"Is Anything Too Hard for God?"

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Sheepscott Community Church March 8, 2009

Genesis 17: 1-7; 15-16; 18: 1-15
Romans 4: 13-25
Mark 9: 2-9

“Is Anything Too Hard for God?”

As the gospel tells this morning’s story, “Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.” And if you knew my mother’s perfectionism in all matters having to do with laundry––washing, starching, drying, sprinkling, rolling and ironing my father’s white shirts––you’d appreciate how white Jesus’s raiment must have been if it was whiter than that. “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus.”

Now that is an extraordinary event to be part of, to witness, as Peter, James and John did. And I can imagine that some of you might be thinking, If I ever saw something like that, then I could really believe. Then I’d have no doubts. If Jesus said, N., N., N., come with me. I am going to show you who I am. Now that would be a life-transforming experience, would it not?

Think again. This transfiguration of Jesus, coming cheek-by-jowl in the gospel of Mark with his first prediction of his death and resurrection, apparently happened not too long before that death, pointing the way toward what the apostles would later better understand Jesus was showing them in his transfigured self, at least part of what the resurrection meant. Why do I say think again about this being a life-transforming experience? It was––in that moment––but think about Peter especially. How long after that did he deny that he even knew this Jesus, this one he had been privileged to see transfigured?

Peter truly does stand in for us: one day up, the next day down, our faith solid as a rock one day, and the next day a pool of quicksand we flounder in. But this is good; it reminds us who we are, and who God is. It reminds us who is in charge, whom we need to turn in faith, with our empty hands and our not knowing.

I had an experience last week in this area of remembering who I am, and who I am not. We’re just over a week into Lent and I stumbled badly over my own personal work I had set myself for this season. In considering my shortcoming that night in prayer, ready to make yet another promise and declaration, I had a new and better thought: I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.

In the morning I was full of peace and balance and was able to go into Sunday service remembering , as I say, who was finally in charge. Whose business is this anyway? We must make it our own, as God’s business in the world is our own, but we must cultivate perspective. Mistakes? Stumbles? Backsliding? Actually denying the Christ by denying what is the reality of our own sinful humanity that needs our cooperation in being re-redeemed as it were again and again? Sure, regrettably but understandably we do stumble often. Paradoxically it is that thorn-in-the-flesh that Paul speaks of, the habit we cannot seem to break, the sin itself that humbles us and moves us to call on God. Like Peter, forgetting the power of what he saw on the top of the Mount of Transfiguration and focused only on his fear of what might happen to him if he were indeed associated with Jesus in the eyes of Roman law or in the gossip of the neighborhood. Although we might be impressed permanently by the effect of seeing such a transfiguration, we are still fully human, and fear for our own well-being, or that of those we love in this world, might obscure the memory for a period of time.

Then I would ask, if Jesus is transfigured and we are one with him in the Body of Christ, then might not we too be transfigured, perhaps in a less dramatic way? I think this month of March is the wildest month of the year, predictable only for its unpredictability. Howling winds and snow like we had last Monday, and yesterday it was 53 degrees at noon. From 13 below on Wednesday morning to 53 at Saturday noon, a 66-degree span within a week in North Whitefield. Let’s hear it for the month of March.

The snow-covered landscape and the weather are an appropriate backdrop and metaphor for our own lives as we approach Easter. It’s a cliché that life is stirring under the ground even now in every crocus bulb, every tulip, every daffodil. We have faith that they will grow again in our fields and gardens because we’ve see it happen every year, but fulfillment of the bulbs’ destiny, from bulb to bloom to seed, and our expectation out of experience doesn’t diminish the sense of wonder and gratitude we feel in the face of this annual resurrection; it enhances it.

How much more our sense of wonder in the face of the resurrection of Jesus toward which we are inexorably moving in our liturgical celebrations? Jesus was transfigured atop the mount and it foreshadowed his later fuller resurrection. Can we, observing the natural landscape and believing in the resurrection insofar as we are able, can we expect to be transformed like plants? Like Jesus? Why not? We are not separate from the natural world or the supernatural world. We are part and parcel of the whole package. We have as much potential in us for change and transfiguration as any flowering bulb. We are budding with possibility even now in the form of good intentions. And although we fall down in trying to fulfill some of them, like the lilac bush where some of the buds are shriveled by late killing frost, still others come to full bud and blossom and beauty, and then go to seed to produce more beauty, more change, more participation in this landscape of life.

