Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on the fourth Sunday of Lent, “Laetare” Sunday, March 30, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Gracious Father, whose blessed Son Jesus Christ came down from heaven to be the true bread which giveth life to the world: Evermore give us this bread, that he may live in us, and we in him; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Joshua 5:9-12, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

The parable of the prodigal son is easily one of the most well-known, most beloved of all the parables, perhaps one of the best-loved passages in all of Scripture, and for good reason. There are few episodes with a greater range of emotion, greater depth of pathos, greater height of celebration, than this one, especially packed into so small a number of verses. For me, I’m always moved by the father’s response to his son, but maybe even more than that, I find myself moved by all that’s contained in the short phrase, “But when he came to himself.”

How long had the prodigal been out at this point, sowing wild oats? Months? Years? A decade or more? We don’t know, but it sounds like it was probably longer rather than shorter. Before that, what must this son have been like when he was at home? Insufferable, no doubt. No father, not even a generous or foolhardy one, would have sold half the farm and given the cash to one of his sons on the first request. How many years must that father have listened to this kid’s whining, his insistence that he knew better, that he could do better, that he deserved better, than so much farming? I’m sure by the time the father sends off his son he’s tried every other option, used every trick in the book, to get him to grow up. But then there came a point when he’d simply had enough, and he thought, fine, let him have what he wants, and off he went.

Really, it was an insulting thing to ask: the farm is the inheritance, after all. The prodigal son is essentially telling his father, “You’re only good to me dead, and even then only as so many dollar signs. Why should I care about you, your life’s work, what you’ve labored to build and create and care for? Why should I stay here, stuck with a crazy family and nothing to look forward to but livestock?”

In a sense, the prodigal son disowns himself: he has reduced his father to mere money, and leaves his family, his life behind. He is now a “free agent,” as they say, with not a care in the world, but a heavy purse in his pocket. Does he at least work diligently with it? Does he do something with it worthwhile? No. He’s so taken with the freedom he’s gained for himself that he spends every last penny in “dissolute living.”

It’s unclear what exactly Jesus means by this, but we can guess, we’ve all known prodigals in our own life; perhaps we’ve been one ourselves. However he employs himself, it’s no surprise to hear, the money eventually runs out, and he finds he has to work for a living. Without any marketable skills, however, he’s limited to the meanest possible labor, feeding pigs: an unclean animal, one Jews do not eat and would not have raised. The prodigal is far from home indeed.

Finally, we’re told, “he came to himself.” And this realization is what turns the whole parable: he remembers he is a son, that he has a father, that his own actions have removed him from that relationship. He remembers that his father has hired hands, all of whom have enough to eat and to spare. So he decides to go back and beg to be treated as one of those hired hands.

You know the rest: his father welcomes him with open arms; the older brother is resentful, the father tries to snap him out of it, and we’re left to wonder whether it isn’t the prodigal who’s more grown up than his brother after all.

There’s a reason we’re reading this parable in Lent, and it’s because we’re meant to see it as an image, a type, an icon, of what the church means when we talk about sin, repentance, forgiveness, even resurrection: it’s all inescapably personal, it’s all a matter of relationship. If the law is involved at all, it’s to indicate what’s right and wrong and to measure the degree of offense. But the substance is personal, the whole point is that the father welcomes home his son despite what the law says he deserves. The son demanded what was legally his, spent it all, and now has no legal recourse. Still his father embraces him. So it is with you and me. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that God treats each one of us with the same degree of compassion and tenderness with which the father treats the prodigal son, but nevertheless this is indeed what the church teaches.

Holy Week is not far now, only two weeks away. This lesson is perfect preparation because it reminds us that, if we read the prodigal son’s story more broadly, as the history of the entire human race, the point at which the Incarnation takes place is when the prodigal is in the pig pen trying to snatch a bite out of their slop. The incarnation, especially the Lord’s passion and death, is how the human race “comes to itself,” how we are suddenly able to remember that God loves us, and that there is a way back from the mess we’ve made of our life, from the wreckage of the inheritance we’ve squandered.

