Transfiguration - Mark 8: 27-9:8

If I had to sum up this particular section of scripture I would call it “adventures in missing the point”. Just as last week we saw that the religious leaders were letting tradition obscure their ability to understand what is truly important, now it is the disciples turn to miss out on what Jesus is trying to teach them. 

First, Jesus and his disciples are on their way from one village to the next when Jesus asks a question, “Who do people say that I am?” In other words, I know that people have been talking about me - what have you heard. And the disciples start to list-off what people had been saying from town to town. You’re Elijah! You’re John the Baptist! You’re one of the prophets! But then Jesus turned the question from what they heard to what they believe - “who do you say that I am?”

Maybe the rest of the disciples were silent, but Peter always eager to please just had the words “You are the Messiah!” Burst out of him!

And at first glance, Peter is absolutely right. Jesus is the Messiah sent by God to be a fulfillment of the convent promise made to Israel. Peter got the correct answer to who Jesus is, but he didn’t understand what it meant to be called the Messiah, the Christ. 

Peter expected that the Messiah was who was going to come and restore Israel through military intervention. He was looking for the Messiah to be a conquering military hero. But that wasn’t God’s definition of restoration. Instead, Jesus came to restore people to the Kingdom of God, not through military conquest, but my sacraficial love. 

Which is exactly what Jesus goes on to say to his disciples - that the Son of Man will undergo suffering, that he will be rejected, and be killed, before rising again in three days. And Peter, the same Peter who just moments before had claimed that Jesus was the Messiah, started to rebuke him. Surly this isn’t true Jesus! Surely you don’t understand what you are saying. 

And Jesus ultimately rebuked Peter in return, telling him to “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus wasn’t calling Peter Satan, instead he was saying who the influence was behind Peter’s words as he focused more on the things of this world than on the things of God. 

We, too, are sometimes like Peter. We, too, have adventures in missing the point. We understand that Jesus is the Messiah, is the Christ, in our heads, and maybe we even say it with our lips, but we are still confused about what exactly that means. Jesus in his rebuke of Peter is saying that ultimately what it means to be the Christ is determined by God who appointed the Messiah in the first place, not by what people of this world believe or are saying about him. 

But even when we do not fully understand, we are still called to follow. Even though Peter missed the point here, he wasn’t kicked out of being a disciple. Jesus continued on as his role as teacher, telling the disciples what is to come. 

One would think that Peter would have learned his lesson, but a mere six days later he again finds himself in a situation where he misses the point. 

Peter has been on this roller coaster of a ride since Jesus called him and now he is hiking up a mountain, having no idea what to expect. And how could have any of the disciples expected this? In a split moment they saw Jesus shining before them talking with Moses and Elijah, the pillars of the Hebrew faith. Not only are they seeing this unexplainable sight, but they heard the voice of God. They…heard…the…voice….of…God. Excluding the prophets in the Old Testament, not many people could claim to have heard God since the patriarchs. And Peter knew that this was huge. We have to give him credit for that. But then, he seemed to just miss the point, by suggesting to erect three dwellings for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. And then they had to come back down the mountain, as Jesus told them not to tell anyone what they had saw until “after the Son of Man had been raised from the dead.” Judging from the happenings in this story, it’s likely that Peter still didn’t understand with this phrase meant.

What is so ironic about Peter’s zeal about commemorating the moment is that he totally missed what God told him to do. God’s message to the disciples in this story wasn’t anything radically new - this is my son; listen to him. Yet Peter didn’t listen. Instead of absorbing the moment and taking it in for all that it was worth he got busy. We have a tendency to be like Peter as well at times. Instead of listening to Jesus we set out to do things for Jesus, instead of simply asking Jesus if this is in fact what he wants us to do. We get caught in this trap both as individuals and as churches. We want to do the next big thing for the Lord, when really if we would simply listen, Jesus is calling us to do something else completely. 

The epistles of Peter tells us that while this wasn’t a long experience,  not even lasting a whole day, that it was seared in the disciples memories. Peter was impacted enough to write about what happened to him on the mountain. Listen to the words Peter wrote again. “We had been eye witnesses to his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ We OURSELVES HEARD this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.” Peter had experienced God in such a way that it impacted his world. 

