Is God Really Like Jesus?

Luke 13:1-9

What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith.  When I say believe, I don’t mean our confession of faith – the doctrinal idea stuff we throw around about God.  Rather, I mean the deep-down-been-programmed-into-me-since-I-was-a-baby kind of feelings that we have about God.  There’s the God we say we believe in and then there’s the God we really believe in.  Who is that God and what’s he like?

Last summer I read a book by Bradley Jersak entitled A More Christlike God: a More Beautiful Gospel in which he points out several different deep down beliefs that we project onto God that aren’t Christlike.  First, he talks about God the doting grandfather. This is the God who spoils us with whatever we want and ignores are misbehaviour. This is the God who gives us the desires of our hearts if we just delight in him.  If you believe, he’ll give you whatever you ask for.  The doting grandfather God works until tragedy hits and you find your prayers aren’t being answered.  Then we must ask how God can allow suffering to happen.

The second projection that Jersak defines is God the deadbeat dad or God the absentee landlord. This is the God who abandoned me, the dad who walked out shirking his responsibilities. This is the God who created the universe and gave it laws to govern how it functions, but then left it to fend for itself.  He's the God-of the-gap whom we blame for everything that's wrong.  This God leaves us feeling like orphans.  He’s simply not there when we need him.  The Atheists can't see past this god. 

A third common image that we project upon God is that of the punitive judge, the God who gets us when we’re bad.  He is a “meticulous micromanager” of our behaviour and a "harsh taskmaster."  This God has given us a law and we must obey it or else.  He seems to like us best when we are feeling guilt or regret about our behaviour.  We try to tell ourselves that he “hates the sin, but loves the sinner” yet there’s no escaping the pervasive feeling that if he hates the sin, he hates us too and will only "pardon" (we have to use legal language because he's a judge) us if we can find someway to make ourselves right with him, someway to appease him and avert his angry wrath.

Jersak’s last un-Christlike image that we project onto God is that of the Santa Claus Blend.  This is the doting grandfather blended with the punitive judge.  Like the doting grandfather it’s, “Ask me for anything and I will give it to you…as long as you’re good.”  And, like the punitive judge he’s keeping a list of everything we do so don’t let your naughty list grow longer than your nice.  Blended Santa falls apart when the good get only socks when they've prayed for ponies while the bad get the ponies.  There’s also nothing called grace here because its all about how good or bad we have been. 

Although these examples may seem a bit trite in my portrayal of them, I think we can all raise our hands and say "those sound a lot like the god I grew up with."  We can confess God as Trinity, as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has made us participants in their loving communion which biblically and theologically is correct.  But, what we really mean when we say God is God the Father the punitive Santa who under scrutiny initiated by the cold hard fact of suffering in the world is just a deadbeat dad who, although his only begotten Son died to appease his anger towards us, is still ready to pour the wrath out on us because no matter how hard we try we only keep discovering we’re not good enough.  I left out the Holy Spirit because that one’s for crazies and it’s just easier for us to say we’ve been touched by an angel.  This distorted projection of our own devise is the God we functionally serve.  This is why guilt is the number one motivator for church participation.  If you want something done around the church, just find the person who will feel guilty if it doesn’t get done and that’s your bunny, your Easter bunny.  So my point is that our deep down beliefs about who God is ain’t necessarily the God we find in Jesus. 

And so we come to Luke, and this morning’s passage which is admittedly a very difficult passage to swallow.  It seems here that Jesus is making God out to be the punitive judge we met earlier.  It seems he is saying "Get yourselves right with God, repent, or God is going to get you too just like he did those other miserable sinners".  But, that’s not what’s going on here.  I think what Jesus is doing here is confronting a false image of God that was common in his day and then tries to counter it with an image of how God really is...a more Christlike God.
          I build my case on a minor point of Greek; twice Jesus uses the phrase “do you think” which can also mean “do you suppose” or “do you believe".   With this conjectural kind of questioning I think he is pushing into their belief system to expose the false idea they had of God.  A predominant belief back in Jesus day was that God punishes sinners and the worse sinner that you are, God will get you all the more.  Birth defects, accidents, horrible deaths, diseases were all things they believed to be punishment from God for sins committed, secret or otherwise.  Therefore, they would have believed those Galileans had to have been really bad for God to have used Pilate who massacred them and mixed their blood with sacrifices; so also the Jerusalemites upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell.

