Dr. Seuss and the Decline of Western Civilization

I gave the following brief talk recently at my morning men’s group:

I’ve been asked to talk this morning about pride, and this seems like a terribly relevant topic for folks like us, who live in 21st century America. Sometimes I think that no civilization in history has ever fussed quite so much about self-esteem as ours has, or has ever encouraged such a frankly individualistic and self-centered worldview.

Still, it’s worth noting that it was nearly 2500 years ago that Aristotle said, “Pride is the crown of the virtues.” Aristotle’s model for this assertion were mythic heroes like Hector and Achilles, but we can see the fruit of his ethical position all too clearly in violence and brutality of his pupil, Alexander the Great. Christianity for a time curbed these tendencies, but they have more recently begun to roar back.  In the 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went even further than Aristotle when he said, “Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.” This perspective, that the primary goal of a human life is to assert ones own claims, is thus neither new nor entirely unique to our culture. Nevertheless, I do believe that both the extent and the rapidity with which it has come to dominate our society is worthy of comment.

I think we can make clear just how quickly and how firmly our culture has adopted a philosophy of self-centeredness by comparing two well-known books by Theodore Geisel - better known, perhaps, as Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss began writing children’s books back in the late 1930’s, in the run-up to World War II. In 1940, he wrote Horton Hatches the Egg, about the resolute and humble Horton, an elephant tricked into hatching an egg by a lazy and faithless “Mayzie Bird”. Expressing his determination to fulfill his promise, Horton also expressed our society’s then-dominant moral outlook with these words:

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant:
an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.

This is stern stuff, full of honesty, loyalty, and self-sacrificial love, and it’s not surprising that the Greatest Generation was raised on it. You don’t survive the Great Depression and World War II without a reasonably stiff backbone.

But shortly before his death in 1991, Dr. Seuss published another book that expresses a quite different perspective. The book is called Oh the Places You’ll Go!, and on every page it reflects the dramatic cultural changes that had taken place since World War II. The book is clever and witty, and I won’t deny that there’s some wisdom in it, but at its heart it seems to endorse a disconcerting self-centeredness. Instead of encouraging faithfulness and loyalty, its theme can be reduced to these words from its opening pages:

You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.

Nietszche and the Mayzie Bird would have nodded and approved, of course, but you have to imagine that poor faithful Horton would hardly have hardly known what to make of such an amoral egoism.
Regrettably, this perspective isn’t limited to children’s books. Try reading a typical advice column and note how much of its advice assumes that we need to think both more often and more highly of ourselves. Take a couple dozen newspaper editorials on controversial social issues, such as abortion or gay marriage, and see how rarely they advocate for an increased sense of personal humility, or commend a course of greater self-sacrifice and discipline. How many movies or TV shows have you seen in the last year which said, in effect, “You need to express yourself, be your own person, stop conforming to what other people want you to be”?

But like I said, this emphasis on claiming our own rights is hardly new. It didn’t start with Aristotle or Nietszsche, and it won’t end with either Dr. Seuss or Dear Abby. It started, in fact, in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent suggested to Eve that she might know her own good better than God.

According to Augustine, pride is “the craving for undue exaltation”. In other words, it is the desire to put ourselves first, not just before others, but most especially, before God. Now, it’s critical to remember that God created us for Himself, and that our hearts will always be restless unless they rest in Him. Our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever; and the enjoyment and the glorification go hand in hand. The rest when we serve Him, the restlessness when we abandon Him and exalt ourselves, are not outcomes that God could change if He wanted, but are fundamental expressions of ultimate reality. To know God is to know Him as immeasurably greater than ourselves. God doesn’t demand loyalty to Himself out of any desire for self-aggrandization, as if God Himself were proud, but rather, because that is who He is, and that is who we are. God can’t make us happy without Himself anymore than water can cease to be wet.

Thus, when we become proud, we are by definition separating ourselves from God. We are refusing to know God as God, and when we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental reality, the rest of our faculties degrade in lock step. We don’t see reality as well as we did before; we don’t understand the world as well as we ought. We take things that ought to be first and make them last. We exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for corruptible images and pale imitations.

This, then, was the sin of Adam; and this was the sin of Eve. That it was an apple or some other fruit is almost incidental: the key is that they chose to know good and evil, that is, they chose to decide for themselves what would be good and what would be evil. For whatever unimaginable reason, they placed themselves in the place of God. The serpent spoke as truly as the serpent could: after eating the fruit, they were as gods: they became their own end and desire and satisfaction. This end, of course, was neither desirable nor satisfactory, for when they moved the true God out of His place, the false gods moved in.

And in this sense, as in so many others, we are the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. We’re on our own; we know what we know; we are the ones who’ll decide where to go. Or in other words, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. But when we affirm this creed, when we refuse to be ruled by the one true God, we discover that we are ruled instead by the false gods of sex, ambition, and money. We desire to serve only ourselves, and serve instead every intellectual or moral fashion that blows our way. And the result is the sad, tragic history of humanity that we know so well. All the wars and nearly all the famines, all the divorces and affairs, all the rapes and genocides, every terrible crime and every tawdry scandal has its origin in this ineluctable turn toward ourselves and away from God.
There is, of course, only one rescue from this fate, and that is the cross. For our pride can only be moved from its seat at the center of our souls when we know God for who He truly is. And it is in the cross that we see God most truly and most completely. George MacDonald said,

When he died on the cross, he did that, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, in the torture of the body of his revelation, which he had done at home in glory and gladness.

The only and final cure for our pride is to constantly remind ourselves that the God who dwells in unapproachable light became a human being so that He could light our way for us; that the author of life suffered death out of love for us; that the Creator let His creation crucify Him. If pride, by definition, cuts us off from knowing God, then knowing God, by definition, will begin to heal us of our pride. And to know God, we must know Jesus; and to know Jesus, we must pass under the shadow of the cross.

I wish I had better advice; and if I were less proud myself, I suspect I would. One of the side-effects of humility is that you can understand the world better. But in the meantime, I can only point you - I can only point myself - towards the cross. And given all the pressure we encounter in our culture to move in exactly the opposite direction, we can hardly do this too early or too often.

Dead to Sin, Alive to Christ

Today was our last Sunday at Overlake Park Presbyterian Church. Three weeks ago, we made it public that we’d decided to begin attending a church closer to our house. This was a hard decision to make, and even harder to tell everyone about. Folks at OPPC have welcomed us warmly for the last seven years, and they love our kids. But it was nearly a half hour drive to church, and we decided that for our kids’ sake, we needed to belong to a church that was closer to home. So today we said goodbye. In a rather astonishing show of good will, they asked me to preach; and this is what I came up with.