But, once again, we too miss the point from time to time do we not? We’ve all had mountain top experiences in our life of faith. Pause for a moment and think about a time when you undoubtedly knew that you were in the presence of God. We each have a unique story that tells of how God has interacted with and blessed up. Those moments when you feel engulfed by the total presence of glory. But how many times like Peter do we want to memorialize the moment, just sitting in God’s glory, instead of using that to fuel our journeys. 

Just one chapter earlier, Jesus had told his disciples what is to come. He had told them that he was to suffer and die. But they wanted to sit there, in an experience that seemed much more pleasant, then go out and face what is to come. This divine moment of realization in the transfiguration wasn’t the point in and of itself. It was simply a stop on the journey to continue to fuel the disciples to go forward. 

Peter shows us in this piece of scripture that we can both be right and wrong at the exact same time. That we can say all the right words with our lips, but our hearts don’t fully understand. Or we can think we understand, but our hearts aren’t in the right place at all.

Thankfully, we don’t need to have it all figured out in order to be a disciple, as Peter shows us. We are still going to miss the point from time to time. The question is if we are still willing to follow Jesus. Even when we don’t understand. Even when it isn’t going as smoothly as we think it should? Do we still follow the call of Christ that transforms and transforms this world, all for the sake of the Gospel? Amen. 

What Defiles? - Mark 7: 1-23

Let us start out with an obvious statement - I want you to wash your hands. Wash them as often as you can. Definitely wash them before you eat. We are now firmly within cold and flu season - wash your hands, friends. But that isn’t really what this scripture is about today, is it? Jesus really isn’t telling his disciples to not wash their hands before they gather at the table. No the questions are much more pressing. 

This scripture is found in the midst of a lot of stories about eating. One chapter easier you find the feeding of the 5,000. One chapter later you find the feeding of the 4,000. And in between you find this story about people coming together at the table. 

The disciples were eating and the religious leaders of the time were calling them out to Jesus for having defiled hands. In the text we are told that means that they did not wash them, but what they are really talking about here are the accepted norms and traditions that were passed down from one generation to the next. 

Some of those traditions were found in scripture and made sense for the time. For example, the dietary laws that we find in Leviticus were an attempt to keep people from getting sick. But other rules were actually customs that were handed down like how to go about washing your hands or washing your dinnerware in a particular way. 

So while it looks like the disciples and scribes and Pharisees are having a disagreement about food, its actually not about the food itself. It’s really about the upholding of traditions. 

But before we go thinking that the Pharisees and Scribes were being unreasonable, I think we need to stop and examine our own hearts and see where we, too, let tradition prevail. In some churches, there is a custom about what type of music is played in church. It can only be songs found within the hymnal, played on the organ. So when people start talking about introducing new types of music to reach out and connect with the community there is an immediate answer of “no, we don’t do things that way around here.”

For other congregations, maybe its not the music, but how you are expected to dress. You need to come wearing your Sunday best, different from what you wear the rest of the week. So when people come in that don’t look like them, they don’t quite know what to do. 

Here is the thing - it is not that the customs that we have, or that the customs that the religious leaders in Jesus’s day had weren’t wrong. Often there is a really good intentions underneath them. We sing these hymns because they have been shared for generations to teach about the faith. Or we dress a certain way when we come to worship because we want to bring our very best to God. But when customs get confused with Gospel, we have a problem. In other words, when we rely more on our human traditions than the movement of God’s spirit, we can become confused about the most important thing. 

These traditions that were passed down from the elders were familiar to the people of the day. The disciples would have known them. But Jesus used this opportunity to talk about something much more important - what it truly means to be pure. 

The religious leaders were using external markers handed down through the generations to make a marker for purity. But for Jesus that wasn’t what it was about at all. Going back to the prophet Isaiah, Jesus pointed out that it isn’t what’s on the outside that makes you pure - its where your heart is. 

Jesus goes on to say that there’s nothing on the outside of a person that can defile, but only the things from within. 

