The Wesley Foundation at UVA

Worship tonight @ 6pm.

Join us for worship each Sunday night in the dining room at the Wesley Foundation. Dress is casual and friends are welcome.

This is a student-led service, with musical worship team and weekly Communion. Come listen for God’s Word and your call.

Come as you are…leave a bit more.

“Making Loincloths for Ourselves”

Genesis 2:15-17; 3: 1-7

We’ve been full of revelation recently.  A month ago we moved from Christmas into the feast of Epiphany, when Christ is revealed to the Magi.  The Christmas intimacy of Jesus’ birth refocuses to include Gentiles, as the Magi arrive and the story enlarges.  Our eyes adjust to the ongoing revelation.

Last Sunday, the fourth and final Sunday after Epiphany, was Transfiguration Sunday.  We went to the top of that mountain with Peter, James, and John and stood amazed as Jesus was transformed into someone almost unrecognizable in his glory.  Once again we squinted, along with the disciples, trying to make out just what God was doing.  What is it we will see the next time the light changes?

Revelation is a strange sort of experience.  An unveiling.  Often, something which has appeared quite normal, something we never questioned at all, is unveiled to reveal another layer, another perspective, another motive or purpose, a deeper beauty or truth.  When God is involved, you never know what you are going to get.  You mean you were in there all along?  Why are you showing up like that right now?  This is the season – the season of revelation – that we’ve lingered in until this week, the first week of Lent.

When Bishop Will Willimon was here for our McDonald Lecture last year he spoke about revelation in a way that I had never conceived of it.  Fitting, huh?  He talked about learning as revelation.  What else is learning but an unveiling?  You read and ponder and write essays and solve for “x” and reflect on the lecture and in time you are given to understand something you didn’t see before.  Revelation!

I love this way of thinking about the academic pursuit.  But, see, I give myself away here by calling it the academic “pursuit.”  I may love Willimon’s novel description and recognize the truth in it, but a big part of me is stuck back where I was before I heard him say that.  This is how we are raised in this country.  Sure, you may have some natural gifts of intelligence and perseverance which make school a good fit for you.  But really it’s because you work hard, right?  Revelation?!  Come on, I earned that grade.  I busted my butt studying for that exam.  No one handed it to me!

Maybe you have a similar gut reaction?

I think it’s an interesting one, as if the only choices are between full out, hi-def, surround sound, God-given revelation or do-it-ourselves Protestant wok ethic pride.  Either God gives it or we make it ourselves.

Does that seem right?

Last week Elizabeth said in her sermon that a lot of the time we come to church looking for just enough of God’s help to make it through the week, but not enough to have our lives turned upside down.

This goes beyond academics.  We want to be in charge!  In recent years I’ve heard several biblical scholars describe various stories – Job, Jonah, Adam & Eve – as all boiling down to this central point:  I’m God and you’re not.

Apparently there is a steep learning curve on this lesson.  Our people have been working on this one a long time, beginning with our story from Genesis today.

God puts the man and the woman in the Garden, telling them to “till and keep it,” offering them abundant food from every tree in the Garden except one.  Avoid that one and we’re OK, God says (Genesis 2:15-17).

But along comes one of God’s other “good” creatures (Genesis 1:25) who puts a new idea in their heads.  What if God’s not really providing for you but keeping the best from you?  Doesn’t that one lone untouched tree over there look tasty?  What if God just wants to keep you from being like God (Gen. 3: 6)?

Well what if God is trying to do just that?

Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, says it this way, “The destiny of the human creature is to live in God’s world, not a world of his or her own making” (Interpretation: Genesis, p. 40).  Here’s Elizabeth’s comment again, about wanting only enough of God to help us do what it is we want to do in the first place, ourselves.  We want to come along like thieves and snatch the low-hanging fruit.  We want the food without the tilling.  We want the food that we want, not the feast we are offered.

And we end up suddenly naked.  Vulnerable.  Ashamed.  Not sure how we got here.  Something unexpected has been revealed – and it is not a beautiful sight.  It is a clear vision of our grasping after what we were not offered.  There it is in plain sight.  It is painful and humbling.  And we have got to cover this unbearable exposed nakedness! 

It’s interesting to me that Adam and Eve don’t run straight to God when their eyes are opened.  If nothing else, it is firm testament to what God was saying all along.  Why not throw themselves at God’s mercy?  Why not run to catch up with God taking an evening walk in the breeze and ask for forgiveness?

It’s interesting what they do.  They make loincloths for themselves (Gen. 3:7).  Seeing how completely wrong-headed they were, seeing their own nakedness, catching a whiff of their own vulnerability, they don’t run back to the God who has given them every good blessing they have received in life.  No.  Instead they decide to fix it themselves.  Thinking, for the first time in human history, that two wrongs will make a right, they sew together some fig leaves (Gen. 3:7).  Making bad worse, they try to cover up their mistake, which, of course, only brings loud attention to it.

