Luke 6.28-36 18 February 2007
“HOW TO GLORY IN GOD”
I was sitting in the front row of Carnegie Hall. It was the JVC Jazz Festival. The band wasn’t even the night’s headliner. A pianist from the Dominican Republic and a guitarist from Spain played a signature piece. Do you know how melody, harmony, and rhythm can mysteriously conspire and transform everything? Something truly magical happened during that song. The two artists were so seamlessly tuned in to each other and to their song—bringing us into their wavelength—it was transfiguring. Something astounding shone in that moment.
As the piece ended, every nuance utterly synchronized and nailed, that sophisti-cated audience exploded with applause and acclaim. Jaws dropped and a spon-taneous whoop of cheers went up. We were like kids watching the massive shelf of water fall off the cliff at Niagara Falls for the first time. It took our breath away.
It doesn’t have to be jazz improvisation. It could be an aria by Mozart or a sea-scape by Joseph Turner. It could be how Meryl Streep delivered her line or the easy grace of Roger Federer’s backhand or the mellow 12-cylinder purr of a ‘34 Duesenberg. It could be a stunning dinner entree that tasted better than it looked.
Whatever it was, it was so rich with someone’s style and point of view on life that you knew no one else could have created it. The effect was staggering and memorable. You felt like you knew whoever crafted it because they pulled back a curtain and let you enter a whole new place where you became more fully alive.
Psalm 19, which we just prayed responsively, makes a claim like this. “The hea-vens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” Really, it’s the same thing. The other night, cold but so dry and clear, I went out on my deck late at night to notice stars that I might not behold any other season. I stood there for the longest time amazed at red-orange stars and blue-green stars and white-hot stars. Do you ever do anything like this only to walk away as-tonished at what an awesome God is our God? “The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” It rings out clear, friends.
Of course, I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. You have seen enough of God’s artistry to grasp they are all the work of one miraculous hand. I speak of dreamy Cape cloud formations, sand dunes redrawn yearly in sweeping patterns, the staccato sounds of woodpeckers flitting in the trees, the curiosity of the foxes and the wiliness of the coyotes. They are the work of the same hand that shaped us from the dust and gave us breath. Of course, for now we cannot see God. But if we no longer perceive God’s glorious handiwork shining about us, attesting to God’s inimitable style, then something within us has already died.
We become breathtakingly alive when we pause to recognize this. We feel mysteriously transported away to other places, even beyond time and space. Times when we attend to God’s simple glory—it could be a dragonfly alighting on our knee—have power transform our lives and transfigure reality as we know it. Something astounding happens as we open ourselves up to God in these ways.
Have you ever seen a rain forest, the aurora borealis or a valley from a mountain and thought to yourself, “Wow, that’s just so God!” That praise is no less holy than ours here in this sacred space. When I was in seminary, we went on foliage drives in the Berkshires. We did it as an act of praise, meaning, we would drive around a bend and clap. The more striking the vista, the louder we applauded. Kids, whatever can we do with them! We do well to give each other permission to exclaim, “Wow, that is just so God.” But if you have ever been to Key West you know that every night people gather on our nation’s southernmost point to catch the sunset. And while the residents of Key West are not noted for their piety, but for, well, other things, gasps and whoops, cheers and applause are heard nightly. I suppose praise and glory happen in as many ways as we have types of people.
But this example of Key West helps me make my point—you don’t have to be a person of faith to extol the glory of God in this sense. Glorifying God like this is about as easy as falling down. That is why when I go to parties, people who are emboldened by a couple drinks, and recognize me as a pastor will invariably say, “Pastor, I don’t worship in any church on Sunday, I worship in the mountains…or I worship out on my boat…(or my personal favorite), I worship on the golf course. And I can worship God as well there as at church. So what do you think of that?”
Of course, there is something to that as well as something sorely missing from it. That is why I’m eager to talk with you today about the shape of God’s glory. All of God’s glory comes by revelation. All of God’s glory requires eyes of faith to see and attribute it to God and have appreciation well up in our hearts toward God. But the glory of God that comes through nature differs from the glory of God that is revealed beyond nature. For this latter glory requires a unique quality of faith.
That brings us to our gospel text, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop. Peter, James, and John accompanied Jesus to the mountain to pray. Mountains, of course, are a place where the veil between heaven and earth gets pulled back. Just ask Moses about his experience on Mt Sinai. In the midst of prayer—much is made possible by prayer—Jesus face was changed. His clothes dazzled with whiteness. Moses and Elijah—the giver of the law and the prototypical prophet—suddenly appeared with Jesus. Verse 31 reads, “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”
Ah, there is that word glory. But this is not the natural glory of a whale breaching the ocean surface and crushing the waves. It is supernatural glory of God taking a hand in our affairs to do decisively for us what we could never do for ourselves. That was what Jesus was intending to accomplish at Jerusalem by facing down the powers of hatred, violence, evil, and pride through his death and resurrection.