Introduction

Many stories in the Bible evoke a sense of crisis, of paths diverging forever, of profound, world-changing events turning on the smallest details. God’s selection of Abraham. Moses hidden in the reeds. The sound of a horn at Jericho. The voice of an angel in Mary’s room. One of the most important examples of small details that change the course of history is found in the words that the risen Jesus spoke to Saul of Tarsus, when He met him on the road to Damascus. “Saul, Saul,” Jesus said, “why are you persecuting me?”

We’ve heard those words so many times that we often miss their significance. To put them into perspective, ask yourself the question, “Who was it that Saul had thought he was persecuting?” Because of course, Saul hadn’t been intending to persecute Jesus at all. As far as Saul knew, Jesus was dead and buried, and good riddance. Saul had been harassing Jesus’ followers precisely because Jesus wasn’t around to bother with. But that day, when Saul fell blinded onto the ground, Jesus didn’t say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?” He said instead, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

We all know the rest of the story. As a result of his archetypal “Damascus road experience,” Saul became a Christian. He disappeared from sight for some years. And when we hear from him next, he is already an apostle and a missionary, proclaiming loudly and eloquently the story of Jesus’ life and death. But Paul is also doing something else that is quite interesting. He’s not just telling the story of Jesus: he’s telling us what the story means. Because, after all, that story is a little ambiguous, isn’t it? I mean, so there was this Jewish rabbi from Galilee who caused a bit of a stir, and stirred up a bit of trouble, and ran afoul of the establishment, and ended up tortured to death at the hands of a police state. His followers claimed that this rabbi had come back from the dead, but even if that was true, well, so what?

It’s precisely that “so what” which interested Paul. And for Paul, the key to understanding the significance of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection lay in those first words from Jesus’ mouth: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Because those words tell us, as they told Paul, that those who follow Jesus are not just well-meaning disciples of some Jewish rabbi. On the contrary, those followers are Jesus, and when Paul was persecuting them, he was actually persecuting Jesus Himself. And if that is true, something big and entirely unexpected is afoot.

The Cross

In his letters, Paul develops this initial insight in a variety of different ways. One of them is through his familiar image of the Church as the Body of Christ. To the Corinthians Paul wrote, “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). And to the Romans, similarly, “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:4-5).

As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it,

the just man...
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces

The other way Paul develops this insight may be a little less familiar to us, though it is perhaps even more important. Paul says that when Jesus suffered and died on the cross, we ourselves, the Church, were right there with him. “Do you not know,” he asks in today’s passage, “that whoever has been baptized into Christ Jesus has been baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3). “I am crucified with Christ,” he writes to the Galatians, “and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). And in the same way, we were somehow present in Christ at the moment of His resurrection. “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Rom. 6:4).

But what exactly does this mean, to be “crucified with Christ”? And why have Christians always believed that the cross was at the heart of Christianity?

To put this into perspective, if you were a Muslim, the symbol of your religion would be a crescent moon.  If you were a Buddhist, the symbol of your religion would be a lotus flower.  If you were a Jew, the symbol of your religion would be a six pointed star.  These all symbolize things like beauty, grace and life. But as Christians, our emblem suggests nothing like that.  Our emblem is the cross, a crude but effective method of execution invented by the Romans for the gruesome purpose of convincing would-be criminals that whatever they were contemplating, it just wasn't worth it.  The symbol of Christianity is a symbol of ugliness, suffering and death.  Why?  Why do all other religions have as their symbols something reminiscent of light and beauty, yet Christians insist on exactly the opposite?

I certainly don’t have a complete answer. But it’s worth noting that this theme of death and resurrection was not merely a Christian invention. On the contrary, it has been the refrain of the great myths and stories throughout history. The Babylonians told the story of how Gilgamesh sought and failed to find the secret of immortality after the death of his best friend. The Egyptians told the story of how Osiris was brought back to life after his body was cut into 14 pieces and scattered across the earth. The Greeks told of Persephone, and how she was abducted by the king of the underworld, and then returned to the earth again after her mother cut a deal with the gods. Perhaps most remarkably, Nordic legends tell of how Odin, the chief of the gods, sacrificed himself to himself, by piercing his side with a spear and then hanging himself on the holy tree at the center of the world.

Beyond those legends, science tells us much the same story. According to the theory of evolution, life arose through pain and suffering and sacrifice. Think of how many different systems in your body need to work perfectly, just to keep you alive. Then think about how many random genetic mutations were required to arrive at those perfectly functioning systems: and how many thousand times more mutations failed, and left the organisms who inherited them vulnerable to accidents, predators and sickness. You and I have life only because untold billions before us suffered and died. Our bodies work because their bodies didn’t. You might very well say, “By their stripes we are healed.”

In other words, a life that comes through death is at the beating heart of our world. So when we see the same pattern in Christianity, we shouldn’t be surprised. Life followed by death followed by new life is not just an abstract doctrine: it’s as close as we can come to reality itself. As George MacDonald put it, “When Jesus died on the cross, He did that, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, which he had done at home in glory and gladness.”

Crucified with Christ

So then: Christians have chosen the cross as their emblem, because we believe that it gives expression to the fundamental reality underlying the universe. As Paul said, “We preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). But again I ask: what does this mean? So we are somehow united with Christ in his death and resurrection; and Christ’s death and resurrection somehow shows who God is in a way that nothing else could. But what does that mean? What is its significance? Does believing this actually change anything?

This is a profound question, and I don’t think we can do anything more than touch on it today. But it’s worth noting three things.

#1 – This is God’s Life

The first is that Jesus tells us that it’s only by conforming to this pattern that we can partake of the life that He came to bring. In Luke 9:23, Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” I don’t think that Jesus is saying, “Unless you’re willing to sacrifice yourself, you’re not good enough to be a Christian.” Rather, I think he means that sacrificing ourselves is what the Christian walk looks like. We partake of the life that God offers us precisely to the extent that our lives resemble God’s Life; and that Life is a life of love, and therefore of sacrifice. The same is also true of another difficult saying of Jesus: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a random for many” (Mark 10:43-45). The requirement that we serve others is not an arbitrary standard, a line which God drew in the sand but which could have been drawn elsewhere; rather, the requirement of service expresses certain unalterable facts about God’s own nature.

#2 – This is forgiveness

The second thing to note has to do with forgiveness. For both to ask and to receive forgiveness is a kind of death. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Again, it’s not that God won’t forgive us unless we forgive others; it’s that we can’t truly repent, and ask for that forgiveness, until we ourselves have learned to extend it.

I’ve had a pretty good life, and I can only think of one instance where someone has done me a significant and genuine injustice. I was angry about that injustice for years; and if you get me talking too much about it, you’ll find that I still am. It’s very true, of course, that my anger, and my lack of forgiveness, isn’t hurting anyone except me. But it is hurting me, and it’s hurting me precisely because that part of me doesn’t want to die. I want to hold on to my rights, I want to insist on what’s coming to me. And to the extent that I’m not dying to myself, to the extent that I’m continuing to hold on to my natural life, I simply can’t participate in the new life that Jesus offers.