Consider what that little phrase, “he came to himself,” implies. He was not himself, and now he is. This is right at the heart of what the church teaches about sin: sin makes us a stranger to ourselves. What was the prodigal’s sin? Sure, it was whatever “dissolute living” means. But before that, at the root of the whole thing, was his decision to render his father into nothing but money, and to divorce himself from all family ties. We can only guess at the story he told himself, what delusions he must have entertained. But what’s painfully clear is that he did not appreciate, and perhaps did not even know, who he himself actually was. Among the lies he had bought into was that freedom meant creating his own identity afresh, by raw consumption of goods and services, without reference to anything  beyond his own ego.

Does this suddenly sound familiar? There are some people who call it “The American Dream.” But for all that it promises of freedom, empowerment, and personal agency, the prodigal’s choice is a trap that keeps people estranged from themselves, from their histories, from their neighbors, and from their world. It is not freedom at all, but a prison. 

There in the pig sty, the prodigal finally “came to himself;” and when he came home, this father ran to him on the road, embraced him, put a robe around him, put his own signet ring on his finger, and announced that his son, who was dead, was alive again. The prodigal’s life has been returned to him, and, having come to himself, perhaps he can finally see and recognize it for what it is: the freedom to be rendered not according to money or pleasure or deserving, but according only to love — with all its limitations, yes, but with all its possibility and promise, too.

This is freedom indeed, the freedom to make something, not just to consume; the freedom to be made, forged by the love of others, and to forge by love in return, not just to feed our appetites.

It’s also worth noting that, even while we are strangers to ourselves, the prodigal son is not a stranger to his father, not a stranger to the one he has despoiled and abandoned, whose love he has injured most. Whether his father considers him alive or dead, he never questions whether he is his son. The father refuses to sever the family ties his prodigal son had rejected.

Just so, you and I are not strangers to God. Everything that was true about us before, that we couldn’t or refused to see, remains true, even in the midst of whatever self-imposed exile or pigsty we currently inhabit. No matter how thoroughly we have refused the peace of God or the promise of life, no matter how often we have treated as disposable the people and creatures of God, there is something deeper that remains true of us: that we are made in the image of God, and for such as you and I, Christ came into the world: to make it possible for us to come to ourselves.

And here is an even deeper mystery: the moment we come to ourselves, the moment we recall the bonds we have broken, the love we have scorned, the moment we notice the wasteland we now inhabit; the moment our conscience quickens and we feel the first stirrings of repentance, then God opens our eyes: to see what till now we couldn’t, what we lacked the strength to perceive: that we never actually left the Father’s bosom in the first place. Whatever we have been doing, whatever enormities we have committed, whatever destruction we have caused, whatever departures we have made  whatever wanderings we have went, whatever rage we have indulged, we have done right there, in plain sight, in his lap, the whole time; and all that’s left is to make a tearful embrace of the One who has seen it all and holds us anyway.

Our culture teaches us that responsibility, that the prudent exercise of power, that a certain amount of well-earned affluence, and other such grown-up things are the marks of maturity and wisdom, of a life well-lived. We are taught to put away childish things, to stop depending on the love and care of others, especially of our parents, and ideally to not need anything from anyone. 

I suppose that’s a good way to make sure we fill up our 401k. But oh if we had eyes to see, as the prodigal’s are finally opened: the Love that made us will not let us go, does not let us go, and we are only finally fully grown in that we remain a child at home.

I don’t know what that looks like for you. Chances are the details are different than what it looks like for me, but I’m sure the overall shape is the same: Your task this Lent, O soul, as always, is to learn to let God love you. Whatever else you do or give up this Lent, whatever other good work you attempt, whatever virtue you try to cultivate, whatever grief or shame you hold, whatever sin your conscience carries, you must learn to let God love you. Like the prodigal’s father, that is all he wishes to do; it is God’s whole will and intent. 

The moment you come to yourself, in that moment, a name, a history, a family, a life, will be restored to you, which perhaps you did not realize was yours in the first place. And when Christ rises from the tomb, it will be for us as the sun rising for the very first time, on the world’s very first day.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the third Sunday of Lent, March 23, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 3:1-15, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our first reading today continues the lectionary’s Lenten romp through some of the most pivotal moments in the Old Testament. This Lent, all of them in one way or another reflect on God’s promises to Israel, especially as relating to their Exodus out of slavery in Egypt and their passage through the Red Sea. 

