Sermon: What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

First Presbyterian Church

February 15, 2026, Transfiguration A

Exodus 24:12-18: 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

 

What Is Revealed, What Is Concealed

 

 

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to drive around town or perhaps across the state on a cloudy day? Not a rainy day, but a cloudy one, when the sun isn't constantly beating down and creating a glare that obscures everything? I know this is a little bit heretical to say, but sometimes cloudiness can be a good thing. 

In the Old Testament a cloud can in fact be a very good thing: it can, on occasion, be a manifestation of the presence of God. 

It happens in today’s reading from Exodus, Moses is making ready to go up the mountain called Sinai to receive instruction from God. Even from the moment the Israelites had first come to that mountain after their deliverance from Egypt (back in 19:9), God had made his presence to Moses there known by the appearance of a thick and dense cloud, from which God’s voice might be heard by the people. Even before that, during the Exodus from Egypt, a pillar of cloud had been the manifestation of God’s protection of the people as they traveled by day, with a pillar of fire taking its place by night. That cloud, in a sense, revealed God.

There are other accounts in Hebrew Scripture of cloud as manifestation of God, but my personal favorite is a little-known account from the little-read book of 2 Chronicles. In this account in chapter 5 the great Temple was being dedicated under King Solomon. At the climax of the dedication, as the priests sang a song of praise, the Temple was filled with a cloud, “so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.” I mean, let’s face it, that’s pretty cool. And again, the cloud reveals the presence of God. (There is a parallel account in 1 Kings 8, but I prefer the Chronicles version because in that story, the cloud fills up the Temple only after the trumpeters have started playing and the choir singing. Music, after all.)

So when we get to the account from Matthew’s gospel today, along with the account of going up a mountain, and the actual glowing transfiguration of Jesus, the bright, welling cloud as a manifestation of the glory of God would not have been unfamiliar to those to whom Matthew was writing. It is a scene in a gospel, but like so much of Matthew’s gospel it contains a host of echoes and resonances with Hebrew Scripture.

Still, though, there is something interesting about a cloud as a manifestation of the presence and glory of God. Clouds, after all, aren’t exactly known for their revealingproperties most of the time. Clouds aren’t translucent; they obscure. The whole reason that the cloudiness makes that drive so bearable is that it obscures the sometimes-oppressive summer sun (or even the sometimes-oppressive wintertime sun). 

And in the account from Exodus, that’s exactly what happens. The voice of God could be heard by the people, but God could not be seen, and when Moses went up the mountain to receive the commandments of God he also disappeared. Not that the people minded; already they were quite content to keep their distance; as early as Exodus 20 they were afraid that if God spoke to them directly – face to face, so to speak – they would die. In their minds, the cloud was protection.

(As for that lovely story from 2 Chronicles 5, the glory of the Lord filling the Temple with a cloud was indeed enough to bring the dedication of the Temple to a halt; “the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud” as verse 14 describes. Not sure if it means the priests were physically unable to stand or simply couldn’t stand it.)

In Matthew, the cloud seems a little different. This event is taking place six days after Simon had made the great breakthrough confession of faith recorded in 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” Jesus had followed up this confession by giving him a new name – Peter – and by launching into an extended piece of instruction on his forthcoming death. The newly-christened Peter had taken Jesus aside to rebuke him for such talk, only to get it back ten times over – “Get behind me, Satan!” 

Despite that incident, Jesus took Peter up the mountain, along with James and John, where this Transfiguration took place. Jesus himself is transfigured and glowing and shining and dazzling, and then as Moses and Elijah – the law and the prophets, so to speak – appear with him. You get a brief reminiscence of this in the reading from 2 Peter, likely written by a follower of that apostle recording his teacher's recollection. 

After this transfiguration, Peter steps into a role many of us might recognize, maybe, from times of great excitement or stress or fear in our own lives: the person whose mouth immediately starts running despite the fact that his brain is supplying absolutely nothing useful for his mouth to say. (Somehow, 2 Peter doesn't include this part.) And then, when Peter is fumbling around about building booths for Moses and Elijah and Jesus as if this were the ancient Hebrew festival known as the Feast of Booths? That’s when the cloud takes over.

The cloud “overshadowed” them. And, as it was back in the days of Exodus, a voice (the voice of God?) spoke from the cloud, to the effect that the disciples fell to their knees in fear (not unlike their Hebrew ancestors at the prospect of the voice of God). What the voice said sounds familiar – “this is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased” is an exact echo of what the voice from Heaven says at Jesus’s baptism, back in chapter 3. But there is added a command: “Listen to him!” (And don’t miss that exclamation point.) Only at the touch of Jesus (“Get up and do not be afraid”) do they look up to see the cloud gone, Moses and Elijah gone, and Jesus – “Jesus himself alone” in Matthews’ emphatic Greek construction – is there. The cloud, the glory of God, has removed the distractions of Moses and Elijah, the safe and comfortable heroes of the faith Peter and James and John knew, and left them with “Jesus himself alone,” whom they have just seen as they had never seen or heard or understood him before. 

