Sermon delivered on Lent 1A, Sunday, March 9, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Due to technical difficulties, there is no audio podcast available for this sermon. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Lectionary texts: Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7; Psalm 32.1-12; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11.

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

In our first reading from Genesis we are introduced to Adam and Eve who were created to be companions with God. The were put in the Garden of Eden to till and keep it. In other words they were called to be God’s caretakers of this place of paradise. They had just begun to undertake this duty or way of life. They had practically no limits upon them except that they were not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Along comes the serpent who entices Eve to eat of the fruit. In this story, the serpent represents not only Satan but all of those things which bring us temptation. — among them the world, the flesh and, of course, the devil. Eve having given into temptation gives some of the fruit to her husband Adam and he too gives into the Temptation. Lest we feel bad for Adam, we should remember that in this recounting, Eve is not alone when she goes to eat from the Tree, but she is accompanied by Adam who does nothing to discourage or stop her, he is just as guilty, perhaps more so, than Eve. As a consequence of Adams and Eve’s sin, they lose their right to remain in paradise, but more importantly are subject now to death. The term used implies not only the act of dying, but also implies that cutting off any relationship with God. This original sin of Adam then taints the whole of humanity. Death – both human mortality and the separation from God now effects all mankind. A breach that will continue until Jesus the Christ comes and as the Epistle reading assures us that just as Sin entered into the world thru one man – Adam so it is that through the one man – Jesus that who through his perfect righteousness and obedience, brings righteousness to the many and restores mankind in its relationship with God.

But even as Jesus came into the world, and through his life and death, reconciled us with God, we still experience Temptation. Perhaps today the types and sources of temptation are more numerous that ever before and if we are to account the Serpent as a crafty evil creature, we can see even more craft and sly ways in which our society and in some cases our churches have been convinced to embrace the various temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. The media be it television, radio, or music portrays sinful lifestyles in ways that not only imply that they are acceptable but are desirable. Often, perhaps almost always the consequences of such sin are ignored or denied.

Jesus is the true Son of God and fully divine. Yet Jesus choose to come into our world who would be also fully human. He had all the same needs and desires that we all have as human beings. He knew hunger and thirst. He enjoyed the companionship of others. He felt the sting of betrayal. So it is not surprising that Jesus would undergo Temptation and in our Gospel story we have a dramatic example set before us.

Jesus has just completed a period of time in the desert presumably in preparation for the beginning of his ministry. He is tired, hungry, and thirsty. Satan comes to Jesus and sets forth three temptations. The first looks innocent enough. Prove you are the Son of God by turning stones to loaves of bread. Jesus was hungry — his fasting was over. He was and is the Son of God. He did have the power to make those rocks bread. But for Jesus, to use his power in such a way would be to reject the role that the Father had asked him to follow. Jesus strengthened by his time in the desert rejects this temptation and tells Satan that it is the word of God that is needed to feed the hearts of man. Then Satan slyly tries to use Scripture to entice Jesus to be a show-off. Throw yourself of the top of the Temple and let the angels catch you, says Satan.

Jesus responds that one should not put the Lord God to the test. Finally, in this set of temptations, Satan shows Jesus all the Kingdoms of the world, and offers them to Jesus. if only Jesus will fall down and worship Satan. Jesus could have everything — he need not suffer and die. Jesus again responds —  “Worship the Lord your God and serve only Him”.

If Jesus was fully human at the time of these temptations, and he was, then these were really challenges that pulled on Jesus’ being. He was hungry. He was in need of feeling the Father’s support and he, like any of us, would love to have achieved his goals without suffering especially the suffering that would lead to his death. Yet he was able to resist these temptations. What was it about Jesus that allowed him to do this. The answer in part may be in how he prepared himself not only for dealing with temptation but in preparing for his life’s work.

Before Jesus started preparing others for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to this world and reconciliation with the Father, He took time to prepare. That preparation occurred at we also learn from the Gospel reading as he spent 40 days fasting in the desert. Going out into the desert at times of deep spiritual need or before starting a ministry was not unusual. Both Moses and Elijah spent 40 days in the desert. The people is Israel wandered in the desert for 40 years prior to entering into the promises land. The number 40 by the way is not meant to mean a literal 40 days but rather a long period of time. John the Baptizer not only spent time in the desert but his ministry was based in the desert.

