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Good
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 Sermon
02/14/2010
The Light of Possibility and Joy and Hope
~ by Reverend Thomas Cary Kinder
February 14, 2010 Last Sunday after Epiphany, Transfiguration
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Mark 8:27-9:29
N.B. It is always good to
read the scripture before reading the sermon, but in this case it is
essential. The first portion
will seem abstract and ungrounded if you have not refreshed your
memory with the Mark passage, because the beginning of the sermon is
all in relation to the scripture as allegory or metaphor or
instruction.
We
have just heard the Transfiguration Story in its entire context,
beginning with the healing of a man’s blindness and ending with
the healing of a boy’s paralysis and inability to speak. If you feel discouraged about the
state of the world, or if you feel the need for healing and
transformation in your own life, then the message the gospel is
trying to convey is important for you to understand. It is the best of good news.
We
need to read the whole sweep of this story allegorically, meaning
that it is not just about the characters in the story, it is about
the way God is working in the world today. It is about us. Jesus is trying to get us to see
differently, to heal our vision so that we see with the eyes of
faith, so that then he can free us of our paralysis and we can speak
and act more effectively as his voice and hands on earth. Our vision is hard to clear, and
Jesus has to work hard and repeatedly to help us understand. What we need to see and believe is
what we heard him explain to the disciples, that his way is the
sacred way to true life, the way to the realm of God and all its
power, and his way leads straight through suffering and loss and even
death. Just as Peter had to
stop setting his mind on human things and set it on divine things, we
have to let go of our old way of seeing and let go of our old life
and let go of all the world, and redirect all our energy to the
Spirit. If we do, if we die in
that way, then while still on this earth we may come to see that the
realm of God is right here, right now, available to us with all its
power, with all its beautiful light.
The
mountain of transfiguration that we have to go up in order to see
this is a mountain of struggle, a mountain of grief, a mountain of
leaving behind all earthly hope.
The mountain is always present, and we step onto it as soon as
we choose to follow the way of Christ, and let go of all our past
assumptions and programs for happiness and all we cling to or crave
in this life. The base of the
mountain is our moment of pain or crisis, hitting rock bottom, when
we finally admit that we need God.
Each step we take trusting and following Christ up that path
helps open us to new vision.
It
may take a long climb through darkness, but eventually our spiritual
eyes come to see that within and all around us God’s light is
here, God is present. We see
life transfigured. As the
Psalm says, “In your light, we see light.” In light of God’s presence we
see light everywhere—we recognize what the Quakers call
“that of God” in every person and place and thing on
earth. With transfiguration
vision we see that the light of Christ shines underneath even the
most repugnant of exteriors—even the worst sinner, even our
enemy.
And
once we see that, we see the possibility of miracles, just as Gandhi
and Martin Luther King Jr. did.
We see that the power to heal, the power to change the world
into beloved community is right here within and around us. There is tremendous joy just in
seeing all this, but if we then turn to the world of action, joy is
followed by hope, a hope beyond our wildest dreams, a hope that
establishing the realm of God on earth is truly possible.
The
great teacher of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating, talks about what
happens when “the presence of God [becomes] a permanent part of
daily life” and we learn to see with transfiguration
vision. He writes, “When
we act from the conviction of God’s presence within us and with
openness to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit, action becomes
effective.” We discover
what the book of Ephesians calls a “power at work within us
[that] is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask
or imagine.”
(3:19-20) (see The Daily Reader for Contemplative
Living, excerpts from the works of Thomas Keating, compiled by S.
Stephanie Iachetta, p 44)
But
even when we see and believe this, it can be extremely hard to act on
it. Even after seeing the
light on the mountain of transfiguration, Peter still lost faith and
denied Jesus.
On
December 9th President Obama gave his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech. We can hear in it his
struggle between the transfiguration vision he clearly has and the
need to do what seems prudent in worldly terms. We can hear the tension in him
between setting his mind on divine things or human things.
In
the speech he said, “We must begin by acknowledging the hard
truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when
nations…find the use of force not only necessary but morally
justified. I make this
statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same
ceremony years ago: ‘Violence never brings permanent
peace. It solves no social
problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.’”