In concealing Moses and Elijah from the overly enthusiastic disciples, the cloud also reveals; Jesus is revealed not merely as an equal to those two, but something completely other, something so far beyond what either of those figures could represent or offer. The Son of God, the Eternal, is revealed by what the clouds conceal. 

As the eminent twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth describes in his The Faith of the Church:

Eternal does not mean "that which has no end" but "that which belongs to the world to come". Eternity is not defined by its unlimited characteristic but by its relation to the world to come, to the glorious kingdom of God.

 

“That which belongs to the world to come” – a world without end. 

At a challenging time for the disciples, when Jesus insisted on his own death and severely rebuked those who could not accept it, these disciples are given a glimpse, however fleeting, of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. At a time and season nearly impossible for us to bear, we receive this glimpse of Jesus the Eternal, Jesus of The World to Come. Death does not, cannot, have the last word, no matter how dark our despair might seem, how much madness might seem to hold sway in the entire world, no matter how bleak the night. The clouds pull back and conceal what is not eternal, revealing the One who is eternal. And that, strange and puzzling as the story might be, is why Transfiguration Sunday is a day of great hope. 

This is God’s Son, the Beloved, in whom God is well pleased. Listen to him!

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #189, O Wonderous Sight, O Vision Fair; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #11, Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud

 

 

Sermon: You Shall Be Called "Rocky"

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline IL

January 18, 2026, Epiphany 2A

Psalm 40: 1-11; John 1:29-42

 

You Shall Be Called “Rocky”

 

“Dumb as a bag of rocks.”

I’m guessing you don’t need to be told that this is an insult. It’s a phrase that was popularized on the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, but that phrase is only one variant of a general theme that might also be expressed simply “dumb as a rock” or “dumb as a box of rocks.” And it’s probably some kind of rhetorical cousin to one I grew up with, “dumb as a sack of hammers” (and no, hammers and rocks aren’t the same thing, but they do share a certain quality of what we might call denseness). 

Mind you, it’s also true that rock can be thought of as solid (that’s the basis of an old favorite hymn, after all – the “solid rock”) the way a rock appears in the psalm reading today, as the basis for a firm foundation. In another pop culture reference, there was an insurance and financial services company that boasted of its solidity and security with the advertising slogan “get a piece of the rock,” paired with a logo depicting no less than the Rock of Gibraltar. 

To be sure, rocks (great or small) have their uses – great foundation material, nice decorations in a garden, skipping them across a river – but you can still see how they might fit into the insults noted above. You’re not going to look to a rock to solve complex mathematical equations or deep philosophical conundrums.

Yet our reading today ends with Jesus, no less, greeting Andrew’s brother Simon, not with “hello” or anything like that, but with the announcement “You are to be called Cephas” (which John the gospel author helpfully translates for us as Peter). The name “Cephas” comes from the Aramaic word for “rock”; “Peter” is the Greek equivalent.

So in other words, the first thing Jesus says to Simon, before Simon even has a chance to speak, is “I’m gonna call you Rock.” Or maybe even better, “Rocky.”

We come to this place as John, the witness in the wilderness, is directing his disciples towards Jesus as “the lamb of God.” Jesus passes by as John is with two of his own disciples and John repeats this proclamation, with the unspoken subtext being “follow him! Go, already!” It’s not impossible to imagine John practically shoving the two disciples off in the direction Jesus was walking. Finally they do follow Jesus, and his first words to them – the first words Jesus speaks in this gospel at all – are “what are you looking for?” The two disciples ask where Jesus is staying, he invites them to “come and see,” and it seems they end up spending the day with Jesus.

We are given no clue what they talked about or did, but it was apparently quite convincing for one of the two, named Andrew. Not only did he immediately go and find his brother Simon; see what he says to him: “We have found the Messiah.” Something between John the witness’s own testimony to Jesus and what Andrew heard from Jesus himself brought Andrew to this startling conclusion, a claim not to be taken lightly in that day and age. 

Now Andrew is mostly known otherwise for being the one to help set the feeding of the five thousand in motion in John 6, by bringing to Jesus’s attention the boy with the five loaves and two fish. In none of the gospels does he come off as one of the “big names”; normally you hear most of Peter, James, and John, and this fourth gospel sometimes makes a big deal of Thomas. But bringing people to meet Jesus, whether it’s the boy with the loaves and fish or it’s his own brother, that’s a pretty good legacy to leave behind in scripture.

