!
These stories are about what we are able to see.  But they also are about what God is able to do.  Can we trust that?
Can we be like the shepherd boy David, who saw God as his shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..for anything. The Lord is my shepherd and that is all that I need.   
It’s enough to see that God knows me, and will journey with me, even when I walk through a valley called death. I will fear no evil.  For Thou art with me.
Friends, Is that a possibility?  Can we do the hard thing – see beyond the appearances of this life, of what seems to be, on the surface. Can we imagine possibilities of how the very Power of the Universe may act, beyond what can now be proven? Can we trust in a Shepherd who walks with us even through death?   
For when we can, it is as if we were blind before, but now see. There’s more lightness to our step, and less fear.
God sees in each of you remarkable possibilities, far beyond outward appearances.  God sees for King’s Chapel great possibilities.  Now the choice is ours:  how do we choose to see God?  As trustworthy, able to act in us and through us, toward new possibilities? 
Could it be? Oh, could it be?
What a difference when we see God’s possibilities!

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”10Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 12If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

John 3: 1-21

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This is a tough scripture today.  First of all, it’s easy to sympathize with Nicodemus.  It was a confusing conversation he had with Jesus.  

But even more problematic for us here today, at King’s Chapel, we likely recoil from a lesson about being “born again,” because we know how that phrase is most often interpreted today. 

But hang in there, because the story of Nicodemus is important – maybe even life changing. 

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Admittedly, the story doesn’t start out well. What in the world is Jesus talking about?   

Jesus starts by talking about being born, and he uses words that have multiple meanings. He might be saying we need to be born a second time, or born anew, or born from above.  But what would those things mean -- being born from the womb again? Being born from somewhere above? Where above? 

Nicodemus – understandably -- opts for the most literal meaning: that we need to be born from the womb again, but that isn’t what Jesus means. Literalism can cause us problems.

Even after Jesus gets more clear, and keeps repeating, “You need to be born from the Spirit,” the word Jesus uses for Spirit has multiple meanings, too – it’s a word that can mean wind or breath or spirit. The wind blows where it will, or the spirit blows or the breath… Whose breath? What’s going on? Of course Nicodemus is confused. 

All of us probably are Nicodemus, when it comes to sorting out the big questions of our lives.  We don’t figure out what’s going on right away. And a literal interpretation won’t get us where we need to go.

But hang in there with this story of Nicodemus, confusing at it is at the outset.  Because it is hugely important, and not for the reasons you might think.  

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We probably shouldn’t be surprised by the language Jesus chose. Through all time, those who have taught humankind about that which is most meaningful, of deepest importance in our lives, almost always teach through metaphors: word pictures.  Throughout literature from every culture, we find metaphors like the ones Jesus is using with Nicodemus. 
 
Often it’s a journey metaphor.  Odysseus in The Iliad and The Odyssey, leaving home to journey far away and ultimately returning, a changed and wiser man.  
 
“Gilgamesh travelling to the ends of the earth, searching for a solution to his mortality.  The Knights of the Round Table riding into the forest on their quest, 
the Buddha as he leaves the comfort of his father’s palace…” -- all journeys as metaphors for life’s greatest searches.  

Lent itself, this 6-week span we’re in prior to Easter, is said to be time for “an inward journey.”

So just as with all great world traditions, in the Bible we read of life journeys, too.  

The first book, Genesis, tells of Abraham and Sarah, leaving home to journey far away, across vast desert wilderness, in search of something better, something promised by God.  

The second book, Exodus, tells of the journey out from Pharaoh’s Egypt, back through desert wilderness, home to the promised land. 

In the New Testament, Jesus travels from Galilee to Jerusalem. 

Each journey metaphor is about leaving something behind, in order to find something better. To find rebirth.
  
In Genesis, for Abraham and Sarah, it’s the improbable birth a baby son, Isaac. And from him, a new tribe of people is born, called the Israelites. 

In Exodus, it’s a journey from slavery into freedom.  The tribe becomes a nation, who lives in a new way, under new commandments, in a new land.  

For Jesus traveling to Jerusalem, it’s a journey towards death, but then astonishing rebirth, too – called “resurrection.”  For his friends, who thought he was gone, they become convinced new life is possible for them, also. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John tell Jesus’ journey, then the rest of the New Testament books tell the apostles’ journeys, around the Mediterranean Sea, spreading the good news.

Journey metaphors:  leaving something behind, to start a new life, to give birth to something new, something even better than what we left.

There are other metaphors, too, aren’t there?

Birth metaphors.  A little mustard seed that sprouts up into a huge bush. A single grain of wheat, planted in darkness, then reborn into a stalk of grain covered in plentiful seeds.  Much from little, if we’ll let go of that seed. 

Darkness and light metaphors.  The blind receive new sight. Nicodemus, coming under cover of darkness, to receive enlightenment. All metaphors. 

But Nicodemus is a literalist. “Do I have to go back into my mother’s womb?

Take the journey, says Jesus. From darkness into light, through wilderness towards promises met, into death that becomes rebirth! 

Be born afresh! It’s possible. 

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Do the metaphors apply to you?  …….

Is there some new way you’d like to be as a person – a little more kind, a little less fearful?  

What’s your deepest yearning – for more courage or deeper peace? What do you need to meet the powerful urge you feel, perhaps to change the world.  Do you need others with you on the journey? 

The place of our greatest longing is different for each of us.  But look for the cavern in your life, where all is dim, and imagine a light cast there.  Look for the place you’re handcuffed, but are offered freedom.

What’s the new life you’re eager for, that could be birthed within you this Lent? 

What’s the new life for King’s Chapel into which we’re invited now? What must we leave behind?

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It’s easy to sympathize with Nicodemus, because he’d already been trying his best. He was a thoughtful man, no newcomer to the notion of new beginnings.  
He’d considered it seriously, both for himself personally and for his people.    

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and both he and Jesus were leaders of reform movements, unhappy with the way their religion and their society had become corrupt, with a small group of powerful priests at the top, who insisted that payments had to be made to them at the Temple. 

Both Nicodemus and Jesus thought religion should be re-vitalized. It’s been a recurring theme over the course of human history, with each new reformation or revival. Not just Protestants trying to reform the Roman Catholic Church.  But also Buddhists reforming perceived excesses of Hindu traditions. Islam, reforming what they thought had gone wrong in the other monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity.
 
At the time of Nicodemus and Jesus, reform of Judaism was being attempted.  One effort came from those who sought to escape what they found corrupt and live in solitude. They were the Essenes, who many think hid scrolls of scriptures in jars, the treasure trove of ancient manuscripts discovered last century that we call the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Essenes were like any of us who think wistfully of getting away, on a long retreat. There’s a reason Kripaulu is a destination, a reason the Dali Llama glows with a deeply held joy, a reason those of us reading A Season for the Spirit find remarkable wisdom emanating from the Episcopal monastery across the Charles River, where our author Martin Smith resided. 

Some things can be re-formed, seen differently, in quiet and solitude and prayer. That was the hope of the Essenes, as their way to reform Judaism during Jesus’ time.