Today’s reading is particularly resonant: God appearing in the burning bush to Moses is almost cinematic in its drama. I’m sure the first time I encountered this story as a kid was watching Cecil B DeMille’s  “The Ten Commandments.” But long before 1950s epic biblical film-making, God appearing to Moses in the burning bush has been understood to be one of the most important and multi-layered passages in the Bible, read and interpreted in many ways. This morning I’ll some time exploring just three of them.

In the Christian tradition, one of the oldest ways of understanding this episode is as a type, an icon, of the spiritual encounter: Moses goes to the deserts of Sinai to escape himself, his history; but what he finds instead, or rather who finds him instead, is the God of his ancestors, who recognizes him and commissions him to return to the land, the people, he had fled, and lead them to freedom.

One of the most frequent reasons people give up on church or faith or prayer is because they come to it with expectations that are totally and utterly disappointed. Faith is not an escape from our problems, going to church does not magically make us better or even different from who we were before, prayer does not introduce us to a higher state of being. 

The episode of the burning bush teaches us that the moment we begin to approach God, we find ourselves stopped in our tracks, disoriented, turned around. Moses saw the bush that did not burn, and when he began to approach it, God called out to him by name, saying, “Moses, stop.” “Come no closer.” Then, “take off your shoes, for this wilderness, this mountainside, this waste scrub, is holy ground.” 

Already we are somewhere very different from the serene peace and joy that so many modern spiritual gurus promise about prayer. For Moses, at first glance in any case,  his encounter with God seemed to bring him everything but. So it is with the rest of us. The closer we get to God, or the closer God gets to us, the more we are thrown back to the very things we had worked so hard to escape. 

I don’t know what that is for you, but if you’re like most, it’s some combination of your history, the shame you carry, your griefs; your most besetting sins, your most unhealthy habits of mind, your disappointments, your distractions, your temptations. Why is it that the minute we show up at church, or the minute we begin to pray, or the minute we resolve to do some good work, suddenly there they all are again, like some monstrous internet comments section trolling our good intentions? 

Well, for the simple reason that God made us who we are, and his purpose is not to make us into something else, but rather to perfect what he began. The bush does not actually burn after all, it only appears to be burning, and approaching it Moses discovers the true end of every created thing, to be bright as flame with the presence of God. 

For us lowly humans, this project always means making something with our histories, our griefs; with the basket of unruly thoughts and deeds we’d rather just ignore. It means facing them, owning them, and letting God tell another story in them than the one we’ve been telling ourselves. But that’s hard, and painful, and very difficult, and it really doesn’t feel like peace or joy or nirvana most of the time.

Moses has to go back to the Egypt he had fled, to the people he had abandoned, and, ironically, be for them the icon of God’s faithfulness and the agent of God’s liberation: be the icon of what he had explicitly escaped. You and I won’t be let off the hook any more easily than Moses. What are you being called to face? The distractions that assault your prayers might be a good place to start asking that question.

Another important element in today’s passage is the introduction of the divine Name. To this day, Jews and even some Christians have such profound respect for the divine Name that they refuse to print it completely, let alone say it out loud. Moses asks God, “If I go to your people and say, the God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask, what is his name, what should I say?” God replies with a name that is famously impossible to translate, but rendered in English is, loosely, “I am that I am,” or, “I am he who is,” or simply, “I am.” 

If you’re Moses in that moment, I can’t imagine it’s a very satisfying response. Wouldn’t a name like Baal, or Anubis, or Ishtar have been more in-genre? But it’s a remarkable name all the same, and for both Jews and Christians it has been understood to mean simply that the God we worship is being in himself. His essence is to be; he is not a creature among other creatures, there was never a time before he came into being because he always has been. 