See the religious leaders were using this question about purity to bring people in or push people out. In other words, they were using it as a measuring stick to decide who was worthy. Worthy to come to the table. Worthy to be part of this religious community. But Jesus is pointing out that you could keep all of the traditions you want, you could follow every rule and commandment exactly, but if your heart isn’t close to God, then you aren’t really pure, are you?

We, too, can get caught up in this struggle of judging who is worthy or not. But I have to wonder, when we get so caught up in judging others, is it really to avoid looking at the places in our life that are defiled? Are we avoiding looking into our own heart in order to confess our sins. It is a lot easier to point to someone else and state all of their flaws that we perceive; it is a lot harder to humble our hearts before God and confess where we are in need of cleansing. 

And other times, it isn’t clear. Jesus and the religious leaders of the time were both followers. And even faithful followers sometimes disagree. Think to different Christian traditions when it comes to celebrating communion, the Lord’s Supper. Some say that you need to be baptized in order to come, as a sign of Christ’s cleansing in your life. Others say no, you can come just as you feel led. Some say that you need to be a member of a particular church. Other’s hold a different belief. Each looks to Scripture to come up with their reasoning, yet the way that there tradition takes shape is different. 

In the United Methodist Church we believe that you don’t need to be pure in order to come to the table. We are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God and all who are seeking to grow in their relationship with God and we are welcome to come. No prerequisite required. In fact, John Wesley believed that there is something that happens when you take communion that can change your heart from the inside out - and its one of the reasons he said to partake as often as you can. 

Friends, it is not a question of tradition, its about seeking after the heart of God. Sometimes we can get so caught up in what is familiar to us that we don’t take time to ask why we do those particular things in the first place. Sometimes we just want to maintain what is comfortable to us, over and above following the calling of God. 

This call of God is to have our entire beings changed - not just on the outside, but on the very inside. I love the image of an old fashioned tea cup - the type often made of delicate china that sit on a little saucer. Those little saucers aren’t just to put your cookies on, they are to catch anything that may spill over. Jesus is saying that what comes out of us is that which spills over from our hearts. And if we aren’t careful, what can take root in our hearts are things that no amount of external cleaning can address. 

Where are you at today? Are you more focused on the outside or the inside? Do you worry more about where you are with God or judging others? Are your traditions keeping people from the Gospel message or sharing it far and wide? 

What Defiles? Not that which is on the outside, but that which takes root in our hearts. Amen. 

“The Death of John the Baptist” Mark 6: 1-29

Have you ever been in a situation where you knew the right thing to do, but didn’t do it? Or perhaps you have experienced the reverse - you have known the wrong thing to do, but you’ve done it anyway? John Wesley described these as sins of commission and sins of omission. One is not worse than the other - and we see them both all over today’s scripture lesson in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6.

If you remember last week, Jesus has been moving throughout the region bringing healing to folks - and last week we heard about how he brought a dead girl back to life and brought healing to a woman who had been struggling for over twelve years with a medical condition. And the question that people were asking was where was this healing coming from? By what power was Jesus bringing this healing?

But oh how quickly folks have forgotten what just happened. Oh how quickly the questions seem to shift. On the Sabbath Jesus and his disciples come to the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town. And people couldn’t stop talking about it. Some were asking similar questions to what folks were posing last week - where is his wisdom coming from? But then others started a different type of whispers, different types of questions. Do you know who that is? That’s the son of a carpenter. What can he teach us?

And Jesus continues teaching anyway and says “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” In other words, you aren’t going to listen to me here so I need to keep moving on. 

When I was in college and after I graduated, but before I entered seminary I served as an intern in my home church. In a lot of ways my experience was vastly different from Jesus. I was trusted and listened to by a lot of folks because I was one of them. Because they knew me, knew where I came from. They were the church that had affirmed my call. They were part of the call. 

And yet. And yet, there were some folks who as an act of dismissal would say things like “I remember changing your diapers” when they disagreed with me. 

Oh how it is hard to lead in the place from where you came. 

