Well, here it is, Thanksgiving. That time of beer out in the garage, flag football out back, aunties in the kitchen, and uncles in the den. Retailer-sponsored parade on TV, bowl game in the afternoon. It’s all those things that bind our families together, and bring us back into the company of people we love.

And it’s the day we remember how blessed we are, as a nation. We remember our pilgrim forefathers, coming to this new land to worship in peace. We remember how they made friends with the native Americans, who helped them prosper. We make much of that prosperity, and we remind ourselves that we are Free.

That is not the story the Europeans told, of course. And it’s not the story the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags told, either, about the coming of the Puritans. And except for 1781, it’s not always clear what we mean by ‘free’, or whether it isn’t also true that most other nations in the world are free too. It’s just language we use, creation mythology, and nations do this. I do this. Back at the beginning of nations, people did this; the Bible is chock-full of tribal retellings of things in the same general manner, and that’s the way we are as humans.

What I’d observe about Thanksgiving, the way we do it, is that we run the danger of regarding a nation under God, as we like to think of ourselves, as celebration of a contract. When we say ‘Thanksgiving’, at least as I look at my life experience, we’ve gotten into a habit of thinking that we’re the sort of nation that God likes, and that as long as we behave as we’re sure we’ve done, God will look after us. (What nation doesn’t do this? German army belt buckles in WWI had Gott mit uns embossed on them. Abraham Lincoln, when assured that God was on our side in the Civil War, was obliged to observe that a better goal was for us to be on God’s side.) And we of course, like all people who mean well, take it on ourselves to decide what behaving like God’s people means. And for that matter, we decide what being God should mean. (Again, me too … I’ve caught myself doing this.)

We even baptise all of this with Covenantal language, our prosperity and freedom agreement with God. We think it’s biblical to be Americans.

I want to suggest something here.

I want to remind us that God is a parent. Not a treaty partner. God is a parent, who provides. What’s more, he provides more – and I’ll just say it – than we deserve. And he does this not because we’ve been good kids or bad kids. He does it, and does it, and keeps doing it, because it’s in the nature of good parents to provide. It isn’t because we’re good kids or bad kids that he provides. We get provided for because we are those kids. We’re loved.

That’s not a contractual arrangement. And I’m not sure it’s really even a Covenant. It’s a family. And we’re just kids.

Which gives me an idea. If giving thanks isn’t about national terms and conditions, and isn’t really about Covenant, what about recasting Thanksgiving as thanksgiving? How would it be to focus on bounty, on generosity … on Grace. Because when we Americans say ‘Thanksgiving’, we aren’t really talking about this, most of us. At least I don’t think we are.

I’m experimenting this year on myself, with replacing the ‘Thanksgiving’ term with … gratitude. Just … gratitude. There’s no contract implied. There’s no eyes on us. There are eyes only on God, the source of what we’ve been given. There’s no congratulating ourselves for being worthy of any of his munificence.

This is what I preached on Sunday. I did it brazenly, because this eye-on-gratitude is exactly what the appointed scriptures seemed to say.

Jeremiah has God put it this way:

“I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. ⁴ I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing.

Good. But the line before that was this:

“Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,”

But the day will come when you will live in safety, under the Lord Our Righteous Savior.

We won’t deserve bounty, in other words. We get it anyway.

Paul and Timothy (by tradition) put it another way – watch for the same dynamic:

He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins … in whom God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell, and through whom he reconciled to himself all things.

We have an inheritance. Bounty is ours, because bounty is ours. We eat well in this family, as it were. And like all inheritances, what we get is more or less undeserved … we didn’t work for it – an inheritance of light, and abundance, and the absence of fear. Just … because. That’s good parenting, is what it is.

And Jesus, in our third reading, said to the robber next to him on Golgotha, to the sneers of the watching and transactional world, don’t worry … I’ll have you with me in paradise today. That robber knew to rebuke the other robber, too, pointing out rightly that we deserve the trouble we’re in. We get out of it not by any earthly means, but by orienting ourselves to accept the abundance of God.

That’s a way of thinking about Thanksgiving that works for me. Because the abundance is here. And if we truly did recognise this, and accept it, and stop thinking about ourselves so much, and use God’s gifts in the spirit in which they were intended for us, we would be living like kings and queens, truly in paradise, lacking for nothing.

So why not focus on God here. That’s my experiment, with myself this year. Why not turn our eyes all the way upward, and replace the word ‘Thanksgiving’ with ‘Gratitude’. Why not picture ourselves as sons and daughters just plain being grateful, instead of a nation sizing up our prosperity and judging it, and celebrating it, and without noticing, estimating our own worthiness for having received it.

Thanksgiving cast as gratitude can be simple gratefulness for an abundance greater than we’re probably aware of, and which probably, actually, has very little to do with us or what we do.

The fact is, there’s a whole theology about this way of thinking, about gratitude, way beyond the language of covenant, or just desserts. There is a whole theology. And a living prayer practice that goes with it. There’s a gratitude theology.

I’d describe it as a one-way, heaven-pointed rejoicing, in which people of God – real people of God – scarcely even think about themselves at all, so deeply are they gazing into the benevolence of their Maker, the Author, the Provider, the perfector and finisher … the New Covenant, as Christ describes Himself.

In Philippians 4, this is exactly what Paul points out:

‘Pray with gratitude, and THEN the peace of Christ, which is bigger than knowledge or understanding, will guard both your mind and your heart.’