The Pharisees had a second program for reform, based on purifying what was corrupt, instead of escaping it. The Pharisees wanted to return to the core of Jewish teachings, just as the Puritans who founded Boston wanted to “purify” the Church of England. To get back to the true roots of Christianity. To live strictly by rules, and banish the excess hoopla of Anglicanism – the rich priestly garb, music, liturgy.  Puritans yearned to be “pure” Christians, like the earliest disciples. 

For the Pharisees, reform meant taking the so-called “purity” rules -- that had been corrupted in the Temple  -- back into individuals’ daily lives. It was an effort at being reborn. The Sabbath really would be honored again. The scriptures really would be read and followed. Widows and orphans really would be taken care of. 

But any reform effort centered on strict purity laws requires clarity, so people can know what to do and what to avoid. Rules need to be tight, to avoid any “slippery slope” problems. The commandment to rest on the Sabbath becomes “Don’t pluck a raspberry to eat while walking down the road, because that’s harvesting.”  “Don’t worship idols” becomes, “Don’t speak to Gentiles who worship idols.”  Staying pure means dividing things neatly: some things clean, some dirty. Some people are clean, some people are dirty.  Some people - okay. Some people - damned.

For a Pharisee like Nicodemus, who genuinely thought purity reform was the solution, Jesus’ third, alternative reform movement, was radical and horrifying. Jesus ate with filthy people:  corrupt tax workers and prostitutes.  Jesus touched lepers. He talked to women, even when they were bleeding. 

Jesus didn’t agree with the core proposition of the purity movement – the two-worlds notion: the pure versus the impure, the in’s versus the out’s.  “God doesn’t want to condemn people,” Jesus tells Nicodemus. “God wants people to thrive. All of them.” “I came not to condemn the world, but to save it.” 

“Nicodemus,” says Jesus, “God loves the world so much – the whole creation, everything and everyone in it, so much!...
   
“You see, Nicodemus, for God so loves the world that…”

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Ah.  Now we’re at John 3:16. Did you catch it? “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son that whosoever believes in him…”

John 3:16 – the words of the Introit sung by our choir, printed at the top of your Order of Service.  

3:16 -  the emblematic numbers written in the eye black under football quarterback Tim Tebow’s eyes, to publicly proclaim his Christianity every time the cameras pan his face. 

John 3:16 - the verse number written on signs that Born Again Christians hold up in the football end zones whenever an extra point or field goal is kicked, so that the verse is broadcast to all watching.  

Now we’re right at the crux of the problem many of us have with today’s story of Nicodemus. It’s not just that the Nicodemus story is confusing. It’s that the Nicodemus story is misused when it’s taken literally, and out of context. It’s the same mistake Nicodemus himself made when he was a literalist. Because it is misused when the phrase “born again” and the verse from John 3:16 are used to draw a stark dividing line through the world again, marking who is in and who is out. Who is saved and who is damned. Who is a real Christian, and who will be left behind in the Rapture. 

But hang in there, because there’s something important for us in the Nicodemus story, too.  

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Theologian Marcus Borg reclaims John 3:16 and the lessons about being “born again,” explaining that they cannot be read literally, using surface level understandings of the English translation in the way so many do today. His new book, out in 2012, is called Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power – And How They Can Be Restored.  I commend it to you. Borg has two succinct chapters on “born again” and John 3:16.  

John 3:16 – there at the top of your Order of Service  - means that God loves all of creation so much that God is willing to dwell right within it, right among us impure humans, right within human Jesus, even within us.  

And the word “believe”- in the phrase, “those who believe in him” – comes from credo, which means what you give your life to, your heart to.  Credo is not about what words you recite, or the theology you espouse.  It’s about who you choose to journey with through life, who you choose as your life teacher. It’s about how you act, not what you say. 

Do you ally yourself with those striving to be as compassionate to others as God is compassionate to us?  Because in Hebrew and Aramaic – the language of Jesus – “compassion” is the plural of the noun that means womb.   In the Hebrew scriptures, God is seen like a womb – giving life, nurturing, compassionate. A woman feels compassion for the child of her own womb.   A man feels compassion for his brother from the same womb.  

Compassion is a deep feeling; not a creed in the head, but passionate caring in the gut – where the womb is.  When we’re compassionate, we feel another’s suffering in our guts. We feel it viscerally. And so we act to help.

That’s what born again is – knowing we all come from God’s womb, and therefore acting to care for one other, siblings of the same womb.

That’s the imagery being conveyed by Jesus to Nicodemus.  That we are all one, all sisters, all brothers.  And seeing that, we will we act on it. 

It’s more than “mercy” – as when we say, “God have mercy on us.” Mercy is given from the position of a superior, offering mercy down.  Compassion is alongside – “with.”  

Even in the English etymology, it’s com-passion. Passion, meaning feeling.  And Com, meaning with, as in com-munion and com-munity – having union with.  So God is compassionate, feeling with us, alongside us, when we suffer. 

The Nicodemus story teaches the antithesis of purity laws that divide us into acceptable and unacceptable – whether it’s the Pharisaic worldview of pure/impure, or some Christians’ worldview today, of the saved versus the damned.  There are not some who are adequately Christian and all others who fail, says Jesus.  

Rather, all of us are beloved community.  

And we can experience that now, not just later in heaven.  When Jesus says those who give their heart to God can have “everlasting life”, we think of heaven later, but in John’s gospel Jesus is speaking of “the life of the age to come” – God’s kingdom on earth.  It’s a kingdom that will be fulfilled later, yes, but God’s kingdom on earth is also a present life we can taste in part now. Life as it is meant to be.

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Life as it is meant to be – available now? Is that promise real? 

It’s easy to have sympathy for Nicodemus, because it’s hard for anyone to trust God’s complete embrace of us already, especially when we’re all so enmeshed in a world view that divides us up, every single day:  the pure from the impure, the cool people and losers, the beautiful people in Times ads and the rest of us. It’s hard to trust in Jesus’ vision when the world is constantly divided between rich and poor, Americans and all others.  It’s hard when like Nicodemus, we’ve learned to work very hard to stay on the “okay” side of the dividing line. 

Like Nicodemus, it’s hard to get our minds around Jesus’ way of thinking, where we’re all acceptable, already. We hear him, but we’re disoriented. Confused. Uncertain. But like Nicodemus, we’re also intrigued enough that we keep coming back.

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Because Nicodemus does come back.  He shows up again twice in the Gospel of John.  

After Jesus gets to Jerusalem, and is being condemned by the Pharisees, it’s Nicodemus who speaks up for Jesus, reminding other the furious Pharisees of their own rule, that they must give Jesus a hearing before arresting him.  Despite the antipathy Nicodemus raises in his fellow Pharisees, he speaks up. Something still draws Nicodemus to the light that seems to flow from this man Jesus and his message.  

And then, at the very end of the gospel, it’s Nicodemus who takes the dead, limp body down from a cross, and with another man, anoints it with 100 pounds of rich spices and creams, and wrapping it in linen, places the body in a grave on Good Friday evening, just before the Sabbath starts. 

By touching the dead body, Nicodemus becomes impure. And I think, reborn.

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For Nicodemus and for us, there’s a whole new way of living, without dividing lines.  A way to live in touch with the Spirit of Love that is compassionately for you, already surrounding you, with you, within you. 