At our first lectionary Bible study last Thursday, one woman wisely asked why distinguish between the natural glory of God as the Creator of this gorgeous planet and the supernatural glory of God redeeming the mess we’ve made of it? Glory is glory, she remarked. Just as love is love, despite all of its various forms.
She made a good point. But here is why the distinction is worth pausing over as this last text of Epiphany points us toward the start of Lent this Ash Wednesday.
God’s glory in nature is easier and intuitive to us all. I mean, how can we not be charmed by a sandpiper’s scamper on shimmering sand or the sunlight dancing upon craggy Grand Teton peaks or the delicate unfolding of a rare lady slipper? Yes, nature can also be cruel but reveling in all of this makes few demands of us.
At same time, God’s glory beyond nature taking a hand in human affairs and changing everything through Jesus’ death and resurrection is difficult and con-troversial. It is demanding to accept and against our grain to emulate and em-body as we go about living. Its counterintuitive to how we would have saved us. Why did God take this approach? Why did God choose to rescue us like this? How could God allow God’s magnificent glory to become tied up in our human struggle and suffering and death? Why would God stoop to conquer us like this? Was Jesus mistaken walking this impossible way of suffering and forgiveness? All doubts we harbor about Jesus’ direction were swept away when God’s voice rumbled from the mountaintop cloud, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
Let’s face it, people do not subscribe to the glory of an ugly cross the way we do a blossoming meadow on the first warm day of spring. In fact, it takes a whole lifetime to warm up to it. It is the deepest profound mystery of the universe. And it takes a lot of trust, a lot of faith, and those don’t come easily to us, friends.
The Westminster Confession claims our chief end in life is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever. That is where I end, exulting in and enjoying God’s glory. But if we are meant to exult in God’s glory much as we revel in the style of an artist, we must consider all of God’s glorious style, and not pick and choose at its parts. It is a package deal. Jesus didn’t only bid us to consider the lilies of the fields. He also said whoever would come after him must pick up his cross and follow Jesus.
So what does God expect of us? Sometimes we feel inadequate because we feel we should know more of the Bible or we should be more regular and eloquent in prayer and we could have offered more acts of mercy and forgiveness in a week. All I can tell you about that, friends, is I have devoted my whole life to these prac-tices and I am about 2% of the way there. So how do we glorify and enjoy God?
Certainly the key here lies in opening ourselves to everything that God is about.
But one more thing, and here I close. Author Sara Maitland writes of the moment when our parents dropped us off at playgrounds, fun fairs, and birthday parties. Do you recall the delighted little shrieks we made as we ran, how our pleasure mingled with our fear, how we were enchanted and scared at the same time? Our exclamations of joy and whelps of fear are close and do not contradict one another any more than the God of the caressing surf being the God of the cross.
God wants us to risk trusting him to mysteriously hold together our troubling con-tradictions. In the end God gives us back the gift of life eternal with a bow on top.
Faithfulness isn’t about becoming plaster saints or biblical scholars or inscrutable contemplatives. Faithfulness is more like childlike open-hearted excitement and the willingness to be surprised by what happens next while still trusting that life is good because God finally stands behind it. God’s glory is God’s signature upon it all. Will you allow others to notice the radiance of your discovery here? If you will, you will lead a life that glorifies God. And no better life is possible than that. Amen.
Gracious God: for your choice of one people among the world's peoples for the revealing of yourself and of your will for human life, we praise you. Through Moses, you gave your people the Law. Through your prophets, you charged them to live by your Law that their lives might be a guiding light for all the nations.
In your own good time, O God, you moved to reveal yourself firsthand, fully, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We give you thanks for the cherished stories that surround his life, particularly today the story of his dazzling radiance showing forth your glory in the most unlikely plan to rescue us that we could ever imagine.
Today we glorify you for expanding your circle of witnesses to include, beyond his people, all those who find in him the Light of the World; for creating, out of Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection, a worldwide community of his disciples, an ecumenical church.
We pray for that strange, richly diverse company of women and men who find in your divine Son a fresh start for human history and an unquenchable source of light. Help us, O God, to let his light shine in the radiance of our discovery that we may be sources of light for others who stumble about in ignorance, anxiety, self-hurt, hatred or any form of darkness. Grant us to serve as messengers of your grace for loved ones and friends whose lives have been darkened by illness or who are at this very time walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We pray for our own Dick Howland, finished with his treatment, looking toward surgery…
(Silence)