Keep our eyes on the Author of Life Itself, in other words, stop thinking so much about us. Ask and seek and bang on the door constantly to keep ourselves in grateful relationship to the source of Life – the giver of gifts without cost, every day and every minute. Never for an instant think that we deserve it. Live with an open, trusting, child-like pair of hands. Not considering our own efforts, or needs, or goals, or selves very much at all, knowing the whole time that the fact of God’s provision for us is, like with any good parent on whom children can rely, True.

Our lives aren’t our own. Our country isn’t our own. WE are not our own. What we have is our bedroom upstairs, with our stuff, in the house of our providing parents. Our stuff is ours, but not really ours. It’s arranged there superficially by us, but not called into existence by us.

I’m reminded of the wisdom of the writers of The Simpsons one Thanksgiving: Bart gives the table grace, and it goes: ‘Dear Lord, we’d thank you for this food, but we paid for it.’

We have a lot in this country, as every other country has. (Americans aren’t special.) None of us deserve it as much as we think. In the end, actually, nothing we have this is our own doing … or grace would not be grace. What we have is not God’s gift as a reward for work well done. That means that we have is nothing for us to be boastful about. It’s something for us to be grateful for. We are God’s artwork, created by and in Christ Jesus.

And the best way to celebrate what we like to call Thanksgiving, it seems to me, is to be what God’s Spirit makes us to be … and just be thankful to God for the family riches bestowed on us.

As promised implicitly in No Sermons, here’s … er … a sermon. I delivered it for Pentecost IV at church today. It makes the point that we don’t have to expect spectacular things to move in concert with God. In fact, most of the time God’s pretty stealthy.

* * *

Pentecost is a time of irruption. That’s irruption with an ‘I’. A disruptive, unexpected, almost violent intrusion into our reality by Divinity. Kaboom! What a day that must have been, when the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit arrived. The world still talks about it.

But there was a time before that remarkable day, when the world was just being readied for this irruption. Jesus was positioning us for it. He’d begun his ministry quietly, almost privately. He spoke in small groups. He worked his miracles and asked people to stay quiet about them. He spoke of restraint, of forgiveness, and of awareness of God and covenant. But gradually, by degrees, he also commissioned. He asked us to begin spreading the word about him. The Holy Spirit may have arrived in Acts with a crash and wallop … but the Holy Spirit was also there in the quiet ministry, already active.

We like the Pentecost version. We like to imagine that our lives as Christians in the world are powered by the Holy Spirit like a sort of turbocharger. And it’s a loud, fiery picture we get. And it’s true – that Fire has done remarkable things in the world. Look at those Apostles: they knew better, with the flames on their heads and the tongues speaking all languages, than to book a church hall on Wednesday nights and have Spirit Evenings for themselves. They knew – they couldn’t help but know – that now was the time to stream out into the world and DO things … to carry that flame. And boy, did they.

But let’s go back before that, to the quiet time. Let’s go to a time of subtler conviction and commission. The moment in today’s Gospel. It was the commissioning of the 70. The Holy Spirit was in that too.

This was a less dramatic moment than the big Pentecost one. But that, if you think about it, is actually how the Holy Spirit has usually been, for most of history. At the River Jordan he came as a dove. Before time, before any of us were here to know about him, he moved by himself across the waters of Creation, doing creative things. He’s been around always. And only on Pentecost did he ever go Kaboom!

Most of our lives are like the lives those 70 knew, not the lucky Apostles who got flames and tongues. Most of us are called on to go kind of normally, into a world that’s kind of normal, most of the time. Most of us have to enter our own private spirituality in a pretty normal, not dramatic or startling way. Our lives are more like the lives of the 70 than the people who experienced Pentecost. And that means, if we read today’s little Gospel passage closely, about the commissioning of the 70, we get a kind of mission manual, that we can use – yes, in the company of the Holy Spirit … just quietly.

It's a template, for our own mission, as regular Joes and regular Jills, as individuals and as groups of faithful people. And it’s a very detailed template. It’s kind of procedural. Broken down into bullet-points, it’s very practical. So much so, that it’s startling in its understated way: Today’s remarkable reading tells us that when the Holy Spirit moves through us, it’s generally in a very quiet way. It’s gentle, and we’re expected to be gentle. It tells us that our action in the Spirit out in the world is mandatory, too. We have to do it. And it tells us that for this mission we will be well prepared, even if we don’t feel prepared when we start. It also tells us that we are led to it – that we don’t need to decide what we’re supposed to do next. And it tells us – and this is something we overlook, or don’t believe – that we are authorised to be part of this astonishing partnership.

It's a quiet irruption.

Let’s look at that Gospel passage a minute, and keep track of the salient guidance, to see that this is true:

The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, `The kingdom of God has come near to you.' But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, `Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.'

"Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me." [And do you remember him saying elsewhere, ‘The Spirit will take from what is mine, and will disclose it to you’?]

The seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" He said to them, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

We’re supposed to walk in the Spirit, in other words. This one passage, which is echoed in other readings from today, tells us that explicitly, and it details, it seems to me, about 6 things: (i) that we are supposed to go into the world and do things, (ii) that we’re supposed to go as we are, right now, (iii) that we’ll not go alone, (iv) that some will accept the Spirit and others will not, (v) that people’s acceptance of the Spirit isn’t our responsibility, and (vi) that we are authorised to come to them this way.

To say it differently … our walk with the Holy Spirit into people’s lives, which is ours to do, is quiet and gentle; and we needn’t necessarily know what it is in people’s lives that we’re there to address – we are led there, more or less blindly; we probably will know a lot about the situation once we’re there, because in the Spirit there is discernment; and we can assume that the tools and the means we need to do our part will be given to us when we need them (and if they don’t seem to come, then the Spirit isn’t choosing to tell us why we’re there, or what he's doing at that moment … but he’s doing something). And again, we are authorised to be there. We’re deputised. We’ve got tin stars and warrants. We can boss around the very demons.