If I had to paraphrase here and read a bit between the lines, I think Jesus is saying “Do you believe these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans (and we all know that all Galileans are dreadfully sinful).  Is it because they were especially bad sinners that God punished them in such a way?  Is this the God you believe in?”  Jesus answers his own question with an emphatic “No!”  No, they were faithful people on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship God rightly and for some reason of Pilate’s whim they died a horrible death.  Sometimes bad things happen to even the most faithful of people.  So also with the eighteen Jerusalemites who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Tower of Siloam fell, do you believe they were worse sinners than anybody else in Jerusalem and so God was punishing them?  Is this the God you believe in?  No!  Accidents happen.  Well, if this is the God you believe in, then you better get yourselves right with this God because you’re going to get it in like manner because you're all sinners too.  So tell me, is this really what God is like?”

Jesus then tells them a parable in which he contrasts their false image of God with one that is more Christ-like.  The first image is the vineyard owner.  He is like a blend between God the punitive judge and God the deadbeat dad.  He planted a fig tree in his vineyard and left it to grow on its own coming back only at harvest time when there was something in it for him only to find that the tree bore no fruit.  Since he couldn’t have a tree wasting his good soil, he wanted it cut down.  The vineyard owner, I think was at much at fault here as the tree itself for there being no fruit.  You just don’t plant a fruit tree and go off and leave it.  They need tending.  And, why plant a fig tree in a vineyard?  The grapevines were probably too much competition for it.  You can’t punish something for your own neglect.  This not the way God is, is he?

Maybe God is rather like the Gardener in this parable.  The Gardener won’t cut the tree down.  He knows better.  He knows it needs tending.  He sees that the tree needs some fertilizer and gets his hands dirty with poo to make the tree able to bear fruit.  I think this is the God we see in Jesus.  Jesus, God the Son, got right into the sewage waste of what it is to be human and suffered as we do in every way.  He shared our every weakness.  Though innocent of any crime he was condemned to death for treason.  His closest friends abandoned him and denied knowing him.  He died a horribly painful death (and this is not to diminish the suffering of so many who die horribly painful deaths).  Yet, God the Father did not pour wrath out on humanity for its ultimate crime against God…No!  He raised Jesus from the dead and then poured the Holy Spirit out upon us, that we may participate in his very life.  God is like this Gardener.  The Holy Spirit, God’s very self, is the fertilizer that seeps into us through our roots and restores vitality to us and makes us able to bear the fruits of righteousness.

Well, I bring up all these images of God because as I said at the very beginning that what we believe about God has a very profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith.  To take Jesus' warning to heart, unless we repent of our misplaced faithfulness to these false images of God that we project onto God and serve instead of the True God, we will perish within the confines of a bankrupt religion.  The Greek word for repentance is “metanoia”.  “Meta” means “with” and “noia” means “mind”.  It is to be “with-minded”, “with-minded” with Jesus.  It means to think, and pursue the things that he thinks and pursues which is adoration and faithfulness to God his Father that expresses itself in the humility of suffering servants.  Paul tells as at 1 Corinthians 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ which means we have the Holy Spirit in us helping us and empowering us to choose and live by means of the way of the cross.  The Holy Spirit makes us able to live together as a community of disciples who love each other as the Trinity loves us and who relate to our surrounding community with compassion and the utmost hospitality.  The Holy Spirit makes us willing and able to get outside these walls and soil our hands with the "poo" of the lives of of real people to whom we can minister in Jesus' name.  This punitive, deadbeat, Santa that we serve only leaves us with boundaries between us and the hurting world out there.  If we persist in clinging to the false images of God that we project onto him we will quench the work of the Holy Spirit in us and we will not be Christ-like but something rather sinister that claims to be.  So, what do you think?  Do you think God is really like Jesus?  Amen.