Because I need to be clear: extending forgiveness to someone who has genuinely done you wrong, means death. Imagine trying to forgive a serial killer who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered one of your children. Even the thought of forgiving someone who had done that would gnaw away at your insides. It would feel like you were betraying your murdered child; it would feel like you were condoning the murderer’s actions. In short, it would kill you to forgive him. But it would kill you in the right way. It would put to death just that much more of that part of yourself which refuses to participate in God’s life.

But there is maybe even a better way to look at it. For if it hurts us to forgive someone who has done us an injustice – just imagine how it must feel to God. Can it be any less of a death for God to forgive? God loves the child who has been murdered, the wife whose husband was unfaithful, the partner who was cheated out of his business, far more than we could ever hope to. If it kills us to forgive someone, how much more must it kill God? And if Christianity is right, that is precisely what it did: it killed God. People talk nonchalantly about God forgiving sins as if it was the easiest thing in the world. But our own experience gives the lie to that facile assumption. Forgiving sins isn’t easy: there is no more difficult thing in all of creation. It’s so hard that the undying God Himself had to die in order to do it. And we must die as well, if we want to participate in that forgiveness.

#3 – This is Resurrection

Third, we must remember that Jesus’ death on the cross was not the end of the story. Yes, Jesus died; and it was a true death. His heart ceased to beat. The neurons in his brain ceased to register the agony of his body. His muscles, on fire for the last six hours, finally slumped, and his corpse began its slow, inevitable decomposition in that merciless April sun. But God had something else in store, for He would not abandon Jesus to the realm of the dead, nor allow His Holy One to see corruption. On the morning of the third day, God raised Jesus from the dead; and the life he now lives, he lives to God. One small part of the meaning of the Resurrection is the lesson that God is faithful to those who engage in self-sacrificial love. Indeed, how could He not be? For He cannot deny Himself; and those who sacrifice their own desires for the good of others, are already living in God’s love, whether they know it or not. If we die to our sinful nature, we will be alive to God. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.”

Two Stories

I should point out as well that self-sacrificing love is not merely rewarded in heaven. To the extent that we live in that love in this life, to the extent that we die to ourselves, we experience God’s new life right now.

I have two examples of how this can work: one from my own very recent experience, another from the experience of one of the great saints of the Church.

Olivet University

To give you some background, twenty years ago, I graduated from a small Christian school in the Santa Cruz Redwoods named Bethany University. Bethany was a lovely school in many ways, but it’s been teetering on the edge of financial ruin for years, and finally, this summer, it ran out of money and was forced to close its doors. Many people had loved that school, and were genuinely grieved at its closure. But within a month after Bethany announced that it was closing, another tiny Christian school by the name of Olivet University announced that it was going to purchase the Bethany campus, and continue Bethany’s mission of ministerial training. On the face of it, this was welcome news.

But after that, things kind of got weird. This isn’t the place to go into all the details, but suffice to say that this new school, Olivet, was surprisingly sloppy with the truth as they began the process of moving onto the Bethany campus. To a wide range of alumni who were still grieving their school’s demise, it felt like our school’s heritage was being used fraudulently – and for purposes that we could only guess at.

My involvement in all this started when I wrote a blog entry in which I complained about some of Olivet’s behavior, and pointed out some of the misinformation that they had been spreading. I uploaded the post to my blog, turned off my monitor, and headed downstairs with a book. I presumed that was going to be the end of it: among other things, really, nobody reads my blog. So I was pretty well surprised when I got a phone call that very evening from an Olivet administrator, in which he threatened legal action if I didn’t take my blog post down.

I didn’t take it down, of course, but as you can imagine, that was the wrong approach for him to take, and it got me even more suspicious about what Olivet was up to. So I started doing quite a bit of research on Olivet University, its history, its background, its faculty, everything I could find. And I followed up that initial blog post with several more, detailing some of the relevant information that I’d found. And some of the information I found was indeed quite interesting.

But here’s the point that I’m finally getting to. As I was researching Olivet, and writing up my findings, I found myself, almost without thinking about it, wanting to stretch the truth. Olivet had made me angry; and I absolutely wanted the bad things I found to be worse than they were; and I absolutely wanted the good things I found to not be as good as they were. I wanted to include any incriminating information I turned up, even if I thought it wasn’t likely to be true; and I wanted to leave out anything that tended to exonerate them. I found myself having to go back and rewrite whole paragraphs of my blog posts, because I had been doing exactly what I was accusing Olivet of doing, of being insufficiently careful with the truth. In brief, I wanted to be right, and I was willing to go to rather inappropriate lengths to convince others that Olivet was in the wrong. Worse than anything else, though, was the realization that I tended to do this with more frequency than I was happy to admit. My conflict with Olivet was not the first time that I had been ready to present “facts” with an unwarranted confidence.

I’ll confess, I wasn’t entirely comfortable when God pointed this out to me. But after some squirming, I did what I should really do more frequently: I repented. I didn’t get down on my knees or anything, but as I sat there, my hands on my keyboard, I prayed, “God, help me to love the truth more than being right.”

As I stand here now, I’ll confess, that sounds kind of lame. But I can’t express how freeing that simple prayer was. I have no illusions about being cured of my tendencies to exaggerate, or my desire to prove the other side wrong. But at least in that one particular debate, that one particular prayer entirely changed my perspective. The debate was no longer about me, but about the truth, and that made all the difference. I ended up having to admit that I was wrong about a couple things, but it felt OK to say so. And when my worst suspicions about Olivet eventually proved to be unfounded, I was very grateful that those suspicions hadn’t made it onto my blog. Giving up my insistence on being right was only the tiniest sip from the cup of death: but the freedom which followed in its wake was no minor taste of life.

St. Francis of Assisi

The second story I have to tell comes from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Apart from Jesus himself, more than any other human being, St. Francis’ life is an example of the extent to which dying to yourself is merely the start of an entirely new life. You may know the story. St. Francis was born to a wealthy family, but in his early twenties he renounced all of his worldly possessions, and began to serve and care for the lepers around his village. St. Francis has a well-deserved reputation for loving nature, and for caring for all of God’s creatures; but it’s worth noting that this love of nature was combined with a very strong asceticism. He renounced any possessions, he walked barefoot through the snow, and regularly engaged in extended fasts. During one such forty-day fast in preparation for Easter, St. Francis prayed that he would know the full pain that Christ suffered, and in answer to this prayer received the stigmata, the five wounds of Christ in his own body. When he died two years later, he requested that they lay him naked on the ground, so that he could return to God the same way he came. Several years ago, a modern medical analysis of St. Francis’ skeleton showed that he was suffering not only from starvation, but also quite likely from leprosy.