And demons there will be, behind the scenes. We go into the world in the shadow of the prince of this world (for now), the father of lies, the adversary, the murderer from the beginning … Jesus is explicit in this passage about this … we’re authorised in the company of the Holy Spirit to sabotage the work of him whom Jesus remembered falling from heaven. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the actual job description.

We’re sabotaging the work of spirits.

What does ‘sabotage’ mean? What are we authorised and empowered to do, exactly?

· We can speak truth to lies, for one thing.

· We can refuse to obey worldly exhortations to malice, for another.

· And we can invoke the very name of him who sent us, for yet another.

And what will the worldly situations look like when we arrive? What are we parachuting into? It can look like anything. It’ll be places where there are are insurmountable amounts of things like …

· Grief

· Despair

· Distortion

· Cruelty

· Ignorance (that is, ignorance of our true state as created beings)

I suppose in some Hollywood way there can be unmasked evil, which you do hear about … outright paranormal harrassment. But that’s pretty rare. And it’s easy to counter. It’s actually pretty pathetic when the forces of darkness show their hand like that. They did this to Jesus, because to him they couldn’t lie, or conceal themselves in situations of cruelty or distortion.

But most of the time, almost always, in fact, what we’ll be led to is awful situations that appear human-created. Which, largely, they are. If the devil that Jesus speaks about is doing his job right, most people in crisis won’t even be aware of his presence. They might even deny his very existence.

Well, we know better. We know what we’re facing. And there’s where our authority comes in. We’re more like the 70 than the people who experienced the one and only Pentecost moment. We’re quiet, but we see things, and we speak things, in the company of the Holy Spirit. And we act, if we’re rightly following, in the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s our job, and we’re prepared for it, even if we don’t speak in tongues or have flames on our heads.

I like to think of the commissioning of the 70 as the back-story to Pentecost. Its lesson is that wherever the Spirit chooses to go, it’s our honor to go too, and to help.

Here’s what I said to the people of Saint James Episcopal last Sunday. It’s about how people who don’t know Jesus hear about Jesus, and why that’s a shame, and why it’s our fault.

Easter is a time of proclaiming. And we’ve got a lot of proclaiming to do.

But ever notice, when you’re talking about Jesus with someone outside the church, the conversation goes in one of two directions? Either they’ll say ‘Yeah, well, Christianity is really just a way to control people,’ or, if they’re feeling expansive and generous, they’ll say, ‘Oh yes, Jesus was a very great teacher, for sure.’ And that’s a nice way of saying, ‘You Christians mean well, but of course we know the Universe is bigger than that Bible stuff. And if you say, ‘Well, Jesus didn’t talk about himself as a great teacher …,’ they’ll get fidgety, and kind of not want to talk about Jesus any more. They’re afraid you’re going to say, ‘Whatever your religious system is, Jesus is actually the way, the truth, and the life.’ And you can kind of see why that might grate. That kind of conversation, it seems to me, deserves to bog down. It’s obnoxious.

And it undersells Jesus.

Which is the problem with that conversation. The problem is actually not quite what you might think it is. And if we’re in the business of proclaiming, this is worth knowing.

See, the problem when the world hears Jesus talk isn’t that it doesn’t want to hear about Jesus. Not in my experience.

The problem is that the world doesn’t want to hear about that Jesus.

And the reason they don’t want to hear about it is not that that Jesus is too big, and threatens to overpower whatever their tenets about the Universe are. It’s that he’s too small. And that Jesus is too dinky to be taken seriously.

I have found that when you start talking about an unexpected, different Jesus, and by that I mean the Big Jesus – really Big, the way he talked about himself – the non-Christian world, funnily enough, starts to listen.

Well, it wouldn’t be Easter V if we didn’t cover this very topic today: that Big Jesus, in the language he and other commentators in the Bible used. Because it’s been scheduled in our lectionary. And we do well to be reminded about it. The world doesn’t know about Cosmic Jesus as a rule, and WE ourselves inside the church, kind of forget about it too. We’re used to talking about the Nice Guy Jesus, and the Rabbinic Debater Jesus, and the Suffering Jesus on the Cross. And these are good things. True things.

But what about the whole Jesus, the Big Jesus, the way he is, eternally, in the big picture? The one he self-described, in words, when he wasn’t too busy showing in actions, by healing people, and forgiving them, and doing all those Jesusy things? He talked about himself a lot. And if we’re going to spread the word, as he told us to do, and for that matter, if we’re going to live by that word ourselves, and die by it, and live again by it, we better remind ourselves about this basic, whopping, and overlooked definition of the Super Jesus, the Cosmic one, the co-eternal and co-extensive with God one. The one – in case this flies by you in our Creed today – the one through whom all things were made. That Jesus.

When people who don’t know Christianity hear this language … they tend to like it. We should too.

And that’s why we have these readings today. They’re all Giant Jesus. Easter V is the loud end of the megaphone, that started tiny, and locally, and intimately, about a few people seeing the beginning of the Jesus event in a garden tomb. And then got louder and more sweeping through the Easter season, telling us about lots of people beholding the Jesus event. And now it’s universal. In today’s readings we’re told galactic things: that the Gospel is huge, so huge that it belongs to everyone. We’re told about adoration of the focus of the Gospel that’s huge too: it’s happening at the level of the sun and the moon, and all the shining stars. There is praise above the waters of the heavens, and among sea-monsters down in the depths. The divinity revealed in and through the Christ isn’t just for Upper Judea, we learn. It reigns over the whole earth, and heaven. The home of God is now present among ALL mortals, and the death of us mortals (ALL of us) has itself been put to death. God, the Alpha and the Omega, outside time and creation, is in the Son of Man, glorifying him. Through the Son of Man all the commandments have been superseded by a new one, the basic love-rule of the Gospel.