But Andrew brings his brother Simon to Jesus and the first thing Jesus does is…change his name?

In John’s gospel, one of the most consistent characteristics of Jesus is that he sees, particularly that Jesus sees people at their deepest level. In the next verses of this chapter, Jesus will greet Nathanael, another disciple-to-be, with the proclamation “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” (insterestingly, this comes just a few beats after Nathanael has made a derogatory remark about Jesus’s hometown). Think also of the clandestine nighttime visit Nicodemus made to Jesus in chapter 3, in which Jesus is answering Nicodemus’s questions before Nicodemus even has a chance to ask them. Or think of the midday encounter with a woman at a well in chapter 4, while Jesus and his disciples were in Samaria, in which Jesus seemed to know all about her, right down to her marital history. John is keenly interested in presenting Jesus as one who sees into the human condition, indeed into the human heart, from the very beginning. 

So what is it that Jesus sees in Simon that prompts him to bestow the somewhat two-sided name “Rock”? (Or maybe “Rocky”?)

After all, this isn’t exactly a common name for us. Oh, the name “Peter” is now, once it showed up all over the gospels and the book of Acts and a couple of small epistles towards the end of the New Testament. I doubt, though, that most parents who name their child “Peter” are really thinking about this Greek word’s original meaning. 

Parents don’t name their child “Rock,” at least not very often. The famous actor was born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., long before any Hollywood mogul slapped the name “Rock Hudson” on him. And the former University of Miami football player turned pro wrestler (and now turned actor) Dwayne Johnson made sure to avoid any confusion about its meaning by choosing the stage name “The Rock” for his professional career – no confusion about not being so bright there. For that matter, to be fair, our perception might also be shaded by the movie character Rocky Balboa, as played by Sylvester Stallone in all those movies, who for all his boxing triumph doesn’t really come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

So what is Jesus getting at with this new name for Simon? Is it all about firmness and stability? But unlike in Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus doesn’t add on the bit about “upon this rock I will build my church,” so can we be absolutely sure that’s what’s up here? Is there something about, maybe, being just a bit of a bonehead at times?

Why not both?

In this season of Epiphany, the Sundays after the revealing of the Christ first to those eastern Magi, one of the ongoing characteristics of the gospel readings is that in some way each of those scriptures point to something about Jesus being revealed. In last week’s reading the baptism of Jesus was the occasion for that opening up of heaven and the Spirit descending like a dove, pointing to Jesus as God’s beloved son. 

In John’s gospel, especially in the earliest chapters, Jesus is presented, as noted before, as one who sees. What is revealed here is a Jesus who knows us before we know him. Again, later in the chapter when Nathanael is caught off guard by Jesus’s unexpected greeting to him, Jesus responds that he “saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nor is this particularly new to John’s gospel. One can go as far back as Genesis and its account of Hagar, the slave girl of Sarah who had been given to Abraham in an ill-considered attempt to hasten the birth of the son God had promised them. When Hagar fled into the wilderness from her Sarah’s mistreatment, the angel of the Lord found her and spoke to her, leading Hagar to name God as “the God who sees,” even someone as lowly as her.

So Jesus sees Simon. The tricky part is, though, that Jesus really sees Simon. He sees in Simon both the good and the…less good.

He sees in Simon the rock. He sees the faithfulness that will endure. He sees in Simon the dogged determination to remain with Jesus that will provoke him to say, later in this gospel when many followers have deserted Jesus, “to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” He sees the disciple who will be determined to follow him to the very last, no matter the threat.

But Jesus also sees in Simon the rock-headed one. He sees the one who, in Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels, will be the one who catches on to the “Who do you say that I am?” question with the right answer – “You are the Messiah” – only to turn around and blow it by reprimanding Jesus for talking about his upcoming suffering and death, the act that gets him blasted with “Get behind me, Satan!” And Jesus sees the one who, in all his determination to follow Jesus all the way through, still ends up denying Jesus three times.

And, seeing in Simon both “the Rock” and, well, the bag of rocks, Jesus calls him anyway. There’s no thought of casting Simon aside because he was going to be such a pain to deal with sometimes. Simon is called, flaws and all. 

And of course, flaws and all, Simon, or Peter, does hold on for dear life, even despite his own failing and fumbling. Jesus pulls him back from his awful betrayal, and by the time we get into the history of the early church in the book of Acts who is out there in front, speaking boldly for the fledgling clutch of believers in the face of an indifferent world? It is none other than this same Simon. Or Peter, or Rock, or Rocky. 

