Fr. Alan Heatherington, Grace Anglican Fellowship homily, March 26, 2017
John 9:1-41

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer, Amen

Today we have another long story from John’s Gospel (Ch. 9). It’s not merely an allegory or an object lesson. It’s a real account of the miraculous healing power of the Son of God, something John calls a “sign” because it points beyond itself to the Person of Jesus. It’s a witness to His deity and to His fulfillment of prophecy.
There’s something compelling that’s buried in the story line, and we might miss it. The parents of this man born blind, when put on the line to testify about their son, refuse to be lights bearing witness to the Light of Christ. Why? Because they fear losing their place in the temple, being “put out,” the Jewish equivalent of excommunication. They fear rejection and exclusion from their worship and their entire society.

What does the blind man himself do? He not only bears witness to the Light, he directly challenges his questioners, facetiously asking whether they, too, wish to become disciples of Jesus, and testifying that “If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.” And what’s the consequence of his witness? He immediately is put out, excommunicated. Perhaps there’s a double meaning, as the Pharisees, by putting him out of the temple, may also be attempting to put out the light of his persistent witness to Jesus. He embraced rejection in order to testify of what Jesus had done for him.

Then what happened? Jesus sought him out, revealed Himself to him, and led him to his declaration of faith: “Lord, I believe.” And John tells us that “he worshiped Him.” If this were a made-up story John might have thrown in at least a few of the Pharisees saying, “We, too, believe in Jesus and want to be His followers.” But John faithfully records only their sarcastic rejoinder to Jesus, “Are we blind, too?” Why did they hold on to their blindness against the powerful witness of this sign, the testimony of the man and their face-to-face encounter with Jesus? We have Paul’s answer in II Corinthians: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (4:4).

The tragic answer to the Pharisees is, “Yes, you, too, are indeed blind.” Both the physical and spiritual blindness of the man born blind were cured when he encountered Jesus, and he moved quickly from declaring Jesus to be a prophet to accepting him as the Son of Man and saying, “Lord, I believe.” But the parting words of Jesus to the Pharisees are, “since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

Should they have known better? What did Jesus think? Just a few chapters earlier in John’s Gospel we find Jesus saying, “if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me” (John 5:47). And Luke tells us about two post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, first to two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus when, “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). Then, later in the same chapter, Luke tells about another time that the risen Jesus is meeting with all of His disciples and He says, “All things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). Jesus expected His hearers to connect the dots.

I gladly would have skipped seminary altogether to be in on either of those sessions with Jesus when he took His disciples through the Scriptures. But then again, we have all the Scriptures at our instant disposal and, reading them with the eye of faith, we can find them to be replete with prophetic references to Jesus. If we need any help, hundreds of books have been written on the subject from the earliest Church Fathers to the present. And we also have the illuminating witness of the Holy Spirit.

In the context of today’s Gospel we cannot help but think of the witness of Isaiah (35:4b-6a): “Your God will... come and save you. Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.” Every bit of this and much more was fulfilled in the ministry of Jesus, the One Who, “coming into the world, enlightens every man” (John 1:9), the One Whose light we’re commissioned to share wherever we go.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us, “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14). In today’s reading in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the Light of the World” (John 9:5). And Paul, in our reading from Ephesians, provides the perfect synthesis of the two: “You are light in the Lord” (5:8). There’s something wonderfully reassuring about this, because being the light of the world on our own would be a tall order and, for many, an unwelcome responsibility. What shrinking violet would welcome being the light of the world? But we see that Jesus’ appellation does not require some personality trait we may not possess. What He really is saying is that our light is His light, and this gives a very different spin. We can say that we‘re the moon to Jesus’ sun, though it may be much more than that. The moon provides only reflected light, whereas we are to allow the Light of Christ to shine through us in a manner that draws others to Him.

When it’s no longer our light but His that we let shine, then we can put into practice the commandment of Jesus, “Let your light so shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father Who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Light is meant to characterize us: we are to be known as “children of light,” as Paul identifies us in Ephesians (5:8). But, again, it’s not about us: it’s all about Jesus Christ and His light. Paul also wrote, “For God, Who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves” (II Cor. 4:6, 7).

Where does this leave us? For starters, it leaves us in a place of profound humility, recognizing that we who were children of darkness have been brought into His inexpressible light, and not by any merit that’s inherently our own. “The surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves.” Then, importantly, it brings us to a place where we acknowledge that our witness to that light in a world that remains in darkness is not optional. It’s to be part of our identity that’s now complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10). We no longer live to ourselves (II Corinthians 5:15), but to Him Who has re-made us in His very own image (Romans 8:29, II Corinthians 3:18). Jesus said, “Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light” (John 12:36). We are to be His witnesses in every part of the world, but especially in those parts that we ourselves inhabit each and every day.

How are we doing with that? What happens when our witness to Christ is not received well by others as true light? Should we be surprised at all? Does it mean that we’re failures when it comes to being the light of the world? No, quite the contrary, we should say, “It’s just as both Jesus and Paul told us it would be, predicated on their own experiences.” As we saw before, Paul wrote, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (II Corinthians 4:4).

Does it sound as though we should consider throwing in the towel? No, because we are no longer our own. We’ve been bought with a price, the price of Jesus’ broken Body and shed Blood, so that we might be His servants (I Corinthians 6:19, 20), His lights, and thereby fulfill not His request but His final marching orders to be His “witnesses both” at home and nearby, “and even to the remotest part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Those were His final words to His disciples before His ascension. He did not offer “giving up” as a Plan B, nor did He suggest the option of just keeping quiet. Rather, He said, “You shall be witnesses of Me.” “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid” (Matthew 5:14).

What are the things that prevent us from being light to our world?

One certainly is letting ourselves get in the way, thereby obscuring the light that is meant to be His and not ours.