That is a whopper of a Jesus. And we forget him a lot. And we rarely, in my experience, tell anyone about this Jesus. Well, the outside world, in my experience, loves it. And there is much indeed to love.

* * *

Wanna know why we forget to talk about Jesus this way, even though he’s in Scripture? And wanna know why the world today is startled if we do? And you wanna to know why the very first thing the early church sat down to figure out was who Jesus was, cosmically? And then made a credal statement out of it?

It was because, unlike us, the first-century Greek-speaking world was actually very used to thinking about God like gigantically. We actually aren’t, except when we stammer and conjecture about the Universe, and Fate, and things. When it comes to divinity, we don’t think about God the way the first audience did at all.

We know from Paul’s experience in Corinth that there were people who took the gods of Olympus seriously, or at least aspects of them. He took pains to converse with them, for example, about Apollo, who they thought they were seeing in the Apostles. He said Apollo was a good way of imagining layers of divinity bringing creation into being. (The details of this are for another sermon.) But the idea that there must logically first be a central, originating divinity, a basic monotheism, that was eternal, and created things, was already in place. So too was the idea that there was an earth-facing divinity, co-extensive and co-eternal, and of one being, with that central, unknowable divinity, through whom all things are made. The words they used were “urge” and “demiurge.” John suggested ‘the Word’, with God and as God. John knew who he was talking to. And his listeners knew what to do with this two-, or even three-part God-in-one. And the first-century Greeks had no general problem conceptualising a Cosmic Christ. Way beyond sermons on the mount, and making water into wine, they were receptive and ready when it came to giant, creative divinity. That ‘Christ’ part, that was Greek too, and they knew what it was to be a Christos, an annointed one, with oil (the word that gives us ‘chrism’ and ‘christen’).

All this was familiar in the first century. Had been since Plato. For 500 years. It’s not for no reason that the first intellectual underpinnings of our faith were, clear until the medieval period, ‘neo-Platonist’. That was the first line of apologetics, because this is where it all germinated. That’s why our Creed today is the way it is.

Paul’s contemporaries heard Jesus’s self-descriptions in a way we don’t, in other words. They knew better than we how to understand ‘I and the Father are One’. Or ‘Before Abraham was, I am’. Or ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ (There’s a piece of Aramaic apparently that handles this last expression better than the Greek does: The original sentence was probably about participation in the great I Am and not about some pathway to salvation, like it sounds to us. It wasn’t ‘There’s all these apparent ways to God, but I’m the only real one’ … it was actually a way of saying ‘I AM God.’

This is why the Greek world wasn’t mystified when they were told, ‘You ask to see the Father; well, if you know me, you know the Father.’

We by contrast ARE kind of mystified by that. We think it means we know how nice God is because we know how nice Jesus is. Actually, it means, you’re looking at God.

* * *

The unchurched like this when they hear it. The people for whom Jesus is a half-heard rumor like this. WE should like this. For a lot of reasons.

It gives us, for one thing, a Jesus who is big enough to respect, to put it bluntly. It gives us a Savior who isn’t just a skyward projection of us, or another nice guy long ago from the land of sandals and centurions. That kind of Jesus is way too small. He does seem like ‘a very great teacher’ … but that’s it. I know I wouldn’t be impressed if that’s all I’d ever been told about Jesus. I wouldn’t want a God I could understand. (I wouldn’t belong to a club that would have me as a member, either, as Saint Groucho of Marx has it.)

A Jesus who is as big and God-sized as he always said he was delights and reassures the world when they hear about him. That’s my experience. That’s why I talk about him to people the way I do. People who have never heard about Jesus, and that can include people who go to church sometimes, by the way, have in the Whole Jesus the promise of someone who can meet them where they are, who created them and still cares for them, and is coming after them, and can do the things he promises. He’s someone who cares for every human on the earth as though he created them, which he did. It delights people who fret that, I dunno … the medieval Japanese, or the ancient Pacific islanders, or anyone else historically denied the Bible somehow doesn’t have Jesus. Well, nobody ever created doesn’t have Jesus. He’s that big.

It means even the cavemen, like the ones along Lake Bonneville 12,000 years ago, who mourned their dead, loved art, and called their daughters ‘flowers’ (that’s the provenance of the Indoeuropean word, ‘girl’) – even those people were called into being and are offered eternal life by and with Jesus. What’s not to rejoice about in THAT kind Jesus? He hasn’t just been waiting for the Episcopalians to come along, in other words – which is what the world often thinks we think.

It even means that when people out in the world who are taking their religious cues from science, like the physicists who show the mathematical reasonableness of an eternal, timeless, Now, or the the neuroscience team at NYU medical school who are mapping stories of patients brought back from brain death and hearing what they themselves call encounters with Jesus – all these listening, watching, searching people have in the Big Jesus, the way he described himself, answers … BIG answers … that satisfy and intrigue the way the Gospel is supposed to. And why shouldn’t they! I heard Richard Rohr say once, ‘Hey, if something is true, we SHOULD be seeing in in science, once science catches up.’

Well, our readings today remind us that we sometimes forget, or don’t take seriously, or are too embarrassed to verbalise, that the scale of Jesus, taking him at his word, is … well …

… my most recent conversation with someone who was surprised and delighted to hear about this Jesus and this Gospel, and ran off to the Bible to see if it was true, ended like this:

She said, ‘It sounds like Jesus is who I’ve been groping for all my life, honestly. And I didn’t realise that any of this was in the Bible. And I sure don’t remember Sunday School being like this.

