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Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Transfiguration, Year B
Texts: 2 Kgs 2.1-12; 2 Cor 4.3-6; Mk 9.2-9

Peter, James and John are the big three in Mark’s gospel. They are three of the first four disciples to be called, they are the only three disciples present for the healing of Jairus’ daughter, they are the three disciples whom Jesus takes with him to the garden of Gethsemane and to this mountain today. Why Peter, James and John are the lucky three, I don’t know. We never really learn what makes them so special. However, I think I might have an idea why they were invited to go up with Jesus to see this extraordinary occurrence.

Up until now, Jesus has been a sensation in the region of Galilee; healing people, casting out demons, even raising the dead. He has been telling a few parables and talking about the kingdom of God, but what draws the biggest crowds is the healing. My thought is that Peter, James and John figured that Jesus really needed what any celebrity really needs: an agent.

I think these three guys took it upon themselves to make sure that Jesus got the most exposure possible. They kept the crowds at bay, they spread the word when he was in town, they lined up people to be healed and basically worked PR. Maybe they just really wanted him to heal as many people as possible, or maybe they had their own ideas, too, like gaining their own fame and power by associating themselves with somebody they knew was going to be big.

We know that just six days before the transfiguration, Peter confessed that he believed Jesus was the messiah, the one sent by God to bring freedom to God’s chosen people. And following this, as Jesus began to teach about how the messiah must suffer and die, Peter took Jesus aside and said, “Y’know, you might want to play down this whole ‘suffering and dying’ bit. It’s such a downer! The crowds don’t want to hear that stuff.” Jesus let Peter have it for that and explained to all of them that that was what he came to do.

Later on, James and John come up to Jesus and ask him to do them a favor. “When you make it big,” they ask, “put us one at your right hand and one at your left.” Jesus then had to explain to them that they didn’t know what they were asking for, and that he couldn’t do that.

You see, Peter, James and John thought they had this all figured out, thought that they knew how to help Jesus get ahead and get his point across, maybe even get an army together and kick the Romans out of Judea. Many people expected a military messiah who would free them from foreign oppression and restore Israel to its former greatness.

But now we come to the mountaintop. Jesus knows that these three disciples, Peter, James and John, they really don’t get it and they need to see what this is really all about. So, he takes them up to the top of the mountain and is transfigured before them. Now, instead of just seeing Jesus’ human side, they are given a glimpse of the power of the Kingdom of God, they are shown the divinity of their teacher. Along side Jesus appear Moses and Elijah, two of the most famous figures from Jewish history. Surely, this ought to convince these three men that this is about more than just healing lepers and gaining notoriety. This is about the Kingdom of God!

The disciples are dumbstruck; they have never seen anything like this before. They get the idea that Jesus really is way more than they imagined. They’ve seen him do some things that no human should be able to do like walk on water and raise the dead, but all along, he’s been their teacher, one of them. But now… now they can see part of the bigger picture.

Once Peter recovers a little, he gets a grip and starts talking again. “Teacher, this is… awesome. You’ve got Moses and Elijah now—people will have to listen! Here’s what we’ll do: we can build three tents up here, one for each of you, and James and John and I can go out and spread the word about it. We can get people lined up for miles waiting to come up here and talk with you and Moses and Elijah and see how powerful you really are! It will be amazing! They’re going to hear about this all the way over in Rome.”

Then, suddenly, a cloud gathers over them and the deep, thundering, echoing voice of God engulfs them: “this is my beloved son, LISTEN TO HIM!”… and everything is as it was.

You see, Peter and James and John were so caught up in doing the talking and the organizing and the campaigning that they forgot just who it was they were working with. They were so caught up in their agenda that they needed a reminder that they should be listening to Jesus, not the other way around. Jesus was the Son of God; and now they had the testimony of God Godself to prove it. This was a call to reality, the consummate mountaintop experience.