Another is our lacking the faith to believe that we actually could be instruments of God’s peace and love in our spheres of influence.

Another is our lack of conviction that the light we have is indeed the Light of the World, the true Light, the only Light that, through our instrumentality, enlightens every person coming into the world.
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Another is the tragic fact that too few of us really believe that those who dwell in darkness without the Light are doomed to live eternally without it.

When we withhold the witness we’re called to provide, we thwart the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that “The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; those who live in a dark land, on them will the light shine” (9:2). We have a story to tell. We have many stories to tell. All of us have our own stories to tell. But the greatest story of all is the one most succinctly summarized by Paul in II Corinthians 5:19: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” That’s how God chose to effect His salvation.

If each one of us would shout out only that briefest of testimonies, then the Light of Christ Who is the Light of the World would shine in His brightness and dispel at least some of the darkness of this world. Jesus said, “Walk while you have the Light, so that darkness will not overtake you” (John 12:35). And John said of Jesus, “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot extinguish it” (John 1:5). That Light still shines through us into a dark world that never has needed it more. May we not fail to be among those through whom the Light of Christ shines most brightly.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer

I love this account from John’s Gospel. It’s a long story, but there’s no way to break it up for two Sundays. Its tight-knit unity requires that it be heard in one pass. At the same time, it contains enough material for at least 5 sermons: one on Jews and Samaritans (the discrimination sermon), one on Jesus as “living water” (the sacramental sermon), one on the deity of Jesus as He’s able to discern the woman’s personal history (the Christological sermon), one on sowing and reaping (the personal evangelism sermon), and one on accepting Jesus as “the Savior of the world” (the salvation sermon). And while some of you might fear that I will try to preach all 5 sermons this morning, I promise instead to look only at two things that might be left out of all 5 sermons, following the adage that “God is in the details.”

Our passage starts right off with such a detail. We read: “Jesus left Judea and went away again into Galilee. And He had to pass through Samaria.” Actually, He didn’t have to! There were several really good reasons for not passing through Samaria at all. The one most frequently offered is the one stated in our passage: the Jews had no dealings with Samaritans. Some other route would have been friendlier and, in the Jewish mind, “purer.” And such an alternative was ready-at-hand. In fact the alternate route was the only one the Pharisees were willing to take, as they refused to risk contamination through contact with Samaritans. Not only that, but their route, going along the Jordan River valley, while less direct, was far more user-friendly in terms of the terrain. It was flat, fertile, facile and beautiful. It’s true that the way through Samaria was the one more commonly used by Galileans because of its directness. If you were going to walk a hundred miles every time there was a Jewish feast requiring temple attendance, you might prefer the shorter route even if it proved to be somewhat more arduous. Still, going through Samaria required going up and over one high hill after another, or at least going around all of them; and it meant dealing with those unfriendly Samaritans.[i]

So why does John tell us that Jesus had to go through Samaria on a trek that He and other Galileans made all the time? Jesus’ choice had nothing to do with geography or ethnic discrimination; it had to do purely with the compulsion the divine Jesus had, in His own words, “to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.” On this occasion, it meant finding His way to Jacob’s well specifically in order to meet with this Samaritan woman and to change not only her life, but the lives of the “many more (who) believed because of His word.” It was a path required for witnessing, for meeting the specific needs of specific people, and for doing the Father’s will.

When that woman went to the well on that day to draw water, a routine duty that she may have needed to perform every day, she had no idea that she would meet the Savior of the world Who would tell her everything she had ever done and offer her living water to quench her thirst eternally. And when Jesus begins speaking to the woman in spiritual terms about the water that springs up to eternal life and He further reveals His knowledge of her personal history, she responds with a question. We often hear it said that the question was a deliberate change of subject designed to get the focus off her remarkable marital history. But I think her question was quite sincere, as it was a very basic bone of contention between Jews and Samaritans, and she had perceived that Jesus was a prophet who might be qualified to resolve the issue for her.

In any case, His answer stands as one of His more frequently quoted lines, especially in church circles: “God is a spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” The Samaritan woman was puzzled by this statement and, amusingly, responded that Messiah would make these things clear when He comes. Jesus simply said, “I am He.” But what exactly did He mean, and how might we apply it to the actual way that we worship in our 21st-century churches? We could start with the seemingly easier of the two things: worshiping in truth. We certainly would not wish to risk worshiping God in falsehood. But just how is it that truth in worship is to be discovered?

It might be easier to answer the question in a negative way rather than a positive one: when is our worship not in truth? Scripture gives us lots of clues in that regard. Trying to make worship syncretistic, that is, trying to blend what we do as believers with what is done by non-believers is unlikely to qualify as true worship. God through His holy prophets made it abundantly clear in Old Testament times that whenever His chosen people tried to introduce elements from the pagan worship of their neighbors, God found it utterly abhorrent. Read Jeremiah if you want to find a non-stop indictment of this sort of false worship. Yet our world today is absolutely filled with churches that try to do a 21st-century equivalent of that very thing under the guise of making Christianity relevant or contemporary or in alignment with other faiths. This may fill more pews, but it never will gain God’s approval. Who are we worshiping? Are we worshiping the God of all creation Who reveals Himself in His Holy Word and in His only Son, or are we worshiping our cultural adaptations of God, which is roughly equivalent to saying that we’re worshiping ourselves?

Just yesterday I watched a brief exit interview with the founding archbishop of ACNA as he was emerging from a world-wide Anglican gathering in England. He reported with dismay that the meeting had concluded with a Buddhist prayer. And you may have heard about the bishop in Scotland who ended a service with a prayer from the Quran. It’s hard to imagine the same God Who detested the false syncretistic worship of His chosen people Israel being any less dismayed by the same bending of the truth in our worship. He wants us to worship Him in truth.