How can God work with a sinner like me, you might ask. Maybe you’re one of the apostles who didn’t get invited up the mountain with Peter, James and John. Sure, they’re the special ones Jesus is always singling out for attention and the special moments. But you? You’re still out on the Sea of Galilee fishing and trying to figure out how you’re going to get everything done today you’re supposed to do, including keeping your wife happy when she’s been complaining about all the time you’ve been spending with Jesus and the boys. And then you have to get done whatever it is Jesus needs you to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and so on. Discouragement, resentment out of jealousy... the track a person’s thoughts can take.

Can that person, can you, can I be transformed, transfigured as Jesus was? As Peter, James and John saw happen? I remind you that the title of this message is right out of Genesis, “Is anything too hard for God?” One of the three visitors whom Abraham addresses as Lord––and who is understood to be Lord––asks that rhetorically of Abraham. The answer is understood to be, No, nothing is too hard for the Lord. In this case it is conception taking place in the womb of a woman who is menopausal with a man who is no longer fertile. Here there would be no question that the product of such a conception would be God’s person, God’s doing. That’s the point. He would be named yishaq, Isaac, which means “he laughed,” which is just what Abraham did when the Lord told him about the son of the promise. He fell on his face and laughed. Sarah laughed as well, at the seeming impossibility of it. The difference with Sarah was that when she was accused of laughing, she dissembled and denied it. How foolish we are to think that anything we think, plan, act on or laugh at is hidden from God. Back to the question, “Is anything too hard for God?”

Let’s appropriate that question for ourselves. We have a situation in our lives that has been draining us for years, whether it’s a habit, a difficult child, a burdensome relative whose care we have, depression, chronic pain, unrelieved sadness, sheer orneriness that we wish we didn’t have but don’t know how to come out from under. “Is anything too hard for God?” Think of Sarah’s barren womb; think of Abraham’s infertility. Think of Jesus actually buried inside a cave, as dead as dead can be.

There’s a wonderful line in this morning’s reading from Romans, characterizing God as the One “...who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.”
And God credits Abraham with righteousness because “he was fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised,” indeed to call things that are not as though they were, and so into being. The fact of Isaac as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, and the fact of Jesus’s resurrection argue for a negative answer to the question: “Is anything too hard for God?” No. Nothing is too hard for God. We and our problems are a piece of cake next to these earthshaking situations, which brings me back to the transfiguration, a kind of shaking of the earth before the dreadful last week of Jesus’s life.

Another feature of that event is God speaking to those assembled––Peter, James and John––from a cloud. He is confirming the rightness of Jesus’s choices and life here at the near-end of his earthly life in some of the same words used in Matthew’s gospel at the baptism by John, at the beginning of Jesus’s public life, and which I quoted last week: “This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” The difference in today’s gospel of Mark is that the voice exhorts those present to, “Listen to him.”

In Jewish thought the presence of God is regularly connected with the cloud. It was in the cloud that Moses met God. Listen to Exodus 19: 9: “The Lord also told [Moses], ‘I am coming to you in a dense cloud, so that when the people hear me speaking with you, they may always have faith in you also.’” It was the cloud which filled the Temple when it was dedicated after Solomon had built it. 1 Kings 8: 10: “When the priests left the holy place, the cloud filled the Temple of the Lord, so that the priests could no longer minister because of the cloud, since the Lord’s glory had filled the Temple of the Lord.” And the Jews believed that when the Messiah came, the cloud of God’s presence would return to the Temple. Elijah, the prophet of prophets, and Moses the lawgiver appeared with Jesus in his transfigured state and thereby at the very least represented the fulfillment of the messianic tradition and the expectations of the people Israel. Here we have these three good Jews atop Mount Hermon hearing the voice of God speaking to them from a cloud, and the figure would have been very familiar to them and identifiable as associated with the Messiah.