Obama
went on, “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of
Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force
of nonviolence. I know
there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing
naïve—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to
protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples
alone. I face the world as it
is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American
people. For make no mistake:
Evil does exist in the world.
A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s
armies. Negotiations cannot
convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”
President
Obama then spent much of his speech rationalizing when war is
necessary and how it must be restrained, but he ended his speech
talking about “the nature of the peace we seek.” And here he switched from setting
his mind on human things to setting it on divine things.
He
said real peace must be “a just peace based on the inherent
rights and dignity of every individual.” He said it must come through diplomacy
and engagement even with the worst of enemies. He said “a just
peace…must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom
from fear, but freedom from want.” He said that confronting climate
change was a major imperative for peace, because climate change will
lead to “more drought, more famine, more mass
displacement—all of which will fuel more conflict for
decades.”
Then
he said, “I do not believe that we will have the will, the
determination, the staying power to complete this work without
something more—and that’s the continued expansion of our
moral imagination.” He
said we need to learn to follow “the one rule that lies at the
heart of every major religion…that we do unto others as we
would have them to do unto us.”
He
said, “Adhering to this law of love has always been the core
struggle of human nature. For
we are fallible. We make
mistakes and fall victim to the temptations of pride and power, and
sometimes evil….But we do not have to think that human nature
is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be
perfected. We do not have to
live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will
make it a better place. The
nonviolence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been
practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they
preached—their fundamental faith in human progress—that
must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey. For if we lose that faith—if
we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions
that we make on issues of war and peace—then we lose
what’s best about humanity.
We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral
compass….Let us reach for the world that ought to be—that
spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”
Those are the words of Barach Obama with his
mind set on divine things. As
he said, he is President, and so he feels forced to set his mind on
human things, too. He feels
the need to doubt what Jesus and Gandhi and King insisted, that
nonviolence could indeed work better than violence against any
evil. I feel sorry for the
President, because anyone who sees the truth of what he said about
peace and nonviolence and the law of love and yet chooses to lead America
ever deeper into militarism and war must be suffering in his
soul. In fact he has spoken
about his anguish over the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He is President and has chosen to
deny the path of divine things and to bear that burden.
But we are not the President. We are the people, and more, we are
followers of Christ, and more, we are a church that says in its
Mission Statement, “We feel called to promote Christ’s
way of nonviolence, creating a loving, just society for
all.” We are a church that
says in its Open and Affirming covenant that we “regard all
people as beloved children of God…. [and] we honor the worth
and dignity of all people….We pledge to work to end oppression
and discrimination whenever we encounter them and, guided and empowered
by the Holy Spirit, to help create the blessed community of
God’s realm.”
Those
words reflect a vision of transfiguration and a mind set on the
divine. While President Obama
reluctantly leads our nation through its wars, Jesus Christ is
leading us on a different path.
It is a mountain path even more difficult than President
Obama’s, full of struggle and grief, but it is also a path of
more light and joy and hope.
It is a path heading right for that moral North Star Obama
said was so essential. It is a
path leading to the possibility of creating a culture of nonviolence
in America
and in the world that could make war obsolete—yes, even in our
lifetime—the possibility of God’s realm established on
earth.
A
few people around Jesus saw the brilliant, clarifying light of this
possibility shining through him and all he said and did. That brief glimpse has kept
Christ’s disciples going up the mountain for two thousand
years. Faith in that vision
has given the faithful the power to endure the struggle, the power to
heal, the power to transform the earth one situation and one person
at a time. That is our calling
today: to endure; to be healed and to heal; to be transformed and to
transform; and to do so here and now, in whatever situation we
confront, with whatever people are around us.
We
will be talking more in the weeks ahead about what this means for us
specifically, both individually and as a church, but more important
than talking, the answer needs to come, as Thomas Keating said,
through us each seeking God’s presence and the Holy
Spirit’s inspiration. As
one of today’s teachers of nonviolence, Michael Nagler,
discovered long ago, the great problems of war and peace that the
world faces are ultimately spiritual in nature, and so the solutions
must be grounded in the spirit through meditation and prayer. Let us pray together now in
silence, setting our mind on divine things, not thinking so much as
simply opening to the possibility of God’s presence and
transforming light being within and around us right now….
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