What about worshiping God in spirit, or, perhaps better, worshiping Him as Spirit? Now we may be wandering into less clearly defined territory where subjective understandings of what this means can send us off in very different directions. Every major branch of Christianity tries to defend its theology and practice as being more authentic and ancient than that of any other branch, truer to the theology and practice of the early Church and more attuned to its spirit. I found it interesting in my study this week that we actually have some fairly complete services of Christian worship from the earliest centuries of the Church, and their Eucharistic Prayer not only contains all the same elements as ours but in many cases the identical words! And that includes churches in the East that were not influenced by Rome. What we do here at this table is not a recent innovation. Abandoning it is a recent innovation with a very short history!
One thing in particular stands out to me whenever I think of worshiping the One who is Spirit by worshiping Him in spirit: we definitely are speaking of Someone the worship of Whom contains a huge element of mystery. If we attempt to reduce worshiping God to maintaining a certain set of propositional truths with an intensely personal mode of expressing our faith, we may have crowded the Spirit right out of our worship, once again making it more about ourselves than about God.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here, as these could sound like fighting words to some of you. I absolutely believe in propositional truth, and, at least figuratively speaking, there are many hills of propositional truth on which I would be willing to die. And I adamantly believe that private, personal worship not only is valuable but that it is in fact indispensable to the very survival of Christianity in this and every generation. You’ve heard me say with some frequency and conviction that I question the faith of Sunday morning Christians who seldom crack open the Bible or speak to God in private prayer from Monday through Saturday. But the question of the Samaritan woman was not about personal private worship. It was about corporate worship in a definite time and place, whether on Mount Gerazim in Samaria or on the temple mount in Jerusalem. And in one sense there’s no ambiguity in Jesus’ answer: “An hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. An hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers” (vs. 23).

Are we among the persons whom God is seeking to be His worshipers? Absolutely! How are we measuring up to worshiping Him in spirit and in truth? Here I think the answer is very personal; and I also think that most of us know in our heart of hearts whether we are measuring up to God’s wishes and expectations. But, as I said before, I also think that the focus both of the Samaritan woman’s question and of Jesus’ answer needs to be applied to corporate worship, not just to private worship. And here, in the context of all that remains mysterious in our faith, we must come together in spirit and in truth not to be entertained, not to be instructed in the finer points of theology, not to be overawed by great architecture and art and music, but to find the means by which our spirits are communing with God’s Spirit. Here we’re not bound by definitions. Nor are we bound by practices. We certainly are not bound by the eloquence of the preacher, nor are we restricted by the preacher’s lack of eloquence. The worst sermon ever preached should not distract us from worshiping God in spirit and in truth, as participants and not as spectators.

One of the things that I treasure in Anglican worship is something that we share with all true Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran worshipers, among others: we believe with all our hearts and minds that God is here. He’s not only representatively here because He’s here through the person or persons up front. He’s not only here because each of us as a Christian carries Him in our hearts. He Himself is truly here because He promises to be here and, unlike us, God always keeps His promises. And He’s here in the Person of His only Son, Whose Real Presence permeates every place where Christ mysteriously presents Himself to us in His very Body and Blood.

Is that something that only happens when certain words are said or certain actions take place at the Eucharist, or is He here from the moment two or three of us enter this space? Yes, He’s here as soon as two or three enter because that promise came from the very lips of Jesus: “There am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). But He also is here because, in the Eucharistic meal that He instituted with His disciples in the Upper Room, He pledged His presence in a sacramental sense that’s beyond our understanding but that decidedly is not beyond our experience. Whenever we open our hearts to Him, He comes afresh, again and again. He comes once to save, but over and over to offer us His sanctifying grace.

There are times when we wish we could have been one of those who had a personal encounter with the incarnate Son of God during His ministry on earth. We would love to have been that woman at the well. Her life was changed forever when she acknowledged Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. But here at this table, when we come together in spirit and in truth and in the company of all believers, past and present, He comes to each one of us. He is here. And that’s precisely what it means to worship Him in spirit and in truth. We cannot begin to explain His presence. We cannot objectify it or prove it. And what a gift it is that we don’t need to prove or objectify it. Yet we can know it to be true.

Why is this important? Why do we need fresh infusions of sanctifying grace? Why do we need renewed encounters with the risen Christ Whose triumph over sin and death makes such spiritual encounters possible? Why isn’t it entirely sufficient that we should receive Him once, affirm His presence in us and go on our way rejoicing? Those are questions we shouldn’t even be asking. What other relationships in our lives would we wish to try to sustain on that once-only or very occasional basis?

No, God is far wiser than we, and He knows our need for fresh infusions and renewed encounters. Every evening during Lent we pray this collect in Evening Prayer:

“Open our eyes to acknowledge Your presence,
that freed from the misery of sin and shame
we may grow into Your likeness from glory to glory.”

Think on that for a moment. First we need to have our eyes opened, because unless we allow God to open them in spirit and in truth, we will not see Jesus. Then and only then, with eyes that are spiritually opened, we can acknowledge the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. Here we acknowledge our freedom “from the misery of sin and shame” because it’s here that we recall His once-for-all sacrifice for our sin. And without seeing Him, how can we possibly expect to grow in His likeness from glory to glory?

It’s a growth that comes through imitation, something that one great 15th century saint, Thomas à Kempis, wrote about in his handbook for the spiritual life, “On the Imitation of Christ.” For Thomas à Kempis, the locus of this imitative walk with Christ was both an interior spiritual experience as well as an encounter through the Eucharist. Similarly, “Saint Augustine viewed the imitation of Christ as the fundamental purpose of Christian life, and as a remedy for our imitation of the sin of Adam. Saint Francis of Assisi believed in the physical as well as the spiritual imitation of Christ.”[ii] But how can we hope to imitate closely someone Whose Real Presence we seldom have experienced?