Why the desert? Let us look at the characteristics of the Judean desert. It is a place of apartness, that is , it is a place away from the every day activities of community life. No shopping, no neighbors, no politics. It is a place of limited resources. There is food but not a lot of it and some of it not the most appealing. Have any you eaten a locust with or without wild honey? There is water but not in great supply and often one needs to take on a prickly cactus to quench one’s thirst. There is extreme heat during the day and cold at night. There are wild animals. Why then go to the desert? It is a place where a person can focus for time on matters of importance without distraction. It is a place of great beauty where one can appreciate God’s magnificent creation. It is a place where one can experience loneliness or the solitude that allows us to listed to God speaking to the heart. It is a place where the body, the mind, and the heart can be disciplined through the scarcity of things. It is a place where one can find that only in trusting is God can they experience true peace. This is the place in which the very human and yet very divine Jesus would through prayer, fasting and study prepare Himself to undertake the greatest ministry —  that of reconciling humanity with their heavenly Father. It was also the place where he could learn to bring His human nature under such control that He was able to resist the very attractive Temptations of Satan.

Last year I shared with you a little of the history of how Lent came to be. In brief the early Church had no season of Lent, but did practice occasional periods of fasting and prayer for specific feast and purposes. During the time when the Church prepared for the Celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection, it also prepared for the baptism of those seeking membership into the Church. These catechumens as there were called went through a period of training, fasting and other disciplines to determine their fitness and to prepare them to live out the life of a Christian and to resist temptation especially the temptation to fall back into their earlier lives. Often members of the faith, especially sponsors would join with those seeking admittance in their prayer and fasting. It was also at this times that those who had publicly embarrassed the Church by their lives but who now sought reconciliation, would do public penance, not to receive forgiveness, but to give witness of their true repentance. Over time the emphasis grew more and more on the idea of penance, the discipline originally applied only to the catechumens was applied to all the faithful and following the practices of Jesus, Moses and Elijah was established at 40 days.

While the Church still describes the season of Lent as a penitential time, it is slowly recovering the sense that Lent is a time not only for acts of penitence —  and which one of us has not sinned so as to be an embarrassment not only of the Church but of our Lord Jesus but a time of preparation. It is during the Ester Vigil or on Easter Sunday that many churches admit new members and celebrate Baptism with the preparation for these occurring during Lent with large parts of the congregation sharing in such preparation. Likewise the Church is again emphasizing that the purpose of Lenten disciplines are not that we can earn forgiveness through them but that they helps us to prepare for the celebration of the Resurrection but even more it prepares us, it strengthens us, to resist the temptations that so abound in our lives and to live out in our lives the Life of Christ.

Lent is a time for us to go into the desert. We can endure Lent. We can suffer through periods of denial. We can fast because the Church requires it. We can find it a time of great discomfort.

Or we can embrace it. We can find during this season in giving up some things the opportunity to embrace that which brings us closer to Christ. It can be a time when we are able to limit the distractions of daily living, to quiet ourselves and to listen to the Lord of all creation.

A week ago someone asked me how was that Peter who had experienced the Transfiguration could then deny the Lord. After some thought, I find that Peter had enjoyed the Mountain Top experience, but at the time he denied Jesus, he had not yet gone through his desert experience. Mountain Top may be great and may be encouraging, but it is our times in the desert that prepare us for the difficult challenges and temptations. Let us take this time of Lent to prepare ourselves. Let us not be afraid of the difficulties and burdens of this season, but let us embrace this time to grow closer to the Lord that we might worship the Lord our God and serve Him only.

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

Sermon delivered on Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2014 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would prefer to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51.1-17; 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10; Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21.

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

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of a 40 day season we call Lent. It is a time for self-examination, confession, repentance, and self-denial. But why do we do these things? What’s the point? The short answer is to develop the habits of character that will be necessary for us to live as citizens in God’s promised new creation and to be signs of his new creation to others. And so tonight I want us to explore briefly what that means for us as we enter this season of Lent (and beyond).

In our epistle lesson, the apostle Paul urges us to be reconciled to God. But how is that possible? The whole history of salvation contained in Scripture is littered with human sin and rebellion against God. Indeed, our sin and rebellion is what necessitated God’s rescue plan for us in the first place! From Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the garden to king David’s sins of adultery and murder that prompted the heart-wrenching and poignant Psalm we recited tonight, sins all the more astonishing and dismaying when we consider the fact that David was a man after God’s own heart, to the ongoing rebellion of God’s people Israel that the prophet Joel addresses in our OT lesson, to our own individual sin and rebellion in all of its variety.