And yet, despite these sufferings, those who knew him universally said that the overriding characteristic of St. Francis was not pain, not sadness, not depression; but rather joy.

In his biography of St. Francis, G. K. Chesterton sums up this paradox well:

[St. Francis’ self-denial] was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. … He held on this heroic course from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the winter woods to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost as deep a certainty, that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

Conclusion

OPPC has been through a great deal over the last year. We said good-bye to Charlie last August, and then unexpectedly had to say goodbye to him again just last month. We said goodbye to Pastor Vonna just last week. And as you presumably know, Galena and I are saying our own goodbyes: this is our last Sunday here. With all of these changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us sometimes felt a little like St. Francis, lying shivering on the rocky floor.

But if you feel that way, think back again on Jesus’ words to Paul. Any pain that Jesus’ church feels, is experienced by Jesus Himself. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to our Lord; and we go forth today, not merely in His name, but with His power and authority coursing through our own bodies. We die daily, but our life, our true Life, is hidden with Christ in eternity. OPPC may yet have further deaths to die, whether literal or sacramental, and that is as it should be. In a far less dramatic manner than St. Francis, we are called to partake of our Lord’s sufferings; but we are equally called to partake of our Lord’s glory. For we are His Church, His Body, and we live in the power of His resurrection.

Compel Them to Come In

I had the opportunity to preach again this morning; and once again lacking anything substantive to put on my blog, I figured I might as well post my sermon.

Introduction: The Great Commission

Martin Luther once compared humanity to a drunkard trying to ride a horse, first falling off on the left, and then falling off on the right. And this is quite true. Hardly has humanity managed to make a mistake in one direction before we overcorrect, and fall off the horse on the other.

A good example of this is the way that our society treats religion. Back in the 1600’s, religious beliefs were not merely things you argued about; you were also expected to fight for them, and quite likely, to die for them. During the disgraceful 30 Years War, Protestant Christians fought Catholic Christians across the length and breadth of Europe, slaughtering entire cities, and burning whole countrysides, simply because their inhabitants held a different view of ecclesiastical authority, or used different words to describe communion. Perhaps a third of the population of Europe was killed during this brutal period in Western history. It was largely in reaction to those horrors that our own founding fathers enshrined in our Constitution the twin principles of individual religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. We are, and we should be, quite grateful for these protections.

And yet, if it is possible to fall off the horse on one side, slaughtering those who don’t share the details of our faith, it’s just as possible to fall off the horse on the other, and conclude that religious beliefs don’t matter. That is largely the situation in which we find ourselves today.

If you’ve been a follower of Christ for any length of time, you’ve probably had the opportunity to talk to someone who isn’t a Christian, about the fact that you are. If your experience is at all similar to mine, at some point during those conversations you’ve heard the following sentiment expressed: “I’m glad that it works for you, but it’s not really for me.” In other words, their assumption is that religious beliefs aren’t actually true. Faith might be helpful, faith might work for some people, but faith isn’t the sort of thing about which you could say, “this is correct” or “this is false.” Faith, most people are convinced, is a private matter, and if I have a different perspective than you do, the polite response is to say something conventional like, “Well, it takes all sorts.”

Of course, we can see a certain value to thinking this way. We need not go back so far as the 30 Years War to understand the power and terror of religious beliefs. September 11 was less than ten years ago, and religious terrorism remains a persistent threat to people across the globe. When we see religious beliefs used as a justification for killing, it’s perhaps natural to conclude that we should keep any beliefs we might have about the fundamental nature of reality to ourselves. As a result, common-places like “it takes all sorts” and “I’m glad it works for you,” aren’t just something people say to get out of a potentially awkward conversation; they represent a perspective that’s ingrained in our culture, and is reinforced in countless ways by the books and magazines we read, the television shows we watch, and even the advertisements we endure.

This belief, that religious claims have no real truth content, is so ingrained into most people that they don’t even recognize it as a belief: they never think to question it, because they never think about it in the first place. Yet when you do think about it, this perspective really is quite odd, and stands out sharply against the background of human societies. It only makes sense if you’ve already elevated individual selves to an almost insane epistemological height. And we most certainly have done so. I doubt there has ever been a society in the history of the world so intensely individualistic as ours. We want not only to choose our own religion free from external constraints; we also want to make up whatever religion we please; and we would generally prefer that the resulting work of our hands be free from any criticism.

In his book Habits of the Heart Robert Bellah describes an interview with a young woman named Sheila Larson. Sheila describes her religious beliefs as “Sheilaism”, and says that they basically consist of “trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.” Although Sheila feels the individuality of her religious beliefs so intensely that she can’t call them by any other name than “Sheilaism”, these beliefs are not nearly so unique as she would have them. What Sheila fancies to be her own private religion, has actually become the unquestioned assumption of hundreds of millions of people. Who says that irony is dead?

But there is a flip side to this intense individualism. Since individuals can make up their own religions as they go, and since different individuals will certainly reach different conclusions, the obvious corollary is that everyone should keep those conclusions to themselves. From this perspective, religious beliefs should be a purely private matter, like underwear: it’s generally acknowledged that most people have them, and that they make life more comfortable, but we’d rather they not be on display. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.” As soon as religion became a purely individual matter, it necessarily became a purely private one as well.

In the face of this almost universal “Sheilaism”, two aspects of Christianity stand out sharply. The first is that Christianity claims to be true: not just true for me and perhaps true for you. Christianity claims to be true, full-stop. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” Jesus said. “Nobody comes to the Father except through me.” “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” These are fundamental claims about the deep workings of reality. Before a statement can possibly be right, it has to start by being possibly wrong, and while these statements of Jesus are astonishing and outrageous on their face, they have a single glaring virtue: they might be false. And therefore they might be true.

Second, Christianity insists on delivering its message to other people, and in a loud enough voice that they have no option but to hear it. “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations.” “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” The truth of the Gospel is inseparable from its proclamation. Christianity at its heart is a missionary religion.

So this is the situation in which we find ourselves. We live in a society which believes religion should be individual and private; but we serve a Lord to whom every knee will eventually bow, and who has called us to proclaim the good news of His resurrection in a very public and conspicuous manner. I suppose the Gospel finds itself in conflict with some aspects of every culture: but these conflicts seem particularly sharp in our own. Consequently, it’s worth thinking some more about these missionary impulses – and more specifically, seeing what the Bible has to say about them.