As we hear this story today, we are called to remember that command given by God: listen to Jesus, because he is the Son of God. Too often we get so caught up in talking and asking and telling that we forget to sit back and listen. In our prayers we thank God and we ask God for this and that and we tell God our problems, which is exactly what God wants of us, but we forget to silence ourselves and listen to what God has to say back to us. We can easily get caught up in our proclamation like Peter and James and John to the point that we forget why or even who we are proclaiming in the first place. We are the body of Christ, and because of that, we need once and a while to come to the mountaintop and just be present with God, allow Jesus to speak to us through prayer and scripture.

When we forget to stop and listen, our focus slowly shifts away from Jesus and his gospel and onto ourselves: we begin proclaiming our own beliefs and agendas, and God slides to the background. But like Paul reminds us, we do not proclaim ourselves, we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as slaves for Jesus’ sake. We cannot properly proclaim unless we can hear the message God is giving us.

And today, we especially remember that the message of Jesus is not just the glory of the kingdom of God, not just the mountaintop transfiguration, it is that Jesus is present with us even as we suffer and struggle and die. Jesus could not stay on the mountain because he had work to do on the cross, and we cannot be Christians unless we remember and embrace the ugliness and the horror of the cross and realize that Christ did not defeat death by overpowering it, but by submitting to it. We would often prefer to forget the cross, like Peter, and to live on the mountaintop, but it is only because of the cross that we can be assured that when we walk in the valleys and in the shadows, Jesus is there with us.

The celebration of the Transfiguration is a reminder to each of us that Jesus is the glorious, all-powerful Son of God. It is also a reminder that Epiphany is now over and Lent is beginning, and as we humble ourselves before God and meditate on our own sin and suffering, that Jesus is there with us, that he accepts us as we are, and that in his passion on the cross, he has granted us citizenship in the Kingdom of God, which will come with power and glory and make all things new.

We Do Not Pray As We Ought

Delivered at Trinity Lutheran Church, Pottsville, PA. Proper 12, Year A
Texts: 1 Kgs 3.5-12; Rom 8.26-39; Matt 13.31-33, 44-52

When I was a child, I had a lot of stuffed animals. One of my favorites was a large rabbit named “Buppy.” Buppy got his name when my parents brought him home to me the first time. I couldn’t quite say “bunny,” and so his name became “Buppy.” Buppy and I went all over the place together. For as long as I can remember, his fur has been matted, and he has been rather flat. However, I have seen pictures of what he used to look like when he was new, when his fur was fuzzy and he was a lot less one-dimensional. I obviously played with Buppy a lot.

I also remember asking my dad one day if I could pray to God to make my stuffed animals come to life. I was specifically thinking about Buppy. I had in my head the wonderful images of how great it would be if Buppy could walk and talk by himself, and then he and I could have all sorts of adventures together in my back yard. Though I don’t remember exactly what Dad said, I seem to remember that it was something about how if God did that, it wouldn’t make me love God any more than I already did, or something similar. Of course, I thought differently.

Now, of course, I was only five or six when I asked this question, and didn’t really understand prayer much at that point. But, I have found that all too often, even as adults we often do not know how to pray or what we should ask for. People sometimes pray for a good parking spot or not to get a ticket when they get pulled over or things like that. While I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with those prayers, we do have to realize that there’s a good reason why the answers we get to those ones are usually “no.”

As I heard another pastor once say in a sermon, God is not a cosmic vending machine, dispensing miracles just because we ask. However, this is how we have been taught to pray from the time we are small children. We are taught to ask for things. Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking God for things, it is a very sincere and heartfelt form of prayer. Every week we and millions of churches across the world pray for the well-being of our friends and family members who are hurt or ill or in pain. But sometimes, we must admit to ourselves that we don’t really ask for things that are appropriate or that will give God the glory in the long run.

In spite of this, God loves to hear our prayers. And thankfully, God is much more adept at understanding what we really need apart from what we may think we need or say we want. It is just like a child who really thinks he desperately needs that new toy to be happy, but his mother knows better, that what he really wants is not the toy, but perhaps something else. God is able to understand our wants and needs better than we do because, as St. Paul writes, the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf when we pray, with sighs too deep for words to express.