A Fox, a Hen, and Chicks Who Won't Come

Luke 13:31-35

There are few sights more idyllic than a bunch of little baby chicks pushing their way in underneath their mother hen for warmth and security.  At any sense of danger they will instinctively seek to hide under their mother.  It is all but impossible for them to do otherwise.  If a dog comes into the yard where there is a mother hen with her babies, without fail the chicks will flock together putting the mother hen between them and the dog and then they will start to burrow in under her.  The mother hen will start to look real defensive.  She’ll stare the old dog in the eye and face it square on and fluff up her feathers making herself look big and ferocious.  The brood pushing in under her adds to that effect.  If you’re a curious old farm dog who’s feeling a bit playful, you get the message.  “Stay away from my brood or I’ll poke your eyes out.”

A fox is a different story.  If he’s hungry, he’s got killing on his mind.  That’s what foxes do.  It won’t matter how ferociously fluffy the mother hen looks a hungry fox will just go ahead and kill her.  Akin to a squirrel trying to avoid a car while crossing the road only to meets an unfortunate demise, a mother hen will still stand her ground.  She will not run away to save her self.  The chicks will still try to burrow in under her and she will do her best to remain atop her brood.  Her grand display of ferocity unfortunately turns to defiant martyrdom.  Her noble maternal instincts only just make her a fairly easy grab for a hungry fox.

Looking at our passage here in Luke, Jesus has pulled out quite a powerful image to describe his love, God’s love, for his people.  Due to her instinctual love for her chicks a mother hen will stand her ground to her death to protect those chicks.  Sadly, against a fox she becomes an utter example of futility and vulnerability.  Of course we are supposed to see an analogy here to Jesus’ death on the cross, a revelation of God’s nature by God the Son in which we learn that the power of God is marked by weakness.  God is not all-powerful in the way we think of power.  Rather, God is all-loving. 

Fox’s have power.  King’s have power.  Yet, there’s a rule of thumb when it comes to power.  Lord John Acton wrote in 1887 in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: “All power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”  That’s what happens when people have power over people.  If we remember last week’s reading, this is the sort of power the formed the basis of the devil’s second test of Jesus.  The devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in an instant and said he could give Jesus all that power and if Jesus would worship him.  Jesus didn’t fall for it, if you catch the pun.

Returning to our fox in the chicken yard image, it is kind of interesting here how Jesus, the mother hen, deals with the threat from Herod, the fox.  First thing to keep in mind here is that the Pharisees were probably lying to Jesus about Herod wanting to kill him.  This particular Herod, Herod Antipas, was a Roman pawn who liked to throw parties.  He was indeed the Herod responsible for the death of John the Baptist.  But, we know he was a reluctant participant in a tragic turn of events in that case.  Herod apparently liked to listen to John the Baptist.  We learn later in Luke’s Gospel that this Herod was equally curious about Jesus.  In chapter 23, after the Jewish authorities arrested Jesus, Pontius Pilate sent him over to Herod to see if Herod could find anything against Jesus.  According to Luke, Herod was happy to finally meet Jesus because he wanted to see Jesus do some sort of miracle.  But when Jesus refused and simply stood there silent, he had Jesus mocked and sent him back to Pilate who in turn stood before a mob roused by the Temple authorities and said that both he and Herod could find nothing wrong with Jesus.  So, I think its more likely that the Pharisees are just trying to mess with Jesus, and this whole exchange is like basketball players out on the court talking shmack.

So, the Pharisees tell Jesus to get out of there because Herod wants to kill him and Jesus gives a very “cocky” one.  “You go tell that fox that today, tomorrow, and the next day I’m going to go do what I do – casting out demons and healing the sick.”  Jesus comments here are not directed towards Herod, but rather to the Pharisees.  And we know about the Pharisees.  They were the devoutly religious people back then who knew their Bibles and had the most power of all the groups in Jesus’ day.  Actually, they were effectually more powerful than Herod.  They should have been able to recognize by the things that Jesus was doing, that he was imbued with the true power of God and was therefore their Messiah, but they didn’t see it.  And so, Jesus goes on to note that it’s not kings who kill prophets, but “Jerusalem”. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”, the power seat of religion, “Jerusalem” is who kills prophets and stones those God sends to them.  It’s impossible for Jesus to be killed by anything other than Jerusalem.