This is the perfect text for the first Sunday of Lent!  The story from Matthew is good too, with the wilderness and the 40 days (and we’ll tackle that one at the Wesley Foundation tonight), but this oldest of stories seems truly perfect.  How long will it take us to get this life with God right?  How long until we learn to turn back and rely on God when we find ourselves grasping for what’s not ours?  Or when we end up naked, unmasked and deceived?

This is where spiritual practice comes in.  And, believe me, it does take practice.

Artists and writers speak about priming the pump.  All those days rising at 5am or staying up until 3am, scribbling away or covering the canvas…All those days, many of them resulting in work that isn’t yet art.  Nothing to sell or even to show to another person.  But the artist trudges up there one more time the next day.  In our production-consumption society those days, those activities, don’t make sense.

But those are the priming the pump days.  The days when the artist submits herself to the practice itself, not knowing where it will lead nor what will emerge from the time.  Those are the days when she agrees to put herself in the way of revelation, in case one of those days is the day when it shows up and art is born.  That’s the crazy way it works.  Most writers will say that their best writing seems to come from somewhere deep within and, at the same time, seems to move through them from some place else.  A revelation.

Spiritual practice can be like this, too.  Sure, there are days when it all coalesces and we are in the groove and the scenery changes to splendor and the choir rocks and we deeply feel the presence of God as we pray and it’s so easy to see Christ in the people around us and we overflow with generosity.

Then there are the other days.  The toaster catches fire while we’re trying to have 5 minutes of morning prayer time and when the smoke clears we still can’t feel God in the room and no one anywhere looks remotely like Christ.

But we are called back to the quiet corner, the walk in the woods, the devotional booklet, the kneeler.  We choose to put ourselves in the way of God, trusting that when we do this often enough our eyes adjust and we can see what it is God reveals.  We choose practice, not because it makes us perfect, but because it’s all we can do.  It is our vocation, how God calls us to participate with God in reconciling all of creation to God.  It’s part of the tilling.

Jan Richardson, a United Methodist elder, writer, and artist, wrote this on her Lenten blog this week:

“These days challenge us to take on a practice, or give one up, so that we can look at our lives in a different way. As Jesus knew, going into the barren and uncomfortable places isn’t about proving how holy we are, or how tough, or how brave. It’s about letting God draw us into the place where we don’t know everything, don’t have to know everything, indeed may be emptied of nearly everything we think we know. And thereby we become free to receive the word, the wisdom, the clarity about who we are and what God is calling us to do” (www.paintedprayerbook.com).

During this season of Lent, don’t be surprised if God is still in the revelation business.  Don’t have your eyes so focused on Easter that you forget to look around. Remember that what you give up or take on is one way in, one path to God – but not God Godself.  Your practice does not need to be perfect.  Take a break from the loincloth-making and let God give you what you need.  Feel startled or uprooted or relieved or at loose ends or eager.  Feel whatever this dependence feels like to you.  Let God speak to you in your vulnerability.  Let God be with you in your anxiety.  Let God show you what you’ve been dying to see.

Thanks be to God!

© Deborah Lewis 2008

Dinner @ 6pm, followed by forum @ 7pm. Check the “Thursday Nights” tab for specific weekly topics.

Bright Lights, Big Ears

Matthew 17: 1-9

What is up with this story?  This is such a strange story that on our church’s website dedicated to worship planning and leadership, here’s what they said this week:  “Friends, this is one of those texts that is next to impossible to preach and feels strange for many even to sing about with a straight face. I mean, what does one say? Jesus got all shiny”  (italics are mine; www.gbod.org/worship).

Jesus takes his inner circle of disciples – Peter, James, and John – high up on a mountain and undergoes a sort of metamorphoses.  Right before their eyes his appearance changes, his face begins to shine like the sun, and his clothes turn a bright, dazzling, impossible white.  As if that weren’t enough, suddenly Moses and Elijah appear and start talking with Jesus.  Never mind that, as my friend Jason points out, this was in the time before photographs:  the disciples recognize the key players immediately.

In fact, Peter recognizes that there is a certain significance to this event and quickly pipes up with an idea for capturing the moment.  Right over top of the conversation Jesus and the prophets are having, Peter says This is a great place to be.  I can make three huts, one for each of you.  Before Jesus or the prophets have a chance to respond, God intervenes.

A brightly-lit cloud overshadows the mountaintop scene and God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Mt. 17: 5).  The disciples fall to ground in fear until Jesus comes and tells them not to be afraid.  They look up at Jesus and suddenly he looks normal again; Moses and Elijah are gone.  Going down the mountain on the way back home, Jesus orders the disciples not to tell anyone about the vision until after he’s been raised from the dead.  What is up with this story?

In the United Methodist church and most denominations following the Revised Common Lectionary, we celebrate Transfiguration Sunday each year on the Sunday before Lent begins.  For Catholics, it’s the second Sunday of Lent.  And for Eastern Orthodox and a few other churches it comes in the middle of that long stretch of ordinary time, on August 6.  But we read it on the last Sunday of a shorter period of ordinary time, after Epiphany and before Lent.  It makes sense to me that we read this story at this point in the liturgical year, since in the gospel it marks the transition from Jesus’ ministry of teaching and healing in Galilee to his ministry of sacrifice in Jerusalem (Handbook of the Christian Year, p. 104).  On Wednesday this week we ourselves begin the journey towards Jerusalem.