He is here, not in the same physical sense that He was with the Samaritan woman at the well, but in a sense far higher than human eyes can see. He came to her at the well because He had to pass through Samaria. He comes to each one of us because, by that very same grace and intentionality, He has to come to you and to me, by the will of His Father. And here’s a very important point: did He come to the Samaritan woman because she was special or unusually worthy of His presence? Hardly! Her life had been rather disreputable, and while some of the villagers believed in Jesus as Messiah because of her testimony, John tells us that many more believed when they themselves heard the words of Jesus.

And so, does Jesus come to you because you are special or unusually worthy? The great English preacher Charles Spurgeon famously wrote, “I am sure God chose me before I was born, or He never would have chosen me afterwards.” I find myself reflecting on those words with some regularity because, when it comes to being a special target of God’s grace, I readily identify with such persons as the woman at the well and Charles Spurgeon. Even King David, said to have been “a man after God’s own heart,”[iii] wrote in Psalm 22, “I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people. All they who see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out their lips and shake their heads. Yet You are He Who brought me forth from the womb; You have been my God from my mother’s womb.”

That was David’s testimony, and it’s mine. And so, Sunday after Sunday, I come here as one who is “freed from the misery of sin and shame,” needing my own renewed encounter with the resurrected Christ and a fresh infusion of His grace, that I might grow into His likeness from glory to glory. He is here. He promised. And He bids you to come to Him, again. He wants to mold you into His image. He wants to feed you with the bread of life, His Body, broken for you. He wants to cleanse you from every sin through His Blood, shed for you. He wants you to look on Him with the eyes of faith so that you may imitate Him more perfectly.
Come to His table, believing that He is truly present here, and be refreshed, renewed, and restored in His image. To Him alone be all glory and praise with thanksgiving, in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.


[i] See Luke 9:51-56
[ii] Wikipedia article on “Imitation of Christ”
[iii] I Samuel 13:14, Acts 13:22

Fr. Alan Heatherington, Grace Anglican Fellowship homily on Rebirth, March 12, 2017

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer

It’s not always easy to be a believer in Jesus. In fact, it’s not always easy simply to be an inquirer. Ask Nicodemus. He was both a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, presumably a member of the Sanhedrin, which put him in a position where meeting privately with Jesus definitely was not a good idea. I love this encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus because it’s so completely human. Nicodemus was bright, theologically trained, and held an esteemed leadership position among the Palestinian Jews living under Roman control. There was something about the Person, teaching and signs of Jesus that had caught his attention, and he wanted to learn more. The very fact that he came to Jesus under cover of darkness reveals that he was being cautious. I think this may be the reason that John the Evangelist found this story rivetingly appropriate for inclusion near the beginning of his gospel, where Jesus as the true Light coming into a world of spiritual darkness is a central theme both in his prologue and in chapter 9 where Jesus restores sight to the man born blind.

We hear from Nicodemus two more times in John’s gospel, and he seems gradually to have become more open in his response to Jesus. The next time is an occasion when the chief priests and the Pharisees are questioning the officers, including Nicodemus, as to why they had not seized the opportunity to arrest Jesus while He was preaching in the temple during the Feast of Tabernacles, or Succoth. When the officers collectively respond, “Never did a man speak the way this Man speaks” the Pharisees ask, “You have not also been led astray, have you?” Then Nicodemus speaks up in a way that’s risky if not yet quite committal. He asks, “Does our law judge a man unless it first hears him and knows what he is doing?” The Pharisees respond, “You are not also from Galilee, are you? Search and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee” (John 7:45-52).

The third and last time we find Nicodemus in John’s gospel, it seems clear that he has made up his mind about Jesus. He joins Joseph of Arimathea in preparing the body of the crucified Christ for burial in Joseph’s tomb. John tells us that Joseph had been a closet disciple of Jesus out of fear of the Jews, and he reminds us that this is the same Nicodemus who first had come to Jesus by night (John 19:38-42).

Returning to that nocturnal visit, we find Nicodemus testifying to Jesus that “no one can do the signs that You do unless You have come from God and God is with You” (3:2). Jesus’ response is enigmatic and inscrutable, and we who have heard about being “born again” all our lives need to have a lot of sympathy for Nicodemus who had never heard such a statement from anyone. All that follows in the conversation and in John’s recounting of it is bathed in mystery, which is precisely the point! We only understand any of it by enlightened hindsight, and even then we have to admit that there’s little here that’s self-explanatory. How can anyone be “born again?”  And what does this rebirth entail? Nicodemus asks, “Can a man enter his mother’s womb a second time?” And even though Jesus offers an explanation, He leaves the perplexed Nicodemus asking, “How can these things be?”

Jesus’ answer is that we must be born both of water and of the Spirit in order either to see or to enter the Kingdom of God. What can that possibly mean? And Jesus likens being born of the Spirit to the movement of the wind, something that remained mysterious to any first-century person who did not have the option to watch the Weather Channel. The earth turns and air masses of varying temperatures collide and unstable barometric pressure brews storms and so on. I took earth science both in high school and in college, and I watch Groundhog Day annually, and I still puzzle over wind. It happens that in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, the words for “wind” and “spirit” are one and the same, and Jesus’ play on words might have helped Nicodemus to follow more closely what He was saying. In any case, Jesus leaves off with the wind analogy and moves right on without further explanation. Frankly I find that more comforting than puzzling. But I puzzle much more over being born of both water and the Spirit.

Being born of water may refer to natural human birth, which of course is attended by water. Some have suggested that embedded here is a forward-looking reference to baptism, but that would have been way over Nicodemus’ head (pun intended). It’s also possible that Jesus is rolling together being born of water and the Spirit as being the same thing, something Nicodemus might have understood from both OT and rabbinic writings where water symbolizes the cleansing presence of God’s spirit.