Same thing happens with us, you know. Jesus sees us, all the way through, flaws and all, and still calls us. Not necessarily to anything quite so lofty as ol’ Rocky’s calling, but we are still called to follow. In a few moments we will be ordaining new elders and deacons, and installing continuing officers, and God sees them and has seen them. Maybe Jesus doesn’t hang a new name on us, except for his own – our mark of being his. But still, in all our weakness and stumbling and flat-out getting it plain wrong and even sometimes being as dumb as a bag of rocks or a sack of hammers, Jesus sees the good parts too, and calls us, and guides us and pushes us and sometimes cajoles us into serving with our whole selves, never leaving us without what we need to serve in the way we are called.

Your good news for today: Jesus sees us, knows us, and calls us anyway, even when we’re more rock-headed than rock.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #263, All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name; #279, Come, Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove; #688, Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart

Sermon: God Stooped

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

January 4, 2026, Epiphany A observed

Matthew 2:1-12

 

God Stooped

 

 

It is a story that clanks noisily against the story we tend to think of as the “Christmas story.” We are accustomed to think of what Luke’s gospel teaches us, of all the angelic annunciations, especially Gabriel to Mary; the whole business about everybody having to return to their hometowns to be registered, therefore Joseph and Mary having to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem; the birth in a manger, because there was no room in the inn; the angels singing out to the shepherds in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks, and their surprise journey to Bethlehem. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, we have to wedge in the wise men somehow. Of course they’re not part of Luke’s story; this reading from Matthew is our only source for this event. 

Perhaps that is why making the time to observe this event, under the name Epiphany and on its own date, is a particularly needful thing for the church to do in this time. While we have become accustomed over the decades to having the wise men crammed into the Nativity scene with all the shepherds and angels, the story of their coming to pay homage to the child Jesus has a different lesson to teach us, one that is all too easily and all too often drowned out in the madness of the holidays. It’s a lesson about who God is and who God calls, a lesson we forget at our peril.

In her last book, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late Christian author Rachel Held Evans writes of how the God revealed in scripture is often misunderstood by those who claim to be followers:

There’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of scripture itself: God stoops.

From walking with Adam and Eve through the Garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross.

 

Held Evans goes on to make the point that when it comes to reaching out to us sometimes dumb and witless humans, nothing is beneath God, no matter how primitive or unseemly it might be to us. And what happens in Matthew’s distinctive contribution to the Nativity story might be the most striking example we have of that.

Matthew only identifies our visitors as “wise men from the East.” They show up in Jerusalem looking for the one born “King of the Jews,” and there’s some logic to showing up at a royal palace to look for a future king, I suppose. The ever-paranoid King Herod learns from his scribes what these foreigners could possibly be talking about, gives them directions along with a request to drop back by and talk about the whereabouts of this child, and the wise men are on their way. Should you choose to keep reading the rest of this chapter, you’ll see how that goes (or you can simply remember last week's sermon). 

But about these wise men, or Magi: “from the East” is a pretty vague description. Given the geographical state of the region at this time, far and away the most likely origin for these Magi was the Persian Empire, an extensive region centered primarily on the land occupied by present-day Iran. 

As such, these Magi were probably scholar-priests of the dominant religion of that region, Zoroastrianism. (Remember that Islam doesn't come along for another six centuries at this point.)  While perhaps not as distant as the panoply of gods worshiped in the Greco-Roman culture that occupied Judea at the time, it was definitely different and “foreign” to the Jewish people and culture into which Jesus was born. The Magi tell us up front that they made this trip because they saw a star, and that would fit in well with the pursuits of a Zoroastrian Magi. All in all, not a set that would seem to fit in well with the shepherds and angels and Mary and Joseph.

But here’s the thing: God. Did. Not. Care.

To return to Rachel Held Evans’s phrase, God stooped. To catch the attention of a bunch of Eastern stargazers, God made that Star happen. God did not care how “foreign,” how “different,” or how outside of every norm these Magi might seem to the people of Israel. God wanted them to see and to behold the child Jesus, and so God made that Star happen and made Matthew write it down. God stooped, and not even to the people who long understood themselves as God’s own children. 

Now that's the part that ticks some Christians off. Who invited them? Well, God did. Those who are foreign, the wrong color, the wrong religion, those who don't speak our language or culture, those whom we consider it perfectly acceptable to hate and oppress and even bomb, God stooped and stoops to reach them and to welcome them. 

We have no idea what happened to these wise men after they dodged Herod on their way home. Matthew does not follow their story, and it is not recorded anywhere else as far as we know. Yet their very existence throws an absolutely necessary wrench into our easily sentimentalized “Christmas story,” so often stripped bare of all that challenges and disturbs. They challenge us to look again at the God who tracked them down through the stars and gave them the jolt they required to make a long and difficult journey to see a child like no other. They show us that the God we worship is not satisfied with the way things are, not content to keep the circle of God’s calling to those who are familiar to us or around whom we are comfortable and at ease. God stoops, not just to us, but to the "outsider".