We’ll likely get dirty, because to live life compassionately with all who suffer, always means life on the hard side.  And we’ll lose something, too, maybe even our old, comfortable way of seeing the world…or others…or ourselves, a way that used to be so central to who we thought we were. As it had been for the Pharisee Nicodemus.

But hang in there – as Nicodemus did – because there’s something here that could utterly change your life. Make you feel like new.  

Matthew 17:1-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. 2And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. 3Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 6When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. 7But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” 8And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. 9As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

At the Pivot Point:  God Gives Us All We Need

It is warm, the day they trudge up the mountain.  It is wonderful to get away.  Things have been so busy below – crowds pressing in, so many sick, so many with great needs. Those climbing the mountain are thrilled to have time alone with the leader, to figure out what is coming next, to ask him their big questions. 

Because recently he’s been testy, making them squirm. Sometimes his demands seem too hard. Full of all these thoughts, the small band of hikers heads off along dirt paths etched into the sides of hills, and soon they are scrambling up the eroded face of a cliff. By the time they get to the top, one man is drenched in sweat, and pants out, “Where are we going?” After several more hours of hiking, he asks again, “How much further?” 

“See that range over there?” says their leader. “We’ll go to the range beyond that.”  Mountains Beyond Mountains.

This scene is from the last chapter of the book with that title: Mountains Beyond Mountains, the best seller ten years ago written by Tracy Kidder about Paul Farmer. 
By now Farmer is well known – the Harvard educated doctor from Boston who provides health care to the poorest of our world, beginning in Haiti.  Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, has made a world of difference for millions around the globe, in the care of AIDs and Tuberculosis.

It is author Tracy Kidder who is trudging up the mountain with the leader, Paul Farmer, exhausted by the journey. It is Farmer who points ahead, to the mountain range beyond, to show their destination.  Paul Farmer is spending his entire day walking up the mountains to visit two families because he thinks those families are worth his time. 
When he finds a family with ten children living in a house only 20 feet by 10, with a dirt floor and roof of banana fronds, he understands why TB has spread so quickly there, and what must be done to help.

Tracy Kidder has been famous before Farmer, a Pulitzer prize winner for non-fiction. And now Kidder is trying to understand why a brilliant Harvard doctor, who could have any job he wants, spends most of his time, with far too few supplies, among the poorest in Haiti.  Through the book, Mountains beyond Mountains, we learn that Farmer believes in what he calls “O for P” – God’s “option for the poor,” God’s yearning that the poorest are cared for first, as a priority, because the stakes for them are so high.  Failure to care for the poor means their death.

Farmer puts his belief into action. Throughout the book, Tracy Kidder pokes and prods at Kidder’s work, but by the end, neither he nor we the readers can rattle this conclusion: Farmer serves the poor because he believes they deserve it. They deserve the ˆ∫of medical care, too.

But this answer about Farmer’s motivation still begs Kidder’s second and larger question: is Farmer serving the poor in the best way?  Strategically, should Paul Farmer spend a whole day hiking to two patient, when he could see scores of patients in the village below, or present a new policy to the World Health Organization? 

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Jesus’ disciples likely have questions similar to Tracy Kidder’s when they hike up the mountain with their leader in the passage we read today, commonly known as “the Transfiguration.” 

Think of it:  the disciples have seen Jesus’ commitment and his brilliance. They’ve stood enthralled by his words at the Sermon on the Mount. They’ve been amazed at the way he can heal people. But recently Jesus has begun saying that he needs to leave their villages in Galilee and go to Jerusalem, where the tensions between Jesus and the religious authorities will certainly escalate. 

When Peter says what they’ve all been thinking – that to go to Jerusalem is suicidal – Jesus had called Peter the Devil! “Get behind me Satan!”  “Don’t’ tempt me! Don’t you think I understand how hard it will be? Of course I’d rather not move forward and keep things just the same here.”

So going up that mountain with Jesus, the disciples must be wondering, over and over in their mind, similar questions to those Tracy Kidder has about Paul Farmer.Is this person the “real thing,” the one we should follow?”  and if so, does he have the right strategies for bringing his ministry to fruition? 

These can be our questions, too:  Is this Jesus the real thing, genuine, one worth following? And even if what he preached and how he lived draws us, strategically, does it make sense? Strategically, where should we be headed next – here at King’s Chapel, or in your own life? 

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Here’s the Good News in today’s lesson: on that mountain top God answers all these questions, and provides disciples with all they need to move forward.  At this key pivot point in their lives, as they wonder what they should do, God gives the disciples all they need for the next tough leg of their journey, once they’ve gone back down the mountain. 

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What does God give them?  

We don’t know exactly what happened that day at the top of the mountain.  But we do know that for listeners in Matthew’s time, mountains always represent important places where God meets people.  Jesus gives his most important Sermon on the Mount. Moses gets the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai. Elijah – the greatest of all God’s prophets – defeats the sham god Baal on Mount Carmel. In the Gospel of Matthew, mountains represent important places, where people can meet God.

We also know that for the Jewish readers of Matthew’s text, the ones for whom he wrote, Moses represents the Law (the Commandments). Elijah represents the Prophets. So when Jesus is talking to Moses and to Elijah, Jesus is being brought alongside all the Law and the Prophets, the vital Jewish teaching central to Matthew’s Jewish readers. 

And if that symbolism isn’t enough, on the mountain the disciples see Jesus more clearly than ever before. Jesus is bathed in a great light, his clothes look bright white, his face radiates -- the same Biblical descriptions of Moses, after Moses had been on the mountain top close to God, or in the tent of meeting where Moses went to talk with God “face to face.” 

Up there, on that day, the disciples understand God affirming: “Jesus is my beloved child.”  The student disciples have a breakthrough in understanding, an epiphany.  That’s why we read the lesson today, the last Sunday of the Epiphany season. 

Is Jesus the one to follow? This first question of the disciples is answered “Yes!”  “Listen to him.” 

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Listen to him. Listen.

In a way, isn’t this always what we do, when we value another person? We listen to her, attentively.  We listen to him, with care. 

Paul Farmer says that Listening is what distinguishes the work of Partners in Health from other social justice agencies:  the deep commitment Partners staff have to what they even call “reverent  listening”. Two weeks ago Paul Farmer was in Cambridge, meeting with a group of students through the Harvard Divinity School Program for Science, Religion and Culture. One of the catalysts was a young student currently studying for both her Masters in Divinity and her Masters in Public Health degrees.
 
When Farmer was asked by the hundreds who gathered to hear him why his programs have such a major impact on global health, Farmer said it is because they design their medical interventions after understanding the point of view of the poor whom they serve. They listen. They value highly the poorest and listen to what the patients have to say.  For example:  

Instead of throwing up their hands at patients who fail to take medications and decrying them as lazy or ignorant, officials at Partners In Health ask patients why they don’t take their prescriptions and [then] work to lower costs, increase access, and remove other roadblocks.
“Instead of saying ‘failure to adhere,’ [we ask] them how we failed them, how we can remove the barriers to good health.” 

Listen to him, said the voice on high.  Listen, so you can change. 

