Sermons: August 2010

Water from the Rock
The Transfiguration (transferred)
August 8, 2010

Exodus 34:29-35             2 Peter 1:13-21 
Luke 9:28-36                   Psalm 99 or 99:5-9 

This is my third annual “Lake Tahoe sermon.” I wrote it while Miriam and I—W.C.: Without Children—were up at Tahoe this week. So if this sermon has a tinge, a tincture, just a smidgeon of regret that I’m back here with you, here in the hot, arid, and smoggy flatlands, please don’t take it personally.

In today’s readings we have not one, but two transfigurations.

Moses comes down from “the mountain”—Mt. Sinai—“with the two tablets of the Covenant.”

Note that it doesn’t say that Moses comes down with the Ten Commandments. Throughout our common history, Christians have accused Jews of being legalistic. The irony is that it’s actually we who have made the mystical Sinai experience legalistic.

Words matter. One rabbi says it’s better to understand the tablets Moses brings down as the ten “sayings.” For Jews they are not the be all and end all—they are a portal, an opening, an icon, not so much to all 613 mitzvot

Words matter. “Torah” in Jewish thinking does not really mean “Law” (although “law” is one meaning) but rather “Teaching.” For Judaism Moses is the great teacher.

It’s no accident that Matthew, in his Gospel written for a Jewish or Jewish-Christian audience, makes Jesus the new Moses, the Great Rabbi. In Matthew, Jesus explicitly says that he’s come not to do away with Torah; rather, like the Prophets before him, he’s come to reinvigorate it. In Matthew, Jesus—like Moses—goes up on a mountain to give “the Sermon on the Mount.” “Sermon on the Mount” is actually another misnomer. It’s not a sermon at all—it’s a collection, three chapters’ worth, of Jesus’ teaching.

That great Jewish-American theologian Mel Brooks nails it here. In History of the World, Part I, on Mount Sinai God hollers to Brooks, who’s playing Moses: “Moses, Moses, can you hear me?” Moses responds, “I hear you, I hear you. A deaf man could hear you. Oy.”

After the requisite thunder and lightning, Moses comes down with three, not two, tablets. “People of Israel! I have brought you fifteen—he drops a tablet, which shatters on the ground—ten; I have brought you ten

Fifteen. Ten. No big deal. There are plenty more. It’s Christians who have made idols out of the ten.

Jesus, like Moses, is not handing down rules and regulations from on high—some sort of first-century California Driver’s Handbook. Moses and Jesus, both, are offering relationship, a life with, and within, God. Equally, they are offering their people relationship with and within a covenantal community, with God and

Moses and Jesus are offering—not commanding—relationship. You can’t command relationship. You can only offer it, and reciprocate it. You grow relationship; it’s organic. You nurture relationship; you love it, nurse it, like a garden. As with a garden, you watch parts of it grow, bloom, and bear fruit. Sometimes thirty, sometimes sixty, sometimes a hundredfold.

You also see parts of the garden wither and die; parts of it die within season, part of life’s cycle. Parts of it die out of season, and then you try to figure out why.

You’ve heard the saying “If you’re given lemons, make lemonade.” In relationships, as in gardening, if you’re given crap, make fertilizer.

Grace is a garden. A rather improbable one, if you think about it. To an outsider it seems to have grown spontaneously—miraculously—in the middle of a vast, arid desert. As Miriam and I drove up I-5 this week, I kept seeing signs that said “Congress Created Dust Bowl.” In the dust bowl that Grace sprang up in, it was John David-Schofield and his minions—and those who went along with them, Schofield’s willing executioners—who crushed and crucified the life-giving Spirit.

Grace’s advent wasn’t miraculous, some kind of ecclesiastical virgin birth. Grace came into being because of us, loving, working, and praying with God. The desert that Grace grew up in, and flourishes in now, was not, however, as arid as it seemed. Like Bakersfield itself, its climate was semi-arid. There is water; you just have to know where to find it.

As the LORD says to Moses, “‘I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’ Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel.”

In three years at Grace we’ve had both crap and fertilizer; along with aridness and dehydration we’ve lived
“Let justice roll down like waters, / and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

In three years at Grace we’ve had deaths in and out of season. We should not run away from these deaths. Out of season, we had irreconcilable conflicts, even brawls, a civil war. Out of season, some people left. To this day I mourn their going, and the mistakes I made that contributed to their need for flight.                                                                                                        

Later, after reading some material on conflict in churches, I came to realize that, given the fragile and wounded nature of our planting, the traumas people suffered in this diocese and this city, conflict, even death, was inevitable.

Still, on the daily anniversaries of those deaths, I celebrate with awe, joy, and thanksgiving the continuing new growth at Grace, new growth in the Spirit, sometimes perceptible, sometimes not.

This coming All Saints’ Day, in the habitual coursing and turning of the seasons, Grace will celebrate three years as a parish here in this chapel. Miriam and I celebrated twenty-five years together last month. Last summer Vic and Marilyn celebrated fifty. So Miriam and I are half way there.

Where is Grace halfway towards? I honestly don’t know. But you know what? I have absolutely no concerns about our future together. None. Court cases, legal battles, church property—they’re all cra_—I mean, fertilizer.

I wrote the first draft of this sermon Wednesday morning. I sat cozily in a coffee shop at 6 in the morning—at that hour, need I say, without Miriam? It was 42 outside—yes, Bakersfieldians, 42, in August. Outside the back door of the coffee shop I watched the sun rise and shimmer over the lake; a single, silent, boat gliding slowly by. Towards where? I didn’t know. But I felt sure of its destination.

This past Tuesday Miriam and I dropped David off at UC Santa Cruz for soccer workouts. David will be a senior in high school this year and we’re looking at schools with good academics where he can also play soccer.

Remember when you were 17 and the world lay before you infinite with possibilities? Grace’s possibilities, if only we see them—and, just as important—as long as we envision them, lie before us and all around us. Perhaps not exactly the Promised Land, but nevertheless the “territory ahead” that lies before an eternally questing Huck Finn.

Grace, we’ve done good. You have God’s permission to give each other a pat on the back. Go ahead.

Now, as they say in baseball, “What have you done for me lately?” That “me” isn’t Joe Torre or Mike Sciosia. And for sure it isn’t me. You know who it is. Oh, you hit .350 last year? Great, do it again this year. And add some RBIs while you’re at it.

This time, God—for once—is not being played by Morgan Freeman. God is Tom Hanks. Some of you will remember A League of Their Own, the story of the first women’s professional baseball team. A story every bit as improbable—and wonderfully true to life—as Grace’s.

Geena Davis. Rosie O’Donnell. Madonna. If that motley crew can do it, so can we.

Amen.

 or commandments of Torah but rather to the Covenant, the Jews’ profound and enduring and tumultuous relationship with God. commandments.” with each other. the prophet’s mandate:
Matthew 13:1-8.

Exodus 17:6.

Amos 5:24; see Isaiah 32:2.