This is perhaps why Epiphany matters in a way we don’t often remember. These Magi come bursting into our cozy and comfortable scene with their strange language and strange religion and strange gifts (the gold is cool, but the frankincense and myrrh...well, hopefully you can get good money for it), reminding us at even this most cozy-fied time of year that there’s a whole world out there beyond our comfort zones and happy places that God is just itching for us to reach out to and to welcome and to bear light to, tobe a shining star even. 

God stooped. Will we follow?

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #152, What Star is This, With Beams So Bright; #151, We Three Kings of Orient Are; #504, We Come As Guests Invited; #150, As With Gladness Men of Old

Sermon: In Light Inaccessible

First Presbyterian Church

March 2, 2025, Transfiguration C

Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36

 

In Light Inaccessible

 

 

For our last hymn today we will be singing a pretty familiar hymn, "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise." The opening words of that hymn put before us an image that might seem counterintuitive, on the surface;

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes...

 

Think about that for a moment. Particularly in scripture or in theology or preaching, "light" is almost always about illuminating, making things seen or more clearly visible, undoing darkness in some way. Think of the prologue of the gospel of John, in which "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." Or consider the image invoked in Isaiah 42:6, in which the people are promised that "I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light for the Gentiles..." (an image repeated in Isaiah 49:6). Or consider a simple image like that of Matthew 5:14, "You are the light of the world," after which Jesus points out that one doesn't cover a lamp with a bushel but rather puts it on a lampstand so that it "gives light to everyone in the house." That's just for starters.

Even the more general usage of our language suggests such a lean towards light as illuminating - even that word carries such a shade, not to mention such a word as "enlightened." We speak of a whole epoch of history as "the Enlightenment" because of the supposed benefit of greater learning and reason that was attributed to the age.

So what's with that phrase in the hymn, "in light inaccessible hid from our eyes"? 

Think of what happens when a solar eclipse comes around, like we had just a year ago. The one warning you get again and again is don't look directly into the sun during an eclipse. Frankly, that's not a thing you're supposed to be doing any time, but the warnings about eye damage come out especially intensely around an eclipse. 

There is such a thing, evidently, as too much light. It isn't that common, but a thing can be so brightly illuminated that the thing itself is no longer visible, only the overwhelming light illuminating it. Such a phenomenon doesn't have quite so much scriptural precedent behind it, but a telling example can be found in 1 Timothy 6:16, in which the Lord is described as the one who "alone is immortal and lives in unapproachable light." One gets a feeling that Walter Chalmers Smith might have had that passage in the back of his head in penning the words of that hymn. 

Maybe this is something we should keep in mind in approaching the two readings we have heard today. The curious reading from Exodus, in which Moses's face glows with light after his encounters with God on Mount Sinai, provides one small glimpse. Moses doesn't realize what's going on until he comes down from the mountain and to the people of Israel to find that they're all shrinking back from him in fear and puzzlement. Moses ends up having to work out a system whereby he wraps his face in a veil when among the people, taking it off when going back to the mountain. The people cannot understand that shining, and to be fair, who could blame them?

The telling of the Transfiguration of Jesus found in Luke's gospel might also point to something about that much light. We are told that while Jesus was praying, "the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning." That probably wasn't a sight people who routinely walked on long, dusty roads were accustomed to seeing. Then Moses and Elijah enter the scene, and we already know Moses knows something about one's face changing appearance; the two of them appear "in glorious splendor" and are talking to Jesus about the events to come.

This is all strange enough; throw in that the disciples were barely awake for all of this, and one can almost be sympathetic to Peter's bungling suggestion about building festival-booth tabernacles for the three shining figures. At this, light is overcome by a cloud, a voice speaks from the cloud, and then - poof! - all of that scene is gone, with only Jesus standing there before the disciples.

Amidst all of that shining and all that dazzling and all that light, Peter, and presumably the other disciples with him, didn't see things right. In all that light, his eyes betrayed him. To be fair, he would have been raised with Moses and Elijah as "heroes of the faith," so to speak, but in that moment of illumination he saw things wrong.

It is particularly telling what the voice from the cloud (we may presume bringing instruction from God at the minimum) finally says to the disciples: "This is my Son, whom I have hosen; listen to him." Not "behold" or "see" or any of those clearly visual words, but "listen to him." The disciples have this amazing privilege that we modern Christians cannot possibly imagine, walking with Jesus in person, and their job is to listen to him, not to get blinded by the light.

