A Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany

Today was the Annual Meeting at All Saints Church, where I've been helping out lately. The readings for the day can be found here. This is what I said. 

Do you know the story about the synagogue that was in a real mess? They were divided right down the middle over a bitter liturgical conflict.The Shema is at the heart of the Jewish liturgy and indeed of Jewish faith:

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

One faction in the congregation felt that you should stand when the Shema was being read as a sign of respect and reverence. The other faction felt certain you should be seated, the posture of a student. So they tried to resolve the conflict by appointing three standers and three sitters to go see Mr. Finkelstein, the oldest living member of the congregation.

The sitters pleaded with him: “tell us about the days when this congregation was founded, surely everyone then sat when the Shema was read, right?” But Finkelstein told them he just couldn’t remember for sure.

“Think hard,” the standers implored. “Surely when this congregation was founded, everyone stood for the Shema!” “I’m sorry, I just cannot remember,” Finkelstein responded.

Both sides started yelling at once. “This is tearing our congregation apart,” they shouted. “Everyone has picked sides and no one is speaking with anyone on the other side, and it’s a huge mess!”

“Ah,” said Finkelstein. “Now that I remember.”

I’ll come back to that story. But let me get there by way of the Mount of the Transfiguration, where God is made manifest in Jesus, who is the Light of the world.

God very often speaks on mountaintops in the Bible, maybe for the same reason that so many of us feel closer to God when we hike up a mountain and look out over the vista. We speak of “mountaintop experiences” as a metaphor for our spiritual epiphanies because the landscape itself very often helps to open our eyes to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. In such moments we may have the experience of knowing God more fully and of being more fully known by God.

There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a temptation. Such moments are fleeting. It is tempting to want to try to hold onto them forever, and maybe even of trying to make them normative. But to do that is a form of idolatry

I think this is primarily what is going on in the disciples’ desire to build booths on the Mount of the Transfiguration. In truth, every moment is fleeting. The good times, the hard times—time is an ever flowing stream. Mountaintop moments in our lives are precious and a gift, for sure. But the journey of faith is not one long extended mountaintop experience. And you can’t just hit the pause button. We are called to listen to the Voice of God in this story, which makes clear that we are called to listen to, and then follow, Jesus. We do that by putting one foot in front of the other. We are a people of the Way, and specifically we are a people called to follow Jesus on the Way of the Cross, and beyond that to the empty tomb. Liturgically, the wisdom of remembering the Transfiguration today is that it sums up what these weeks of Epiphany-tide have all been about, even as it prepares us to take the next steps in the journey of faith into Lent which begins this Wednesday as we resolutely set our faces toward the holy city of Jerusalem.

I want to interrupt this sermon for a commercial:  an invitation to please make time to be here on Wednesday when we remember together that we are dust, which is simply to say that we do not have all the time in the world and therefore we need to make the most of it. For Christ’s sake and for our own sakes, I invite all of you saints, in the name of the Church, to journey with me into a holy Lent. That journey begins this Wednesday.

Now there is one caveat I need to share with all of you. Everything that I have said to you so far today is shaped by the Western Christian liturgical calendar. While there may be differences between Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, we all follow this same basic path from Three Kings Day to the Jordan River and ultimately to the Mount of the Transfiguration and from there to Ash Wednesday and ultimately to Easter morning where “cross and Easter day attest, God in man, made manifest.”

While my own experience of the Christian tradition has been quite ecumenical, it has mostly been very western. I have recently been in the Holy Land for my fourth visit, however, where I was again reminded of the rich traditions of Orthodoxy that are rooted in the Church’s experience in the east: Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and others. One of the surprises, especially in the old city of Jerusalem, are the ever-present reminders that Christianity is, at its roots, an eastern religion that spread to the west, not the other way around. You feel that and you smell it and you see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher!

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York, a leading liturgical scholar in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. A few years ago I read his book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha.  As much as I love the Epiphany season and find this journey we have been on is familiar to my western mind, reading Schmemman’s book challenged the way I thought about preparing for Lent.

In Orthodoxy, the weeks leading up to “Great Lent” are very different from what I have been describing to you. In the five weeks before Lent, the Orthodox focus on five themes: Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and then finally, Forgiveness Sunday. The Orthodox are clearer than we have been in the west that Lent is not a time to wallow in guilt or shame, but is in fact an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s abundant love, which then allows us to more fully embrace the Paschal mystery by becoming instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation as we participate in Christ’s victory over sin and death.

Sin is the experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred. The first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, Schmemman says, is forgiveness, which opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality. “To forgive,” Schmemman writes, “is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.”

Orthodox Easter falls a week later than our Easter this year. We will celebrate on April 1 and our Orthodox brothers and sisters will do so on April 8. So next weekend, February 18, will be Forgiveness Sunday, also called Cheesefare Sunday, in the varied Orthodox congregations in this city and across the world. On that last Sunday before Lent begins, there will be an elaborate kind of dance where each person in worship says to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

Now I am not going to ask you to dance today, All Saints. But I want you to think about what it would look like for just a moment. What it would be like today for you to ask each person here for forgiveness. And then those beyond this room whom you have hurt as well. Now I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to forgive someone who has hurt us very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you”—because, to be honest, that just might not yet be true. The correct liturgical response is: “God has forgiven you.” 

Forgive me, for I have sinned. God has forgiven you. The spirit of Lent, Schmemman says, is an invitation to experience that mysterious liberation that makes us “light and peaceful” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.” 

Maybe that image brings us face to face with Jesus, in whom there is no east nor west. Maybe that is where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday, taking us, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter” -  which is always about forgiveness because forgiveness “opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love…[and] breaks through to a new reality, to God’s reality.”

Imagine yourself both saying those words to someone whom you have hurt, and then imagine someone whom you have hurt saying these words to you. Maybe this Lent you will find you need to go say them for real and in person or in writing to someone. But for today, let’s just practice: forgive me, for I am a sinner. Listen even now for good news even if you are not yet ready: God forgives you, be at peace. Listen even now for the Easter alleluias that we’ll sing again on April 1. No fooling.

There is an Annual Meeting today, in a parish where there has been a lot of hurt over the past year. I have not forgotten the story I began with today and I hope you haven’t either. Sometimes it’s a little easier to smile at a truth we can see in others and then by the grace of God may then see in ourselves. Whether we stand or sit for the Shema may not cause a passionate argument here. But there are always things to fight about if it is fighting we seek. The work that lies ahead for you, all saints (always with God’s help) is this work of forgiveness; the work of healing and reconciliation and of finding ways for sitters and standers to live together in love. Forgive us, for we are all sinners. God forgives us, be at peace, for we are all saints.

Community is hard. People will always disagree. That’s ok. It’s part of the tradition. But be gentle with each other. Be patient and kind; not arrogant or rude. I know that there is a sense of feeling like we’re spinning our wheels a bit right now and it’s hard to know how you’ll get traction again. But you will. And I know some folks have simply slipped away, rather than staying to fight together. That makes me sad, but it is beyond my control.

For now, we who are here can keep on praying this simple prayer of confession and we can pray that it will lead us into a holy Lent, until we once again sing those alleluias and embrace the new and liberating life that is ours in Jesus Christ: the new life characterized by hope, boldness, freedom and abundant life; the new life that breaks us open to a new reality. God’s reality.