The Master and His Feast

In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus begins by describing the Kingdom of God as a sumptuous banquet to which God has sent out invitations to all and sundry. This image of a feast and celebration is something we should keep firmly in our minds as we contemplate what it means to proclaim the Gospel. For it is indeed something we often forget: that the Christian proclamation is good news. That’s what the English word “Gospel” means, as well as the Greek word from which we get “evangelism”. And the content of Jesus’ message, and the story of His life, death and resurrection, is in fact very good news. Everywhere, Jesus describes the message of the Kingdom in images of almost outlandish pleasure and beauty. It’s a lavish wedding, a pearl of great price, a sumptuous banquet. The Gospel is health and healing, the best wine you ever tasted, water and light, bread and harvest, the fatted calf, the son who was lost and now is found.

There is, of course, one obvious way in which the Gospel is good news: the proclamation of the Gospel, and our acceptance of its message, brings the possibility of eternal salvation. If we are truly in Christ, we participate vicariously in his life, death and resurrection, and we experience in Him the hope of eternal life. One day, Christ will return to rescue the world, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away; and all will be new. An eternity with Christ, an eternity contemplating the glorious vision of God, basking in God’s undying love for us, and loving and praising God in return: that is certainly beatitude.

But we sometimes forget that the Gospel brings with it a present hope as well. Jesus’ message of salvation and redemption was not just for the age to come; it is also highly relevant to the age and to the world in which we now live. The Gospel changes people; indeed, it changes whole nations, and has changed the course of history. This present world, without the message of the Gospel, would be dramatically impoverished.

I think one of the reasons we sometimes forget this is because we are keenly aware that the arrival of this Gospel did not, in fact, always mean good news for those who heard it. For hundreds of years after Columbus, European Christians committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Christianity against Native Americans. Christians have oppressed women, have carried out pogroms against Jews, and crusades against Muslims. These are dark blots indeed against the followers of Christ, and it is important that we remember how easily even Christians can be seduced into horrific evil. But our sorrow over these sins, and our repentance that they were done in something like our name, should not make us forget how hard, even during these horrible times, many true followers of Christ sacrificed all they had for the cause of peace and justice. Evil is a powerful force in this world, and Christians have not always resisted it with success. But through the power of the Gospel, they have indeed opposed it: and there is no doubt that the Gospel has made a powerful positive difference in the history of the world.

To take but one example: throughout human history, slavery was a nearly universal institution. It has existed in one form or another, across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, throughout all of recorded history – until Christian activists fought to abolish it. It’s now inconceivable for a country to tolerate slavery: and this is entirely the result of the light of Christ being shown on the practice. Although Christians sometimes regrettably and shamefully participated in slavery, the movement to abolish slavery began with followers of Christ and was all but unknown except in nations influenced by Christianity. This is not an accident. The Gospel is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of owning another human being. If it is really true that Christ died to save even the lowest slave, there is no justification for slavery of any sort. I suspect very strongly that were it not for the yeast of the Gospel of Christ leavening the world, institutionalized, industrial chattel slavery would still be a prominent feature of life today. Just imagine what our world would be like without the moral force of Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison, or Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman. Try to imagine the stench of a slave market in Bellevue Square Mall, or the sound of the lash on Boeing assembly lines. For the millions now living in freedom who would otherwise be enslaved, for those feasting on liberty at the table of the Kingdom, the proclamation of the Gospel certainly has been good news indeed.

Those Who Declined the Invitation

When we hear the Gospel, we are receiving an invitation to sit down with Jesus at this very feast. But Jesus’ parable makes it clear that we do not need to accept that invitation. Indeed, the whole story turns on the possibility of rejecting the divine offer. And this is another key aspect of the proclamation of the Gospel. It is not always successful. In the parable of the sower, only one of the four seeds eventually bears fruit; but our own efforts to evangelize our friends and neighbors may come to fruition even more sparingly.

This does lead to another question, however, that Jesus doesn’t address directly. We all understand, I suppose, that those who consciously and explicitly reject the Gospel message have nobody but themselves to blame if they’re not present at the heavenly feast. But what about those who have never heard? Or indeed, what about those who have heard, and have even given the Gospel a fair hearing, but simply can’t convince themselves that it’s true? Is it fair for God to send someone to Hell simply because of an honest intellectual mistake?

This question is as difficult as it is common, and it remains puzzling to me that nowhere in the Bible is it clearly addressed. So in offering my thoughts on the matter, you should understand that I’m trying to put together an answer to a question the New Testament never even raises, let alone answers: so take this next bit with whatever dosing of salt you feel is appropriate.

First, the New Testament is quite clear that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ. If the Bible is indeed the Word of God in any meaningful way, it’s simply not tenable that all religions are equally viable paths to God. If we are ever to stand before God with anything like equanimity, we will do so only through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Second, the New Testament doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t possible to reject the Gospel. There are simply too many passages that warn us against such a rejection, and which offer a very clear view into the fate of those who do. Those warnings come from all sources: Paul, Peter, James, and most insistently of all, from Jesus Himself. I wish I could be a Universalist and believe that in the end everyone will make it to heaven. But I can’t square that even with today’s text, let alone the rest of the Bible. God is a gentleman, and He will not override the choices we have spent our whole lives making.

Third, not all mistakes are honest mistakes. I don’t know how God will judge the person who wants to believe, wishes that he could believe, even struggles to believe – but simply can’t convince himself that it’s true. That’s for God to decide, not me. But I don’t think many of us are actually in that position. To put it bluntly, we’re far too gullible. Unless we’re faced with overwhelming evidence, humans tend to end up believing what they wish were true. In my experience, the vast majority of people who believe that the Gospel is not true also hope that it’s not true. They dislike the idea of an Authority who will one day assess their every word and deed. They want to call their lives their own. They really do hope that no outside Power will ever judge each of their choices nor weigh every slow, imperceptible turning of their soul. When someone in this position mistakenly concludes that the Gospel is not true, their mistake is not, perhaps, completely innocent.

Finally, many Christian thinkers have speculated that those who were not Christians in this life might be offered a “second chance” to acknowledge Christ as Lord when they finally stand before His throne on the Day of Judgment. C. S. Lewis was one of those, and he put it this way in Mere Christianity:

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.

I very much hope that Lewis’ belief is true, though I must also be honest and say that I don’t know if it is or not.

Those Who Accepted the Invitation

But the rich friends who declined to attend the feast are only half the story. For the master’s house was eventually filled with the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. When Jesus first told this parable, sitting in the house of a Pharisee, it would have been difficult to miss His point: that the religious leaders of his day, the ones who should have embraced His message and been first into the Kingdom of God, had instead rejected it. In contrast, those who would have been expected to reject the Gospel, the poor and uneducated, the traitors and collaborators, the whores and drug addicts, had actually embraced it.

This strange dichotomy did not disappear after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Paul himself, in writing to the Corinthians, says,

26 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.