It seems that our sin-sickness is encoded into our very DNA, the product of the Fall and its awful aftermath. Our suspicions are confirmed when we read the chilling observation the Lord made to his prophet Jeremiah about the human heart: It is desperately sick and beyond understanding (Jeremiah 17.9). As a result, we are separated and alienated from God with no hope of being reconciled to him. This means, of course, that we still remain under God’s curse and that death and separation from God, now and for all eternity, is our destiny. As Paul observed in his letter to the Romans, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3.23) and of course the wages of sin is death (Romans 6.23; cf. Genesis 3.19). This is why ashes are imposed tonight. They remind us that we are dust and to dust we will return, and they also serve as a visible sign for our need to repent or turn away from our own selfish sin-sickness.

And even if we consider ourselves to be Christians and acknowledge the desperate plight of our human condition that we have just surveyed, many of us continue to be rebellious toward God’s love and grace for us as manifested in Jesus Christ by acting as if we are the ones responsible for pulling ourselves out of the black hole of sin by embarking on all kinds of programs of self-help spirituality. We resolve to read the Bible more or be more regular in our prayers. We resolve to give more to charity or do more volunteer work in hopes that this will result in getting our ticket punched. It won’t because our strategy of self-help has about as much chance of succeeding as most of our new year’s resolutions do. And even if we are successful in becoming more “spiritual,” whatever that means, it does not address the problem of our sin and the alienation and separation from God that it causes. In short, left to our own devices, our sin and the evil it allows to operate leaves us dehumanized as well as separated and alienated from God and people who are utterly without hope so that when we read exhortations like Paul’s to be reconciled to God, we are tempted to consider them to be cruel nonsense.

At this point I am pretty sure what some of you are thinking. Fr. Maney, not only are we hungry from fasting today and sick of this miserable winter that seems like it will never end, now we have to listen to another one of your heart-warming and feel-good sermons! Thank you for making us feel lower than a snake’s belly, dude! We are so glad we came out to listen to you tonight. You can thank me later. But first hear God’s final word on our hopeless condition.

To be certain, the great and dreadful day of the Lord is coming as the prophet Joel warned in our OT lesson. We must all one day stand before the judgment throne of Christ. But as Christians, we have received a great and wondrous gift from God our Savior and his name is Jesus. And when by faith we believe that God has done what is impossible for us to do by becoming human and dying on a cross for us to atone for our sins, our hopelessness turns into joy and real hope because the cross of Jesus is our “Day of the Lord.” As Paul tells us, for our sake, God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us so that we could become the righteousness of God. In other words, God became human and went to the cross to pay the death penalty for our sins so that when we stand before the judgment throne of Christ we can be confident that we will hear the verdict of “not guilty” pronounced in our favor. Not because we are good, but because God is gracious and merciful. This is what the logic of justification by grace through faith is all about. God’s future verdict of “not guilty” is made known to us now so that we can hear it now and be freed from the fear and crushing guilt our sin can cause. In the cross of Jesus, our penalty has been paid. And because we believe it has, we also believe that we will share with Jesus in a resurrection like his (Romans 6.5).

If we really believe this, I mean really believe this, it changes everything. We no longer have to fear dying. We no longer have to fear standing before Christ and hearing the damning guilty verdict and being swept away into hell forever. This is all God’s gift of love offered to everyone freely. It is terribly humbling because it reminds us that only God can end our predicament and hopelessness. No wonder Paul urges us not to accept in vain God’s gift of grace offered in Jesus. But what does that mean? It means that we continue to act as if the cross of Jesus does not matter in reconciling us to God. It means that we continue to labor under the delusion that we are responsible for our salvation and rescue from evil, sin, and death by how we act, as if our actions will somehow magically make us good in God’s eyes.

Rejecting God’s grace offered to us in the cross of Jesus Christ is like the woman who, when receiving an engagement ring from her boyfriend, remarked that it was too plain and went out immediately to replace it. In doing so, she not only grieved her boyfriend, she essentially rejected the gift offered her. Likewise, when after hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ offered freely to each of us, we ostensibly accept it but then we continue to act like we really believe in the delusional program of self-help and salvation, we reject God’s offer of love and mercy.