This is an insight many of the great religions share, that there is something divine about being. But the Judeo-Christian tradition goes quite a bit further by asserting that this divine being who is the God of Abraham is personal, is capable not only of recognizing Moses, but of seeing the suffering of his people Israel, of having compassion on them, and of appointing an agent who will rescue them and bring them to the land he had long ago promised to Abraham and his descendants. 

For Judaism and Christianity, Divine being is not just a principle, it is a person, a person who is not only capable of speech, relationship, empathy, but also a person who desires such things in the first place and acts in history in order to bring them about. This is incredibly important, because suddenly it places the ultimate truth about God not in the hands of scholars or emperors or bureaucrats but into the hearts of any who are capable of replying in kind, whose longing to know God meets God’s longing to be known to them. If divine being is fundamentally personal, then the ultimate truth about God is something that can be known only by love, not by training, position, expertise, or certification.

Maybe you know the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and his famous, terrifying quote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Frankly, he’s not far off: except, for the Christian, the abyss we stare into when we go deep into ourselves and contemplate our life, our being, is not a void, not the annihilation of all distinction, not a principle or an abstraction; but rather the abyss at the heart of our being is nothing less than the whole love of God — and what stares back at us is God’s own face, in whose image you and I were made. There, at the deepest point of our souls, of all that is, is an encounter, whose name is only and all Love.

The last thing I’ll observe this morning about this episode of the Burning Bush is that it reminds us that there is a point to all this faith stuff, there is an end to our religion that we’re eagerly anticipating, aiming at; this is all really going somewhere, it’s not just an endless repetition of readings and rites so we can have some meaning on this earth during the time we’re alive. For Moses, he was to go liberate the people of Israel so that they could leave Egypt and worship there on that very mountain where God was visiting Moses in the burning bush — Mt. Horeb, Mt. Sinai. So that, when they got to that mountain, the whole people could receive the law and ratify a covenant with God, that he would be their God and they would be his people. So that they could embark on the joyful project of living together with him in love.

In the Christian faith, the end we’re aiming at is just what we’ll say in the creed in a few moments: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” when Christ’s “kingdom shall have no end.” In this life, we do not have being in ourselves, we are creatures, God is creator; we have being insofar as God continually wills it. The promise is, that because he created us to love and delight in, that God’s purpose is finally to assume all created, contingent creatures into himself. We will participate by grace in what God is by nature, and so we will join the eternal dance.

In this life we pray, we worship, we undertake works of charity and repentance so that we might be ready for the life of the world to come when it does finally arrive. This work always entails a retelling of our own stories, a reconciliation with former, younger, lesser versions of ourselves, forgiveness for the evil we have done and the good we have failed to do; and love for the God who makes these reunions possible, love for the God in whom these reunions take place.

So, when we enter the kingdom of God, we will recognize the face of the One who greets us, and find our whole selves, our souls and bodies, restored to us, and full, finally, of every peace and joy.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the second Sunday of Lent, March 16, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from thy ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of thy Word, Jesus Christ thy Son; who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Gen 15:1-12, 17-18, Phil 3:17-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our readings today are all about covenants and faithfulness, even tenderness. They are so comforting that it feels almost odd to be reading such reassuring words in Lent. Aren’t we supposed to be getting stiff doses of our own sinfulness, and if the assurance of pardon, then not before a reminder of the necessity of penitence?

Perhaps. But this Sunday anyway the lectionary suggests a different path. I for one am grateful: sometimes we get so inundated with questions of ultimate meaning, with wondering what to make of our lives, our world; sometimes we get so overwhelmed with the tasks ahead of us, that words of comfort land like rain in the desert, unlooked-for and refreshing. So it is today. If you hear nothing else, then hear me say that God is faithful to the promises he has made, at least as much today as centuries and millennia ago: promises to keep, preserve, forgive, heal, redeem, fulfill.

Our reading from the Gospel is especially tender, all the more so for the feminine imagery Jesus freely employs regarding himself: “How I have longed to gather your children as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” As tender as it is, it’s also bittersweet, as he reflects on the sad end many of the prophets faced, and the persecution they received in their lifetimes.