And this remains true today. At the macro level, Christianity is no longer a phenomenon restricted to the rich, Western world. On the contrary, Europe and the United States seem to be growing more and more secular with each passing year: but the message of Christ is vibrant, thriving and growing quickly in the poor countries of Africa and South America.

But this is also true on a much smaller scale. I’ll tell you one story; there are thousands like it.

When I’m visiting my parents in Longview, I usually go with them to their church, Columbia Heights Assembly of God. Over the years, I’ve grown acquainted with a program Columbia Heights is running called Celebrate Recovery. As you might guess from the name, Celebrate Recovery is targeted at addicts, and in Longview, this invariably means methamphetamine. Every Friday night, in the church fellowship hall, nearly a hundred current and recovering meth-heads get together to talk about Jesus. I’ve met many of these folks, and trust me, this meeting isn’t a pretty sight. My Dad, who isn’t one to mince words, says it looks like the bar scene out of Star Wars. Last Halloween, everyone came in costume, and my Dad said he couldn’t tell the difference. The people who come to Celebrate Recovery have had precious little to celebrate in their lives. They’re addicts and prostitutes and alcoholics. Many of them have spent time in jail. Most of them have spent time on the street, homeless. They don’t have any teeth. They talk weird. They’re strange. They smell. They make me uncomfortable. I don’t like how they sing.

And they love Jesus. And Jesus loves them; and they know it. Columbia Heights is in a rich neighborhood: but it’s these poor broken and bloodied slobs from Celebrate Recovery who are the beating heart of that church. On Sunday morning, it’s easy to spot them. They’ve got their hands raised higher than anyone else, and they’re singing louder. They’re not ashamed to get their bodies into it, either, and if you happen to be sitting next to one, you may get bumped a little as they start dancing. They’ve been called in from the highways and byways, they’re the crippled the blind and the lame who don’t belong at the Feast of the Kingdom of God, but got invited anyway.

I don’t mean to say that the folks from Celebrate Recovery are perfect Christians. Hell, they know that. That’s why they’re there. They know they’re not perfect: but they know that they are loved.

Conclusion: The Great Authority

I think many of us find the whole idea of evangelism intimidating. It brings to mind images of street preachers, or folks turning up on your doorstep on Saturday morning, smiles plastered on their faces and a stack of tracts in their hand. To be sure, those things have their place, especially for those who are called to that sort of ministry.

But evangelism doesn’t have to be intimidating. To start with, remember that evangelism is the reason why you’re here this morning. The reason your butt’s in that pew is because Peter or Paul or James or John told somebody who told somebody who told somebody else about Jesus – and one of those somebodies told you. Evangelism isn’t something foreign to any of us: it’s something we’ve each experienced. It’s why we’re here. There’s no reason to be scared of it.

So if you want to start evangelizing, if you want to start taking seriously Christ’s command to proclaim the Gospel, do this. Start by thinking about the things that attracted you to Christ, and the things that have held you to Him over the years. Think about the satisfaction that comes from serving Him and His body. Think about the difference He’s made in your life: how you’re not the person you once were, or would have been, had He not been with you, step by step. Think about why you’re here this morning. And then look for opportunities to explain those reasons to the people around you. As Peter said, “Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

There’s no particular need to be pushy about it. To be sure, if you’re a natural salesman, feel free to be as assertive as you want: I’ve seen it work. But most of us aren’t like that. We already have conversations with friends and family and coworkers where it’s natural to ask questions about their own beliefs: so go ahead and ask, and listen to their answers. And when the timing is right, or when they ask, tell them what you yourself believe, and why. If someone is going through a hard time, offer to pray for them. Go out of your way to help people out. Talk about your church. Bring a thoughtful but explicitly Christian perspective into conversations about politics or business or family life. Talk about why you went down to D’Iberville to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Tell them why you think God is interested in social justice. Pique their curiosity. Surprise them. Give them an explanation for the hope that is within you.

When Jesus told his disciples – when he told us – to go forth into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation, He didn’t tell us it would be easy. As a matter of fact, He told us pretty bluntly that it would be difficult. But He also told us that He would be with us as we went, even to the end of the age. And that makes all the difference.

Why do the Nations Rage?

I had the opportunity to preach at my church this morning, and since my blogging has been a little thin lately, I thought I’d post it here as well.

The Crevice

Strange things happen on mountains. Mountains are hard to climb, and even harder to live on. They can kill you if you’re not careful, and sometimes they can kill you even if you are. Twice, I’ve fallen into crevasses on a mountain; but I’ve also seen sights of unbearable beauty from their summits. Mountains take your breath away, literally and figuratively. They leave your lungs aching from the exertion and your heart aching from their beauty. They are astonishing and terrifying, as inhospitable as they are alluring. We’re not meant to live on mountains, but our lives would be far less rich if we could never see their distant peaks, imagine their thin, cold air, and sometimes, stand on their summits.

It’s no surprise, then, that mountains have often been places where God chooses to meet human beings. Mountains stand apart from our daily lives; they are beautiful and mysterious and terrifying: and in this way, they are much like our God. When Moses removed his sandals before the burning bush, he was standing on the sides of Mt. Sinai; and less than a year later, he was standing on its summit, communing with God, receiving the Law of God’s covenant with His holy people, hiding in a crack in the rock when God Himself passed by in a storm. Many hundreds of years later, when Elijah fled from Jezebel, he took refuge in perhaps the same cleft in the rocks of Mount Sinai, and once again God descended: but this time, God was not in the earthquake, God was not in the fire, God was not in the storm: but after the storm, there was a still small voice, and God spoke to Elijah, restored his faith and his courage, and sent him on his way.

And of course, in our passage today, Moses and Elijah are once again privileged to meet God on a mountaintop, though in a rather different setting. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, that point in the church year when we remember first the sleepy, then the astonished and finally the terrified looks on the disciples’ faces. Mountains are places where God can break through into our normal existence, and today we will try to imagine, and maybe even remember, some small part of what that can look like.

The Climb

When Jesus took Peter, James and John for a hike on that late winter day two thousand years ago, it was at a crucial time in Jesus’ ministry. Matthew tells us that that just six days prior, Jesus had for the first time revealed to His disciples that His destiny was a death by torture at the hands of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The disciples were still reeling from this revelation, none more than Peter, who, like many of us, was the proud owner of a tongue that frequently outran his brain. Peter began to upbraid Jesus for thinking this way, and for his troubles received perhaps the harshest rebuke Jesus ever uttered: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Peter’s response made it clear to Jesus that His disciples needed to understand more about exactly who He was; and this undoubtedly weighed on His thoughts as they ascended together that morning.