It is not so familiar to us, except as we read about it in scripture. However, it’s a very useful figure and one I would like to appropriate to finish up on these thoughts about transfiguration. It is out of the cloud that God speaks and once again identifies Jesus as his Son with the new directive: Listen to him.

In our lives, it is much more likely that we will learn the lessons of those lives from the dark clouds that inevitably come into them. We are merry and bright and ready to party on sunny days, and we are grateful for them. Those days teach their lessons of the joys of life. But it is on those cloudy days, those days the weatherman in March has not necessarily predicted, when anything can happen, it is on those days that we need to remember the voice of God speaking to our apostolic stand-ins, Peter, James and John, reminding us that Jesus is the one with the answers and that we would do well to listen to him.

If Jesus could say yes, and he did, to what was before him, trusting the Father and the experience he had on Mount Hermon, especially including the validating and vindicating voice of God again, he can enable us to say yes to whatever the circumstances of our lives are, especially in those areas where we are trying to be better people. He can help us by his Spirit to be more responsive to God directly and more responsive to those around us in whom God lives.

We are all on pilgrimage up that holy mountain and we have our glimpses of God along the way, whether in nature by ourselves, in communion with others in this church, in the workplace where we see the best and worst in people, in random encounters on the street. We meet God, and we are transfigured by those encounters in small ways. What we don’t register fully with the mind is impressed on the spirit, where we listen with an acuity of hearing our bodily ears cannot even dream of.

In these remaining weeks of Lent may we recognize the transfigured and transfiguring Christ in one another and in our circumstances, where God is always at work sharpening his tools so that his purposes can be better accomplished, so that the work of art that is the unfolding of universes may be truer and more beautiful for our having lived. Amen.

The Advent of Advent

The Rev. Judith Robbins advises us to prepare for the Advent season by getting over ourselves. [Runtime is about 20 minutes.]


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Sheepscott Community Church November 30, 2008
Isaiah 64: 1-9
Mark 13: 24-37

Prepare the Way for The Way

On almost all first Sundays of Advent in the past, I have alluded to a descent into the earth through the Aelwie Cave in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland, where I was visiting the birthplace of some of my ancestors in 1994. In that cave, I with others was led by a tour guide down and along a jerry-rigged bridge-walkway, past the hibernation spot of a prehistoric bear, past stalactites and stalagmites continuing to drip and build as they have for uncounted centuries, past an abyss-like cavern under the bridge that was disconcerting as the walkway swayed beneath us. When we had reached the endmost part of the cave’s excavation, the guide warned us that she was about to shut off the lights––single bulbs that were strung along the excavation route––and we would be plunged into absolute darkness. And that’s what she did, and we were.

Absolute darkness is that level of darkness when there is no light at all, no relief for the human eye. Nothing. Just blackness. The guide noted that human beings can only bear absolute darkness for about 30 seconds, when they become increasingly uneasy and agitated. And that’s just what happened. There was rustling and unsettled movement on the rickety bridge until the guide turned on the lights again, and everyone turned as a body and noticeably hurried unspeaking back up the walkway toward the brighter light from the gift shop far above.

So, I have made that allusion in the past on this first Sunday of Advent, but I didn’t really have to go back that far this year. On Tuesday night, the night of the Great Wind and Rain, we at our house in Whitefield were plunged into Absolute Darkness, something I hadn’t seen since the Aelwie Cave. Light was only a lit candle away, but I held off for a bit to relish the darkness––soft and black and complete.

When I did scratch that match in the darkness, the parallel to Christmas was unmistakable. There, The Christ, coming into that unrelieved dark like a match lit in a dungeon. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. We are gathered and perched at the beginning of the walkway bridge across the abyss of Advent. For four weeks we will journey together toward Christmas, hoping that we will be ready to welcome once again the Christ child into our midst.

At his baptism last Sunday, William Skiff gave us a blessed foretaste of God’s readiness to be with us, as God was so obviously with him. We cannot reclaim our childlike innocence and be like William again, but we can bring ourselves before God as we are, repenting of our sins and asking for cleansing, for purification, a new beginning three weeks hence when the Christ child comes again. This is possible, to be desired and expected, and what makes the whole enterprise of Christmas worth marking from year to year. It is a reminder that we can be new, renewed.