Next, Jesus creates an image that’s not so idyllic.  Imagine a fox coming into the chicken yard and the mother hen calling the chicks to find their protection underneath her.  But the chicks don’t want to come.  There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.  By instinct the chicks should run to their mother.  They should flock together putting their mother between themselves and danger and wriggle in underneath of her, but that’s not what’s happening.  Rather, it seems the fox could care less and all the while, the chicks are actually attacking the mother hen.  What a bizarre scene.

What a bizarre scene.  The Greek word for desire, for longing shows up three times in this passage.  First, the Pharisees said that Herod is desiring, longing to kill you.  The next two times is when Jesus says to “Jerusalem”, the religious leadership of God’s people, “How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you (Jerusalem) did not long for it.”  Shuh-mack.  So, Jesus tells the Pharisees that their house, the Temple, is left empty to them meaning God is not there and they are not going to recognize him until they see the children of Jerusalem welcoming him into town singing, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” The day of his triumphal entry, Palm Sunday.

The heart of the matter driving this whole bizarre scene of chicks turning on their mother hen when a fox is in the yard was a lack of a longing desire on the part of the Jewish religious leadership for those entrusted to them to find the security of a life giving relationship with their God.  “Jerusalem” likes its power to control others with religion, with rules for morality and proper ritual.  “Jerusalem” likes its the power to condemn and to enslave and oppress by means of rules and images of an angry, judging God who must be pacified lest he break forth in wrath against you.

The moral of this story is “don’t let your religion get in the way of your relationship with God.”  Christian faith is not a religion, though the institution of Christianity can be.  Christian faith is new human existence, people indwelt by the Holy Spirit so that we are in a relationship with God in which nothing can separate us from his love and presence.  Like a mother hen God longs, deeply desires, for us to come to him...not to some religion about him.  The new human existence that God has wrought in Christ Jesus is new human being in which God is restoring his image in us, the image of a self-giving, loving communion of persons.  This new creation is not found in the observances of religious institutions.  But rather, in prayer and meditation on Scripture and in worship – times when we are in his presence and his nature simply rubs off on us.  It is found as we learn to love our neighbours as we love ourselves, unconditionally and unselfishly and indeed sacrificially.  It is found when we forgive and love those who have hurt us and try to bear them up understanding their woundedness.  It is found in extending hospitality and gracious fellowship, friendship, to all.  All who are in Christ are new creation, the old life is gone and a new one has begun – a new life filled with and transformed by God.  We, this congregation, we are new creation in the midst of the old, new humanity in the midst of the old.  The more we live it, the more we will know it. Amen.

The Body Tested

Luke 4:1-13

This account of the temptation of Jesus by the devil in the wilderness is in my opinion a very misinterpreted passage for two reasons.  First, the devil is not tempting Jesus in some sort of pseudo-Lenten idea of temptation where we give up chocolate, beer, lunch, TV, or looking at pretty women because the absence of these things in our lives and the hungering for them will remind us of how hungry we are for God.   That whole “what are you going to give up for Lent” thing in my humble opinion is bogus.  If I were Jesus hung on a cross for four to six hours to die after being beaten all night mercilessly by Roman soldiers who are arguably history’s best at doing that sort of thing so that humanity can be free of sin and death and be a new humanity living in my image, I would be a bit insulted if the best my people can come up with is fasting from chocolate.  But, Jesus is not me and you can take what I just said with a grain of salt.  

Jesus is not being tempted here in the way we think of temptation.  He’s not lusting to partake of something he’s grown habitually dependent on such as coffee, TV, and deserts.  The Greek word is better translated as tested.  The devil is testing him as to the nature of his person.  If he is the Son of God, how will he use his authority and abilities as such?  Will he use them to serve himself or will he stay obedient to his Father? 

Well, that was misinterpretation number one.  This passage isn’t about how to deal with temptation when it comes to things that we lust after.  It is about staying true to our born again nature as children of the living God.  The second way we go about misinterpreting this passage is presuming we can put ourselves in the place of Jesus.  Usually when we study this passage our tendency is to put “me”, the individual, in the place of Jesus and try to say how “I” am tested in the same way that he was. 