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Change didn’t seem a top priority for Peter on the mountain.  He wanted to keep things just as they were – to build booths so he could put Elijah and Moses right inside them, and stay on the mountaintop to worship them.

We can feel the same way. Change is never easy.  And when, like dear Peter, we’ve once had an insight, a religious experience -- maybe in a special place, like the mountaintop, we often want to stay right there, and keep that special space just as it was. To capture the experience, and put it in a booth, so we can nostalgically recall how we felt, when everything felt full of light. Who wouldn’t want to stay on the mountaintop, where we can see from a wider perspective, where we finally can be away from the thorny problems below that resist solution, away from the thorny people with whom we don’t agree. 
 
Let’s build boxes, says Peter, and keep everything just the way it is, right now. Our little group and God. Just us, as it is right now!

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But at its core, the transfiguration story is about change.  Transfiguration means change --  a change in appearance where even greater beauty is seen. Someone’s face can be transfigured by love. Jesus is transfigured and shines!  When Jesus is seen most clearly, for whom he is, the Beloved of God, a light shines on and through him.

As it can for you!  And for all of us, in God’s beloved community. Here we can experience a time when we are seen – finally – for who we really are, for our status as children of God, too, right alongside Moses and Elijah.  In God’s beloved community are all of us humans who over time stumbled and bumbled – as did even Moses and Elijah – but who kept getting up again, yearning to grow closer to God. 

We can radiate, be transfigured, be transformed.  No longer even wanting to live in our little, comfortable boxes, because they confine who we can be, are meant to be! 

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But if Transfiguration is about us experiencing our lives, ourselves in a new light, is Jesus’ strategy for changing us, for changing the world, really the best one? Because his strategy is to go back down the mountain, and moving inexorably toward the teeming city, full of problems? 

Is all his talk of loving enemies, of building a beloved community, really the right strategy? Is all of Paul Farmer’s talk  -- of valuing each patient so much that it’s worth a whole day for him to walk up mountains to treat a handful of Haitians in a distant shack? 

Amidst questions just like ours, on the mountain top, the disciples got what they needed – because Jesus says these words to them: Do not be afraid, and he touches them, and he helps them up to their feet again, so together they can all go down and on to Jerusalem. “Get up,” he says, “touching them.” “Do not be afraid.” 

“Get up.  Do not be afraid.”

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I am convinced that we receive the same messages at key turning points in our lives, when we stand at some threshold, uncertain of what to do. It might be our retirement or the offer of a new job, a change at school or where you live.  It it could be facing the future without a beloved one on whom you’ve depended, or health challenges for you or your family. 

At these pivotal moments of change and challenge, you too are invited to see God more clearly. To listen more deeply. To feel God’s touch of love. To get up and not be afraid, because you’ll be journeying with God, never alone. 

As we look ahead, it’s my vision that King’s Chapel can represent all the pieces of today’s Transfiguration Story. 

A place, like the mountain, where people can meet God.  Where they can see, just a bit more clearly, the holy mystery behind this universe, bathed in new light, a fresh perspective.  A place where people can experience God’s touch, and hear words saying, Get up.  Do not be afraid.  

Friends, What will we represent for the thousands of people who annually pass by here?  And for the many area residents not yet among us, but craving a progressive faith?  In future years, what will all these say King’s Chapel represents? 

What will they say, based on our space and actions, based on our music and lived lives, “O yes, King’s Chapel: that’s the church where…… Those are the people who…..”

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In Haiti, at the top of the mountain when Tracy Kidder and Paul Farmer finally stop their long, long ascent, Farmer kneels with his stethoscope on the dirt floor to listen to the heart of the family’s father, a man who has lost his legs in an accident.  Author Tracy Kidder thinks of all the critics who would say this has been a wasted day, to serve so few. But by now Kidder knows Farmer well enough to anticipate Farmer’s response: 

“If you say seven hours is too long to walk for two patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.” (294)  

By his actions, we know what Paul Farmer represents: He’s the one who serves the poorest, against all odds.

+++++

So now we go down the mountain together, into Lent.  A time for each of us to take a more inward journey, to discover where we’re more inclined to build boxes when God calls us to change.  Where God calls us to be a voice and handsfor those so needy for hope.

Let us dream large, like the large vision on the top of the mountain. Dream as Paul Farmer has, starting with just a handful of colleagues. Trust that whatever we need to continue God’s work here, God will provide for us.  

And may God’s people say, Amen. 

‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 

Matthew 5: 21-24

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There are two options, about what Jesus says today in Matthew.  Which of the two you choose makes all the difference.

The first interpretation is that Jesus is giving us “the 10 commandments on steroids,”[1] as one commentator called them. We should not murder, but we also can’t be angry. We can’t even show up to make a gift at church unless we’ve first successfully resolved every difference with every person we know.  The Ten Commandments on Steroids!

Since we’re in the middle of a pledge campaign, and I’m hoping all of you will declare your intended pledges of offerings to the church in the next two weeks, by the end of February, so we can plan the year, I not anxious to have all of you, en masse, rise and depart this instant, never to return and offer a gift here until every single dispute in your life is settled!

Although, were all those disputes to be resolved, I think upon your return, your generosity, in gratitude, would be astonishing!

But your pledging is not my real worry.  The real worry is this: if Jesus is offering us the Ten Commandments on Steroids, with harsh requirements and harsh penalties, then we’re all doomed.  Doomed! Every single one of us.

By those standards, we might not even escape this worship service without hurling ourselves into the fire  – you’re bound to be irritated by something I’ll say, or the off hand comment of someone during coffee hour, and then – it’d be hopeless.

Great, we say – so glad I came to church this morning!

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But there is another way of hearing today’s story:  that Jesus is painting a picture of what the beloved community looks like, and inviting us into it.  He’s giving us a glimpse of how beautiful human life is meant to be, can be. 

Life where we honor each other.  Where we know that insults hurt, and that spitting out “Stupid!” “Fool” “Idiot” or worse --even in a flash of anger -– can crush a soul, so we hold back.

Jesus points today toward a life where we spend more energy affirming others’ value than enumerating their failures.   A life where, when we have hurt another in anger, as will happen because we’re human, we’ll have learned to drop other things, as less important, and just apologize. We’ll do what it takes to reconcile, rather than battling to a litigious win.

There are two interpretations, when it comes to what Jesus says today. Which of the two you choose makes all the difference in whether you think religion is fear-based or loved-based.  Is built on following the rules perfectly, or in building relationships in a beloved community.

Which interpretation you choose could determine whether religion is worth your time at all. 

One member said today’s reading reminded her of an absurd Monty Python monologue, the rules growing more and more preposterous with each clause. If that’s what Jesus really meant, why would thinking people bother?

What did Jesus really mean?

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The “10 Commandments on Steroids” certainly seems like what we’re hearing.

The rule is not just “Do not murder,” as Moses told the people of old; actually, the rule is that you can never even get angry. Don’t call someone names, and never insult.

And if you “color within those lines,” you’ll be fine.[2]  But if you don’t, you’re damned to hell.

Quite a few Christians over the years have chosen this interpretation, that Jesus was laying out reality:  we humans can never hope to measure up to God’s impossible standards, so our only hope is to fling ourselves on our knees, begging God’s undeserved mercy. Our prayer book contains some words like these. But is that all Jesus intended, all that our prayer book teaches? Or is there more?