When Jesus speaks in terms of being born again, He defines this as a matter of being born of the Spirit. He actually suggests that Nicodemus as “a teacher of Israel” ought to understand what He means. At this point I would have been squirming if I had been Nicodemus. I said a bit ago that we understand what Jesus means by virtue of our “enlightened hindsight,” but do we really? There’s an element of mystery that accompanies much in the way of spiritual truth. St. John Chrysostom, an early Church Father so highly regarded that he was declared a Doctor of the Eastern Church, wrote extensively and somewhat repetitively against our effort to insert human reason into our acceptance of divine operation and divinely revealed truth. He certainly did not mean to throw in the towel in every area of theological inquiry, and he never did that himself. But he clearly intended that we also should leave plenty of room for mystery.

Accepting the element of mystery in our faith does not mean we’re to shrug our shoulders and offer our personal equivalent of “whatever!” Clearly Jesus thought that what He was saying to Nicodemus was of paramount importance. And so did John the Evangelist, as he works his way to what has become the best-known verse in the entire New Testament. Those who dismiss so fundamental a matter as being born of the Spirit have every right to question whether in fact they ever have been “born again.” And without that step of faith, Jesus suggests that our fate might be like that of the Israelites who, apart from looking up at the serpent raised by Moses in the wilderness, were doomed to perish from the deadly bites of the fiery serpents. For us, looking up to Jesus is our path to gaining eternal life.

Am I leaving you in suspense? I hope so, yet I sincerely hope not. Everyone who presumes to be a follower of Jesus and to have been born again by the Spirit must have some experiential understanding of just what that means. To experience it does not mean that one can write a doctoral dissertation on the subject. That’s precisely the point Jesus is making about the wind. My earth science courses did not qualify me to be a professional meteorologist. And my seminary education did not qualify me to define precisely what it means to be born again, or I would have done that by now.
 
But that’s the single point of my sermon this morning. “You must be born again” is not just the refrain of a gospel hymn; it’s verbatim what Jesus says to Nicodemus in verse 7. And spiritual rebirth of the sort Jesus is demanding is not automatically covered by baptism. It’s a personal faith encounter with Jesus Christ of the sort into which He Himself was leading Nicodemus as an earnestly inquiring ruler of the Jews. The more we try to define it, the less likely we may be to experience it. Without being born again, we cannot hope for eternal life. And spiritual rebirth carries with it a commitment not only to come to Jesus under cover of darkness, but to follow and obey the One Who is the Light of the World and Who challenges us to be the same (Matthew 5:14).

Our Gospel reading stops several verses too soon and easily can leave us with a warm-fuzzy confidence that’s perilously misplaced. In our day, this is where the passage ends for many who profess to be Christians. Their favorite verse is not John 3:16, but John 3:17: “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”  That’s a wonderful sounding slogan of the “I’m okay, you’re okay” variety. It even suggests universalism. But it’s not by any means the end of this passage. Listen carefully to the verses that immediately follow John 3:17:

18 He who believes in Him is not condemned. He who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”

John ends chapter 3 with this summary statement: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him” (3:36). What’s being said here? It’s that something more is required than being baptized and attending church services faithfully. That “something more” requires a conscious stepping into the Light of Christ, looking up to Him on His Cross just as those Israelites who were saved had to look up to the serpent that Moses had raised up. Again, while John 3:16 speaks only of believing in Jesus, John also says it is the one who practices the truth who comes to the Light, and he concludes with the statement that “he who does not obey the Son will not see life” (3:21, 36).

Whatever it means to be born of the Spirit, it means a change of life. It means entering into a life of obedience to the ways of God’s Son. It does not mean simply trying to avoid the most heinous sins or trying to be a generally good person with a clear conscience. It means turning away altogether from the life that issues from only being born of water to the life that issues from spiritual rebirth. It means not only coming to hear God’s word, but also letting one’s life be so changed by it and challenged by it that obedience is the only possible response. It means that when we hear the words, “Be swift to love, make haste to be kind and go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” we should be reaffirming the commitment we have made to the One Who gave His life for us and calls us to obey His voice. It means that we are going forth from this place of worship to practice and proclaim God’s truth as revealed to us in the Person of His Son.

Listen to these words of exhortation from the author of Hebrews:  “Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called ‘Today,’ so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end, while it is said, “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Hebrews 3:12-15a).

Yes, there definitely is such a thing as the hardened, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. And yes, such hearts can be found in our neighborhoods, in our families, and even in our churches. May it be that such a heart will not be found in ourselves. The judgment is not our own, the condemnation is not pronounced by us, but it is clear in the message of God’s word this morning: “he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”

At the same time, God be praised, the gospel message is one of hope and assurance that God stands ever ready at all times and in all places to hear our repentant hearts, to listen to our confession, and to heal all our diseases as we lay our sins on Him. The only thing that’s required of us is that we accept the once-for-all work of Christ on the Cross, and fall on our knees before Him in faith, saying with confidence and with obedient hearts, “Yes, ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.’” 

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night as an inquirer. Jesus, the Light of the World, accepted him just as he was. He spoke to him the words of life and Nicodemus, whether or not he immediately and fully understood everything that Jesus was saying to him, went away as a changed man. Jesus stands ready today to meet each one of you wherever it may be that you find yourselves on your faith journeys. If you’ve been an outsider looking in, now is the time for you to take the step of complete commitment, to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, to follow Him in obedience and to hold fast to your faith, “firm until the end.” We have today. Procrastination is a risky choice. Coming to Jesus is always the right choice. “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.”
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This morning we are going to do something very Lenten if not quite liturgically correct: we will affirm our repentant hearts and our readiness to accept Jesus, by faith, while we sing the familiar hymn, “Just As I Am Without One Plea.” And as you sing it and come to terms once again with its words, I ask you to open your hearts in a way you may never have done before and say to Jesus Christ, “O Lamb of God, I come, I come.” 