This has been my favourite way to deal incorrectly with this passage over the years.  In the past I’ve preached on how we each are tempted to turn rocks into bread meaning we take the talents that God has given us and use them to serve ourselves rather than serve God.  I’ve preached on how we use our personal power to get our own way and build our own little empires rather than to serve one another.  I’ve preached on putting God to the test rather than accepting our lot in faith.  But those “temptations” are not what this passage is about.  The tests that Jesus faces here are specifically aimed at him the Son of God become human and whether or not he will succumb to acting like a fallen human or will he be faithful.

Strangely, this passage is probably the only passage in the Gospels in which we put ourselves in the place of Jesus.  When we read the stories in the Gospels we naturally will try to say what do I have in common with whichever of the characters in the story.  Usually, we find ourselves being like the disciples or the Pharisees or the paralytic on the mat or the guy who has to bury his father before coming to follow.  But we never put ourselves in the place of Jesus.  That really is like putting ourselves in the place of God.  We have to look beyond the unholy Trinity of “me, myself, and I” here.  It is inappropriate for us as individuals to put ourselves in the place of Jesus in this passage and reduce its meaning to simply Jesus giving “me” good advice on how to deal with “my” temptations.  

What we can do here is put the Church in the place of Jesus.  I am not Jesus.  You are not Jesus.  We, us together, are the body of Christ.  The Church is his body and he is our head.  We are bond to him by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Us, this fellowship of believers in Jesus bonded together in the Holy Spirit, (indeed us Christians – the Church universal in all times and places) we are the body of Christ and we, the body of Christ as fellowships of believers all over the world face the same three tests that Jesus faced here by the wiles of the devil.  So what does this passage look like when we place us as the body of Christ in the place of Jesus?

The first test sounds like this, “If you are the beloved children of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”  We the church in North America are in the wilderness and very hungry these days.  The Church as we have known it has lost its authoritative place in our communities.  The local congregation is wasting away into obscurity.  Our temptation is to taking the route of institutional survival over and above being the body Christ, being a fellowship of believers that lives by loving God, one another, and our neighbours sacrificially and unconditionally expecting nothing in return.  The church does not live by buildings and programs and doing whatever we can to keep them going.  It lives by the Word of God, Jesus, who gave us one commandment – to love one another as he has loved us, sacrificially and unconditionally.

The second test has to do with how the church tries to rule the world.  The history of Christianity in the Western world is the story of an institution readily corrupted by the power of empire.  Paul tells us that we reign with Christ (2 Tim. 2:11-12), but the type of reign that he is talking about is not establishing Christian governments and ruling the world according to a Christian interpretation of the Bible.  That’s what ISIS does with Islam.  Whenever the church tries to take political power as it has done for the last 1,700 years in the West, we fail this test.  In the U.S. we see this readily right now as they are shaping up for a Presidential election.  Donald Trump plays the card of being a good Presbyterian to increase his voter base.  Hillary Clinton plays the “I’m a devote Methodist” card.  Bernie Sanders probably won’t get elected because he’s a Jew.

The type of reign that we share in with Jesus the Christ, the Lord of all Creation, is exhibited and exercised by how we love one another.  How different would our communities be if local churches simply got down to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, looking to the needs of the elderly and children and stopped trying to ensure its waning institutional place.  What if we simply got down to just loving people sacrificially and unconditionally rather than trying to figure out how we are going to get people to come to our Sunday worship club to do the things we have grown tired of doing or are otherwise too busy with other stuff to do.  Just saying.

Moving on to test number three.  The devil is trying to get Jesus to prove who he is as the Son of God by going to the highest part of the temple in Jerusalem and jumping off knowing that he’s not going to go splat on the ground because according to Scripture the angels will catch him. If Jesus were to do something like this in Jerusalem at the Temple, the heart of faith at his time, he would prove to the religious authorities beyond a doubt that he is the Son of God.  They would set him up as the Messiah and welcome in their version of the Kingdom of God.  In turn, Jesus wouldn’t have to go to the cross.

For us, this is the temptation for Christian communities to do things that are ridiculously congregationally self-aggrandizing, indeed spiritually suicidal, to try to prove that we are the true people of God.  We do this by trying to establish the church by spiritual coercion rather than by going about the quiet, humble, and yet loudly prophetic task of loving sacrificially and unconditionally expecting nothing in return.