Here on the cusp of ordinary time an extraordinary thing happens.

Just as Peter tried to capture the moment with huts, artists throughout the centuries have tried to put on canvas the unexpected majesty described by the disciples.

Art can be a transfiguring experience, reshaping and shifting the expected colors, lines, shadows, textures…until the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary.  The extraordinary has so much more dazzle than the ordinary, that it can be tempting to try to stay there, build a hut and set up a permanent camp.  Novelist Carrie Fisher jokes that she doesn’t want life to imitate art, she wants it to be art (Postcards from the Edge).   I read a claim that the purpose of art is not to delight, dazzle, and then strand us in an alternate world, but to return us to the realm of the ordinary, only with new eyes (“Art, Beauty, and the Transfiguration,” Gregory Wolfe, Godspy.com, 3/03).   I see.

Take a look at these artists’ depictions of the Transfiguration.  Some of these look similar to the mental image I have when I read this story.  Others seem fantastic or grotesque.  Others are what I wished I’d seen in my mind while reading…  What do you see?

We could stay with these images.  These could serve as our huts, our way to make sense of and contain this wild, illuminating story.

But you know better than that.

Listen again.

Through the supernatural light, God’s voice pierces, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”  When we think of the Transfiguration, when we remember this story, it’s all bright lights and radiance.  That’s what the artists have picked up on.  That’s the way we tell it.

But comb through this whole story and what you’ll find is one command.   Only one.  It’s God’s imperative and there is nothing mysterious or dazzling about it.  It would be quite hard to mistake the message, once you see past the shining lights to hear it.

God says, “Listen to him!”  And, in case you haven’t been reading on your own this week, let me tell you that there is an exclamation point at the end of that short sentence:  Listen to him!

How is it that we overlook this?  It’s the one “take away” intended for the disciples, but after two millennia we are still focused on the visual special effects.

It’s not entirely our fault.  This is a weird story.

This story is like coming into your friend’s home on a cold winter day.  You open the door and immediately smell chili in the air.  You walk from the front of the house to the kitchen at the back, unpeeling yourself like an orange along the way.  Hat, gloves, coat, scarf, boots.  You leave a trail of winter gear behind and the smell gets heavier in the air the closer you get to the kitchen.  Before you round the corner, you can smell garlic.  When you enter the kitchen, your friend is at the stove, pulling out a tray of garlic bread.  Steam is rolling out of the pot of chili and your mouth is watering.  You light a candle and help to put the plates on the table.  You pour two glasses full.  Your mouth is watering all the while and you realize you’re hungrier than you thought you were before you got here.  When everything’s ready, the two of you sit at the table.  The prayer is said, you feel your hand moving towards the spoon, as your friend says, “Ok, everything’s ready.  Let’s enjoy looking at the beauty of this meal now.”

That’s what the Transfiguration story is like. Though everything that’s happened since you got to your friend’s has predisposed you to tasting a meal, you find out at the last minute that you won’t get to use that sense.  This will be a visual dinner only.  Huh?

The Transfiguration sets an extravagant, luminous, strikingly visual scene.  And then tells us to listen.

Why would God stage this elaborate dazzling light show and then redirect us to listen rather than watch?

“Listen” carries the same connotation here as it does in the Hebrew Scriptures (NIB p. 364), like Deuteronomy 6:4, which says, “Hear, O Israel:  The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”  This passage is known as the shema, for the Hebrew word that begins the passage, “hear.”  Used like this, “hear” carries with it not just the duty to listen but also to obey.  The shema was instruction and reminder that there is only one God, “the Lord alone,” and that this is the God who must be heard and obeyed.

God chooses this same command at the moment when Jesus looks least like himself.  In case there is any doubt about what’s going on and who is who, God tells the disciples directly to listen to Jesus.  There is still only one God, light from light, true God from true God (Nicene Creed).  But there is a new way for the disciples to see God, there among them in Jesus, and God doesn’t want them to miss it.  It’s like God says, “Now that I’ve got your attention:  listen!”

Here on the cusp of ordinary time an extraordinary thing happens.

Look at how what you thought was ordinary never was.  Look at how extraordinary it is.  Look at how it is part of God.  And now listen.

The purpose of art – and of religious experience – is not to strand us in an alternate world, but to return us to the realm of the ordinary, only with new eyes – and receptive ears.

Knowing what you know, having seen what you’ve seen, how will you listen for God this Lent?  These next 40 days have another glorious and unlikely vision of God awaiting us at the end – but we’re not there just yet.  The radiant image on the mountain is just fading and we’ve yet to start out this Wednesday with ashes marking our foreheads.

How will we listen for God on this journey?  Where is God asking you to obey?

Thanks be to God!

© Deborah Lewis 2008

Worship tonight @ 6pm.

Join us for worship each Sunday night in the dining room at the Wesley Foundation. Dress is casual and friends are welcome.

This is a student-led service, with musical worship team and weekly Communion. Come listen for God’s Word and your call.

Come as you are…leave a bit more.