No, says Paul. We are reconciled to God only in and through Jesus and his great sacrifice on the cross. So stop deluding yourself into thinking you can somehow find favor in God’s eyes based on your own merit. Stop acting like your salvation is some distant event in the future as was prophesied in the OT. Your salvation is here and now, won for you on the bloody cross of Jesus. Take hold of it right now! Don’t wait! When you do take hold of it, you will find yourself to be a new person, freed from your fears and hopelessness. With the help of the Spirit, you will find yourself developing an eternal perspective so that you won’t focus so myopically on your current situation and problems. And if you don’t believe me, look at my own example. I suffer mightily to preach the gospel faithfully. I am utterly scorned and held in derision. But that’s just an illusion. Because I am Jesus’ I am held in high regard. People look at me and think I am dying. But I am wonderfully alive because my Savior is alive and I share his destiny. So can you.

And because Jesus is alive and because we have his Spirit given to us, it is now possible to put aside all the old nasty habits and evil in which we once engaged. See? This is why I told you that you would be a new creation, i.e., a new person! And what’s more, being a new person who is recreated in Christ in the power of the Spirit, you will find yourself training to live in God’s promised new creation when it comes in full at Christ’s return. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming and you can help bring it in by acting as a new creation in Jesus. So pay attention to me and my teachings because I am teaching and living the real gospel in person and nothing else will be able to free you from your bondage to sin and the inevitable hopelessness and guilt that accompany it. Reject my teachings and you reject the gospel. The stakes are that high.

And while this is all God’s gracious gift offered us, God expects us to respond to his call to us. We have to say yes to his invitation to us to accept the gift of his Son offered freely to everyone. This is where we need to pay attention to Jesus in our gospel lesson tonight because he is telling us what we need to do to bring our behavior in line with our faith. Real faith always manifests itself in action because our actions always stem from our beliefs.

The problem is that even after we accept by faith Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we still live with our fallen nature and our brains have to be remapped so that our behaviors come into line with our new nature and this involves practicing the new behaviors until they become second nature to us. This is hard at first, but as with any learned behavior, the more we practice it the more natural it becomes. I know this isn’t particularly sexy or spectacular but it is the way things typically work. And notice that the behaviors may not look differently from self-help spirituality programs that we just talked about. We still might resolve to read the Bible more and pray more regularly, for example. So what’s the difference? Motive, which is what Jesus is addressing here. When we really believe that it is Jesus and Jesus alone who has healed us and caused us to be reconciled to God, it frees us from the onerous burden of trying to get our ticket punched and allows us to focus on imitating our Lord in our whole pattern of living.

This will necessarily involve some changes in our life and this is where our Lenten disciplines come into play. What in us is interfering with our desire to follow Jesus so that it needs to die? What aspects of our lifestyle keep us focused on our selfish desires rather than Jesus? These are the things that we must think about during Lent and these are what should be the focus of our Lenten disciplines. But here we must keep in mind what we just said about changes in behavior and the need to develop new habits.

Let me give you an example to illustrate this. Over my life I have probably lost close to 500 lbs—literally. But here I am today, doing my best imitation of the Goodyear blimp. Losing that weight was hard and it took a lot of discipline. I felt so good, physically and psychologically, after losing it and I looked better too. So why couldn’t I keep the weight off? Because I failed to develop a change in eating behavior necessary for me to keep the weight off. I still love the junk food more than the healthier stuff. So my time of diet was similar to the season of Lent. I focused on doing the right things to lose weight. But then the diet ended, like the season of Lent ends, and I found myself going back to my old behaviors. Forty days, so to speak, weren’t long enough for the new behavior patterns to be fully encoded on my brain. Neither will you likely find the 40 days of Lent to be enough time for your targeted behavior to be really changed.

Now of course, this is an imperfect analogy. We are promised, for example, to be given the Holy Spirit who helps us in our weakness. But the point remains. If we want to turn away from our selfishness and dehumanizing behavior so that we can enjoy the perfect freedom of being God’s fully human people, we must kill our old fallen nature with its accompanying behaviors with the help of the Spirit and replace them with new ones. Real piety, i.e., our sweat equity in developing real righteousness, will always lead to changed behaviors, love, joy, peace, righteousness, generosity, to name just a few. And we do it all in response to God’s great love offered to us and poured our for us on the cross.

