March, 2010 Minister’s Message
Dear Friends,
I received many requests that I share the text of the sermon that I preached on February 14, 2010. So, here it is, with my heartfelt love and gratitude.
Rev. Sara Marean
[February 24 was Transfiguration Sunday. Following are the two Lectionary Readings that preceded the sermon.]
Exodus 34:29-35
Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses spoke with them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil on his face; but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off, until he came out; and when he came out, and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.
Luke 9:28-36
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” — not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
In her book Home by Another Way, The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, describes a concept called ‘thin places’. An idea cherished in Celtic spirituality she explains that ‘thin places’ are "places where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer that it is easy to step through.” She recounts a trip she and her husband took to Ireland, during which she stumbled upon many of these ‘thin places’. She says, “If you have been there (to Ireland) yourself, then you know about the stone rings and sacred springs. There are so many of them in Ireland that plenty of them are not even marked.
You can be walking down an ordinary country lane and all of a sudden see a footpath leading off to the left. Follow it for a couple hundred feet and you come to a little mossy hole full of crystal clear water. It would be easy to mistake it for an ordinary watering hole if it were not for the tidy bank of stones around it, set there hundreds of years ago by people who recognized a “thin place” right there in the middle of a sheep pasture. If you can stop all the racket in your own mind and body, you can sometimes feel it for yourself- a freshness that drenches you as thoroughly as a shower. How it works is a complete mystery, but there is no denying the effect. Simply to stand near it is to experience living water.”
These ‘thin places’, or as Taylor puts it these "cracked doors between this world and some other, brighter place where God is no absentee landlord but a very palpable presence" these are the focus of our scripture lessons today. First Moses and then Peter, John and James experienced in a very vivid way the presence of the divine. On mountain tops they approached the essence, this light of God, and were transformed, transfigured by their encounters. On the top of Mount Sinai Moses conversed with God, and this conversation not only changed him emotionally, he bore traces of his encounter physically. As he descended the mountain his face shone with radiant light, he was beaming, and this light terrified his family and friends, his nation.
In our second reading Peter is so shocked by witnessing the conversation between God, Jesus, Moses and Elijah that he starts to babble. He wants to do something, anything, to honor this experience. But God puts a halt to his babble and his frantic energy. God says “This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him! Listen! Listen!” What we see in these stories is that there is something terrifying, something so totally and unalterably life changing about encounters with God. I think this is true. Those people in my life that are the most spiritually grounded shine in many ways. They shine a peace and calm, or sometimes a holy energy, that is a little intimidating, but which undoubtedly comes from their encounters with God, their life of prayer in which they stop, they listen, they listen, and they wait with patience for the presence of God.
Listening is not one of the things we do well in our culture. Well, let me rephrase that, listening to the voice of God is not something we do well in our culture. We do listen; we listen to the computer, to our I-Pods, to our televisions, our radios, we skype, and tweet, we love to rant and rave. Rarely do we stop and listen to the small still voice of God. Rarely do we pause to wait to hear this voice and to wonder in amazement when we do. But when we do, we too are transfigured by the experience, the encounter.
One of the most powerful rituals I have ever been a part of during any worship service is the lovely tradition here at East Church of the Beth-El Table. For those of you who have not been to a summer worship service I’ll give a little explanation. At the beginning of the summer holiday season we set up this table that you see in front of you. We ask people when they go on their vacations, or even their stay-cations, to bring back to church a small physical memory of their encounters with the Spirit. That token could be a small pebble, a shell, a piece of sea glass, even a post-card or store-bought souvenir of a time they felt the presence of the divine with them over the summer. It has often been water from a special place which we then collect and boil and which becomes the water we use in baptisms throughout the following year. It is a way that we share our own transfiguration stories, a way that, with shining faces, we retell our divine encounters, be they of the more mundane or more thrilling variety.