Peter, James and John, similarly, must have had much on their minds. They had been together with Jesus now for nearly three years. They had left their careers and their families to follow Him, even though they didn’t really know what they were doing, or why they were leaving all they held dear, or even who they were following. There was no doubt Jesus was a popular rabbi and a charismatic teacher: the crowds hung on His words, and He spoke with an uncommon authority, even daring on occasion to constrain or correct the Law of Moses. But the more time they spent with Him, the more impressed they grew. He spoke with authority not only to the crowds, but also to the wind and the waves. His touch could not just comfort the sick, but could also heal them. A leper who approached Jesus did not make Jesus unclean, but rather, it was Jesus who made the leper clean. So the disciples knew Jesus was at least a prophet, and a powerful one: anointed by God in a way that Israel had not seen for many generations. But was Jesus something more? Perhaps, they thought. Perhaps He might even be the one to redeem Israel, to return Israel to the glory she had formerly enjoyed, and to the faithfulness that she had not. But even as these hopes were rising in their hearts, Jesus had begun to talk of disturbing things: of conspiracies and betrayals, of a trial, torture, and death. None of this made any sense to them. How could God raise up a servant, and then allow that servant to suffer? How could God place His Spirit upon a prophet, and then withdraw His protection? How could God anoint a king, and then lead that king to his death?

And so it was that Jesus and His disciples reached the summit. With all this on their minds, and after a wearisome climb, followed by a lengthy prayer, it’s perhaps understandable that the disciples decided a nap was in order. And so, one after another, their eyelids closed, and they began to drift in and out of sleep.

Try to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those disciples on that morning. Lying on a hard bed of uncomfortable rocks, you’re napping fitfully, slipping in and out of dreams, occasionally lifting an eye to see if anything interesting is happening. Then something you had initially mistaken for another uncomfortable dream abruptly becomes all too real. It’s the shadows from the rocks that you notice first: they’re all at the wrong angles. A sudden light has flooded the mountaintop, and with a start, you look up and realize that the light is coming from your rabbi’s face. Just a few seconds earlier his tunic had been grey with old dirt and muddy from the morning’s ascent. But now His clothes are suddenly and painfully white – whiter than any earthly detergent could make them, as Mark tells us helpfully. Still blinking and shielding your eyes, a mounting excitement compels you look closer, a mounting terror all but convinces you to flee. And then you see not just Jesus, but two other figures that weren’t there a moment ago. In that sharp and frightening light, you can’t make out their faces, but you hear Jesus greet them by name: Moshe, He says. Eliyahu. It takes a minute to sink in, but as they begin to converse, you realize who your rabbi is talking to. Moses. Elijah. And He’s talking with them like they’re old friends.

Luke adds an interesting detail at this point. He’s the only one of the Gospel writers to give us any hints as to the content of that memorable conversation. He tells us that Moses and Elijah were discussing with Jesus his impending departure from Jerusalem. We should note that Luke was a very careful writer, and the Greek word he uses for “departure” is literally “εξοδος”, “Exodus”. Moses and Elijah were discussing the Exodus that Jesus was about to bring to completion in Jerusalem. And remember what the Exodus was: it was when God made the children of Jacob into the children of God, when God established an eternal covenant between Himself and the squirrelly sons of Israel. And Jesus was about to do the same thing in Jerusalem: he was about pour out his life-blood to establish a new covenant between God and humanity.

It’s at this point that poor Peter’s mouth runs away with him again, and he utters what must be one of the greatest non sequiturs of all time. He’s just been confronted with two of the greatest figures of the Old Testament, heroes of Israel who have been dead for a combined two thousand years. In addition, it’s become apparent that Jesus is on speaking terms with these two men; and beyond that, has developed an uncanny resemblance to a light bulb. So what does Peter say in response to this astonishing situation? “Umm, Lord, Lord, umm, hey, I’ve got an idea. This would be a great place to pitch some tents.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so hard on poor Peter. His idea actually had some merit to it. The Greek word for “tent” – σκηνη – also means “tabernacle”, that is, a place of worship. A σκηνη was where the Ark of the Covenant dwelt; a σκηνη where all of Israel worshiped until Solomon built his famous temple. A tent, a tabernacle, was where Israel celebrated the great acts of God, and remembered the amazing things that God had done in bringing them out of Egypt, repeatedly delivering them from the hands of their enemies. So although it’s not entirely clear what Peter was thinking in suggesting three tents, he certainly realized something big was happening there on the mountain, something worthy of celebration and remembrance.

The Crux

But hardly were the words out of Peter’s mouth when the disciples’ very strange and impressive day became even stranger and more terrifying. While Peter was still speaking, a cloud covered the mountaintop, much as clouds had covered Mt. Sinai during Moses and Elijah’s earlier visits. And a voice came from the shining mist: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.”

If you’ve ever been in an earthquake, you must have some sense for what the disciples were feeling at that moment. A powerful earthquake is an almost numinous experience. When you feel concrete and asphalt begin to move under your feet, when you watch solid rock dance like a wave in the ocean, when the hills themselves skip like lambs, it becomes plain that the mundane and simple texture of what we call reality is not all that there is. In an earthquake, we realize that an external force has the potential to break through into our daily lives, that perhaps this reality has always been breaking through, that our lives are mere foam on the surface of something larger and infinitely more powerful than ourselves, that the depths of existence hold a power and a mystery and a terror we had never suspected.

Any thoughts the disciples might have entertained about being equal to Jesus, or for that matter, of being equal to the situation, were immediately abandoned. They did what every sane person would do: they fell trembling on their faces before the God of the universe.

But what did the voice in the cloud mean by those mysterious words? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!” Any first-century Jew could have told you in an instant that those words were an allusion to a famous and well-known Messianic psalm. Earlier today, we read this passage from Psalm 2:

I will proclaim the LORD’s decree:
   He said to me, “You are my son;
   today I have become your father.
⁸ Ask of me,
   and I will make the nations your inheritance,
   the ends of the earth your possession.
⁹ You will shepherd them with a rod of iron;
   you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

Psalm 2 describes a revolt of the nations against the King of Israel, the “anointed one,” for that is what the Hebrew word משיח, Messiah means, or the Greek word χριστος, Christ. In this Psalm, the Messiah had been anointed, installed as king and proclaimed as the Son of God on the holy mountain of God. But the Messiah now faced a rebellion from those who should have known better.

The kings of the earth rise up
   and the rulers band together
   against the LORD and against his anointed, saying,
³ “Let us break their chains
   and throw off their shackles.”

Originally, this psalm referred to a specific king of Israel: perhaps David, possibly one of his descendants, Solomon, Hezekiah, or one of the others. This king had been crowned on Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, and ruled, under God, with God’s blessing. But there were many nations around Israel: Moab, Syria, Edom, Egypt, and others. These nations were restive, and were often opposed to Israel, to Israel’s king, and to Israel’s God. When the kings of Israel were strong, the neighboring rulers resisted their authority. When the kings of Israel were weak, the neighboring rulers took advantage of this weakness, and plundered their people and stole their territory. But in the end, this psalm says, God would stand up for His king and would redeem His people: and those who opposed God in this matter would find themselves learning better wisdom in a somewhat painful fashion.