A quote from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, a bishop in the Eastern Orthodox Church based in England, offers some insight, just maybe, into what's going on here:

It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

 

We could also turn to the Apostle Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 13, which we read just a few weeks ago: "For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part ... for now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully ... " (9, 12). 

This is a challenge for we who are steeped in the post-Enlightenment ethos of learning by observation. We see the thing, we observe it, we learn from doing so. That generally works fine in a lab or perhaps in fieldwork. But our eye cannot see through all the light inaccessible, to borrow the phrase from the hymn. 

Even our typical cultural concept of "mystery" betrays us here. If you were to see or hear the word "mystery" outside of a church setting, there's a decent chance the word might be referring to a novel, by Agatha Christie or some other such, or to endless numbers of movies or TV shows sold as "mysteries," with the implicit social contract that the "mystery" will be neatly solved and packaged within the hour or two hours of viewing time, and with the implicit reward that if you observe carefully and follow the clues you'll be "right" about "whodunit." 

That's not how the mystery of faith works. We can listen to Christ, as that voice in the cloud tells the disciples, but we're not listening for clues; we are listening for the mystery itself, the very thing that our eyes cannot comprehend.

What the disciples saw on that mountain that day was, at least in part, a mystery. This teacher with whom they had been journeying around Judea or Galilee was far more than "just a teacher," far more than "just a rabbi." To contradict the old Doobie Brothers song, Jesus is way, way more than "just alright." And this side of eternity, we're not going to grasp it all. No preacher can preach enough sermons, no teacher can teach enough lessons to wrap the faith up neatly and package it up neatly and to tie it off in a neat bow. Any "Christianity" that promises you all the answers to life's problems is lying to you, and there is plenty of "Christianity" being forced upon the public square right now that purports to do exactly that. 

We suffer a plague of people who know. Our public discourse is glutted with supposed "faith leaders" who have got God pegged. They can tell you exactly which parts of scripture are sacred and inviolable, and which can be safely ignored or tossed aside. They can tell you exactly whom you're allowed to hate and whom you must follow without hesitation. These are the ones who back "patriots" who do unpatriotic things, and who back dictators who launch utterly unjust and despicable wars for petty spite. 

Friends, no. That's not how it is, and to the degree that the Transfiguration reminds us that we don't have God all neatly packaged, this is the best possible news. We know only in part; we may know more over time, but this side of eternity we know only in part; but then, only then, we will see face to face. In the meantime, our only recourse really is to follow the instruction of the divine voice from the cloud, and "listen to him!" 

The disciples got just a glimpse of that 'face to face,' and they weren't ready for it. The mystery wasn't theirs to solve, it was theirs to wonder. So it is for us. We know only in part now. The time will come, but that time is not now. For now, we can know the One who is God's only Son, God's chosen, and listen to him. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #156, Sing of God Made Manifest; #---, Upon a holy mountain; #12, Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise

Sermon: ...if Christ has not been raised...

First Presbyterian Church

February 16, 2022, Epiphany 6C

1 Corinthians 15:12-26

 

...if Christ has not been raised...

 

 

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

--Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:1

 

 

These words from Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" soliloquy, are of course broadly famous as a key moment of that character's struggle with what to do in what he increasingly sees as a hopeless situation. So burdened is he that he is contemplating suicide. 

This particular portion of the soliloquy contains a particular phrase that has taken on a life well beyond what Shakespeare might have imagined. The phrase "shuffle off this mortal coil" has become a commonplace slang reference to death, and especially death as a leaving behind of the physical life. Note that the soliloquy contemplates "what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil"; while the body is dead, evidently the spirit is still kicking, at least enough to be tormented by dreams. 

Based on today's reading from 1 Corinthians, we'd have to guess that the Apostle Paul would get pretty frustrated with this soliloquy, maybe even jumping up and exiting the theater in a huff. If anything is made clear in today's verses, it is that resurrection is real, and it is not merely spiritual. If you were wondering after last week's reading why Paul was so adamant about providing that whole list of witnesses to the resurrected Christ, you now have your answer. 

It seems that there were some among the Corinthian fellowship who were perhaps still (as they were in so many things) under the influence of certain Greco-Roman ways of thinking about the relationship between the soul and the body. In much philosophy, particularly following Plato, soul and body were separate things. In short, much of that thought saw the body as a thing to be escaped; let the cludgy old flesh die and the spirit be set free upon death. Not all Greco-Roman thought accepted this - the Epicureans and Stoics were two such examples - but a good bit of such thought held that death was the chance for the soul to be free of the body, fulfilled at last. 

