Never Again

Scriptures:         Genesis 9:8-17; I Peter 3:18-22,  Mark 1:9-15

 

Today is the first Sunday in Lent, that 40-day season of repentance and refocusing on God, in preparation for the events of Passion Week, for Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Lent is based on the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism, fasting and praying and being tempted by Satan.   During his time in the wilderness, Jesus was prayerfully trying to discern the kind of ministry to which God was calling him, and Satan was offering some options that would have derailed Jesus’ ministry.  Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels give us more information on the details of Jesus’ temptations – to make his ministry primarily about serving his own needs by turning stones into bread to satisfy his hunger following his 40-day fast, to make his ministry about spectacular displays of power by jumping off the pinnacle of the Temple, and to receive power over all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worshipping Satan.  But Mark’s account – the Gospel reading for today – is very lean, very spare on details:  “

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

The Revised Common Lectionary – the cycle of Scripture readings followed by the Roman Catholic and many mainline Protestant Churches – pairs this reading with our reading from Genesis 9, which immediately follows the great flood, when the waters finally subsided and Noah, his family, and those on the ark set foot on dry ground.  Remember that, according to Genesis, the flood was God’s response to human wickedness, when God elected to save a small remnant of humanity, wipe out the rest, and start over – as Genesis 6 tells us,

 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord…Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. (Genesis 6:5-8, 11-13)

“The thoughts of humankind was only evil continually.”  Really strong words – ‘don’t hold back, God, tell us what you really think.’  God was on the verge of giving up on humankind and indeed even all the plants and animals he had created, though at the very end we’re also told that “Noah found favor in his site.” So the flood was a sort of a divine re-boot of creation, though at calamitous cost.  Following such a calamity, those who survived the flood needed God’s reassurance – from their point of view, they had to be terrified that if they messed up again, God might throw another divine temper tantrum and wipe everything out, including them.  So God offered reassurance.  Let’s hear these words from Genesis once again:

“Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, "As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth."
God said, "This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth." God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth." (Genesis 9:8-17)

Parents and teachers know that often, when instructing children, it’s necessary to repeat things a number of times, perhaps in various ways, so that the children can remember.  Our passage from Genesis is like that, very repetitive, as if God is really trying to make sure Noah and the survivors of the flood get what God is saying.  Notice how many times the word “covenant” appear – seven times, as it happens, which in the Old Testament is a number signifying completeness. And three times – the number three is also significant in Scripture – three times the words “never again” – “never again will there be a flood to destroy all flesh.”  It’s almost as if God himself is sorry for what he had done.  And he gives Noah and his family a sign – the rainbow.  “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth."

I want to go back to that word “covenant”.  What is a “covenant”?  A covenant is an agreement, with promises involved.  In the legal world, a covenant is, in fact, a contract based on promises that are legally enforceable – if the parties fail to uphold the provisions of the contract, there are adverse consequences, often the payment of money damages.  And while the analogy to the legal world doesn’t hold exactly, we can understand that God is not just making casual statements, but solemn promises – solemn promises never again to send a flood to wipe out all flesh - to which he will hold himself accountable.  And the rainbow is, in effect, the witness and guarantee of the covenant.

What does all this have to do with us?  What can we gather from this strange but striking story in Genesis?  As we begin Lent, here are a few thoughts:

Human sin, especially corruption and violence, really angers God.  Ours is emphatically not a God who says, “If it feels good, do it!”  We worship a God who is not only powerful, but just.  As persons created in God’s image, while we lack God’s power, God also expects us to act justly.  Note that, when God speaks to Noah, God isn’t speaking about just any old sin, but corruption and violence.  Corruption.  Violence.  Corruption is mentioned three times, and violence is mentioned twice.  We’re not given details on the nature of the corruption – economic corruption?, social corruption?, sexual corruption?, all of the above? – we just don’t know, though I think it’s safe to say that the kind of corruption that leaves a few with great power and wealth while the multitudes starve is greatly displeasing to God.  Any uncertainties about corruption aside, the concept of violence, that I think we can wrap our minds around.  We know what violence is – one-on-one assault and murder, as well as oppression and war.  These are not just unfortunate, but sinful.   And corruption and violence, on a global scale, characterize all the great national powers, most especially our own country.  And, as an old confession of sin puts it, “God for our sins is justly displeased.”