Because there is another view. And which you choose makes all the difference.

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The second view recognizes that Jesus was teaching the antithesis of “the Ten Commandments on Steroids.” In fact, to understand the Sermon on the Mount as “the Ten Commandments on Steroids” just repeats the rigid, rule-bound religion from which Jesus sought to free us, rules that wouldn’t let Jesus heal a man’s deformed hand because it was the Sabbath.

Under the second view, Jesus wants us to still honor the Sabbath, but to do so by digging down and understanding the intention behind the commandment. The goal of the Sabbath is to give us fuller life, and touching a man’s hand to heal it brings fuller life.

The intention of the commandment not to murder, says Jesus, is that we deeply value the lives of our fellow humans, despite our differences; that we wake to the fact that ­each person is made in God’s own image, not just us; that the other is someone whose life we care about, not someone so lacking in value that we could snuff out their life force.

The deeper intention of the commandment against murder is to teach us ways of living together, and seeing each other, that transforms us and them. From enemy into sister.  From opponent into brother, all equally children of God, especially when our interests diverge. 

God’s heart must break each time we in the Christian church have created the Ten Commandments on Steroids.  When, in order to support a ‘good” thing, like Christian marriage before God, the Church creates this new rule:  we will marry you only if you have never have been divorced, and you love the people we think it’s right for you to love.

When in order to protect the specialness of Jesus’s gift in a shared meal of communion, the Church creates this new rule:  you can receive communion only if you adhere to our interpretation of God’s love, never get divorced, are free of sin or have adequately confessed.

Institutional religion, of every stripe, all across the globe, tends to fall into this trap: seeking clarity, we humans set up rules again, like the Ten Commandments on Steroids. Rigid church rules are comforting for many people, lay and clergy alike. Many of us like being told by someone else, “Here are the rules, now follow them.”  We like knowing:  As long as I profess these things, it’s all good.

           

People leave the liberal tradition we represent here at King’s Chapel because they want to be told just how to live. Just what to do.  Just the things they should believe. 

But here, with humility, we say, We’re not always sure. We respect each other’s opinions. We don’t say, as our critics claim, “Anything goes – do whatever you want.” Instead, at least at our best, we say with great intentionality: I want to learn, grow, change, be more loving, like Jesus. And I’ll gather with others who want to grow, too. I’ll come worship and study and practice living in beloved community.  Honoring others. Taking that seriously. 

We do that because, since our founding, we have seen how many of God’s beloved have been hurt by rigid church rules, premised more on people’s depravity than on their possibility.  We’ve seen, both in the days of the Puritans, and today, how deeply hurt people have been by exclusionary church rules, made in the name of Jesus.

My friends, there is an interpretation of Jesus’ words today that does not create the Ten Commandments on Steroids. Which you choose makes all the difference.

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How would you size up the two options?

In some ways the second interpretation is easier to live because Jesus says, “Life in the beloved community is not built on things you must do, rules you must follow, but on what God already does, right now, all the time: God loves all people unconditionally.

The only thing for us is to discover the remarkable love God has for us. Because when we are secure in that, we’re transformed into being able to love others with that same generosity. Jesus had found that in his own life, and wanted to share that good news with us.

But this second interpretation is harder that mere rule following, because it requires an inner journey, exploring why it’s do so hard for us to trust that we really are God’s beloved ones. I’m hoping Lent will be a time for us to do that inner journey. Martin Smith’s book has offered gentle daily guideposts for many, helping us notice why we’ve had to be so wary of trusting anyone who says, “I love you.”

When we begin that pilgrimage into a relationship with a God who loves us, and when we “emerge”[3] from this remarkable inner journey, we find we can act with more love and trust toward the world outside.  Not every moment. Not every day.  But more and more, alongside others in God’s beloved community, here – in this place – with those also on the journey.

A world built on rules that we’ll inevitably fail to follow perfectly, makes us more self-loathing, as well as more contemptuous of others who can’t comply.  We tend to be driven by our fear of failing, and focus on tallies of who did or didn’t do what. With rules, we keep score, win/lose.

But a world built on relationships – yours with God, and yours with others whom God loves –that is a world where we begin to act differently. 

Today’s passage jolts us to imagine what our world could be, were we to honor each other as beloved, blessed.  We don’t try just to avoid murder, but to respect each other. We listen more closely, assuming first that someone may have something worthwhile to share with us. We learn to construe what our neighbor says in the best light instead of in the worst.  We hold another’s welfare close to our hearts, and trust that she does the same for us.[4]

Jesus is radical – not by creating Commandments on Steroids – but by being perhaps the first genuine humanist, according to one theologian[5] – who showed us that humans, when secured by love, when transformed by unconditional acceptance, are capable of good, true and beautiful acts. The reign of God, right here, within us and among us. Now!

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All this has application in that “easiest” of all human relations – marriages!

I first heard of John Gottman,[6] researcher and counselor on marriage, on National Public Radio. The interview was one of those “driveway moments,” when you do actually sit in your car, even after you’ve arrived at your destination, just so you can hear the end of the radio interview. 

If you Google John Gottman’s name, you’ll see the many awards he’s received from prominent institutions, the reams of careful, data-driven, peer-reviewed research he has conducted about marriage for 35 years at the University of Washington. 

The Gottman Research Institute has followed couples for years, in longitudinal studies, and not only interviewed them, but also videotaped them, minutely observing words as well as body language.

Gottman’s goal has been to learn what distinguishes the “masters” from the “disasters,” in other words, the marriages that endure from those that quickly end in divorce. Gottman now can predict with about 90% accuracy, from watching just five minutes of a couple’s interactions, whether the marriage will survive. The key variable is contempt. 

Gottman’s work is not unlike what Jesus had to say about insulting others, or calling them fools. It matters enormously.  Gottman says anger itself is not a problem – anger is just a human emotion, and its impact on a marriage is neutral, neither good nor bad.  Anger, by itself, usually can best be understood as a way of saying, “Something is important to me, so please pay attention.”

But how our anger is expressed matters greatly. Fights aren’t the problem, but how we fight. Gottman’s research shows the four dangerous ways of treating each other that can break a marriage, and each involves how we belittle the other person. 

Relationships fail when we won’t honor what the other person is trying to tell us –rather than really listening to what they’re saying, we immediately get defensive, and retaliate by naming their failures, without actually responding to what they’ve said about our actions.

We convey that we’re not listening by “stonewalling”:  avoiding eye contract, sitting in stony silence, or walking away.

Rather than directly complaining about the other person’s actions, we attack the person him or herself.  Instead of “you didn’t get the groceries,” it becomes “you never do what you promise.”  

But the worst, says Gottman, is when we are contemptuous, as if our partner disgusts us.  When we stand in a position of moral superiority and demean them.  When we feel contemptuous, all the research shows, our heart rates increase, our overall health declines, and we cannot even remember any of the admirable things about our partner.  We literally cannot remember why we are in this relationship in the first place.

So the kinds of conduct towards others that we need to ban from our lives are those that show contempt; as the video captures, we need to ban: insulting our partner, calling them names, mocking them, using hostile humor, or conveying contempt by our facial expressions: sneering, curling our upper lip, rolling our eyes.