It should be obvious now how this psalm relates to the story of the Transfiguration, and what the disciples would have understood the voice from heaven to mean. “This is my Son, the Messiah,” God was saying. “Here on the holy mountain I have installed Him, and I proclaim that He speaks with my blessing and acts with my authority. The ends of the earth are His possession; the whole world belongs to Him. Even so, what He has been telling you is true. He is facing a challenge from those who claim to rule the world I gave Him. They will reject His authority, and conspire against Him. But I will be with Him, and in the end, their rebellion will not succeed. They will be broken like pottery, and my Son, the son of David the shepherd king, will shepherd not merely the people of Israel, but all the nations of the world.”

The Cross

The Transfiguration stands out sharply against all the other stories in the New Testament. We are told, of course, that Jesus performed many strange and wonderful miracles during the course of His ministry. Indeed, miracles followed Him around like so many sheep: from the angel who announced his birth, to the angels who greeted the wondering disciples on the Mount of Olives after his ascension, Jesus’ life was marked by repeated incursions of the supernatural into our merely natural world. But amidst all these miraculous stories, the Transfiguration remains unique. The Gospels clearly present Jesus as the suffering servant: but in the Transfiguration, we see him, for the first and only time prior to the Resurrection, as a triumphant Lord. The Gospels tell us Jesus was a man, fully human, like ourselves; in the Transfiguration, we are shown that Jesus was God, fully divine, like His Father. We know that Jesus did not defend Himself before the Sanhedrin and Pilate; the Transfiguration tells us that Jesus could have defended Himself very ably indeed, had he but chosen to.

The brilliance that shone from Jesus’ face that morning brought light to much that had hitherto been shrouded in mystery. But nothing on which that light shown threw so long and dark a shadow as the cross; and that shadow stretches out over the centuries, and reaches across the oceans. Indeed, we still live today in that shadow. For in the light of the Transfiguration, it becomes clear what actually happened on that dark afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem. It was not a good man going bravely to his death. It was not a teacher of peace and love whose message had been sadly misinterpreted. It was not even a dangerous revolutionary, ruthlessly executed by those whose positions he threatened. No: the cross was the death of the undying God, the passion of the impassive deity, Omnipotence made helpless. On the cross, Life itself gave His life so that we might live.

And of course, this changes everything. If God did not go to the gallows, Christianity is at best a maudlin religion with a mildly interesting moral code. But if it was God in person who hung on that tree, if it was God Himself who left infinite glory to rescue a fallen humanity, then everything we thought we knew about this world is wrong. We are far worse off than we thought: because it took the death of God to save us. But we are far more blessed, and far more important, than we could have imagined: because our redemption was purchased with a price beyond any possible value.

As G. K. Chesterton said:

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already: but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.

The Crown

But eventually the cloud lifted, and the awful light faded. The disciples felt Jesus shaking them: “Arise,” he said, “don’t be scared.” And when they dared to raise their eyes, they saw only their rabbi, with the same dirty clothing, the same care-lined face, the same long beard and dusty sandals.

Their descent off the mountain that afternoon must have involved some long and interesting conversations, as well as some equally long and interesting silences. All we know, however, is that Jesus told them not to tell anyone about what had happened, until He had been raised from the dead. And it’s not hard to see why: however true what had happened on the mountain, and however important the lesson, it was a dangerous truth, and the lesson could be easily misunderstood. For just as Jesus needed to make it clear to the disciples that he was not just another prophet, not just another rabble-rousing Messiah with dreams of greatness, Jesus also needed to make it clear to them that his destiny did not consist in evicting the Romans from the land of Israel. Yes, Jesus’ authority was not that of a human being, however wise, moral or charismatic. His choices and His destiny brooked no argument from a mouthy Peter, for Jesus had set his face towards Jerusalem, and His destiny was death on the cross. But while the Transfiguration made it clear that Jesus was more than a prophet, it was not until Jesus’ death and resurrection had been accomplished that the disciples could understand just how radical Jesus’ mission was.

The voice on the mountain had declared Jesus to be the unique Son of God; and by quoting from Psalm 2, God had, in effect, made Jesus the recipient of the extravagant and even militaristic claims in that psalm. All the old prophecies, all the old promises, were to come true in Jesus. Jesus could ask of God, and God would give Him the nations as His inheritance, the ends of the earth as His possession. If Jesus had asked the disciples for advice at this point, they would certainly have recommended that Jesus use that position and authority to drive out the Romans, and restore Israel to its former glory.

But however far the disciples could see that day on the mountain, Jesus could see further. He could see far beyond the borders of Israel, over the oceans, and through the millennia. He could see into a small church on the outskirts of Seattle, into a congregation mostly faithful, sometimes struggling, always in need of grace. In short, He could see us. He knew that we needed redemption every bit as much as Israel did. He knew that we needed His love and His leadership, His compassion and His wisdom. And He knew that we needed His death.

And so it was that Jesus went willingly from the Mount of Transfiguration to the Mount of Golgotha. He asked, and His Father truly gave Him the nations as His inheritance. You and I are a small part, but a well-tended and cherished part, of that possession. For we belong to Christ.

These recent weeks have been filled with two events of great moment and some discomfort for our church. Pastor Vonna announced last month that she will be leaving in September, and I anticipate that we will feel the want of her gifts immensely. And we received word just this week that after 13 years of hard work and faithful service, Pastor Charlie won’t be returning at the end of his sabbatical. He is leaving with good will and blessings on both sides, but I, for one, will miss my friend a great deal.

In these times, it may be all too easy, like Peter, to jump to conclusions and pass judgment on matters we don’t understand. Like Peter, it may be tempting for us to let our mouths race ahead of our brains and say things that we may later regret. These are unsettled times, after all. But we also have the opportunity to learn a lesson it took Peter many more tries to learn: that Jesus is in charge. This is not Pastor Charlie’s church. This is not Pastor Vonna’s church. It is not mine, and it is not yours. It is our Lord’s. Our Lord died for this church. Our Lord bought every member of this congregation with His blood. You and I, each one of us, and every one of us: we are not our own, for we were bought with a price. Our Lord could see us from the Mount of Transfiguration when the disciples fell on their faces; He could see us from the Mount of Golgotha, when the disciples fled in fear; He could see us from the Mount of Olives when He ascended to heaven; and He is watching over us right now, from His seat at the right hand of His Father. Our Lord is present with us, and He will not abandon us, for we belong to Him, and He takes good care of His own.