For Jesus his leadership was so stifled that scripture tells us that he could do no acts of power there. All of those miracles that he had been doing throughout the region couldn’t take place in Nazareth because the people were so caught up in where Jesus came from that they couldn’t even give him a chance. Surely they had heard about what was happening the next town or two over, but that wasn’t to take place because their lack of trusting Jesus stopped it before it could even come and be a testimony amongst them. 

He was able to heal a few folks by the laying on of hands, but as a whole he was amazed by the town’s disbelief. 

For the towns folk in Nazareth their sin was not giving Jesus a chance. They didn’t want to hear him speak about the power of God amongst them. They didn’t want to hear truth being spoken to power. They could not set aside their own biases to catch a glimpse of what God was doing, because in their minds there is no way that God could be working in and through this person right before them. 

Have we ever been there, church? Have we ever let our own biases get in the way? Have we ever rejected something that was said simply because we didn’t think God would show up in that way? Or didn’t expect God to show up at all?

Some of my most wrenching moments in ministry have taken place in board meetings where people were so caught up in doing things their own way that they didn’t see the big opportunities that God was opening up right before them in the Kingdom. They let their fear dictate their faithfulness to the Spirit, because they had never done it that way before. 

Interestingly, right after Jesus had this experience in Nazareth he send his disciples out amongst the region. And perhaps because of what Jesus just faced, or maybe because Jesus knew our human heart so well, he made this statement that if folks don’t welcome you then leave and shake the dust off of your feet. In other words, not everyone is going to accept the Good News. Not everyone is going to be receptive to repentance and being open to hear. And if they aren’t going to hear than its going to be really hard for them to open up their whole lives to God. Jesus just had to shake the dust off of his feet in Nazareth and his disciples were going to have to do the same. In other word, the disciples were to do their best wherever they found themselves and then leave the rest up to God. 

Through Jesus’s teaching and healings and miracles, and the disciples going throughout the region, King Herod started to hear about Jesus and it stood as a conviction to his Spirit. See Herod had John the Baptist arrested and put him in prison because of his wife, Herodias. John had testified against him for marrying her in the first place, because she was his brother’s wife. And because of those words Herodias had it out for him. 

But there was something in Herod’s spirit that was a bit more receptive. He heard John and was perplexed. He feared him. He tried to protect him. He listened to him. Friends, maybe we could ever call that an opening of the Spirit. 

Until the ways of the world simply became too much. He killed John the Baptist, even though he knew it was the wrong thing to do, because he wanted to save face amongst the guests at a party and thought more his own ambitions than what was right or wrong. His desire to please other people outweighed his respect for John and his spirit became closed off. 

Herod feared the wrong power. And he knew it. Because the news of Jesus stood as a conviction to his spirit. Have we ever cared more about not stepping on someone’s toes then doing what we know is right? Have we ever set aside pleasing God in order to please other people? Has our ambition ever lead us to do something that didn’t honor God? Have we tried to shut our spirits off to the point where God needs to convict us?

Friends, what sins of commission or omission is God trying to point out to us today? How have we acted in ways that have shut the Gospel message off in our own hearts and lives? How have we failed to act in ways that are obedient to what the Spirit is doing?

This morning we are going to take time to examine our own hearts. The alter will be open if you feel lead to come and pray. Let us bring our sin and shortcomings before God, asking that the Spirit remove anything in us that would block us from a faithful response. Amen. 

Mark 5: 21-45 “Jairus’ Daughter Healed”

When I was in seminary, a professor invited me to be part of a Bible Study. We would meet together as a small group over our lunch break and pour over scripture together. One of the first scriptures we looked at together was this one, two stories, tied together by Jesus, that otherwise don’t seem to make much sense. 

Jarius is well known in the community. He was one of the leaders of the synagogue. He would have been a man with power and privilege and yet, even deep need came to him, as he broke down before Jesus, begging for the life of his daughter. 

Jesus agrees to go with Jarius, but along the way there is an encounter with an unnamed woman. We are told that for twelve years she has struggled with a health issue that caused bleeding. She was broke. She was out of options. She had no power. She couldn’t be part of the community of the synagogue where Jarius lead because she was ceremonially unclean. 