It should be noted that such a philosophical bent doesn't necessarily result in an outright skeptical or denialist position about physical life after death. It isn't as if Corinthian objectors were necessarily getting all riled up about this talk of resurrection because it offended them intellectually; it's also quite possible that they were offended emotionally by the whole idea. In other words, such an objection might be framed not as "that's impossible" or "that's ridiculous"; it might as easily have been framed as "oh, gross" or "why would you want that?" When one is conditioned intellectually or emotionally to see the body as an encumbrance, being taught that your body is part of the whole resurrection package can be a shock to the system.

It might be easy for us moderns to scoff at such thoughts or fears, but let's check ourselves: are we that far from such attitudes about body and soul, really?

That line from Hamlet's soliloquy, for example, and the evolved interpretation of it as being freed from the body, seems pretty Corinthian in some ways. Are our old gospel hymns and songs completely free from the whole idea of, say, our disembodied souls floating off to Heaven while our bodies remain in the grave or in whatever state they have been treated after death? Or take the whole idea of ghosts, for example - what is that spirit doing floating around all un-embodied? If we're not making popular-culture fun with ghosts as disembodied spirits, we're making horror movies about "dis-emspirited" bodies, or zombies. For what it's worth, that image of a body in, shall we say, really rough condition, wandering the earth creating terror, is probably not that far off from what those Corinthians might have thought about resurrected bodies. 

There's another way that the whole "being rid of the body" idea becomes particularly alluring: when those bodies suffer illness or pain. I know that many of you here in this sanctuary, and likely many of you on the live stream as well, have experienced that struggle, either for yourself or for a loved one or friend; I know I have. We even acknowledge this struggle in the liturgy for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, when we offer our thanks to God that for the deceased, "death is past and pain ended." Being ready to be rid of the physical stuff is not uncommon, when we think about it.

However we frame it, Paul is having none of it. And the biggest reason for Paul's agitation is not any particular concern about disembodied spirits or dis-emspirited bodies or anything like that. No, for the apostle, horrible thing about denying resurrection is that if you say there is no resurrection of the dead, then you are saying that Christ was not resurrected from the dead. And that Paul cannot accept.

"If Christ has not been raised," all of Paul's work is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians (such as it is), or of any of those to whom Paul has ministered, is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," Paul and his fellow laborers are liars. If the dead are not raised, somehow, some way, some time, then Christ is not raised. Paul and his fellow laborers have done all this work in proclaiming Christ raised from the dead, which can't be so if the dead are not raised, he says. 

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians, and for that matter your own faith, are not only in vain, but futile, even pointless. You are hopelessly mired in sin with no redemption coming.

"If Christ has not been raised," the dead in Christ are not even that - not even "in Christ"; they're just dead.

"If Christ has not been raised," if our hope in Christ was only about this walking-around human life, then (in one of the most heart-wrenching lines of all scripture) "we of all people are most to be pitied." 

But! "But", as Paul reminds his readers, that's not the case. But, as Paul reminds his readers, "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead." Here he comes up with the evocative phrase "the first fruits of those who have died" to describe Christ. And of course, if Christ is only the "first fruits," we are led to believe there are more "fruits" to come. In case it's not clear, that would be us, when our time comes. 

Again, you have to tune in for one more week to get how Paul envisions all this working out. Verses 21-23 give some description: 

For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

 

We get just a little tease there of Paul's "big finish," speaking of the return of Christ and where we fit into it. But for this point, we are reminded that as Christ was raised from the dead, the same will be true for those who die in Christ. It's worth remembering that for readers of Paul's own time, Christ's death was in living memory. 

It's a different challenge for us, nearly two thousand years after the fact, to hold on to that hope, and clearly many today who call themselves "Christians" have none of that hope, but have placed all their hope on power in this world. But Paul is insistent that this is our hope. We don't live hopeless lives. We don't live in vain. We are not cast off by God to be forgotten or to disappear into oblivion. Our future is with God. We have a future, and our future is with God. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #35, Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty; #246, Christ Is Alive!; #250, In the Bulb There Is a Flower

Sermon: The Basics

First Presbyterian Church

February 9, 2022, Epiphany 5C

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

 

The Basics

 

 

 

"Let's get back to basics here..."

"OK, back to square one..."

"Remember how all this started..."

"Remember your fundamentals..."

"In a nutshell..."

We have a lot of ways to talk about the need, every now and then, to return to those things in our work or our family life or our life in general that are most basic, perhaps most foundational, to how we operate or how we live together or even to how we exist as a human being. It's not uncommon to get so caught up or maybe bogged down in the day-to-day details of that activity that we forget why we're doing that thing in the first place. Sometimes we really do need to get back to basics, or remember how we started, or to sum it all up "in a nutshell." 