Yeah. That’s the Big Jesus. The Easter V one. Pretty much in his own words.

I know I promise no sermons in this platform called No Sermons. But I do want to share what I’m preaching tomorrow at St. James, my home parish. This is partly because I have a lot of Christian readers, and it’s partly because I also have a lot of non-Christian readers. The former are invited to ruminate on my topic today because here at the end of Epiphany this is laid out in the appointed readings. (For you civilians, the readings are scheduled by liturgical season in what’s called the ‘Lectionary’.) For the latter, I share this because I keep seeing the problem of fake Christianity come up in social media. It comes up a lot lately, for political reasons that we all understand.

The thrust of this talk is ‘transformation’. To say it in different language, it’s about toxic religiosity masquerading as religion. Jesus is famous for having let everybody off the hook whenever they’d done something bad. He forgave a lot. But he was harsh about this thing. Every time it came up, he got genuinely pissed – once to the point of violence. It was on religious hypocrisy that he had no mercy. Non-Christians are right to call us out on this when they see it. Jesus did too.

Here are the salient parts of the readings:

Exodus 34:29-35 (exerpt):

As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. … When [he] had finished speaking with [the people] 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.

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 (exerpt):

We act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside. … Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. … And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image; … for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Luke 9:28-36 (exerpt):

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 dazling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him.

And here’s what I’m saying tomorrow.

‘Today in Scripture we learn that when you talk with God, face-to-face, your own face gets all shiny. And everybody sees that – unless there’s a veil in the way – and they know from this that you’ve been talking with God. And that makes them want to listen.

Scripture is funny. It comes to us as a literary form, or collection of literary forms. It’s full of imagery, and allusions, and rhetorical devices that are probably opaque to us most of the time. And it’s easy to take them all literally, and it’s easy to get distracted, and not be sure what the intended message is. You have to adjust to the way the ancients said things, so that you understand them.

Imagine people 2,000 years from now trying to interpret a Pizza Hut menu. Or an episode of The Simpsons. David MacAuley wrote a very funny book about this some years ago. It was called Motel of the Mysteries. It was a spoof archeological report, in which people in the future dug up a Best Western and completely misunderstood it. All those chambers in a circle, as I recall, were monastic cells, and this was a cloister, and there was a central worship space called ‘Office’.

All these shiny faces, on Mount Sinai … all these glowing bodies, on Mount Tabor. Did they really shine? Did they really glow? I don’t pretend to know.

Did they have to light up, just because God was making himself known there, face-to-face? Maybe not, if the account of Jesus making himself known on his resurrection from the Easter tomb is any evidence. That was a God-encounter moment. Victorian paintings love making him glow when he emerges. But eyewitnesses didn’t say he did. Nobody said his face shone. They actually thought he was the gardener, they thought he was some guy walking along a road. Angels glowed there, but he didn’t. Nor did the Apostles in response. So you don’t have to radiate light just because you’re in the presence of God, I guess.

But here’s what does have to happen in the presence of God, and our Luke, or pseudo-Luke, is very clear on this:

You have to transform.

In the unmediated presence of God, a human being cannot but change.

That’s the message in our readings today. That’s what Luke, or whoever wrote as Luke, meant to say. Whoever he was, that author, he knew the story of shining-Moses on Sinai. He also knew about Lazarus later on, on Sinai. And he tells the story about Mount Tabor with Jesus glowing, and Moses probably glowing with him, and also Lazarus likely glowing too.

He’s not talking about glowing; he’s talking about transformation. The fact that these people are there together, and are visibly different all of a sudden, contains the message, whatever the physical event actually looked like.

The message is that where God is, anywhere in time, transformation happens.

And boy, does it. Everywhere. Look what happened to Paul. Paul/Saul, the killer. We forget that he was a murderer before he met Jesus. Look what happened to Thomas. Look at all the Apostles who saw Jesus resurrected. They may not have seen glowing faces, but they sure saw something, or experienced it, and that turned them into gentle fanatics, for the rest of their violently shortened lives. Look at Mary. She only needed an angel presence to capitulate to God.

Divinity is like that, and we’re built to receive it, to recognise it … and we cannot but be changed by it, transformed. THAT is the full message, the rest of the message, of Epiphany. The season we’re ending now. This season started with everybody discovering Jesus, and knowing who he was – the Persians, local Hebrews like the humble Simeon, and everyone else. Here is God, is the message. Now the season comes to its fulfilment with the effect of this revelation. The beginning of the astonishing power in the world of God With Us.

It's still here. We see transformations to this day, whenever God arrives. People’s testimonies are full of them. That’s … kind of the point of testimonies. Sometimes they’re dramatic. You’ll see truly awful people completely turn around, and be truly wonderful people, for the rest of their lives. And you can tell by what they do that they really did get transformed. You can tell just by being around them. Their transformations were the real deal. It still happens.

So here arises something that I want to emphasize.

And this is a part of our Epiphany Scriptures today that we can miss easily.

It’s the fact that we can tell when transformations happen. We who are watching.

It isn’t just that transformations happen … it’s that transformations happen and we can perceive them, in ourselves and other people, and evaluate them for how real they are.

2 Corinthians today makes exactly this point, and very adroitly. We are aware of the glory of the Lord IN EACH OTHER, ‘reflected in a mirror’. That’s the language. We see the glory. We don’t mistake their reflected light for the source of that light. We’re born with the eyes to see it and to understand what’s going on.