Two people who’s lives would not have intersected. Two people, one rich, one poor. One looked upon well in the community, one disregarded. One male, one female. But that day they were united by one thing, a desperate need for Jesus. 

Both felt like they had run out of options. Both were willing to go to extremes. And both of them were precious enough to Jesus to stop what he was doing and bring life to them.

Jarius’s daughter was 12 years old. She was now at an age when she could be married, but instead, she lay dying in her family’s home. And Jarius, because he loved his daughter so much, we went as far as to break every rule in the book. He would have known that Jesus was blacklisted amongst the religious leaders of the day. In fact, he may have even been one of the people engaging in the blacklisting in the first place. Just a few chapters earlier in Mark 3, we find Jesus engaging in another healing - the healing of a man with a withered hand. And in that healing everything broke loose, because he dared to heal this man on the Sabbath, in the synagogue, in the presence of these leaders. And scripture tells us right after that healing, “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him”

And yet. 

And yet, even though Jarius would have known this his daughter was worth the risk. His daughter was worth casting aside the blacklisting of the religious leaders in order to fight for her life. 

Only on the way to Jarius’s home, Jesus brought healing to another woman. This woman had been suffering with bleeding for as many years as Jarius’s daughter was alive. She, too, was at the point where she was willing to risk it all just for the possibility of restored life. This woman had the courage to interrupt Jesus’s day and touch him, to touch just the hem of his garment. She did exactly what she knew that she wasn’t allowed to do, because she was so, so desperate. 

Have you ever been there, brothers and sisters? Have you ever been so desperate for healing, so desperate for Jesus that you were willing to risk it all? Willing to do the courageous thing as an act of faith?

A few months ago I was blessed to go on a 42 hour silent retreat. Over the course of three days we did not speak, except during worship and time with a spiritual director. During one of the worship services the priest spoke about another passage of scripture from he Gospel of Mark, Mark 10, but what he was getting at speaks so profoundly to this particular passage. Dis-ease. Dis-ease of the body, when we are so sick that all we long for is the freedom of healing. Dis-ease of our world, where violence and conflict abound. Dis-ease in our personal relationships where we wish that things were different. Dis-ease in our spirits, when we know that something isn’t right, but we can’t quite put words behind what we are feeling. 

Jarius and this unnamed woman knew dis-ease. They felt it deep within themselves. But here is the thing about dis-ease. It is not the end of the story. Healing is. Healing that may look like what we expect. Healing that may not be anything like what we expect. But we still believing that healing is possible and healing is coming. 

Hope is what lead Jarius and this woman to Jesus that day. Hope that something different then everything that others were telling them was possible. 

As much as this story is about the woman and the child, its actually about so much more. Often our rational brain starts with the question asking how these people were healed, but the real question is who is this one who brought the healing? Who is this Jesus?

Friends, have you met Jesus, the healer? Jesus who shows us time and again the absolutely generous grace of God. Jesus cared enough about these people to stop what he was doing, stop everything that he was doing on a day where it seemed like everyone needed him for something, because he saw these people. He saw their pain. He saw their deep need. And he offered them life and life abundant. 

Sometimes our desperation is actually an act of faith. An act of courage. All too often, we see these individuals as going to Jesus as a last resort, but really in going to Jesus at all, they were risking everything for the possibility of the unknown. But just that possibility made it worth it to them to seek him out. 

What leads us to Jesus, today? What in our lives cries out to Jesus out of desperation? What is our act of radical faith in the presence of Christ?

Because friends, this is part of the mission of God. To bring us healing. To bring us life. We, too, have deep areas of hurt and needs that Jesus sees and is just waiting for us to bring them before him. Spiritual writer Flora Slosson Wuellner put it this way in her 2010 Upper Room Devotional piece, "Once we do name hurt and deep need, we move into another dimension altogether. We are no longer trapped. A window is open, and we are able to see where we are.”

We are going to have an opportunity this morning to bring our deep needs to Jesus in prayer. We are going to have a time of anointing if you would like to come forward, or pray with others or pray silently in your seat. But know wherever we are, crying out to Jesus, that he hears you. He sees you. And he is bringing you life, and life abundant. Let us pray…