God will not give up on us.  Here’s the second thing we learn from our reading in Genesis.  God made a covenant never again to wipe out all flesh on earth.  And, throughout Scripture, we see the importance of the saving remnant – when humanity’s sins threaten to become overwhelming, when humanity has painted itself into a corner by its sin, God always finds one or a few people with whom to start over.  In this case, Noah and his family were the remnant.  Just a bit later, the Tower of Babel debacle unfolds, and humankind has again painted itself into yet another corner – but then we’re given the geneology of Abram, starting a new cycle of deliverance.  When God’s people are once again in a dead-end situation, in bondage in Egypt, God raises up Moses, and then Joshua after him.  In the time following Joshua, God raises up various judges, including Samuel, the last and greatest of them.  When the kings of Judah and Israel sinned, God raised up the prophets.  Later, God allowed God’s people to go into exile in Babylon, but a remnant returned to rebuild Jerusalem and its Temple.  God won’t allow us to destroy ourselves, but steps in to save us.

The work of Jesus Christ is central to God’s plan of salvation.   On one level, Jesus of Nazareth was another one of those whom God raised up to deliver God’s oppressed people.  But on a much broader level, Jesus Christ provides salvation to humankind on a global scale.  Just as the disaster of the flood destroyed on a global scale, Jesus Christ saves on a global, even cosmic, scale – remember those words from the beginning of John’s gospel:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was  God…..and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”  And it’s really something for me to wrap my head around, both the transcendence and the particularity of God’s work through Jesus.  Jesus saves on a global, even cosmic scale, but his work on earth took place in a particular place, among particular people – in Israel, in towns like Bethlehem and Nazareth and Capernaum, which were under Roman oppression in Jesus’ day and are patrolled by soldiers with machine guns even today – In Jerusalem, where the Via Doloroso, the way of the cross, winds today through the narrow, winding, sometimes fragrant in pleasant and unpleasant ways streets of Old City Jerusalem, amid the shops and souks owned and run mostly by Christian and Muslim Arabs, with the sign “Via Doloroso” in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, and little but Roman numerals to mark the various stages of Jesus’ passage.  The earthly events took place in these humble, sometimes out of the way settings, but they have cosmic significance in God’s work of salvation, to the point where our reading from I Peter tells us not only that our own baptisms trace their lineage to Noah’s flood, but that even after the crucifixion, Jesus preached to the spirits in prison, those who had died in their disobedience, so that nobody is left without a witness to God’s saving work.

As we look at our world today, in which the privilege of so few results in the suffering of so many, and the ability of planet earth to sustain life seems threatened, it can easily be said that

“the earth is corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth is filled with violence” and  “the wickedness of humankind is great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts is only evil continually.”  Humankind has really made a mess of things, and, having sown the wind, we may well reap the whirlwind.  But we have God’s promise that, even now, God is working to turn us from our foolish ways and to save us.  The rainbow is the sign of God’s promise of deliverance, and the cross is the sign of  God’s salvation.

To quote from an old Good Friday hymn:

“O love of God! O sin of man! In this dread act your strength is tried.

And victory remains with love: Jesus, our Lord, is crucified!”

Amen.

Clay Jars

Scripture:  2 Kings 2:1-12, 2 Corinthians 4:1-12;  Mark 9:2-9

Today is Transfiguration Sunday, which always falls on the last Sunday before Lent.  On Transfiguration Sunday, we read about Jesus taking Peter, James, and John, who were the inner circle of the twelve disciples, to the top of a high mountain, when they had a vision of Jesus being transfigured.  We’re told that his appearance changed, and his robe became whiter than anyone could bleach it, and he was speaking with Moses and Elijah.  The three disciples hardly knew what to make of what they were seeing, and Peter started babbling about building huts for them to stay in.  A voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.”  Then the vision passed, and they saw Jesus as they’d always seen him.  Jesus cautioned the three not to tell anyone what they’d seen until after he’d been raised from the dead.