As the Apostle Paul draws to the conclusion of his letter to the church in Corinth, after pages upon pages of instruction and correction and chastisement and sometimes downright frustration, he apparently decides that the Corinthians need to get back to the basics and remember why they're even a church in the first place. Today's reading constitutes those "basics," at least as Paul understood them; the rest of the chapter, which we will attend to on upcoming Sundays, describes how Paul concludes the Corinthians got off-track.

In this case, these "basics" are cast as the message Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians. Paul makes no claim that the message is in any way unique to his ministry; as we will see, he is quick to acknowledge that others proclaim this same basic account, and some of those have even borne their witness to the Corinthians themselves. But notice how carefully Paul casts this message before he even gets around to repeating it:

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you-unless you have come to believe in vain.

 

That's kind of a mouthful, but Paul is taking pains to stress just how basic this message was to the Corinthians' (or snyone's) very existence as part of the body of Christ. He then reiterates again that what he has taught them he taught "as of first importance," as if he hasn't stressed this point enough already. 

But then, Paul probably had reason to be so precise about his proclamation. There were plenty of examples of churches in Paul's travels that had decided, on their own or through the influence of bad teachers, that other, nonessential or even non-justifiable thoughts needed to be elevated to primary or indispensable status. Perhaps the most notorious example is found in his letter to the church of Galatia, the one where Paul writes "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting..." almost immediately in the letter (1:6), and later is moved to exclaim "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?" (3:1). 

What had the Galatians done to provoke such ire from Paul? They had, under the influence of those "bad teachers," decided that, for example, male Gentile converts to this community of believers should be required to undergo the rite of circumcision according to Jewish practice; in short, they had to become Jewish to become Christian. Galatia wasn't the only place where Paul ran into this obstacle to faith - those bad teachers traveled almost as well as Paul did - but his literary outburst in that letter is perhaps most striking. Indeed, Paul had reason to be very precise and direct about taking the Corinthians back to square one.

The gospel in a nutshell, as Paul puts it?

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

There it is. The basics. The gospel in a nutshell. 

The self-described "lectionary comic strip" Agnus Day takes on this passage in a humorous exchange between its two characters, sheep named Ted and Rick. Ted remarks of this passage that "there it is, the whole gospel in a handful of verses," to which Rick, the wiser sheep, responds that "Paul doesn't want them to forget the basics of the faith." Then the punchline, from Ted: "Makes me wonder why I'm carrying around the rest of this Bible...". 

No, this passage is not an invitation to toss out the rest of the Bible - there's a lot more to be said about how this gospel came to be and what it means for us. As far as the most basic element of why we are what we are, though, it's hard to add to this. We echo this in our Lord's Supper responses: Christ has died. Christ is risen. (Paul will get to the "Christ will come again" part later in this chapter.)

With this basic gospel stated, Paul then engages in some "human bibliography" - being careful to cite sources for this gospel, in particular the part about Christ being raised. (Yes, this might serve as a clue to what is to come later in the chapter.) He does this by rattling off a pretty impressive list of witnesses to the risen Christ. There might be an inclination to panic over the fact that this list doesn't necessarily correlate to any particular account of resurrection appearances in any of the gospels. Don't panic. Remember that Mark's gospel includes no such appearances, Matthew barely gets in any, and John flatly admits that there's a whole lot more he could have included in his gospel but didn't. Also, those gospels hadn't even been written at the time Paul is writing to the Corinthians to boot. Nothing in the gospels gives us any reason to question what Paul has received and passed on.

Of course, the last witness Paul lists is Paul himself, referring to his dramatic conversion recorded in Acts 9. Paul is quick to acknowledge his own dark past as one who "persecuted the church of God," but uses that failure of his past to illuminate the grace of God that made him into what he now was, even if he can't stop himself from going on about how hard he's had to work at this before acknowledging God's grace again. 

In short, here's the point, so far: Christ died and was buried, Christ was raised again (this is all consistent with scripture, Paul points out), and we have a lot of witnesses to the risen Christ, some of whom you know (it seems that Cephas, whom we know as Peter, might have visited Corinth at some point). That, Paul tells his readers, is the most basic foundation of your faith, of your being what you are. 

This is a challenging topic to translate into our own modern context. Those eyewitnesses are no longer with us, after all, and the church has blundered through nearly two millennia of trying, with intent good or ill, claiming all manner of other doctrinal assertions as "fundamentals" of the faith. This has inevitably done incredible damage to the church's witness, not to mention to those who are victimized by such assertions. 

No, none of that: the fundamental of the faith, Paul would say, is this: 

...that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #485, We Know That Christ Is Raised; #441, Hear the Good News of Salvation; #649, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound