3/3/2019 0 Comments Because You Asked Me ToA Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday
preached on March 3, 2019 at the First Church in Sterling, MA by Rev. Robin Bartlett Patti Griffin wrote the song, "Up to the Mountain" for Dr. Martin Luther King, based on the prescient "Mountaintop speech” he gave right before he died, recalling the words of the prophet Moses. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” King told an overflowing crowd in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3rd, 1968, where the city’s sanitation workers were striking. “But it really doesn’t matter to me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Make no mistake about this: Dr. King was not the vaunted hero he is now. Listening to him meant asking for trouble. Listening to Dr. King meant crossing boundaries. Following him was dangerous. He was, in fact, one of the most hated men in America the year that he died, with a 75% disapproval rating in polls. Less than 24 hours after giving the mountaintop speech, Dr. King was assassinated. When I’m tired and despairing about the world as it is, I play this song. I imagine singing it to Dr. King. I imagine Dr. King singing it to Moses. I imagine Jesus singing it to God: the Father he called “Daddy.” “Sometimes I just lay down, no more can I do. But then I go on again, because you asked me to.” Here’s what we know from the biblical prophets, from Dr. King, from Jesus: We will get to the Promised Land. It may not be in our lifetimes. But we keep going on again, because God asks us to. There’s a reason God is often speaking to people on the tops of mountains. Sometimes like the disciples, we need to be up high to see. We need a revelatory experience to appreciate who God is. We need to see a vision of the Realm of God; the Kingdom of Heaven; the promised land. (What does that look like? Help me preach this sermon). Once we get a glimpse of all that, we need to come back down and create it here, right where we are. In our Transfiguration scripture from Luke, Jesus asked three of his friends, Peter, James and John to follow him up to the top of a mountain to pray. As he was praying, a grand supernatural event occurs, and Jesus’ appearance changes. He is bathed in a warm, white light, and he is transfigured before them. Suddenly, Elijah and Moses appear in the clouds. And God’s voice booms out “This is my Son, the Chosen. Listen to him.” Peter, James and John had been about to fall asleep, but luckily they stayed awake for this moment. They are appropriately amazed. “Listen to him?” They think. “I can do that.” “It is good to be here,” they say to Jesus. “We like hanging out with you like this, chillin’ with Moses and Elijah and God,” they say. They say, “let us make three places for each of you to live, and we’ll just hang here forever, listening to you.” I’m sure it was good to be there—far above the hot mess down below. Up there, Peter, James and John could just worship their Lord. They could listen to his stories, sing some Christian rock, put up their Jesus hands and sway: “my God is an awesome God”….feeling blissful and above it all FOREVER. Unfortunately, Jesus made them leave. It turns out that “listening to him” didn’t mean gathering up his words like golden nuggets and using them later out of context as a weapon against other people. Listening to him didn’t mean worshipping him on a mountaintop and shutting out the world. Listening to him meant following him down the mountain the next day. Listening to him meant listening to the fathers who are begging, “heal my son.” Listening to Jesus meant casting out the demons that threaten to swallow up a faithless and perverse generation. Make no mistake about this: Jesus was not the vaunted hero he is now. Listening to Jesus meant asking for trouble. Listening to Jesus meant following: crossing boundaries to heal. Following Jesus was dangerous. He was one of the most hated men in Jerusalem just a few weeks after his transfiguration with a near 100% disapproval rating, and he was assassinated. Like the disciples, we wish it were less dangerous to listen to Jesus. It is easier to stay up on our mountains. It is nicer in our safe church buildings with our gilded crosses and our organs and our polite New England manners. Here, we can listen quietly to Jesus’ sweet words once a week before returning to our lives of relative comfort and prosperity. We need to ask ourselves what we are willing to risk to follow Jesus down the mountain. We need to ask ourselves what demons we need to cast out of our own faithless culture. We need to ask ourselves what boundaries we are willing to cross to be the people God has called us to be. And we need to ask ourselves who needs our healing. This year all through Lent we’ll be considering the book, “If the Church Were Christian” by Philip Gulley. He puts it this way: The church has been too deeply concerned about its own power and wealth. It has insisted upon a level of respect it has not earned, and it has been silent at critical junctures of history. It has far too often aligned itself with the powerful and the immoral, and in the process has neglected its responsibility for the outcast. Gulley says, if the church were Christian, it would welcome the other unconditionally. If the church were Christian, it would lose its fascination with law and doctrines, it would befriend the poor and marginalized, it would welcome the rejected. If the church were Christian, Gulley says, Jesus would be a model for living rather than an object of worship. If there is one thing I want you to take away from my sermon today, it is this: THE CHURCH IS NOT GOD. It’s been a tough month in the life of the Christian Church. The Catholic Church had its first ever summit on child sexual abuse by priests, gathered by the Pope. The church leadership listened to survivors tell their stories. Five anonymous abuse survivors addressed the gathering via a video. A survivor from