It’s as if Jesus knew the same thing Gottman’s videos have shown.

And the key to reversing this damage in a marriage, says Gottman, is to learn to reconcile, or manage the inevitable differences between partners, just like the inevitable differences in any community. 

How people do this varies: sometimes we agree to disagree and make light of differences; sometimes we compromise, not getting perfectly what we want, but ensuring that all feel understood and respected. The marriages that last are fundamentally based in an admiration and fondness for one another. 

In Gottman’s counting, lasting married partners give positive feedback to one another in a ratio of 5:1, five positive comments for every one negative.

If you’re interested, I’d love to have some discussions about Gottman’s theories, because they seem to track this passage by Jesus so well, banning insults, abuse and contempt.  Gottman even parallels            the odd bit at the end of Jesus’s talk, where he teaches how it is far better to reach a compromise early with someone than end up in bitter litigation.

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In marriage, in a church community, in this world, you can try to live either by rigid rules, delineating your rights versus mine, compelling obedience based on our mutual fear of punishment.  Or you can live in a relationship, between you and God, and you and others, built on God’s unconditional love.

Which of the two you choose comes down to this – the very heart of our passage today.

Could God ever hold you in contempt?



If yes, then why would you follow that God?

If no, then why do you ever need to have contempt for someone else?



[1] David Lose, “The Relational God,” Working Preacher (February 11, 2014). https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=3071 This sermon owes a great deal to the thoughtful comments of both Lose and Peter Woods (see notes following). Thanks to both.


[2] David Lose, see above.


[3] Peter Woods, The Law of Love, or the Love of Law? http://thelisteninghermit.com/2011/02/08/the-law-of-love-or-the-love-of-law/


[4] Woods, see above.


[5] Woods, citing theologian Don Cupitt.


[6] Gottman’s research is readily available. See, for example,

http://couplestraininginstitute.com/gottman-couples-and-marital-therapy/,

http://www.gottman.com/research/research-faqs/

http;://insightcounselling.blogspot.com/2012/05/excerpts-from-john-gottman.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/what-makes-marriage-work

You: Salt of the Earth and Light of the World? Really?
 

Matthew 5: 13-14

“You are the salt of the earth.”  “You are the light of the world.”  What did Jesus mean?

He didn’t say, “You have the potential to be salt of the earth.” He didn’t urge us,

“With a little more sprucing up, you could become light for the world.”

He said it as if it were already true. He declared it as if it were obvious. Jesus told the group, huddled before him on the Galilean hillside, “You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.”

They were no select group.  They were just an assortment of people who’d gotten up on an ordinary morning, and made their way to the hillside that day, to hear this man Jesus about whom they’d heard.  They got up, just as all of us did on this ordinary morning, deciding – for one reason or another – to make our way here, to King’s Chapel.

And then we hear, as those on the hillside did, these odd words: “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.”

Is it true?

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Maybe we’re here today because it’s our job to be  -- singing in the choir, playing the organ, or preaching. Perhaps we had an assignment we’d taken on:  ushering or making our lunch. Perhaps attending has become our Sunday habit, or a friend agreed to meet us, or we were visiting from out of town, or were simply curious about what happens in this place. 

But however we came to be here this morning, my guess is that you – like those first Galileans –did not come because you were convinced that you are the Light for the World, that already, in this moment now, you are salt of the earth. 

More likely, you feel just the opposite.  You came because somewhere inside you were more aware of the clouds in your life than the sunlight; you were more wearied by the blandness and routine of your days, than aware of their salty zest.

We all tend to come to church hoping for light to be shed on a murky question, wishing for an enriched sense of our life’s purpose, one that would be worth savoring.    

But now Jesus calls you the light, says you are already the salt.  You have within you and around you all that you need.

Is it true?

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We can’t even take solace in being singled out. Jesus hasn’t been particularly discriminating. Everyone sitting in these pews, all in the hillside throng receive the same message from him. Regardless of your past, regardless of your future intentions, “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells us all. “You are the salt of the earth.”

And when he looks your way saying those words, you glance over your shoulder to see: To whom is he talking?  But his eye hasn’t left your face. The voice comes again, with a gentleness: You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.

And we wonder “Me?”  “Right now?”  “Already?”

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From time to time, you may have met people who fit these two descriptors: of light and salt. When they enter a room, it lights up.  When you see their script on an envelope, you smile, a ray of sunshine about to be cast into your day when you read the letter enclosed.

When you’re in need of a true friend, who will not let you down, you seek the one who is “salt of the earth.”  Because today when we say someone is “the salt of the earth,” we mean that he or she is solid, and humble, and trustworthy. They may not be flashy – not hot spices, making food exotic or burning our lips – not the models airbrushed in ads, but people who can be counted on.  People worth knowing.  Those whom we call “salt of the earth” are those who will see us through. An “old salt” is the sailor who deserves respect, knows his way around the ship, is one you’d want aboard in a storm.

This doesn’t make salt “plain” or “ordinary”:  salt is remarkable! It changes ordinary food into something tasty. When the seemingly small, single teaspoon of salt is forgotten in the recipe, everyone who tastes it knows immediately.  Salt changes things. It makes them so much better. 

For people in Jesus’ time, salt was a miracle preservative: only in this last split second of human development have we had electric refrigeration – before that, for almost all of human history,  it was salt that allowed meats or fish or other food stuff to last.  Salt kept families from starving, because they could save and store what they butchered or grew in the seasons of bounty, to eat in their seasons of want. Salt changes things – it makes life so much better.

Salt is a healer, too.  When I had a nasty cut on my hand, and wondered if I should swim in the ocean, my sister-in-law, an intensive care nurse at Mass General, told me salt water would hasten its healing.  Gargling with warm salted water is recommended for sore throats or colds, and when little babies are congested, small drops of salt water can loosen the mucus so they can breathe again.

 “You are the salt of the earth”:  Healing. Preserving. Enhancing life. You can make lives so much better, says Jesus.

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On the ancient hillside, and in this place today, Jesus wants us to know our true identity, from God’s perspective, our true identity as salt and light. 

It’s not because of anything we’ve done, or some creed we espouse. We’re salt and light because we’re human, made in God’s image. By being children of God, loved unconditionally, we’re imbued with these qualities: salt and light, able to bring deeper life to lives we touch.

This week a member told me that once he’d walked down a street here on Beacon Hill, and suddenly he was aware of true Reality. For a memorable moment, he knew he belonged to something greater; it was a pure joy. True. Real.

When you know who you are, in the deepest sense, when you glimpse Reality, or God, or whatever word or metaphor we grasp at to name it, when we are aware even for an instant of who we were made to be, then everything changes. To know who and whose you are, changes your life, and the lives of those around you, as salt does. As light does. 

And when we ignore this true identity, when we forget who we really are, it’s an absurdity, says Jesus. He doesn’t say that harshly, or with anger. But he’s clear: 

“Dear ones, Why wouldn’t you act like the wonderful salt God made you to be – when you forget, it’s like treating a precious spice as if it’s lost its flavor, throwing it on the ground where it will be trampled like dirt underfoot. 