Peter and the other two disciples hardly knew what to make of the vision they’d seen, and we may scratch our heads trying to make sense of it as well.  Was Jesus just showing off? 

This vision came shortly after a critical moment in Jesus’ ministry, when Jesus had asked the disciples “Who do you say that I am?”, and Peter responded by saying, “You are the Messiah”.  But when Jesus began to teach that he would be killed, Peter rebuked him – and Jesus in turn rebuked Peter, saying Peter’s mind was set on earthly things, not heavenly things.  The vision of the Transfiguration was granted to Peter, James, and John to give them a clearer picture of who Jesus is, and what it meant that Jesus was the Messiah. 

They saw Jesus on a high mountain, in glory, speaking with Moses, representing the Law, and Elijah, representing the prophetic tradition.  Just as Moses was on the mountain when he received the law from God, the three disciples saw Jesus on the mountain in glory.  Jesus is presented as the fulfillment of the work of Moses and Elijah.  The words spoken by the voice to the disciples are the same as those heard by Jesus at his baptism – “This is my Son, the beloved” – with the additional words, “Listen to him.”

So Jesus was not just showing off, but granting his closest disciples, the inner circle among the twelve, a glimpse of who he was and what he was about, underneath the muck and mire of daily life.  The disciples knew Jesus as teacher and healer.  Peter proclaimed Jesus as Messiah, but in so doing, he likely had in mind a political leader who would free Israel from Roman domination.  By granting this vision, Jesus was showing his closest disciples that his mission was of much greater significance than the disciples envisioned, and that the divine power at work within Jesus was far beyond their understanding.  He gave his disciples a glimpse of the power at work within him, that empowered him to teach and heal.

Our reading from 2 Corinthians reminds us that, like Jesus, we too have God’s power at work within us.  Paul writes, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’” – a reference to Genesis, where God said “let there be light” – “who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”  - and this is the glory that Peter, James, and John saw on the Mount of Transfiguration.

But the three disciples only saw this glory on the mountain for an instant, and then they saw Jesus as he had been before.  In the same way, the treasure of the good news of Jesus Christ is in our lives, but contained in clay jars, that is, our fragile human bodies and our limited human understandings.  Of course, Paul’s making a contrast, placing high value on the treasure within; not so much on the container, which is fragile, expendable, disposable – one commentary I read said that, in our culture, Paul might use the metaphor of putting treasure in a paper cup.    In our culture, we obsess over the clay jars, over the paper cups, obsess over our bodies, how attractive they are, how strong they are.  But, ultimately, our bodies let us down; they get sick, they age, ultimately they die.  For Paul, the fact that, despite many hardships and his own bodily limitations, he is able to proclaim the Gospel in the face of persecution, shows that the power of the gospel is God’s, not his own.  As Paul writes, he – and we – are always carrying in the body the dying of Jesus – that is to say, our own bodily sufferings – so that the life of Jesus may also be visible in our bodies.

Usually on Transfiguration Sunday, I focus on the Gospel text, with the momentary image of Jesus in glory.  This year, I’m giving some space to Paul’s metaphor of “treasure in clay jars” because of the passing of one of our longtime members, Linda, from cancer.  Linda was one of our members that we didn’t see at church very often, though I’m very glad to say she was with us this past Easter, and she also sometimes came out to our auctions.  Linda had worked for over 40 years as an emergency room nurse at Frankford Torresdale, now Aria Torresdale, hospital.  She worked weekend shifts so that other staff could get to church.   Linda was a person of faith, praying with and for those she treated in the ER.

Linda had just retired, and was hoping to travel….and then she was diagnosed with cancer that had spread.  Linda started chemo, but it was discovered that the cancer had traveled to her brain.  She was in hospice at Nazareth Hospital, with her family sitting vigil, and so died with her family members surrounding her.