What needs to die in you with the help of the Spirit so that you will become a new creation and more fully human? What lifestyle changes need to occur? This should be the subject of our Lenten disciplines and beyond. It’s never easy, this repentance and self-denial business. But it is what we are required to do if we ever hope to produce the fruit of righteousness that will necessarily flow from our changed and grateful hearts so that we can rightfully claim our prize that is in Jesus. That is why having an eternal perspective and asking the Spirit to help us in this work is so critical. So this Lenten season, let us embrace the challenge because when we do, we will surely be embracing the Good News that is ours in the death and resurrection of Jesus, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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

Sermon delivered on Transfiguration Sunday A, March 2, 2014, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

If you would like to hear the audio podcast of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: Exodus 24.12-18; Psalm 2.1-12; 2 Peter 1.16-21; Matthew 17.1-9.

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

In our gospel lesson this morning we heard the strange and amazing story of Jesus’ transfiguration. But what are we to make of it with its description of his amazing transformation in appearance? It’s clear from the root of the Greek word that Matthew uses, metamorphoo, from which we get our word, metamorphosis, that Jesus’ change in appearance was not caused by some external source of energy. And what are we to make of the cloud and the Voice? It all seems utterly impossible to some of us because, well, things like that just don’t happen and our science simply cannot explain any of this (we say in all of our 21^st century enlightened arrogance). That’s why many struggle to believe stories like the transfiguration and the other so-called mighty acts of power that Jesus demonstrated, e.g., walking on water, turning water into wine, feeding the multitudes, making the blind see, and most of all, Jesus’ body being raised from the dead. We will return to this shortly.

But before we do, we must understand that if we focus on these questions or on the supernatural aspects of the transfiguration exclusively (the change of appearance, the cloud, the Voice, etc.), we will surely miss the deeper story Matthew and the other NT writers are trying to tell us. It is the story of how God is reclaiming his fallen and sin-sick world through Jesus the Messiah, and it is ultimately a story of our destiny as Christians.

God’s rescue story begins with Israel and eventually focuses on Moses, who led God’s people from their slavery in Egypt. And with its echoes from our OT lesson this morning, one of the things Matthew surely wants us to see is that Jesus is like Moses who will lead his people in a new exodus from our slavery to evil, sin, and death. But Matthew also surely wants us to see that Jesus is much more than just a new Moses, precisely because the stakes are so much higher. This is not to diminish the importance of the exodus in which Moses led God’s people because it remains a dramatic example of God’s faithful love for his people and his ability to deliver on his promises to rescue his people from all kinds of slavery. But in Jesus’ transfigured glory, we are given a preview of what Jesus’ post-resurrection glory will look like, a glory that we as Jesus’ people will share with him in the new creation, precisely because he has rescued us from our alienation from God and the death the necessarily results when we are cut off from our Life Source.

And while it would be easy for us to focus on the resurrection and God’s glory revealed in Jesus in this wonderful event, it seems that Matthew is also inviting us to reflect on exactly what Jesus’ path to glory would entail because there is a remarkable series of parallel shared similarities and contrasts between Jesus’ transfiguration and his crucifixion that is surely more than coincidental. For example, in the transfiguration narrative, God himself declares Jesus to be his beloved Son (Matthew 17.5). In the crucifixion narrative we see a pagan soldier declaring to his surprise that Jesus is God’s Son (Matthew 27.54). Both narratives include the number six (Matthew 17.1; 27.45). Could Matthew be pointing us to the themes of creation/new creation in a way similar to what John does in his gospel (cf. John 20.1,19)? And only in these two narratives does Matthew tell us that the participants were terribly afraid (Matthew 17.6; 27.54).

These similarities take place within a series of dramatic contrasts. For example, Jesus is glorified in the transfiguration (Matthew 17.2ff) and shamed at his crucifixion (Matthew 27.27ff). In the transfiguration, a bright cloud sheds its brilliant light on the participants (Matthew 17.2). At the crucifixion, darkness covers the whole land (Matthew 27.45). At his transfiguration, Moses and Elijah, who represented the law and the prophets and who were two of the greatest heroes in Israel’s history, stand beside Jesus (Matthew 17.3). At his crucifixion, two criminals, perhaps representing how far rebellious Israel had sunk, hang beside Jesus (Matthew 27.38). There are other examples, but you get the picture. There are some parallels that Matthew clearly intends for us to reflect on. What does Jesus’ path to glory look like as well as our own?