Now, as pastors we are always thinking of ways for individuals and communities to enter into the life of the Spirit. We want people to experience God’s love and so we try different things, sometimes they take off and sometimes they don’t. No matter how good an idea we’ve got, it takes a congregation willing to participate, willing to engage, willing to let their faces shine with the divine light. And here at East Church this congregation has entered into the tradition of the Beth-El table with gusto. What it has shown me is that this congregation is full of listeners. We are a people who want to listen, who value the pause of summer peace, and who use this pause to search for the spirit of God.
So today I want to celebrate this Transfiguration Sunday, and look toward our Lenten season, by bringing out the Beth-El table from its winter hiatus. Throughout the Lenten season my hope is that this tradition can help us to bring the peace of summer into our busy winter lives, that by hearing other people’s stories of divine encounters, and seeing their shining faces, each one of us can make the time to pause, to listen, to hear, touch, taste and smell the incredible wonder of God’s presence, those ‘thin places’, that surround us.
I thought I would kick off this Lenten practice by sharing my own experience of a thin place. As many of you know our son Wren was born with a life-threatening condition called Congenital Lobar Emphysema which necessitated the surgical removal of the upper left lobe of his lung. We were in Children’s Hospital for a total of fifteen days, and our stay there was a life changing experience. To hear children coughing on the pulmonary floor, to see babies weighing just one pound in the NICU, to meet mothers whose babies have never been home, never been out of the hospital in the months since they were born, hearing, seeing, experiencing these things changed me in ways I have yet to discover. I have never prayed so much in my life, not only for my own baby, but also for all the babies of all the parents there.
I also have never experienced the power of prayer so intimately. As a pastor I have often been on the side of giving prayers for people, for groups, in public and private. This is part of my job that I enjoy and is meaningful to me. But, I have rarely been the one asking for prayers, in public or private. And what I found was that I didn’t even need to. The prayers poured in. Emails, cards, care packages poured in, from relatives, from friends, from neighbors, and most especially from East Congregational Church. You fed us, you came to visit us, you cared for this little baby boy who you hadn’t even met yet. And through these actions both large and small I realized that there was a community of people out there who were thinking, hoping, praying, and talking to God on our behalf. And when it came down to it, when we had to hand over our beautiful baby boy to the anesthesiologist team, during those nine hours when Wren was in surgery and we waited to hear whether he survived, when our ability to pray stopped and it was all we could do to breathe, to take one breath after another, then we knew we had help carrying the burden, that there was a loving group of people uttering those words that I couldn’t speak, praying for Wren’s life, sending up to God the concerns which I could not confront. And I can’t tell you how much this moved me. As a pastor I understood what it meant to be prayed for, to be lifted up, to be held in prayer. And I really got it for the first time; this is what a faith community can be and do, this is the heart of why we exist at all. We are here to be open to those ‘thin places’, to listen, to watch and wait for the voice of God, and we are here to pray for one another, to hold each other in the arms of love so that each of us has the capacity, the resources, the strength of faith, to battle the demons that confront us.
So today I brought two items I would like to place on the Beth-El table, two prayer shawls given to us by the Prayer Shawl Ministry Group here at East Church. The first was knitted by Marion Nelson and was given to me last summer when I was expecting our new baby, and the second was created by Jenna Hughes for that new baby, baby Wren. These shawls symbolize for me the thin places I have found here at East Church, those places where I have found the Spirit in the hearts, minds and compassion of this congregation. Thank you for all of this, for being my ‘thin places’ when I needed them most. Thank you for the warmth and comfort of shawls wrapped in prayer, and for wrapping not only my family, but all those in need, in the love and hope of prayer.
And so, as we leave our scene of transfiguration, and enter into the solemnity of Lent, let us do so with faces radiant with divine light. Let us make space, let us take time, to stop, to listen, to listen to the words of Christ, to look for the ‘thin places’ in our lives. And let us not forget what we are all about, we are a people of prayer.
Amen.