The clay jar that was Linda’s body is broken, but the treasure of faith within Linda lives on.  As Paul wrote, “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”  Paul further wrote that “We are always confident, even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord – for we walk by faith, not by sight.  Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”  Paul longed to be at home with the Lord, but knew that God needed him to be at home in the body a while longer, to proclaim the good news of the Gospel. Linda completed her mission on earth, and she’s at home with the Lord and with the members of her family who went before her.

For we who remain, remember that, as persons of faith, each of us carry the treasure of God’s grace within the clay jars that are our bodies.  This calls on us to regard one another as vessels of God’s grace, and to treat one another accordingly.  Each of us, no matter how young or old or short or tall, has the treasure of the Gospel within us.  May we treasure our time with one another, for none of us knows how many days in this life  God will grant to us.

I’ll close with these words from Paul:  “So we do not lose heart.  Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.”  May we not lose heart, but instead give thanks to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Kairos

Scripture:  Jonah 3:1-5, 10, I Corinthians 7:29-31;  Mark 1:14-20

Kairos

As I was meditating on our Scripture passages for today, I was struck by the fact that all three readings contain the element of time.  In our Old Testament reading, Jonah proclaims to Nineveh, “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.   In our Gospel reading, Jesus begins his ministry with the words, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel.”  And in our reading from I Corinthians, Paul writes, “I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short.”   Paul thought that the world would soon be coming to an end, and so he advised his readers to live as if they were running out of time, and thus not to cling too closely to the things of this life:  “let those who mourn live as if they are  not mourning, and those rejoicing as if they were not rejoicing, and those who have possessions as those with no possessions, for the present form of the world is passing away.”  As I pondered further on the nearly two thousand years that have passed since Paul wrote these words, I was reminded of Salvador Dali’s famous painting “The Persistence of Memory” – it’s the one with the melting clocks, and I included a copy in a bulletin insert – so if you leave worship today with nothing else, you’ll have a not-very-good inkjet-printed copy of a famous, if famously bizarre, work of art.  Just to reassure you, the picture of the melting clocks has nothing to do with the length of today’s sermon.  I’m not an artist or an art critic, nor do I play one on TV – watching Rod Serling’s Night Gallery on TV growing up is about as close as I’ve ever gotten – but in my artistically illiterate way, I’d observe that in this painting by Dali, with its melting clocks, time and memory have a fluid, elastic quality.  At the same time, the closed pocketwatch in the lower left corner, being devoured by ants, reminds us that, if not used purposefully, our time, indeed our lives, can be devoured by trivialities. 

Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.”  In the Greek language in which the Gospels were originally written, there are two words used for time.  One is chronos time – the time that is captured by our watches and calendars.  From the Greek word chronos we get words such as chronic and chronology and chronological.  The other – and the Greek word for time used in today’s reading – is “kairos”.  It has a meaning of “the appointed time” and, particularly with regards to God, it means the time that God has chosen to act in a special way.   Perhaps we can think of these two kinds of time in our own lives.   Chronos time is the time we live with every day, when we know we have to get up early to get spouse and kids off to work or school, when we’re watching the clock to see how long until our workday is over or the calendar to see how long till the weekend, when we look back over the past week or month or year or decade and wonder where the time has gone.  But then there are those moments where things come together in a special way – that moment when we meet that special someone who ends up being a spouse or best friend, or an experience that changes the course of our life – when we discover a new talent or skill we didn’t know we had.  These pivotal moments in our lives, when time is on a hinge and we stand in the doorway between what are lives were and what they will be, and there’s no going back – those are kairos moments, moments when God acts in our lives in a special way.  Often we may not recognize those moments when we’re in them.  We may only recognize them in retrospect, when we look back and think that, “if I hadn’t been in this place at this time and this other person hadn’t been at the same place at the same time, how different my life would be today.”

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is at one of those pivotal moments.  He had just been baptized by John the Baptist – and heard the voice of God calling Jesus God’s son, the beloved – and then spent forty days in the wilderness pondering what God was calling him to do, and, we’re told, being tempted with false choices by Satan.  News of John’s arrest apparently prompted Jesus to realize that this was the appointed time for Jesus to begin his ministry.  And so he called Simon and his brother Andrew – poor fishermen, who were casting from the shore into the sea because they had no boat – and later James and John, whose family was more prosperous, with a boat and even hired men.  God had prepared their hearts, and when Jesus said, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” – they all followed….Simon and Andrew didn’t have much in the way of material possessions to leave behind, but we’re told that James and John left their father and the hired men in the boat, left the family business behind to follow Jesus.