And this makes sense. We would have to be built to see it, as children of God, however fallen we may be. We must be able to know our maker, and know our maker’s ways reflected in each other’s radiant faces. This goes for the unchurched, too – and let’s remember, we all were once unchurched ourselves. The non-Christians know divinity when they see it. It’s non-Christians who chide us official Christians when they see us do un-Christian things. I don’t think it’s cynicism when they hold us to what we say. I think it’s a dim awareness, and a wish, that what we proclaim is right. It’s non-Christians who have enough innate discernment to recognise Jesus when they find him, like we did, and become Christians themselves. We humans can see, and evaluate, God-induced transformation. It is given to us to be able to do that.

You’re actually looking right now at a once-unchurched person who capitulated to Jesus through this very mechanism.

I believe I’ve always known Jesus, back to my baby crib. I can remember him there. But when I became official, when I had my Damascene moment, this was when I was in high school … it was the shining example of about three magnificent Christians that ignited me. It was being around them that did it. I saw light in these people, and I knew it was reflected from some source, just like it’s described in our epistle today, and I wanted that source. More accurately, without knowing exactly what I meant, I wanted to be transformed.

And I was.

You know how I know I was transformed? You know how I know that my capitulation to Jesus was the real McCoy?

It’s because I remember being absolutely helpless with it. I had to capitulate when Jesus came. I wasn’t interested any longer in NOT being with this … light, I guess I’ll call it.

And because I’ve gotten worse ever since then. Every year, every season of my life I’m mercifully more captive to him.

I know that you know exactly what I’m talking about. My story is no more remarkable than anyone else’s in this room. It may be LESS remarkable. All of us know a lot about ‘transformation’ here.

So, I had a thought. Because we know a lot about the transformation that comes when we meet God face-to-face, I thought that, even though this isn’t exactly in our Epiphany readings today, wouldn’t be a nifty thing to look at this notion of being captive to Jesus, and mentally compare some notes.

Just for a minute.

Let’s ask ourselves, what does it mean when a person transforms? What do you look for when you’re evaluating somebody’s response, or our own response, to an approach by God?

Are there features that show you that yes, that God-encounter was the real deal? Were there any changes in us, in other words?

Richard Rohr is very unhelpful on this question. I went and looked. He says you Just Know when you’ve encountered God and been transformed.

Good ol’ St. Paul is much more helpful. He says – and he’s the only guy to use the word ‘transformation’ in the whole New Testament – that you’re transformed when you’re no longer conformed to the ways of the world. That’s in Romans 12.

I’m gonna be even more helpful, and offer three things that seem to me to be evidence that we’re changed when, in one way or another, we’ve encountered God. In other words, three forms of evidence that it was indeed God. Three … I dunno … three colors of light of the Spirit reflected in us. (There’s my poetic language for the day.)

One of them is readiness to accept what we see when God comes to us, the way it comes; the second is about no longer trying to force this seeing-journey, or control it in any way; and the third is having a sudden and unslakable hunger for more understanding, a new desire to grow, continually, and to keep welcoming it.

These, to me, are evidence that a person has had a transformational experience of God, and not just some emotional moment about God.

Let me unpack.

Number one. Think about the people you have known who you really, really feel, in your bones, are Spirit-filled and mature people of God. The real thing. Think about the experience of being with them. Did they ever tell you what you’re supposed to see, as you mature spiritually? Or have they been more interested in your ability to see? Have they told you what to see, or have they shown you how to see? Is life with them like going to catechism? Is it a study session where you memorise Articles of Faith? Or have they walked you into life in the Spirit? Allowed you feel it, the warmth of their reflected light? Living the Gospel is not group-joining. Transformation is not rules. Let’s remember, the devil himself ‘believes’ the Nicene Creed. Did these people show you how to see?

Second, have these people in whose reflected light you’ve been prodded you in the direction of enlightenment projects? Have they, or have you, even with pious intentions, tried to build up your spirituality? Y’know … get right with God, and all that. People do this, and it’s not evidence of a transformed self. I kid you not, I saw once, in one of those personal life-organiser books in a Franklin Covey store, a tabbed section called ‘My Spiritual Planner’. If so, how is this like the Apostles? Isn’t a real journey to faith actually a willingness to unlearn things? To unbuild edifices? To concede powerlessness? It may seem religious to engineer oneself into a godly person. It seemed religious at the time to build the tower at Babel, too. Deciding how we’re going to approach God, rather than how we’ll make ourselves receptive to God, is really just a skyward projection of Us. It’s ego-driven, and it’s almost, allllmost adversarial in its way. Or at least confrontational. Or transactional. That’s evidence-area number two. Are you doing this, or is God doing this?

And third, is there now a life habit, whatever form it may take, of living into the reality of God, the God of the big encounter? I don’t mean, is there some program of activities or anything. But has prayer changed? Has the kind of praying changed? Are there things like contemplation happening? Is there art, music, or some new way of exploring God? Have horizons broadened themselves? Is there change? Change that seems natural as breathing now? If we don’t feel transformed, or seem transformed … you know what? We probably aren’t.

I offer these thoughts here, at the close of Epiphany. I share with you my experience of trying to understand the way God comes to us, and the way we respond. I don’t take issue with shiny faces, or anything. I take joy in the fact that God does come to us, and that we do respond.

Amen.’

This will sound dopey, but try it.

Think about your houseplant across the room. Or think about your car. Think about a thing in your space.

Got it?

Now make a little imaginative jump, the way children do, and place yourself in that thing, or as that thing, beholding you. Silly as it sounds, make – or rather let – yourself see things from there. Go one better, if you can, and let yourself see things solely from that identity, and not your own. Let your selfness go away. Notice the difference between thinking about something and thinking as something.