Falling as it does at the time of the winter solstice, when the earth again tilts on its axis toward the sun, the astronomical world mirrors the world of faith, as we respond like our primitive ancestors who celebrated the return of the sun. The sun equaled life. The Son equals life.

To prepare for another new beginning, we have to take care of old business first, and I’d like to talk about that. Old business with its weight of guilt or anger or lassitude or preoccupation, whatever the source––an unsettled argument; a self-righteous indignation that knows better than God about the matters of this world; the agony of distraction by a family concern that paralyzes one for action––needs to be tended to. The first reading from the prophet Isaiah characterizes our human state when we feel paralyzed by our lives and our attitudes and our sins in those lives. “All of us have become like one who is unclean,” the prophet writes, “and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind, our sins sweep us away.”

But then comes the plea, “Yet...you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord, do not remember our sins forever. O, look upon us, we pray, for we are your people.” As I have noted time and again, we are the creatures. God is the Creator. When we truly internalize that fact, we get perspective on our importance and lack of importance and become empowered in a backhanded kind of way, as in the relief that comes with knowing the truth of our condition. If we’re diagnosed with something perfectly dreadful, as dreadful as that diagnosis is, it is better than not knowing.

So, with the prophet we diagnose ourselves as the sinners we are and make our plea to the Creator, and that is fitting. This is not simply a literary or theological exercise, but a real examination and admission of who we are and who we are not. Having established that creature/sinner identity in our own prayer before God, we can then accept, receive what we believe is God’s forgiveness and go forward to act, not so much on our own behalf, except as that personal behalf intersects with others’ behalves. We become actors in our lives.

And this is true across the spectrum of our lives, although it looks different depending on where we find ourselves. The youngest among us, like William and his siblings, and Brie, and Michael, are in the care of their parents at the first beginning. The older kids, Alex, Ethan. Jamie, Derek, Willie and Louisa are discerning their lives’ paths now, and learning that they are not alone. Their families have been their safe nest, and now they know it is nearing time to fly. The nest is still there; the love is still there. When they look over their shoulder they can see it and count on it. In fact that is what will give them the impetus and momentum to keep moving forward.

In that moving forwardness, at some point, if they haven’t already, they will discover the quiet presence of what could be called in this context the Nest That Goes With Us, the place within ourselves, themselves where they can retreat, remembering home but also coming to know their own selves as spiritual resource. God, the very large bird that seems absent from the nest much of the time but whose feathers they occasionally find when they go within, has them under its wing and is watching over. A quiet confidence can steal in that will steel them for the road and work ahead. So, their journey is at a second level of the beginning.

For those in the middle years of working and raising a family, it’s harder to find that time to go within for confession, restoration and renewal. But there is irony here, that the more we tell ourselves we don’t have time for that kind of prayer, that kind of stepping aside, the more the soul parches and then can only think about water. Instead of dropping the bucket down into the well, the tendency is to bemoan the thirst, which keeps the person from going about the daily round with energy and a peaceful spirit. Five minutes: I’ve said this before. Five minutes will sustain. Come before God through scripture, in private prayer in your own words, in thought, in just sitting consciously, however you do it, and ask to be shown what you need to look at in your life in order to be living your life as fully and in as good a way as you can in your circumstances, in order to be getting ready for Christmas. How are you going to know there’s a love letter in the mailbox if you don’t go to the mailbox to check?

So, in preparation for Christmas, my encouragement for those who are in the middle years of working outside the home and inside the home, not to mention some of you who are additionally in school, I strongly encourage a habit of prayer––again, start with five minutes––for your own sake, not just for God’s sake. That five minutes comes with a guarantee of deepened inner peace, a sense of focus and renewed energy to do what the work of your lifeis at this time, which tends to feel overwhelming much of the time.

And for those who see themselves as beyond beginning again and only in a holding pattern for death, but who are in reasonably good health and are relatively ambulatory, let me share the following.