This is a fair place to stop and say, wait a minute. This is a really lovely image. Why were the prophets so poorly received, if this was the tradition they stood within? Well, to put it simply, divine comfort is a harder sell than you might think, and unearthing why also reveals why it’s actually a deeply Lenten message after all.

We can start by asking, what was it, exactly, that the prophets counseled? The critique they offered is probably more familiar than their actual counsel: we know they spoke up against economic policies that disenfranchised the poor and the stranger, against kings who had abused their power, against greed, hypocrisy, and propaganda. But what were they for? What was the alternative they suggested? At the end of the day, that’s probably even more subversive than their critique. Because what they counseled instead was simple trust in the provision of God.

Why is that subversive? Because it meant not putting trust in the things kings normally put trust in: things like the royal maintenance of chariots and standing armies; like entangling alliances with foreign powers; like wars of conquest and campaigns of international subterfuge. Famously, the prophet Samuel was even against the institution of monarchy altogether, and against the centralization of the state that a monarchy implied. For him it was much preferable that the people remain a loose network of tribes, bound by family obligations rather than by any kind of civic code.

Nathan the prophet confronted king David over his affair with Bathsheba, we know that well enough, and we have the glorious Psalm 51 as a result. But less well-known is that David was punished much more severely for presuming to do something so unthinkably wicked as to take a census of the people. A census? That sounds pretty innocuous to our ears, but the problem was that a census always means taxes and conscription, and with those things come exploitation and war.

In our first reading today, God promises Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars of heaven. He believed God, and his faith in the promise was reckoned to him as righteousness. Later on, the kings of the people, instead of simply trusting God to be faithful, preferred to take matters into their own hands, and tried to bring about the fulfillment in their own time, in their own way, by whatever means they could muster. This was the opposite of faithful trust. The prophets said as much. And as a result they were run out of town on a rail.

In all those kings’ defense, it’s hard to imagine how it could have played out otherwise. What, they were supposed to just trust that everything would be okay, without making any provision for the kind of resources, security, and organization that a stable, prosperous society would need? If they built no fortresses, if they kept no chariots, how would they defend themselves when the Assyrians came marching? Or forget the Assyrians, what about when their neighbors came marching? And if they made no alliances, if they did not engage in international trade, how could they get the cedar logs or acquire the stone blocks or accomplish the fine metal work to make the Lord’s temple beautiful? 

I can’t blame them for trying to make the best of their situation. But it does seem that ‘just trusting that everything would be okay’ is exactly what the prophets would have preferred, what God would have preferred, despite how insane it sounds to the more practical and pragmatic among us.

It’s a fair question to ask ourselves, especially in Lent. How often do we try to short-circuit God’s promises of peace, or justice, or ‘life and that abundantly’ by making them come true for us on our own terms, at a time of our own choosing? I don’t know what that looks like for you, though I’d venture a guess it doesn’t look much different than for myself. Basically we try to mitigate risk by heaping up whatever resources come naturally to us. Maybe that’s money or security, or maybe it’s things like affection, or influence, or position;  or degrees, or certifications; perhaps it’s our own indispensability, or maybe it’s our zeal — for the Lord’s house, or the Lord’s people, or the vulnerable we care about.

Don’t misunderstand me, none of these things are bad on their own, and most are quite good. When we pursue them because they are good and for no other reason, then we haven’t short-circuited anything at all. But all too frequently we pursue them in order to feed some existential need or lack of our own, and then we twist them to serve another purpose, to serve ourselves instead, and we begin to look less like those simply trusting God to be faithful, and more like Lucifer claiming God’s prerogative for his own.

The truth is, though we can and do trust God to be faithful, the final and complete fulfillment of his promises will not occur in our lifetimes. We cannot have all the answers now. Our life, our work, is oriented towards a future we are not likely to see, towards beneficiaries we are not likely to meet this side of heaven. This should grant us both humility and good cheer, as we suffer whatever slings and arrows come in the meantime. Building ourselves a fortress to mitigate all possible risk is actually counterproductive: it draws, it attracts the very threats we wanted to ward off. Worse than counterproductive, it walls us off from any possibility of being surprised by God’s faithfulness, goodness, or mercy.