Now do it with a person you know. Funnily enough, this might be harder. Pick a person. Abandon the encyclopedia of facts you think you know about them. Let yourself be them. It’s an experiential thing, not a calculation or a simulation. Just let yourself just move into their space, as it were. Take your time with it, and you’ll notice, with a little bit of surprise, that your awareness of your own self will have evaporated a bit. You’ll have forgotten you for a moment. You won’t be there, as it were. If there’s an emotional change that comes with this, it’ll probably be a sort of calm, a patience, a kind of poise, a feeling of generosity and expansiveness. It’ll feel like great love. It will be peace.

This is an exercise, of course, to demonstrate that our identities, whatever we may think, are not the same as our thoughts. (Yes, really.) But it’s something else, too.

Try the same technique now with the world, if you can. Try it with the entirety of what you know as Reality. Let yourself move into the totality of whatever you believe is around you, huge and minute, concrete and abstract. Don’t think about these things. Try to be them, without thought.

It’s a process of eliding with everything that is, not trying to understand it, and not judging any of it. Again, this is an experiential thing. It won’t work if you think about it. The goal is simply to participate in the being of the created order.

Something funny emerges from this, if you’re able to do it (and with practice you can). You notice that you’re happy, at least momentarily. Sometimes you remain, if not exactly happy, somehow freed a little bit, for the rest of your day, from the heaviness you’re used to feeling – the thoughts, the calculations, the hedging, and the fearing.

This is evidence that it isn’t the world that makes us happy or unhappy.

And I’m going to cut to the chase here, and suggest that making us happy actually isn’t the purpose of the world. It wasn’t designed and given to us to do that.

What the world is for – since we clearly have the option of relating to it in ways that are freeingly absent of self-obsession – is to make us conscious. Or if it doesn’t ‘make’ us conscious, at least it invites us to consciousness. Or maybe it forces us at least to try. It puts us in situations where we have to consider life outside ourselves. We’re too miserable inside. Too much attention to the confines of our own selfhood is, as we’re forced to learn eventually, is tormenting. And it’s a false reality.

So here’s something practical to consider doing – or rather, not doing. If the experience of existing is more important than what we think about that existing, if we really are something transcendant beyond the world in other words, then it doesn’t make sense to be too transactional with that world.

Put simply, true peace passeth all understanding. Instinctively, we are prepared to know this.

What’s not to trust about life? What’s not to trust about setbacks in life?

Setbacks are inevitable. But what is the real need to be allergic to them?

There will be a time, let’s remember, when we’ll all be gone. Not many years from now, people we’ve not met will own our houses, have our money, and drive on our roads. People in only a couple of decades, possibly, will know nothing of our stories, and will only encounter our names in epitaphs and family trees.

Our best response to setbacks now is therefore the same as our basic response to life itself. For me, it begins with the assurance that whether I live or die I am the Lord’s. And that is robust, even when I myself am not robust.

Nothing can fall out of God, after all. Every quark and every neutrino is ordained, and maintained, and promised.

We’re not lost, to say it plainer, and God isn’t lost.

To say it practically, we might as well trust God in everything this side of death, even our setbacks, since we’re going to have to trust him on the far side too.

There is life before death, in other words, and we are intrinsically part of that. This connectivity, this continuity, will continue.

So here’s the thing, about setbacks in life. If you regard each of them as a gateway into life, whatever that is, the fear of setbacks and their apparent consequences ends.

We can sure try to have the right Everything, and set all our affairs up to please us, and we can imagine that in this way we’ll finally be without fear. But good luck. Or we can allow the reality of every feeling we get when our okayness system inevitably fails. And then shrug.

The burden of carrying our ego self and mistaking it for our real self then vanishes.

The clarity, the freedom, after that – what Christians like to call trusting – is a surprise intimacy with another world, THE world, actually, the real world, hidden in this one, right here, partly disguised as our troubles.

What part of you is angry about your latest setback in the world you see? What part is terrified? (And let’s be clear, the right name for anger is actually Terror.) You have a chance to know that if you walk away. You get to see what part of you survives. That part of you, you’ll recognise, was always there. And it’s indestructible.

To say it another way, living life in the heart with integrity, and not in the idolatry of setback-avoidance, proves no interruption with your true identity. To do anything other than this is disorienting, and frightening. To live outside of the stockade of your own construction is to live in the continuum of life before time. And that’s right where you’re built to be.

Still grieving about a setback? Still frightened and hurt by something you bought into emotionally that didn’t go right? Here’s what happens when you lose your fear of being hurt in this way. The grief doesn’t disappear; but you do become able to assimilate it. The grief doesn’t get smaller; but what happens is, you realise you’re bigger.

The most remarkable act of pastoral generosity I ever experienced came from a source that surprised me.

There was an early Gay Pride parade on the television news. It was on the news because there was a confrontation between the parade people and a crowd of protesters.

The reporter was circulating with his microphone, and getting the thoughts of everyone involved. Yes, the people who spoke were flamboyant, and frankly for the most part were pretty obnoxious.

But one man said, and he said it from the top of a table, himself bedecked with purple hair and a pink dress and a lot of ostrich feathers, ‘Everyone, we need to remember one thing. These people who are against us today really, really do believe the things they believe. They are sincere, and they honestly think they’re right.’

He finished, ‘So, look, be nice. Remember that, and be nice.’

I was disarmed, and also impressed. It had not, to my embarrassment, occurred to me that we can allow our adversaries to be well-intentioned.

So it is, nowadays, with how I try to approach MAGA people. For people they are, distinct from a ‘movement’. They mean the things they say, and in their way they mean well. And they really – really – feel it.