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer, Amen

Welcome to the first Sunday in Lent with all of its lectionary readings on original sin and Satan. You will have to trust me that it gets a lot better next week, when we read about God’s blessings, His promises and His salvation, ending with John 3:16. But our entrance into Lent today is not a gentle one. It’s a portrait of where we stand as sinners, why we’re in need of a Savior and, to our great good fortune, what God Himself has done about it. God took the initiative to do something completely amazing.

Our reading in Genesis recounts what we call “the fall of man,” and when we use that phrase, we’re not talking about one man named Adam or about one woman named Eve, but about all of humankind who fell right along with them. And when our human nature leaps to the fore to say, “This cannot possibly be fair,” we’re being phenomenally presumptuous. We’re saying that given identical circumstances we would not have done exactly the same thing.

When we get to the Gospel, we encounter Someone who experienced the temptation of Satan on an even heightened level and managed to withstand it completely. Now our gratitude surges to the fore and we would love to say about Jesus, “That’s exactly what I would have done given identical circumstances.” And once again we’re being phenomenally presumptuous. In both the circumstances of Adam and of Jesus we would like to think we would have done the right thing. And perhaps it’s possible that we would have done a good job once or twice. But in the end, we would have found ourselves siding with Adam while only wishing that we had the spiritual fortitude of Jesus, the Son of God.

Sermons on sin have become somewhat of a rarity in our day. They never were particularly welcome. One always thinks of the great American colonial preacher, Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” has become a classic of American literature. It contains these famous statements: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.”

I hadn’t read this sermon since college, so I brought it up on my computer because I wanted to see how it went on from there. I was anticipating something wonderful about the saving grace of Jesus Christ that rescues us through the propitiation of God’s wrath. Alas, Edwards was not into saying the line we love to say, that “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.” Here’s how he continued: “And it would be a wonder, if some that are now present should not be in hell in a very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if some persons that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house, in health, and quiet and secure, should be there before tomorrow morning!”

No one could preach this way today and have anyone come back the next Sunday!
 
But that’s not the end of Edwards’ sermon. After several more paragraphs castigating unbelievers and threatening them with the certainty of Hell-fire, he says this: “And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to Him, and pressing into the kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south. Many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to Him Who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in His own blood, and they are rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God.”

As with so many things spoken in public discourse, it’s all about context. Edwards was preaching to unbelievers, persons who already had rejected the saving grace of God in Christ Jesus, and whose eternal souls were imperiled. His intention was not to scare his hearers to death, but to scare them to life. His preaching contributed to what we know as “The Great Awakening,” a time of revival in the American colonies that was meant to counterbalance “The Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment, also known as “The Age of Reason,” attempted to substitute a scientific and humanistic world view for a religious one. It was a movement of liberal philosophy that had many people turning away from God altogether.

Does this sound strikingly familiar in our day? One of Edwards’ contemporaries was the Anglican preacher, George Whitefield, whose energetic preaching attracted huge crowds with his call to repentance. He invited his hearers to attend to the message of the revivalists, appealing to them with words such as these: 'Come to hear them, not out of curiosity, but from a sincere desire to know and do your duty. To enter His house merely to have our ears entertained, and not our hearts reformed, must certainly be highly displeasing to the Most High God, as well as unprofitable to ourselves. Oh, that persons instead would turn their thoughts inwardly, and say, 'Lord, is it I?' How far more beneficial should we find discourses to be than now they generally are!”

Does this also sound strikingly familiar? We often feel that ours is the worst of all times and that our society is going to hell in a hand-basket. But so was the colonial society in 18th century America, so was European society in the run-up to World War II, so was Roman society in the time of the preaching of Peter and Paul and the other apostles and evangelists, and so was Jewish society in the run-up to the captivity. No wonder David began Psalm 32 with these words, which were his own personal testimony and ours: “How blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How blessed is the one to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit!” He adds these beautiful and comforting words: “I acknowledged my sin to You, and my iniquity I did not hide; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord;’ and You forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to You in a time when You may be found; surely in a flood of great waters they will not reach him. You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance” (vss. 5-7). 
 
Yes, it all started with Adam and Eve when Satan the tempter came to them with enticing words about becoming like God, something to which humankind has proved susceptible in every generation. Any number of Adams or Eves would have made the same choice, including ourselves. But that’s precisely why the devisers of the RCL have juxtaposed the account of the fall with the account of the Temptations of Jesus. Satan told Eve that she could be like God, and Eve saw this as good and desirable. Then, a long time later, Satan told Jesus that “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” could be His if He would worship Satan. Eve said “yes” to Satan, but Jesus said “no.” Jesus said, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.’” Adam fell prey to temptation, Jesus brushed it aside.
Paul puts the two persons and their stories and the consequences of their actions together in Romans 5. And it’s all good news. In fact, it’s great news. Paul writes:

“But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. The gift is not like that which came through the one who sinned; for on the one hand the judgment arose from one transgression resulting in condemnation, but on the other hand the free gift arose from many transgressions resulting in justification. For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:15-17).

I think Paul’s meaning here is clear, though the parallelism he is uses gives rise to some possible confusion. Staying with what is absolutely clear, Paul is saying that the consequence of Adam’s sin is death. As Paul will write at the end of Romans 6, “The wages of sin is death” (verse 23). We may be tempted at times to quarrel with God over why certain things have to be the way that they are, but God made it absolutely clear to Adam and Eve in advance that on the day they disobeyed Him by eating the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, they would surely die. And whether we call this “Original Sin” or, by a twist of semantics among our Orthodox friends, “Ancestral Sin,” the result is precisely the same: “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” as we said on Ash Wednesday. “The wages of sin is death.”

But Paul says more. In the following verses of Romans 5, he writes, “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:18, 19; cf. I Cor. 15:21, 22).