As people of faith there is no security we can claim, no impregnable fortress we can flee to, no army of chariots to fight our battles for us. There is only the shadow of God’s wings; there is only the cleft in the wounded side of Christ. Everything else is as so much grass, here today and gone tomorrow.

This is why Scripture uses such tender imagery so much of the time: “All we like sheep have gone astray;” “I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me;” “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters;” “I do not call you servants but friends; you are my friends.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good, happy are they who trust in him.” We are sent out as sheep into the midst of wolves, and our whole purpose is to be just as trusting, just as dependent as sheep, trusting that God will be faithful to keep us until he calls us home.  Taking refuge in divine comfort means not taking comfort in anything less, else our comfort of choice be revealed as so many fig leaves, as it was so painfully for so many biblical kings.

There’s no way around it, this is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in: especially for reasonably well-educated, reasonably well-resourced people in Berkeley, California, in 2025. We want to do something, we want to use our power, exercise our agency, to make positive change in a world that desperately needs positive change. 

Yes, please let’s do. But at least insofar as we are Christians, a big part of our work is to put ourselves in positions where we can be misunderstood, dismissed, rejected, removed from the board, for our earnestness, innocence, or integrity — in short where we are vulnerable enough to be wounded by those savvier and more cunning than we, by those more willing to take up  the weapons they find lying about the world. Such a dismissal, such a wound will, in the grand scheme of things, serve far greater and more lasting positive change than we could ever accomplish by taking up the tools of our enemy in order to force our ‘better way’ earlier.

“Them that live by the sword die by the sword.” Our life, our task, as Christians, is to trust that God is faithful: to trust that the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, to live now as if this is already the case, and to make our boast in nothing but the God who went to the cross that death may die. So in simple trust we shall be gathered under the shelter of Christ’s wings. So, safe from all disquietude, we shall feed on the bread of heaven. So on that final day we shall wake up after his likeness and find our faithfulness vindicated by God’s own, and all the world at peace.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35, 1 Corinthians 13, Luke 9:28-36

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our Gospel today, the Transfiguration, is a tale of three mountains, or perhaps even more, depending on how you count. Wait, three? Aren’t we just on Tabor? Not all of them are geographical. You’re probably familiar with the traditional image of prayer being a mountain: Thomas Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain comes to mind, or St. John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel. Our Gospel today begins with Jesus taking Peter, James, and John up a mountain in order to pray. Prayer is the point of their ascent, not the fireworks that come later. Jesus prays, while his friends doze off.

It should come as no surprise that the spectacular event of the Transfiguration occurs while Jesus is deep in prayer, and while the disciples are heavy with sleep. How many other moments of divine visitation occur at prayer! From Hannah in the tabernacle to Mary at the annunciation to Jesus’s own baptism in the Jordan, addressing ourselves to prayer puts us in a posture where God is known to make things known. Here at the Transfiguration, what is revealed is Jesus himself in divine glory, shining like the sun, while a voice from heaven claims him as God’s beloved Son.

Critically, he is not alone. Moses and Elijah are there, the great archetypal Prophets of old. And there is also the voice from heaven, speaking in the midst of the cloud that comes to overshadow them all. All of them are talking together, while Peter and the others try to make themselves useful. This illustrates another major point: that revelation, in the Christian religion, is never private, it is always something shared. God’s revelation of himself is something which creates relationships, draws links where before there was only disruption, especially across the chasms of time and space, matter and spirit.

What are they talking about? Luke tells us that Jesus and Moses and Elijah were talking about the departure that Jesus was about to make in Jerusalem. We usually interpret his “departure” to mean his crucifixion and death, especially considering where this story occurs in Luke’s narrative, just before Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem.” But Luke is more specific than mere “departure.” The word he uses in the Greek text is “exodus.” Jesus and these two great prophets are speaking of the Exodus Jesus is going to make by virtue of his passion and death in Jerusalem.

Talk of the Exodus introduces the second of today’s mountains: Mt. Sinai. When Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt through the Red Sea, they went first to Mt. Sinai, where in the midst of another cloud Moses spoke with God and received the Law. This was a major, perhaps the pivotal moment in the self-conception of ancient Israel, the moment when God became not just God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but their own too; when they became not just descendants of the patriarchs but their own nation, whom the gift of the law makes a people.