Their leader does not. Donald Trump is a rotten little man. Grappling with him, mentally and emotionally, is an entirely different problem.

But his followers, at least the ones I’ve met, are sincere, and they think they’re doing right by following.

Never mind, that he denies them healthcare, defunds their schools, tells them what they can’t read, and tells them what babies to have, doesn’t secure their border, doesn’t build them roads or bridges, doesn’t bring their old jobs back, doesn’t keep crime down, lets them die in a pandemic and still suggests bleach, encourages them to carry guns, pisses off their friends overseas, gives rich people tax cuts, but not them, doesn’t support their troops, and doesn’t keep a lid on the national debt. It doesn’t matter that he keeps them down, and frightens them instead with Secret Jewish Space Lasers.

They still vote for him.

Why do they vote for him? Not because they’re evil. They vote because they’re siloed. And they’re siloed for two reasons.

One reason is that their leaders like them that way. They don’t defund schools and talk darkly about university Libtards for no reason. Siloed people – and this is striking in conversations I’ve had with MAGA people – simply don’t know very much about the non-MAGA world (even if they think they do). And they can be worked up to refuse anything that comes from outside, especially if it’s from professional thinkers, which is to say, Libtards. They would rather know about the Illuminati, Bill Gates tracker vaccines, a flat earth, and Democrat pedophiles. We have a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and Trump and his people, for votes, exploit that.

The other reason is that leaving siloes is Bad. Really bad. I had it explained to me by someone who left the MAGA world recently, and found the passage very difficult. More precisely, she found it frightening. This was eye-opening to me.

She said, ‘Look, when you grow up in the boondocks, and you’re almost certainly being raised in some kind of Evangelical environment, you’re told over and over that your way of life is under attack. And also, Christianity is under attack.’

She laid out what rural, mostly white, people go through in their dark nights of the soul, and now I can understand how it must horrify. She said they see on TV that cultural and demographic change is coming. They know that most people in the country live in cities anymore. They hear about jobs they don’t understand. They worry that their own jobs aren’t important these days. They see black people, and homosexuals, and foreigners. They hear about liberal overreach from the far, far left, and they galvanize around ‘traditional values’. They pick up guns, and turn their backs on education, and on city-led healthcare initiatives, and on real knowledge of what’s actually happening behind the TV. Christianity, a mature and breathing religion to many of them, becomes for others a bizarrely un-Christian ethno-political marker. Neither of these two phalanxes dares engage with the city hordes they imagine coming at them. The deep reason is that their very souls would be in danger. Loyalty to Jesus, as they define Him, and look to Him to repel the heathen, is a matter of guts and guns. This is holy culture war.

They’re not wrong about everything.

They have not done well in the present dispensation. They’re poorer than they used to be, and their access to medicine and education is abysmal. A physician I know just gave me a rundown on all the kinds of doctors that simply don’t exist in Wyoming. It was heartbreaking.

They are also ignored politically. That’s partly because they’re in the minority, and partly because, though they feed us, they aren’t contributing much economically. Nor will they, as their education erodes, and as they refuse help with schools and doctors and roads and all the rest. ‘Socialism’, they’ll cry! Liberalism! But remember when Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign in their states? That must have really stung.

They are also – and here I come to my real point – despised. They are not wrong about that.

I myself have said insulting things to MAGA people, and about them. I am not proud of it.

Other times I’ve let them talk. And talk and talk. Or talk and yell, actually.

They’ve said things that are just plain wrong (‘the Covid vaccine has killed more people than Covid ever did), or blinkered (‘How can Trump be self-serving, if he donated his salary back to the country?), or scary.

They’ve also said things that surprised me. One was, ‘I think a lot of us would actually like a single-payer health system, honestly. Because what we have right now sucks.’ Another was, ‘Yeah, we call them terrorists, but hey, if there were Iraqi planes over my hills, I’d be up there shooting big-time. It’s kinda what we’ve been doing to them’.

I’ve called these people ‘stupid’. But the ones I know are not stupid. Nor would they be. The intelligence curve across a population doesn’t work like that. They’re not generally violent, either.

I’ve called them Neanderthals. But the ones I know are gentle, thoughtful people, who love their children like I do, and want to have good doctors, and go to college, and not worry about gunfire.

What they are is frustrated, humiliated, frightened, and dismally prepared for life in what the country has become. Compounding it all, they have an enormously vested interest in contortions that allow them to remain in the information silo that’s around them. In this respect, the MAGA way does function very much like a religious cult.

But they’re not fools about this either, even if their talkingheads on TV make them sound like that, or if you catch them at a rally, when they’re all wound up. Get them talking in person, and eventually – eventually – they talk like the rest of us. And they’re pretty reasonable about their pain. If you just hear them, in fact, you want to befriend them.

I believe the MAGA movement, and the realities that drive it, will die in time. Whatever dictator is in office then will have his head on a pike. (That’s how dictators end.) In the meantime, the MAGA people are suffering, if you watch closely, and they’re suffering even worse than we are. It’s because their suffering will continue to increase that I think the red-hat way will eventually, after a lot of blood on the sand, go the way of the old Confederacy. It cannot deliver its people.

Meanwhile, what we have now is – deep breath – a pastoral problem.

Want to know what to do for MAGA people? Let them talk, and really listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t correct. Don’t challenge.

Want to know what to do for yourself, when you’re revolted and afraid because they’re talking? Let them talk, and really listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t correct. Don’t challenge.

This is how pastoral care works. It’s why it works. The Franciscans, who have a lot of practice in pain and healing, have taught me this. ‘You make yourself an empty vessel,’ one of them counselled me. ‘You let the pain pour into you. Simple as that.’

Know what? It works.