Later on he wrote to Timothy the “Comfortable Words” that follow our prayer of Confession: “It is a trustworthy statement, deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (I Timothy 1:15). When we follow Paul’s exhortation and fully accept God’s offer of salvation in Christ Jesus, then we’re removed far away from the fiery condemnation of Jonathan Edwards’ preaching and drawn into God’s merciful arms of love.

There we discover what the penitent King David meant when he wrote, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and sustain me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners will be converted to You. Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation; then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Your praise” (Psalm 51:12-15).

Thomas Cranmer, one of the founding fathers of Anglicanism wrote this beautiful collect that brings David’s confession forward to the 16th century. Perhaps his words are the perfect conclusion to our thoughts this morning:

Almighty and everlasting God, You hate nothing that You have made and forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may receive from You, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, Who lives and reigns with You, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen

May the Words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer.
 
All of this morning’s lectionary readings are about mountain climbing, something that was incredibly important to me in my childhood. It was an amazing experience that I shared with my father. In fact, it was among our last shared experiences of the sort when I set off to climb Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks with my father and my oldest daughter. But my father, already in the last decade of his life, bowed out from joining us under intense pressure from my mother. When my daughter Christi and I reached a fork in the trail an hour into our climb, there was my father, who had left my mother to shop in Lake Placid and literally had run along a shorter but more challenging path in order to meet up with us and finish the climb to the mountain top.

Spiritually speaking, the mountain-top experience was a very common metaphor in my youth. Going to Christian summer camp was always a mountain-top experience, as were many retreats and rallies with Youth for Christ or my church youth group. We often said how sad it was that the mountain-top spiritual experiences could not be perpetuated after we returned to our everyday lives with their challenges, temptations and failures. The pledges we had made on the mountain top soon faded. As God said through the prophet Hosea, ‘Your love for Me is like the morning mist, like the dew that goes early away” (Hosea 6:4). We found ourselves frequently falling under that condemnation.

Decades later I now reflect with a great deal of pleasure on those childhood mountain-top experiences. I’ve been blessed in recent years to have had a renewal of similar ones both in seminary and in ministry. God seems ever-ready to bestow them on us if we’re faithfully putting ourselves in a position to receive them. They may be periodic spiritual “highs” that never will be a completely “normative” part of our Christian walk. Yet they are times of refueling, of restoration, of rejuvenating that lead us forward with a jump-start that we all need from time to time. They may transcend the weekly experiences of worship that for some can become repetitive and mundane, even though they should not. In the best sense, they may reinvigorate our understanding of weekly worship and lead us to new and more frequent mountain-top moments.

I’ve never lost my childhood fascination with mountains, and on our summer travels I always try to include some place where I can get my “mountain fix.” Of course it has to do with those treasurable past experiences, both physical and spiritual; but I think it also has to do with my reading of Scripture from an early age and my appreciation of the important place mountains have had in the history of Israel and in the life of Jesus. It was incredibly moving for us last September to see some of those mountains mentioned in Scripture, among them Mount Nebo, where Moses was allowed to view the Promised Land that he would not be able to enter; Mount Carmel, where Elijah did battle with the prophets of Baal; the Mount of the Temptations of Jesus; the Mount of the Beatitudes and the Feeding of the 5 Thousand; Mount Tabor and the snowy Mount Hermon, one of which may have been the Mount of the Transfiguration; the Mount of Olives with its Garden of Gethsemane; and the Temple Mount and Mount Zion in the city of Jerusalem.

God seems to love mountains even more than I do, as He chooses to meet with His people on their slopes and peaks. He met with Moses on the slopes of Mount Sinai when He spoke from the burning bush and again on the top when He gave Moses the law, not once but twice. Of course God is everywhere, including right here in this room this morning; but clearly God shares my love of mountain-tops. In fact, He probably has placed that love in my heart.

We heard in our reading from Exodus 24 that “the Lord said to Moses, ‘Come up to Me on the mountain and remain there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the law and the commandment which I have written for their instruction.’ Then Moses went up to the mountain, and the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights.” What an amazing experience this had to have been for Moses. And he came down with those tablets of stone, inscribed by the very finger of God, the second set of which were preserved in the Ark of the Covenant until the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 b.c.
In Psalm 74:2 the psalmist says to God, “Remember Your congregation that You purchased of old, the tribe You redeemed for Your own possession, and Mount Zion where You dwelt.” Psalm 76:4 says, “In the light of splendor you appeared, glorious from the eternal mountains.” And in our Psalm for today, Psalm 2, we hear God saying, “But as for Me, I have installed My King upon Zion, My holy mountain.” That holy mountain of God remains to this day the holiest of all places for Christians and Jews and it’s one of the 3 holiest of all places for Muslims. The palpable sense of God’s presence on that holy mountain brings one to a prayerful acknowledgement that God is truly there. It’s also the place to which Jesus will come when He returns to establish His Kingdom and, according to Hebrews 12:22, it will symbolize the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.

The mountain that’s our focus today in both the epistle reading from II Peter and the Gospel reading from Matthew is the one we call “the Mount of the Transfiguration.” We cannot be certain what mountain this was. A Byzantine Church of the Transfiguration was built on Mount Tabor as early as the 4th century, and there are both Orthodox and Franciscan churches there today. But Mount Hermon fits the geographical flow of Matthew much better. Several other possibilities have been put forward by various scholars. Peter simply called it “the holy mountain.” It may be that God did not intend for us to be certain of the site in question so that we would not be tempted to worship the site itself rather than remembering the significance of what happened there.

Today, the last Sunday before Lent, is called “Transfiguration Sunday” in the Lutheran and Methodist calendars and this is why it appears in the RCL readings for today even though Catholics, Anglicans and others observe it on August 6. In some ways Peter’s first-hand recollections of his experience on the Mount with Jesus are even more compelling than Matthew’s account of the event in his Gospel. They also may dispel the notion that Peter was culpable for doing something rash or inappropriate in his wish to build three booths on the Mount. Had that been the case, he might have been less likely to have referred to the incident at all.
 