You may know, this generation proved faithless time and again, and God decreed that they wander in the wilderness until every last member of that generation died. Only then would he finally let the people enter the promised land. And yet, forty years later, Moses says to the new generation, “On Mount Sinai, God made a covenant not with our fathers but with us, with every one of you alive here today.” Moses is saying, that moment of encounter on Sinai persists, remains live, fully present, to all the people held by its promise, even if they weren’t born yet.

Elijah, too, knew Mount Sinai: it was the place where he fled for refuge after defeating the prophets of Baal and fearing the anger of king Ahab. At Sinai he looked for God, and knew him not in fire or earthquake but in the still small voice. God told him he had preserved a number who had not bent the knee to Baal, and ordered Elijah to return to them, and organize their defense. At Sinai, with Moses, the people had celebrated their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. With Elijah, their deliverance continued, now also from royal exploitation and oppression.

Maybe it’s fitting to recall in this context that Sinai was also where Moses had first met God, in the bush that did not burn, where he gave his name, ‘I am that I am.’ Today, on Mount Tabor, if Moses and Elijah are talking with Jesus about the exodus he is about to make in Jerusalem, then Mount Sinai can’t be far from their minds, with all it recalls of deliverance from slavery in Egypt, deliverance from exploitation by greedy kings, and the persistent presence of God in the midst of his people, to make himself known among them.

The exodus Jesus is about to make in Jerusalem should recall for us the third mountain of the day. Here we are on Mount Tabor, talking in a divine vision with heroes of Mount Sinai, of Jesus’s coming work — on Mount Calvary. Like Mount Zion, Calvary is not much of a mountain to speak of: only a mountain at all in the sense that the ground falls away around it; it is surrounded on all sides by higher, more dramatic hills. And yet the exodus Jesus makes there makes Calvary a far more glorious mountain than either Tabor or Sinai.

The exodus Jesus accomplishes on Calvary is by his passion and crucifixion; and the way it makes is not through the sea this time, but through sin and death. On the cross, Jesus parts the waters of sin and death, which constantly threaten to drown us, which separate us in ways sharp and grievous both from our beloved dead and from our true homeland in the nearer presence of God. Jesus makes a way through those treacherous waters for everyone to follow who wants to, without regard to origin, class, holiness, wickedness, or deserving. He makes his resurrection theirs too.

So, as glorious as Mt. Tabor and Mt. Sinai both are, as bright and stupendous the vision of Jesus in his glory, bright as the sun, talking with Moses and Elijah, the very subject of their conversation drives us to see a yet brighter and more splendid sight: the Son of God upon the cross. Brighter and more splendid than the transfiguration? It must have been an squalid, dirty affair, with a mob of people behaving their absolute worst. Glorious? Yes. Here a tool of shameful, agonizing humiliation, is made the very throne of God, where death lies defeated forever.

We’re used to seeing and hearing reversals in the Gospels: “Blessed are the poor,” “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” “The last shall be first and the first last,” “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.” But here on Calvary is the final reversal, the one in which all the rest inhere: a dying man is the eternal son of God, a tool of state execution is the throne of heaven, the moment of humiliation and death is the moment of victory and liberation for all creation.

And this is the chief glory of the Christian religion: that just when all seems to be lost, it isn’t: “For unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.” What the powers of this world consider defeat, shame, unworthy, alien, waste, God invests with incalculable dignity and worth; and just when those same powers have squeezed the last drop of profit from their captive, in their moment of victory they are utterly undone, bound forever by the one they crucified, while all their prisoners go free.

We can rejoice, then, that our hope burns brightest when the night grows darkest. But even more than this we can rejoice that in the ugliest corners of our lives and of our world, the sneers of the seeming victors blow easily away, and we find there taking root the beginning of love: love that persists through death and hell, love that makes itself present, alive, equally across all generations; love that claims us for its own, that opens our eyes to see as we are seen; love that makes itself known to us in the breaking of the bread.

In theName of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.