I know that I myself have prayed at times for things that I have really thought I needed, but have not gotten them. In many cases, looking back, I see that God has given me what I really needed, even though it was not what I thought I wanted.

Today we hear about King Solomon. His father, King David, has just died making Solomon king of Israel. Solomon is young and inexperienced, but his father had selected him to be his successor, and Solomon had probably been specifically trained to do what needed to be done as king. The Lord comes to him in a dream and basically tells him to ask for anything, and he would receive it. Solomon could have asked for wealth and fame, for great military power to crush his enemies, for prosperity for Israel, or any number of things to benefit himself and his people. And yet, instead, he asks only for wisdom, to be understanding so that he might govern God’s people well. Though he could have had anything for himself, he instead thought only of God’s people and how he might best serve them.  In asking for wisdom, Solomon actually showed that he was already wise, knowing exactly what would help Israel the most.

When we pray, we ask “your will be done, on earth as in heaven” like Jesus taught us. In doing this, we are asking not only that God do as God wills, but also that the Holy Spirit will come into us and change our will to match God’s. We ask that we may want only what God wants for us. Martin Luther would say that it is the discrepancy between our will and God’s will which causes much of our suffering. We suffer because we think we know what we want, and when God gives us what we need instead, we anguish over it. If instead our wills are conformed to God’s, our suffering is greatly reduced.

“We do not know how to pray as we ought,” Paul writes; and he is correct. We pray for self-advancing things, for things which bring us glory instead of God, for things which make life easier or less painful for us, but which in the end, may actually be worse for us. Thankfully, the Spirit intercedes for us, with sighs too deep for words. In this intercession, God hears what we really need, and gives to us accordingly out of love, so that even when it is not what we want or like, eventually we are made stronger and God is glorified by it.

Consider Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane. He asked, “Father, take this cup from me.” If God had taken the cup away from Jesus as he asked, if God had allowed Jesus to avoid the pain and suffering of the cross, then where would we be now? In Jesus’ death on the cross, we witnessed the true extent of God’s love for us—to the point of being willing to die for us. Without Jesus’ resurrection, we could not be assured of our own resurrection and the promise we have that we will be accepted into God’s own house.

In the garden, Jesus also prayed, “not my will, but your will be done.” Jesus was human. As a human, Jesus wanted to avoid pain and suffering and death, just like we all do. But, Jesus was also God, filled with the Holy Spirit. As God, Jesus knew that what he wanted wasn’t always what would best serve the rest of God’s creation.

Such is the case with the kingdom of heaven. It is so often not what we want or expect. It is like the treasure in the field, buried and dirty, but when we find it, even though it is not what we expected, it is so much better that we rush to give up all that we might have otherwise so that we might obtain it.  It is like the mustard seed, so small and insignificant when we would expect it to be grandiose and glorious, but when it is sprouted, it outgrows all the expectations we had previously.

God doesn’t always give us what we pray for because we do not always know for what we should be praying. God knows, though, and the Holy Spirit intercedes for us and helps God to understand what we truly need, and at the same time helps us to understand as well that what we think we want may not be what is best for us.

We should not cease to ask God for things, even insignificant selfish things. I think that God loves to talk to us, and any excuse to get us praying is worth it. When we pray, though, we should take an example from Jesus, and pray, “not my will, but your will be done,” allowing God to fill us with the Holy Spirit and conform our wills to God’s. We do not always know how to pray as we ought, but that’s alright, and it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pray. In fact we should pray all the more, in the confidence that even when we are not praying as we ought, the Holy Spirit does what it is meant to do, and helps us in our prayers. Because we have the help of the Holy Spirit, we do not even need to know what words to say. Sometimes, when I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed and have no words to speak, I simply pray with a sigh, a sigh too deep for words. That is a good place to start, because the Spirit understands those sighs, and interprets them for us, and helps us to then find the words as we simply come into God’s presence.

We should also not be afraid to pray because even when we do not pray as we ought, we know that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God; not heights nor depths, not rulers, demons or angels, not things present nor things to come, and least of all, not prayers, that can separate us from the love of God. Thanks be to God for that.