How can we recognize these kairos moments, these life-changing moments?  How can we be prepared for them?  The brief reading from I Corinthians gives us a clue:  Paul tells his readers that since the appointed time is short they – and we - are to live in a way so that we’re not caught up in the world around us.  In the words of an old hymn, “Jesus calls us from the worship of the vain world’s golden store, from each idol that would keep us, saying Christian, love me more.”  If we’re caught up in chasing what the world has to offer, we will miss the moment in which God is calling us. Now, at our midweek service this past Wednesday, we were reading the story in Acts chapter 9 of Paul’s call, when God knocked Paul off his horse and granted him a vision of Jesus.  For Paul, that was a kairos moment, in which he went from being a persecutor of the early church to perhaps the greatest missionary of the early church.  And earlier in the book of Jonah, in a section we didn’t read today, the prophet Jonah tried to run away from his kairos moment, when God commanded Jonah to preach to Nineveh and he got on a boat to Tarshish, traveling in the opposite direction…..that’s where the famous story comes in of Jonah getting thrown off the boat and swallowed by a whale, and brought back to square one, back to where he started – and it was after the whale coughed Jonah up on shore that he heard God’s call a second time, and went to preach to Nineveh.  But when God is trying to get our attention, it’s unlikely God will knock us off our horse or send a whale to swallow us up….though I sometimes wish God would be that obvious – in order to hear God’s voice, to recognize the kairos moment, the appointed time, we have to pay attention.  Over and over through the Gospels, Jesus tells his disciples to “keep awake, to watch therefore, for you know not the hour.” That word is for us as well.

Some kairos moments – some life-changing moments – are easier to recognize than others, and we have one such life-changing moment before us today, as Benjamin Stephen Jones is being baptized.  Baptism is the rite by which we enter the church – a rite of initiation and inclusion, a rite of passage – but it comes with many layers of meaning.  By baptism we are included in Christ’s death and resurrection – Romans tells us that when we are baptized, we are baptized into Christ’s death, so that with Christ we will be raised from the dead.  In the waters of baptism our sinful human nature is drowned – as those not on the ark were drowned at the time of Noah – and we rise up out of the water with the new life of Christ within us, pardoned and cleansed, freed from the power of sin, freed to love and serve God and neighbor as children of God, disciples of Christ, and members of Christ’s church.  In baptism we receive the anointing and the promise of the Holy Spirit.  By baptism we are made members, not only of Emanuel Church, but of the worldwide body of Christ, and in baptism we are called to ministry as part of that body.  Ministry is not just something the pastor does on Sunday, but it is something to which all baptized Christians are called every day of the week.  And so this baptism of Benjamin Stephen Jones, while it looks like just the sprinkling of some water and the intonation of some words, is a life-changing event.  Like a downpour of water getting into our hair and our eyes and ears and nose, in baptism, God’s grace gets into every part of our lives, and we are never the same again.

God claims us in our baptism.  The German reformer Martin Luther went through many periods of self-doubt.  As he was translating the Greek text of the Bible into German so that the common people could read it, he struggled with doubt every step of the way, felt himself assailed by demons, to the point where he would sometimes throw an inkpot at whatever he felt was tormenting him.  But during these moments of doubt he would say to himself, “But I am baptized.  But I am baptized.”  For Luther, his baptism was the sign of an unbreakable relationship with God, a relationship stronger than his doubts and fears.

Many of our longtime members grew up with the Heidelberg Catechism.  The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism reads, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death.”  And the answer begins, “That I belong, body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself, but to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ…..” – and it goes on from there.    We can take comfort in knowing that we belong, not to ourselves, but to Christ, who through the waters of baptism claims us for Christ’s own.  Amen.