At this point some of us will want to throw our hands up in the air and ask rather impatiently, “Then why doesn’t Matthew just come out and say that?” This response is not unlike high school students who, after struggling to wrap their minds around a difficult and complex topic, often get frustrated and blurt out, “Just give us the answer so we can get on with it!” But just giving the answer will not result in the deeper and more satisfactory kind of learning that comes when we have to wrestle with issues and stories and think them through on a far deeper level than our desire for superficiality often demands, a desire that stems from the fact that we too just want to get on with it. And if Scripture really is God-breathed as Peter claims in our epistle lesson, then it should not surprise us at all that the biblical writers were capable of writing nuanced and subtle stories that demand deeper thinking and more than just quick, superficial answers.

All well and good you say. But returning to our initial questions, how do we know the transfiguration actually happened? And what’s the point behind all the comparisons between the transfiguration and crucifixion? Both excellent questions that will allow me to finish this sermon in a timely manner! How can we trust the narrative despite the fact that it seems too fantastic to believe? Because fortunately we have an eyewitness to the transfiguration and we need to pay attention to what Peter says in our epistle lesson. Evidently there were doubters and scoffers in Peter’s day as well as our own because he states emphatically that the transfiguration is not some cleverly devised myth. Why? Because he was an eyewitness to it and can testify that it happened. And if we think about it, if God really does exist as we believe, and if he really is omnipotent, stories like this should not surprise us at all, even if they are beyond our understanding and boggle the mind, because nothing is too hard for God. Nothing. So unless we are willing to call Peter and the other apostles liars or crazy (or worse), we have no reason to doubt that the transfiguration really happened as described.

Based on that, and on who Jesus was, Peter goes on to tell us that this confirms the whole world of biblical prophecy was true, messy and diverse as that world was. In other words, based on Peter’s experience with Jesus it all made sense in retrospect. God had indeed rescued his people in and through his Messiah, but not as they had expected. The Lord of glory had become human and rescued his people by hanging on a cross for our sake. And Jesus’ resurrection, which the transfiguration previewed, proved it. Perhaps this is why Jesus warned his disciples on the way down from the mountain not to tell anyone about what they witnessed until after he had been raised from the dead. There are some things we just cannot understand without the proper perspective, and the perspective of Easter is certainly necessary to help us reflect on the meaning of Jesus’ transfiguration.

But there is more than just future hope in the transfiguration. When we take stories like the transfiguration and resurrection seriously, Peter reminds us that they become like a light shining in the darkness to help us navigate the difficult waters of our mortal life with all its doubts, fears, and uncertainties. To fail to take the stories of Scripture seriously and reflect on them continuously effectively removes the light contained in Scripture, including especially the light of Jesus, so that we are enveloped by the darkness once again.

This all helps us make the connection between the transfiguration and the crucifixion because like Jesus’ path to glory, our path to glory is also through faithful imitation of Jesus’ suffering love. If Jesus really is the prophet (and more) who is to follow Moses so that we are to obey him (cf. Deuteronomy 18.15)—and if we believe what Peter has just told us, Jesus most certainly is that prophet (and more)—it becomes necessary for us to take seriously Jesus’ command to us to take up our cross and follow him. How is Jesus calling you to take up your cross and follow him?

Whatever that looks like, remember this. Jesus partook of God’s glory on the mountain of transfiguration and through his suffering obedience to the Father. And Jesus gives us this same glory when we give our lives to him. In practical terms this means that it is possible for us to actually obey Jesus’ command to us to take up our cross. We do not have to live in the darkness of our sin and brokenness (there’s that exodus theme again). Because we can partake in the divine nature through the power of the Spirit, it is possible for us to have, e.g., goodness, knowledge, self-control, godliness, and love. To have these attributes means that we are truly walking in the light of God’s love and presence right here and now. This also means that we can give up our programs of self-help or self-improvement, programs that are utterly futile, and let the One who can accomplish all things work his way and will in us to utterly transform us in the way we’ve just described, a way not unlike the metamorphoo Jesus experienced.

Think on these things, then, especially as we prepare to enter the season of Lent this coming Wednesday. The transfiguration reminds us that resurrection and life is our destiny and that because it all really happened, that same power is available to us right now as we struggle to live faithful lives, i.e., as we struggle to take up our cross. Take advantage of that power right now and learn the story of your salvation thoroughly because doing so will allow you to really take hold of the Good News that is yours, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

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