by the Rev. Leslie Scoopmire
Readings:
It is March. It is a time when Mother Nature giveth, and Mother Nature taketh away, as we saw in the glory of Thursday and Friday and bone-rattling chill of Saturday and today. But March also means that, thanks be to God, the start of baseball is right around the corner, as the full teams have now reported for spring training down in Florida and Arizona. And yes, last year was not a great one for the Cardinals, but the start of a new season is always a time of possibility and hope. Remember, I grew up a Cubs fan, so I know whereof I speak. So much talent! So much snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
We are also on the doorway of the start of Lent, a time many associate with deprivation and sacrifice.
You know, it’s funny—there is the idea of sacrifice in baseball, too. A common strategy available when your team has runners of base is for the manager to send in a hitter with an order to do a special kind of hit called a “sacrifice.” This can be either a deep fly ball into right field, or a short squibbly hit called a bunt that draws the basemen from defending their bases. The point is to help the runners already on base to advance to second and third bases.
Although the batter hits a ball that is certain to cause them to be called out, they in a way give themselves up in order to advance the other runners already on base. The batter places their own desire to get on base aside, and puts the welfare of the team's interests first, so that at least one or more people on base can move into what is known as “scoring position.”
Now, not every hit meant to be a sacrifice results in the batter getting out—some hitters, like Ted Williams, have been notoriously good bunters as a way to get on base. But generally, the odds are pretty good that the batter themselves will be called out. Skills like bunting and hitting the opposite way are some of the things that are especially practiced during spring training, since they take hours and hours of practice, as do all things in sports.
The greatest hitter of sacrifice bunts of all time is an amazing person named Eddie “Cocky” Collins, who, in his 24 year career with the Athletics and the White Sox, hit an astonishing 512 sacrifice bunts. You might think that his leadership in this category would reflect subpar statistics in other measures of baseball greatness, but you would be wrong. He played in more than 2800 games; he was on six World Series teams; he stole 500 bases; he had more than 3,000 hits—and it took 17 years for the next fellow to join him. He is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and rightly so. His willingness to sacrifice made him the complete player that he was.
I imagine the idea of sacrifice is hovering in the minds of more than a few of us right now. Here in this last Sunday after Epiphany, we stand at the edge of Lent. Already, I imagine there are many who are thinking about what they can give up for the 40 days, excluding Sundays, that start on Ash Wednesday this week. Will it be chocolate? Caffeine (for the love of everything holy, DON’T DO IT!)?
The idea of Lent as a time of deprivation, of unfulfilled hungers, and dreariness has even penetrated modern secular culture—as a negative aspect of Christianity. But what if we embraced the full meaning of sacrifice—as something that makes us holy; as something that enables us to take the long view, and lay the foundation for a deeper richer life by devoting our time and attention from our shallow, everyday impulses and hungers toward building lasting justice, peace, and well-being for all? What if we thought of this Lent as a spring training for the soul?
On this last Sunday before Lent, we traditionally hear stories of transfiguration—stories where the glory of God becomes manifest before humanity. As we close out the Season of Incarnation, and the season of light that we call Epiphany, we end with the most dazzling light of all—even more dazzling than the Christmas star. It is right that we spend some time thinking about the sacrifice the Son of God made in taking on human flesh, and ask ourselves why, before we enter Lent.
We get a welcome reminder of the awesomeness and overwhelming power of God as someone who could have chosen to remain beyond all our ways of knowing— but instead is a God who cares for and seeks relationship with us, and who built us to long for that sense of wonder and awe in our lives, a sense of purpose and meaning and community which leads to the greatest of human flourishing.
In THE Transfiguration story from Luke’s gospel, the humanity that the Son of God takes on in the Incarnation is drawn back, like a curtain, for a moment, so that the three apostles with Jesus can see the divine being Jesus is. But Transfiguration is also something that we all can embrace, as the account of Moses indicates. Moses’s obedience in conquering his fear and being willing to seek the presence of God has a transforming effect on him: his face glows with that transfiguring light. What Moses’s followers don’t get is that that light is not external—but comes from within. It is a flickering flame within all of us. The Son of God becoming flesh in the person of Jesus assures us that human flesh is capable of revealing God’s glory. All flesh—including ours.
What might it be like if we were to take seriously Jesus’s repeated call to his disciples—including us—to follow him, to emulate him? To understand that Jesus came not to die on a cross or perform miracles, but to remind US of the miracles we can all be should we seek to truly follow him and reveal him to the world through our actions?
Too many people believe in a God who smites people, who casts people out, who created a hostile planet for us to live on. I don’t believe in that God. Too many other people cannot or will not perceive the presence of God in the world around them. It might be partially based on the company they keep. Or it might be because we have allowed our sense of wonder and awe to atrophy. We live in a world that feeds us distraction rather than substance. This account of the Transfiguration symbolically invites us to use our imaginations to look for wonder laced through the world all around us—and within us.
The disciples who accompanied Jesus that day got a vivid reminder that God is God, and we are not, to quote the great songwriter Steve Earle. What does Jesus show us in the transfiguration, but that God will hold nothing back in attempting to recall us to seek unity with God, rather than simple membership in a club.