Why wouldn’t you act like the beautiful light you are? To ignore your own radiance is as silly as covering a lamp with a bushel – no one would do that!  Why, the whole room could be lit by your beauty, by your shining love, so all in the house could see it.

God longs for us to know who we really are:  for our good, and the good of all the world. “You are the salt of the earth,” says Jesus, with urgency and wisdom. “You are the light of the world.”

In his life, he’d somehow grasped it.  Can we?

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There are many reasons we forget our true natures, reasons why on most days it’s hard to imagine any sane person mistaking us for salt or light.  

Our true God-given identity may be drowned out by voices insisting otherwise:  a school teacher or parent, a drill sergeant or spouse, a minister haranguing from the pulpit or a supposed friend who constantly chides. From all or some of these we pick up this message – even sometimes when it’s not intended: You’re worthless, like tasteless salt underfoot. 

So in time we hide who we are under a bushel:  who we really are, or at least some part of ourselves, is unacceptable, we conclude. It happens if we’re gay in Russia, or on most sports teams in America. It happens if we’re Latino seeking an apartment, and notice that those with whiter names fare far better. 

We hide who we are if we didn’t go to the right school, or don’t earn the right salary, and someone makes us feel the less for it.  We work hard at church, but no one thinks to say thanks; we make a blunder in our religious home, and no one will forget.  We get the message: you’re no longer Salt of the Earth. For right or for wrong, we feel unwanted now, and aren’t sure how to change back again, regain our flavor.

Some of us forget we’re salt and light, because our body chemistry is awry.  It’s hard to admit the anxiety that plagues us when family or friends  look askance at drugs or therapy. So we struggle on alone, self-medicating as best we can: extra sweet snacks by day, Chablis or scotch at night. But the loop in our brain keeps singing the same refrain:  you’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good.

Sometimes experiences in our lives shout out, You can’t be salt or light!  If we fought in Viet Nam, and came home to derision and shame. If we’re soldiers fighting now, returning to few jobs in the weakened economy. If we’ve seen death, jumped at bombs’ near misses, discovered buddies destroyed, and must just “man up”for yet another grueling tour of duty.  What was once called “shell shock,” is now known as Post Traumatic Shock, but our soldiers still wait too long for adequate treatment, because we Americans prefer not to pay more taxes. 

No wonder some veterans forget that they are “salt of the earth,” “the light of the world.”  They feel trod underfoot, men left on sidewalks, walked past and ignored, their light hidden under bushels, or under mounds of anonymous blankets, asleep at night in our doorways. 

There are many reasons we all lose sight of this reality:  in God’s eyes we are born beloved, valued “salt of the earth,” shining light for the world, treasured and precious in God’s sight.

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The data are sobering. Of all the homeless men on the street, one of every four is a veteran who’s served this country. Someone whose boots were well polished at morning inspection. Who could do the workouts, follow the orders, vault the obstacles, run the race.  A vet who signed up or was drafted, and who represented us, defended us, perhaps killed on our command.

And now?  Once every hour, an American veteran commits suicide. Once every hour.  22 suicides each day.[1] Right now, most veteran suicides are by those who fought in Viet Nam, but just a few weeks ago, the government reported a vast surge in suicides among the youngest veterans, those still in their teens and twenties. In July, a survey by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America found that 30% of service members in our current wars have considered taking their own life. 45% know another Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who has already attempted suicide. A wave of suicides likely lies ahead, due to the wars of this last decade.[2]

Jesus says to you and me, and to every veteran considering suicide: You are the salt of the earth, already loved by God. You are the light of the world, because you are God’s child.

Can we hear that? Can we say it to someone else, by word or action?

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There is good news in this darkness. Thoughtful people are working hard to help fellow Bostonians remember that they are part of our beloved community, salt and light.  The Boston Courant, the small local weekly that covers Beacon Hill, Back Bay and the South End, reported this week that Boston’s homeless population is now 7255, based on the census taken in December. 7255 homeless right now in Boston. That’s up from last year, but because programs have pushed their limits, no one has had to sleep on the streets in our bitter cold.[3]

The Boston Globe yesterday carried a Business section piece on the Fireman Foundation, an organization deeply committed to ending homelessness.[4] That Foundation, through its grant criteria, now insists that public services be coordinated. A single mother who loses her job, can’t afford her rent, and is forced into a shelter, now might receive comprehensive services to help her regain independence:  not only subsidized rent for a new apartment, but at the same time, the child care aid she needs to land a job, and training at Jewish Vocational Services so she can earn more than minimum wage. The Fireman Foundation’s goal is to prevent repeated cycles of homelessness.

The New England Center for Homeless Veterans, our neighbor one block away, also provides comprehensive services. They commit to “leave no one behind.” You’ll hear more of their inspiring work at lunch.

Strategic policy initiatives like these are vital:  another organization King’s Chapel supports, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, invites all of us to join their lobby day later this month, at the State House. There you can urge legislators to fund homeless programs and programs that prevent homelessness in the first place.

In addition to this systemic work, there is the ministry of presence with individuals.  I’ve learned from the Rev. Joan Murray, who served the homeless on Boston Common for five years with Ecclesia, and now works alongside those on the margins in Waltham.  Any of us, who may have forgotten that we are salt or light, can regain our sense of true self when someone shows, by their simple presence with us, that they deem us worth their time. Worth talking and listening to.

One man told Joan later that he had mustered courage to get sober because she’d called him by name, day after day. Joan had no idea, because the man had rarely responded, but he’d felt her presence.

In the ministry of presence, Rev. Murray or the Vets Center invites us to come and be present with their guests.  Just to be, playing cards or chatting, Just being salt and light, as all of us are, already.  Conveying to each other, that all can add to the world, for such marvelous good, like salt and light.

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To be light, shining in all the darkness, to be salt, given scope of the task, we need to come together as beloved community.

Think of a recent Christmas Eve service, or of our Easter Vigil here, times when this church rests in darkness, until one candle is lit.  That one lights two more, then all those up this center aisle come ablaze, and the tiered candelabra here in front.

If you’ve been in a church with long rows of pews on Christmas Eve, you may have seen a mother take a candle, and carefully light the one held in her child’s little fist, then you’ve seen how the child dips hers to light the grandparent’s, and on down the row, row after row until a whole sanctuary is warm with flickering light, visible on every wondering face.

Alone my light might light one room, or a corner of one. But together, our light grows spacious, glowing, giving hope to those who’ve forgotten the true reality, this message: You, too, are the light of the world.

The very first flame is the unquenchable love of God, that enables all else, our true identity, as ones precious in a loving God’s sight.

Light can shine throughout a beloved community. A the feast of great joy can be shared, seasoned well by the salt of the earth.

Pass it on.  You are the salt of the world. You are the light for the world. And when we come together, as one, oh what a difference God can bring to many lives.

Beginning with yours.

May it be so, dear friends. May it be so!