Well in closing, as the children of God, the body of Christ, we – indeed this Christian fellowship, this congregation – we participate always in all times and all places in the ongoing work of worship and reigning that Jesus does.  That is a given.  Since that is the case our task, our purpose as a congregation is exclusively to simply be a communion of people who love God, who love our neighbour, and who love each other sacrificially and unconditionally and to do so openly in word and in deed without reserve expecting nothing in return.  To focus on anything else truly is succumbing to the devil’s testing.  Amen.

Entering the Cloud of Jesus' Praying

Luke 9:28-36

Atop the Blue Ridge Mountains not far from where I grew up in Waynesboro, Virginia there is a tourist attraction known as Humpback Rocks.  It is a rather large outcropping of rocks that gives you a spectacular view of the Shenandoah Valley.  The climb to get to them is one of the steepest and most strenuous one mile’s you will come across, but it’s worth it.  If you get out on the edge you get that “King of the World” sensation.  Unfortunately, since my 20’s I have found being out on the edge just a little too terrifying.  If you fall off, it’s about a fifty or more foot drop just to get into the tree tops.  It’s a place you need to be careful, but the view is worth it.  It’s good.

I’ve been up on Humpback a couple of times on rainy-ish days when the clouds are blowing by.  It is quite a different experience to watch a cloud coming at you, billowing its way along the ridges, engulfing everything along the way and then…it engulfs you.  I have been up there when visibility was about ten to fifteen feet.  If you’re not familiar with the rocks your inclination is to sit right down and wait this one out.  It is not “good”.  It’s terrifying.  I think of Humpback when I read this story of the Transfiguration.  Peter, James, and John go up on a mountain with Jesus to pray and it’s good but then they find themselves engulfed in a cloud and terrified simply because they have found themselves in the presence of God.  What shall we say about that?

Well to start, what we have here in this story of the Transfiguration is one of those rare moments in the Gospels when God fully reveals himself as Trinity.  There’s Jesus the Son and the voice of God the Father and the Holy Spirit who shows up here as a very foreboding cloud.  This same sort of thing happened at Jesus’ baptism when he began his ministry and now it happens again this time as Jesus is beginning his journey to the cross.

Now to get a little theologically heavy on you, many theologians like to talk about the Trinity as being the eternal relationship in love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and, as Trinity is this eternal relationship in love, there is always communication happening.  In essence this is prayer.  The book of Hebrews says that Jesus is ever standing before the Father in the Spirit praying and more specifically interceding on our behalf.  Jesus is always praying for us.  So what does a Triune God in all eternity do in his very self?  Well, he sits there and talks in himself…he prays.  God in his very self as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is praying.

So, the first thing we have to say about prayer is that it is this eternal communication that goes on between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.  The next thing we say about prayer is that when we pray, the Holy Spirit due to his abiding in us, his bonding us to Jesus the Son, brings us as God’s beloved children into that eternal praying of the Son to the Father and the Father’s answering his beloved Son.  Our praying is participating in the praying that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does within himself.

I bet you never thought of prayer that way.  We are inclined to think of prayer as our talking at God from a vast distance and God hearing and maybe from a distance answering at us.  But the truth is prayer is our participating in the talking that goes on within the Trinity in such a way that by the work of the Holy Spirit our prayers become Jesus’ prayers and his ours.  When we pray “our Father, who art in heaven” that “we” is us in Jesus and Jesus in us.

Now, your theological moment out of the way, let me use that basic thought about prayer – that prayer is our participation in Jesus’ own praying – let me use that to set the stage for what is going on here in Luke because what we have here is a moment when certain of the disciples enter into the “cloud” of Jesus’ praying.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell this story of the Transfiguration, but Luke tells it from a different perspective.  He is the only one to put the Transfiguration into the context of prayer.  It happens while Jesus is praying and his disciples are attempting to pray with him.  

So, we have Jesus heading up the mountain to pray.  Peter, James, and John are with him and as he begins to pray of course they begin to fall asleep.  Prayer would not be prayer if we didn’t fall asleep.  Do I hear an amen?  But Luke says they manage to stay awake.   Then suddenly, they find themselves engulfed in the “goodness” of a bright light and Jesus’ face is changed and his clothes become dazzling white.  Jesus, glorified, unveiled before them in his relationship with the Father in the Spirit. 