Last Sunday I was at the Lincoln Home for a service I do in a rotation with other ministers in the area. Usually there are anywhere from 3-6 people who turn out for the service, a simple affair in the sitting room. I shared with them the scene and story of William’s baptism last Sunday, and they enjoyed it even secondhand. Belle, one of the women, asked what the parents called William. She was pleased that it was William and not Bill––no offense to Bill’s in the congregation today––but Belle wondered if the name William wouldn’t be corrupted to Bill when he went to school. I suggested the Skiffs might hold the line on William, and she was satisfied.

One way I encouraged those gathered to think about the baptism was to see it as a new beginning. Although they, as with many of us, had already been baptized many years before, there is occasion and possibility for a kind a re-baptism when we consider our sins and repent of them. That’s what John the Baptist was doing day after day at the Jordan River when Jesus turned up among those coming for baptism. He was calling those who could hear him to repent, for the ax was already laid against the root of the tree and they would be cut down unless they bore good fruit. Pretty heavy. While Jesus had no need of repentance, he was setting an example for those who would follow him––us––to repent of our sin and be baptized. This is a particular work of the Advent season.

But let me return to the story of the people from the Lincoln Home. Belle, the woman concerned about William’s retention of his given name, is in her mid-90’s. She made what sounded like a very sad assessment of her days, just getting through them, waiting to die. I believe there is more for Belle and for the others, one of whom is 99, and the others in the upper 80’s. I told them a rather apocalyptic story that was sadly true but worth reflecting on at this other end of the spectrum. An 82-year-old woman in Augusta died of smoke inhalation in a fire the week before last. The firefighters couldn’t reach her because there was 3 to 4 feet of stuff against the outer walls and against the outside door on the inside, so they couldn’t push through in time. Flammable materials too close to the hot plate had caused the fire.

This morning I offer this sad cautionary tale of the woman in Augusta, whose death could be directly attributed to her inaccessibility because of stuff in the way. One message is to get rid of the clutter, both inside and outside. We can think of the outside work as getting our focus off our possessions and protection of them, involvement with them, at whatever stage in life we find ourselves. Another of the women at the Lincoln Home said she had begun to divest, giving away her engagement ring and other jewelry to her daughters. The disposition of furniture was a literally bigger problem, but she was about the business of getting rid of what I’m calling the “outside stuff” and its control of us and our thoughts.

The inside clutter is often the stuff I started with in this message: guilt, anger, lassitude or preoccupation, just a few of the things that keep us from being available to the God who would help us find our way in life, through life––at whatever point we find ourselves. When we have finished the cleanup, when we know we have done what we can to make ready for Christmas, we will be in the season with peace and can expect joy in the morning, the makarios kind of joy I think we all experienced last Sunday at William’s baptism.

In this context I encourage you to remember what it was like to fall in love for the first time. The world was different, full of possibility and good, because we were different, full of possibility and goodness enabled by the great gift of love in our lives.That ‘s how it feels when we truly repent and know ourselves forgiven by the greatest of lovers.
In these four weeks of Advent, it is the time for getting ready to know the joy, to clear the decks, to put out the stuff for the trash man to pick up. This is stuff you don’t want to recycle. You just want the trash man to take it away and deal with it.

But conscientiously you might ask, Don’t we have an obligation to deal with our own stuff and not expect God to take care of it? That’s true as far as it goes, but what would you do with the inner trash besides put it out of the house away from yourself? If it’s out there, I can almost guarantee that you’re going to start thinking about it again, and then go and open the door and start sifting through the stuff wondering if you should hang on to this bit of righteous anger, this guilt––after all, if you knew what I did, and so forth. Let it go, give it to God, don’t hang on to it. This is the season. Give yourself that gift.
As we heard in the gospel of Mark this morning, “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come.” It is an exercise in pride to think we can take care of everything by ourselves. The sooner we get over ourselves––not to discount legitimate responsibility; I think you understand what I’m talking about––the sooner we get over ourselves and let God do what God does best, the better off we’ll be. It’s infinitely simple calculus: Advent season: Repent. Prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. We can begin again. Amen.