Chile said the church's leaders had discredited victims and protected the priests who abused them. "You are the physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed, in some cases, into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith," he said. In the Catholic Church, priests are considered to be Christ’s representatives on earth. That’s the theology of priesthood. Imagine the catastrophic spiritual devastation it causes when one’s Priest becomes one’s abuser, and the leadership believes him and not you. God seems no longer accessible to you. It seems that Christ himself has become your abuser. This was an effective summit; a first step on the path to healing, perhaps. Philippine Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle choked up when he told the gathering that "wounds have been inflicted by us, the bishops, on the victims. ... We need to help them to express their deep hurts and to help heal from them," he said, adding that perpetrators need to face justice. I want you to hear this again: The Church is not God. You were fearfully and wonderfully made by a loving God. What harms your body harms God’s body. There are many who want to blame this disgusting abuse of power on the Catholic Church as if abuse of power is unique to the Catholic Church. We found out two weeks ago that since 1998, about 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, according to a sweeping investigation by two Texas newspapers that came out last month. The Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News also found that in the past 20 years, more than 700 victims have been abused, with some urged to have abortions and forgive their abusers. As your pastor, I have heard countless stories about the ways in which the Christian churches you grew up in or attended in the past have failed you and victimized you. Abuse of power happens anywhere power can corrupt, which is any institution human beings are involved in. So I want you to hear this again: The Church is not God. You were fearfully and wonderfully made by a loving God. What harms your body harms God’s body. What harms your body harms the Body of Christ. In a contentious meeting years in the making this week, the United Methodist Church—the United States’s third-largest faith community—voted to emphasize its opposition to same-sex marriage and gay clergy. The vote was deeply split, and will probably result in a split of the denomination. Many American ministers in the United Methodist Church already perform same-sex marriages and approve of the ordination of LGBT people as clergy, although the church’s rules officially forbid these marriages and ordinations. Many Methodists hoped that the church would amend those rules this week. Instead, a group of more than 800 clergy and lay leaders from around the world voted to affirm the church’s traditional view of sexuality — and to punish disobedient clergy more harshly than before. I want us to imagine what it might be like to wait your whole lifetime for your church or your denomination to debate your worthiness before granting you full fellowship in the Body of Christ. I want us to imagine what spiritual damage that might inflict upon actual, in the flesh, God-imaged people already endowed with sacred worth by our Creator. It is literally killing people. The Reconciling ministries of the UMC had to send out suicide hotline numbers after the vote at the General Conference this week to its thousands of LGBTQ constituents and clergy who have been waiting for a lifetime for their full inclusion in the denomination that raised them up. If one has to send out suicide hotline numbers following a vote of a Christian organization, one can surmise that the action taken may not have been Godly. I want us to be careful about tooting our own horn in this moment as an open and affirming Christian church. Because far too often we like to notice the speck in our neighbor’s eye without removing the log from our own. I want us to be proud of the work we’ve done to expand our welcome, yes. I want us to lift ourselves up as a healing sanctuary for the folks the Christian church has cast out, yes. I want us to be a public voice for the Christian Church to become more like Jesus, yes, yes, yes. But at the same time I want us to be able to say, “we’re sorry it took us so long. We will do what we can to reconcile with the God-imaged people we have harmed with our silence and complacency." And then, most importantly, we need to say: “We will be silent no more.” That’s what it might look like to take a step toward healing, I think. ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. The Church is not God. What harms your body harms the body of Christ. God is Love. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love. It cannot be killed or swept away. So beloved, join us this Lent to take a step toward healing. Join us to repent for the ways in which the Church has fallen short of the glory of God. Join us this Lent to HEAL the body of Christ, beginning with ourselves. Come down off your mountains! Walk toward trouble, take the highway to the Jesus danger zone, listen to the parents weeping for their children and do something about it. Join us this Lent to bravely follow the most hated man in Jerusalem. Join the Love REVOLUTION! Do not be afraid. Some days I look down Afraid I will fall And though the sun shines I see nothing at all Then I hear your sweet voice, oh Oh, come and then go, come and then go Telling me softly You love me so The peaceful valley Just over the mountain The peaceful valley Few come to know I may never get there Ever in this lifetime But sooner or later It's there I will go Sooner or later It's there I will go Amen.
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AuthorRev. Robin Bartlett is the Senior Pastor at the First Church in Sterling, Massachusetts. www.fcsterling.org Archives
February 2021
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