My own childhood mountain-top experiences always left me with profound sympathy for Peter, who probably wanted to extend his time with the transfigured Christ by building booths for Moses, Elijah and Jesus. The rebuke He is thought to have received from the voice of God was in fact much gentler than the ones he’s received from countless preachers who say, in essence, “There goes the ever-impetuous Peter, once again trying to get ahead of where Jesus wanted him to be or misinterpreting his circumstances and springing into inappropriately impulsive action, an act right up there with his slicing off the right ear of Malchus, the servant of the high priest, in the Garden of Gethsemane.” Then we’re admonished by the preachers not to emulate Peter’s actions on the mountain top, but to learn from Peter by way of negative example.

On the contrary, I think that Peter’s suggestion sprang from an altogether laudable spiritual inclination. In fact, the voice of God from heaven may have been one of affirmation rather than of rebuke, saying in essence, “Yes, Peter, this is indeed My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased,” the same Person you yourself identified just a few days ago at Caesarea Philippi when you made your great confession of Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). I know that if I had been James or John, I might have sprung into action to help Peter build those booths and to extend the experience before descending back to real life. For the Jews of Jesus’ day, the booth-building at Succoth was a symbolic anticipation of Messianic times, when Elijah would return, Messiah would appear and the perceived space between God and His people would be eliminated. In that light, we should be applauding Peter for his remarkable spiritual acuity in capturing the meaning of the moment.

Later Peter wrote about the Transfiguration in a spiritually powerful and succinct fashion. I find it interesting that in his second epistle Peter makes no mention at all of the appearance of Moses and Elijah. His focus is entirely on Jesus Himself, Who as the incarnate Son of God personally embodied all that Moses and Elijah had ever represented to the children of Israel as lawgiver and prophet. And that’s precisely the point for us. Peter wrote that they “were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is My beloved Son with Whom I am well-pleased,’ and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.”

For Peter, whatever witness may have been given by Moses and Elijah to the majesty of Jesus, it was the voice of the One he calls “the Majestic Glory” that was by far the most important. It was God the Father declaring once again that this man Jesus was His beloved Son in the very same words that were spoken from heaven at the baptism of Jesus by John. Luke adds to these words of God the descriptive title, “My Chosen One,” and all three of the Synoptic Gospel writers add, “Listen to Him.” The disciples had no idea how very short their time for listening to Jesus would turn out to be. We have the great advantage of being able to hear Jesus through the words of Scripture whenever we choose to be reading them and listening to Him.
 
So powerful was this moment that when the three disciples, James, John and Peter, heard the voice from heaven, the voice of “the Majestic Glory,” they fell to the ground terror stricken. I imagine any of us would have had the identical response. This voice, added to the fact that Jesus’ “face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light,” would have struck an overwhelming sense of fear and awe in anyone who could have witnessed the scene.

All three Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration immediately move on without further commentary to relate the events that followed the descent of Jesus and His disciples from their mountain-top experience. But Peter adds a sentence the importance of which in this context is easily missed. He writes, “So we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.” That was the message of the Transfiguration for Peter’s readers in the first century; and its beautiful, poetic and challenging message remains the same for 21st century Americans. “We have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.” That’s what Peter retained from those three simple words of the voice from heaven, “Listen to Him.”

Note that Peter’s sentence is all about light: the shining lamp, the dawning day and the rising morning star. In a spiritual sense Peter is saying that the same radiance that made the face of Jesus shine like the sun and His garments become white as light on the Mount of Transfiguration is now shining in our hearts. This is our take-away from the account of the Transfiguration. Only three disciples were privileged to experience the event itself. But Peter tells us that the event has made the prophetic word more sure, and that we would do well to pay attention to it, not just once or twice a year when it’s Transfiguration Sunday or when the passage shows up in our Gospel reading, but whenever we reflect on the light of Christ that’s meant to shine forth through each one of us, today and every single day that we name His Holy Name and proclaim His Holy Word.

Jesus is indeed uniquely the light of the world, as He said in John’s Gospel; but in the Sermon on the Mount, He said unequivocally that we are the light of the world, a reflection of all that He was when He walked on this earth. We are the city set on a hill. We carry on the work that He did in the brief time of His incarnation 2000 years ago. He promised His disciples that they would do even greater works than He Himself had been able to do. In His High Priestly prayer in John 17 He prayed to the Father, “As You have sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.”  Then He added, “I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word.” That’s us: through what we like to call “apostolic succession,” we are among those who have believed in Jesus down through the centuries and who are called on to bring His light to a world of darkness. That’s exactly what Peter meant when, reflecting on his experience of the transfigured Christ, he said that our witness to Him must be “a lamp shining in a dark place.” We’re living in a dark place and the light we are to share is desperately needed.
 
Do you feel inadequate for that task, that awesome responsibility? I know I do. But here’s how Peter concludes his challenge: it’s not something that we do “by an act of human will,” our own wills being notoriously weak; but we do it as persons “moved by the Holy Spirit” who speak from God. In other words, the very same Holy Spirit Who inspired the writers of Scripture and ensured that they were not offering their own private interpretations now illumines our minds and speaks to us and through us. It’s a process superintended by the Holy Spirit from start to finish so that the truth of Scripture is safeguarded and guaranteed. And it’s why we firmly believe in the inspiration and authority of Scripture as well as the truth of our proclamation of it in our time and in all times without altering it in any way.
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And so, in the words of the beautiful prayer often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, may we pray, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Then we will hear Jesus cheering us on with His words, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” We proclaim the peace of Christ in a world where we know there to be no other true source of lasting peace. Jesus is our peace (Ephesians 2:14), and we are to bear His holy light to our dark world. To Him and to Him alone be all honor and glory and praise both now and forever. Amen