[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/21/us/22-veteran-suicides-a-day/


[2] http://iava.org/press-room/press-releases/veterans-participate-suicide-prevention-month


[3]  The Boston Courant, February 6, 2014;  see also  http://www.bphc.org/healthdata/other-reports/Documents/2013_2014_Key_Findings_ESC.pdf


[4] http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/02/08/philanthropy-promotes-coordinated-effort-address-homelessness/K8KuTEy18SUUPfqZj8d22J/story.html

The Beatitudes – Matthew 5: 10-12, 9

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake,

for theirs is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you

and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,

for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

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Standing For Reason and Tolerance

During these two months of January and February, we’ve been focused on building “the beloved community” – the phrase used by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to describe a community built on the conviction that we are all children of God – each of us, across all barriers.

So we’re gathering often, starting off the year with a shared New Year’s Evensong service, dinner and concert; a book group that met twice in January; 46 of us who last Sunday night walked down to the Parish House for soup and salad after the Choir’s Evening concert.

Today we’ll share tours together, next week we’ll have lunch and learn about the Veterans Center located one block from here, and in two weeks, we are all invited to the retreat at Glastonbury Abbey. 

Building the Beloved Community  -- within these walls, despite painful differences we’ve had in the past; and building the community out beyond our walls, greeting newcomers, and discerning how we are called to serve our wider City of Boston.

Today we focus on another aspect of Building Beloved Community – this time across national boundaries - as we honor our ties to the Unitarians who in the 1500s founded the first Unitarian Church in Kolozsvar, Transylvania, now in the country of Romania.  Denton and Peter will give you the more complete history right after our service.

Let me focus now on the experience our sisters and brothers in the Unitarian Transylvanian Church have had living the Beatitudes I just quoted – being reviled and persecuted because they were Unitarians in that land, a religious minority who has fared poorly most of past several centuries. 

That’s the history of our forebears in Transylvania.  In the 1500s, the world was in religious tumult, the powerful Christian Church was critiqued from within, Roman Catholics and the protestors (the Protestants) severed.  Our forebears in Transylvania argued for a Christianity that included these central features: 

1) use of our human reason to discern; and 2) tolerance of different understandings of the truth.

Human reason and tolerance had a central place in Christianity, they asserted.  Transylvanian minister Francis David forcefully argued this, and for a brief time, these twin principles – human reason and religious tolerance – held sway in that land, sandwiched between the Ottoman Empire of Islam, the Christian Orthodox of Greece and Russia to the East, and the European Catholics and Protestants to the West.

Perhaps because the Transylvanians lived in that fulcrum, perhaps because they had met men and women with different beliefs, perhaps because they had seen the horror of warfare played out again and again on their soil, there in the crossroads between competing interests, when the people of that land heard a message about using our human reason, and about tolerance for different religious views, they signed on!

You see, when one has had exposure to people and ideas unlike your own, when people come to believe that we are all beloved of God, all honored by God, then we are more willing to trust each other to think for ourselves. 

The beloved community is founded on respect for individuals; we dignify each other.  I ask you to listen to me.  But I also assume that I may have something to learn from you, so I hear your thoughts, too.

Human reason and tolerance. Grounding principles of the Christian Unitarianism of Transylvania.

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We can’t trace a direct path from these ideas in the 1500s to those of our minister James Freeman in the 1700s; bright and thinking people can independently reach similar conclusions in different parts of the globe, of course. 

But we know that these radical ideas traveled between Transylvania and Poland, and between Poland and England, and between England and America. And that today we still hold them dear, in this congregation: we, too are committed to human reason and tolerance within Christianity.

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Pete Seeger died this week, a man who also stood for years in support of causes he deemed just, but which were hardly popular at their start.  He stood with laborers during the depression, against McCarthyism in the 50s, for civil rights and against the Viet Nam War in the 60s, and for a cleaner environment, along his beloved Hudson River, in the 80s and beyond. 

Seeger is held in esteem by many now, but for years he suffered financially and was banned from many venues because of his views. He was reviled and picketed by the John Birch Society as anti-American, prosecuted criminally by the FBI for his refusal to name names to McCarthy, banned from television for decades, and his performance group, the Weavers, broke up under the pressure.

How many of us remember the way Pete Seeger suffered?  Or is it easier to just remember his songs, and hum along, “Goodnight Irene….” 

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But if we were to forget Seeger’s travails, or those of the Transylvanian Unitarians, we wouldn’t be doing our job.  Because those who are reviled are nonetheless blessed by God – that odd and incongruous notion – when we become agents of God’s blessing to those who suffer.

Here at King’s Chapel we stand for tolerance and human reason, too. But our stance did not require the anguish that the Transylvanians experienced.  Our Unitarian leaders in this place were not martyred for their beliefs. Our churches were not banned. We didn’t have to meet secretly in homes. Our building – this beautiful building that we treasure, as Transylvanians have treasured theirs – was not taken by a government opposed to us.  Our seminaries were not limited to only two new ministers per year - nationally – as happened in Transylvania, even recently.

And most of us, unlike Pete Seeger, have not lost lucrative contracts because we stood with low wage workers, protested for peace, demanded equal treatment across races, or insisted that polluters clean the PCBs from our river.

How are these who’ve come before us been “blessed,” despite being reviled and persecuted?

They are blessed, if we here at King’s Chapel are God’s hands of blessing helping Transylvanians rebuild after the ravages of World Wars and Communism’s oppressions.  

They and leaders like Pete Seeger are blessed, if we honor their actions, and commit to stand as firmly for justice and tolerance and the power of human reason in a beloved religious community that continues on, and thrives.

They are blessed, when they know that they do not stand alone, and we stand by their side.

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Two last notes.  First, I’ve enshrined the word “tolerance” today. But we know that tolerance can be translated “live and let live,” a comfortable notion that lets us duck tough issues, that says “anything goes.” 

Tolerance misconstrued becomes apathy, a total lack of conviction. There are times we must be intolerant:  intolerant of intolerance.  We must stand against intolerant racism, for example, refusing to countenance its vicious outcomes.  A beloved community does not tolerate racism.

Second, though we may be convinced that we are squarely on the side of angels, seeking justice is not a warrant for us to persecute and revile others. We can be intolerant of their positions; we may strongly disagree and refuse to accept their views, but in the beloved community, we still treat even our enemies with kindness and respect.

It is not easy – all these grays in a world we’d prefer were black and white.

That’s why we read the Beatitudes in full – we are blessed when we do God’s work, though we may be persecuted and reviled, but we are also blessed when we are peacemakers. How we do God’s work matters.

The prophet Micah said it best: “What does the Lord require of us, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.”

When we do justice, we act always with kindness, and walk humbly with our God: because God is God, and we are not, and others may have something to teach us.

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So come to our shared communion meal knowing this:  We are heirs to a profound legacy, of many who came before us to build this beloved community, to forge a country where different views are tolerated, and justice is sought; heirs to the many who opened doors so that we might have the gift of using our minds and reason; heirs to those who gave us a space in which to worship freely,  here in King’s Chapel,  where everyone – regardless of belief or doubt –is invited to join the circle and partake of communion, in beloved community.

Stay for a few minutes after the service to learn more about this legacy, so that we continue it, too.  and continuing it, discover how blessed we are. 

For I wonder:  When have we here at King’s Chapel bravely stood, against the odds, in favor of a position that made us reviled?  

When will we?

Oh I wonder how God may call us next, this beloved community.