I sometimes wonder if defining Christianity as primarily being about belief hasn’t gotten us off in an entirely unhelpful direction. If we saw being a Christian as not so much about our beliefs but about our practices, how might our own lives and the life of the world be transformed. I also wonder if some people making Christianity all about their own personal salvation hasn’t completely upended their understanding of the life and gospel of Jesus.
This is the true work of salvation: it is not a ticket to keep us out of hell; it is a change in our orientation in the here and the now that directs us toward a more fulfilling, more holy life right now, It is recognizing, welcoming, and nurturing that transfiguring light within us so that we may stop mirroring the world around us passively and instead go about redeeming the world and the relationships around us toward truth, justice, mercy, and grace for all. It is embracing the possibility of that transfiguration within that allows us to resist the forces of death, despair, division, and destruction in the world today.
Jesus’s Transfiguration is not a miracle, per se, nor is it a parable. It’s important to remember that Jesus is not CHANGED here, but REVEALED. This is not a story of transformation but of revelation. The Transfiguration is the revelation of Jesus’s true reality as both spirit and flesh. It is an insistent exclamation point on all the signs he has embodied that point to his divine nature dwelling in the same space as his human nature, inseparable.Just like it is for all of creation.
The Transfiguration is the expression of a foundational truth: that we are made in God’s image; that we fall short of living into that image, but that the Son was sent to us to unite the human and the divine so that we can embrace the wonder and the gift of being made in the image of God. Jesus came so that we see this one wild and precious life as a chance to continually remake ourselves so that our lives, too, tell out the glory of God and the love that God bears for this entire world. That’s the work of salvation: to bring God’s reign and God’s values of love, mercy, and grace into full view by our own witness.
That’s really what Lent is all about, too. Yes, it is about purification and sacrifice—words that rarely get used in our common lives together, but I think words that might need restoration in our common lives together. The word “sacrifice” itself has lost all meaning for too many people in our common life. People recoil from this word, thinking it means “suffering,” or “being deprived of something.” And our society is not about those things, or even delaying gratification. The invention of modern advertising in the 1920s is predicated on killing off those concepts.
But the history of the word “sacrifice” paints a more appealing picture. In its Latin roots, there are two parts: “sacr,” which means “holy,” and “facere” which means “to make.” At its roots, then, a sacrifice is something that makes us holy. The ancient Romans used the word sacrifice to mean the exercising of a priestly function. The most benign general meaning of the word in English today refers to the giving up of something now in order to get something better later.
The idea of Lent as a time of deprivation, of unfulfilled hungers, and dreariness has even penetrated modern secular culture—as a negative aspect of Christianity. But what if we embraced the full meaning of sacrifice—as something that makes us holy; as something that enables us to take the long view, and lay the foundation for a deeper richer life by devoting our time and attention from our shallow, everyday impulses and hungers toward building lasting justice, peace, and well-being for all? What
Much of the world may be lacking an awareness of the glory of God. We Christians believe that Jesus came to reveal that the glory of God is here among us, and within us. The great 2nd century bishop and theologian Irenaeus makes this point clear in his great theological treatise Against Heresies, in which he denounced the belief that the material world, the world of matter, was hopelessly corrupt, and that humans had to escape the earthly realm in order to attain enlightenment. Instead, Irenaeus insisted that the Incarnation of Jesus reinforces the stuff of creation, from atoms and cells to flesh and bone, is God’s handiwork and reflects God’s intention of flourishing for all. “How shall humanity pass into God unless God has first passed into humanity?”[1] Irenaeus asked.
But then Irenaeus makes this point:
…from the beginning the Son is the Revealer of the Father, since from the beginning he was with the Father… [B]ecause the Word became the dispenser of the Father’s grace for the benefit of the men for whom he made such great “economies”, he showed God to man and man to God…. For the glory of God is the living human being, and the life of a human being is the vision of God.[2]
The glory of God is a living human being, fully alive to our connection to God and to each other and to all creation. The glory of God is a human being who shines forth with the light of God. If you think of it, all religions proclaim this message at their centers. But as Christians, we have a model and teacher in Jesus to show us the way to reveal God’s glory. By seeking to shed what divides us from God and each other, and by revealing the solidarity of God with us in our own lives.
Has the world ever needed this transfiguration more?
Lent reminds us that Jesus was willing to lay down his life to overcome the calculus of human evil—what would happen if we respond by taking up our lives and seeking to make ourselves more Godwardly-centered?
Let’s make this season of Lent a spring training for the soul. Let’s be willing to lay down a sacrifice of our own to advance others toward the goal of knowing and loving God and each other for the life of the world. Let’s embrace the joy of the practice of faith and open ourselves to revealing God’s transformative power at the center of each of us—by making ourselves more God-focused, more justice-focused, more joy-focused. This precious season calls us to gratitude and commitment to each other, not personal pain and suffering. It calls us to a sacrifice, all right, but one of praise and thanksgiving, of being visibly people standing for and insisting upon justice and mercy for all.
Let this Lent be a mindful commitment to allow God's love to reveal our true natures, lifting the weight of cynicism and self-centeredness which is so lionized in our culture, and instead bear God's glory down from the mountain into the valley where so many people struggle, empowered by our encounter with the Holy One to be fully human, and therefore fully children of God. Let this Lent be one where we are determined to show God’s glory in the world, one small step at a time.
Amen.
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