Then, they see two more people with Jesus, Moses and Elijah who themselves are no strangers to talking with God on the mountaintop.  On Mt. Sinai, Moses heard the voice of the LORD and received the Commandments.  He was also the great mediator.  Up on the mountain he talked the LORD out of destroying the Israelites for their idolatry in the Golden Calf incident and convinced God not to abandon his people but to continue on with them, and not just from afar but present with them dwelling in their midst in the tabernacle, and leading them as a whirlwind by day and a pillar of fire by night.  Moses intercedes for God’s people, so does Jesus for us his beloved sisters and brothers.

Elijah also had a Mt. Sinai experience. On Mt. Sinai he, the greatest of the prophets excepting John the Baptist, heard the “still small voice of the Lord” while hiding there in a cave.  Elijah was on the run, afraid for his life for he had slaughtered the prophets of Baal and offended the very wicked King Ahab.  Elijah thought he was the only faithful person left in Israel, but by that still small voice God assured him he was not the only one and told him to go back to Israel for there were 7,000 still faithful waiting for him.  On the way he was to anoint a couple of yet to be kings who would prove to be the downfall of Ahab and to find Elisha who would be his successor.  Elijah had served the LORD faithfully and he would not die.  As we know, he was taken into heaven in a fiery chariot.  Likewise, Jesus was the only truly faithful one and he would die a death akin to the one that Ahab threatened Elijah with and yet be raised and ascend into heaven.  In a way, Elijah’s presence here is the still small voice of assurance from the Father to Jesus that though the cross lay ahead he will live.

Peter, James, and John find this experience of praying with Jesus to be good.  Peter’s remarks about its goodness reminds me of the Creation story and God saying at the end of each day of Creation “good”.  There is something “Creation-y” in the order of New Creation going on here in this experience of being with Jesus in his praying. 

Well, the moment is good and they want it to go on forever but reality sets in, if I might say it that way.  We could say that Peter, James, and John were suddenly awakened from a dream-like state and confronted with God in his very self.  They are having their very own Mt. Sinai experience.  The cloud of the Holy Spirit overshadows them. Things become darkened as they enter into the cloud.  Their feelings of “good” turn to outright terror.  “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of death.”  Then, God the Father speaks to them just as he spoke to Moses and to Elijah.  “This is my Son, my Chosen One.  Listen to him.”  And its over…and there’s silence.  It’s time to go to Jerusalem.  They kept this one to themselves.

We have to keep in balance the goodness of being with Jesus in his praying with the daunting task of actually listening to him and doing what he says.  In the cloud of Jesus praying is where we discover that God is with us and experience the “good-ness” of his living presence, the Holy Spirit, present with us.  In the cloud of Jesus praying is where we discover Jesus is praying for us, that he is praying for things to work together for the good for us.  It is in the cloud of Jesus praying that we meet Moses, so to speak, where we are awakened to our idolatry and discover “forgiveness”.  It is in the cloud of Jesus praying that we, like Elijah, hear the still small voice of assurance, that God knows our faithfulness and has a plan for us.  This is especially “good” when we feel alone and even abandoned in our faithfulness.  In the cloud of Jesus praying is where we find the strength and direction to go on with Jesus ministry, his mission for us.

Being with Jesus in his praying is very good but…we still have to listen to him and do what he says.  Jesus tells us we have to deny ourselves and pick up our crosses and follow him.  He tells us we have to love and pray for our enemies.  He tells us we have to forgive rather than hold grudges.  He tells us we have to love one another as he has loved us…unselfishly, without condition…to name a few.  These are difficult things to do and not only to do but to have become who we are at the very root of who we are.  Impossible tasks if we were simply left to them, but here’s your word of grace for the day.  I gave you your word of theology to begin with.  Here’s your grace.  As prayer is our participation in the Trinity’s life of prayer, the more time we spend in prayer the more his nature just naturally rubs off on us and we become more able to listen to Jesus and do what he says.  Prayer, my friends, is crucial.  Let us not neglect it.  Amen.