Bursting the Flags Bursting the Air

A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Sunday, April 14, 2024 

"This is a Christian nation!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world." 

"We need to take back this country for Christ!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world."

"We need to have the government legislate Christian values!" 

Jesus: "My kingdom is not of this world." 

Our role as followers of Jesus in relationship to our nation is to be a prophetic witness on behalf of the poor, the powerless, and the vulnerable among us. 

~BENJAMIN CREMER 

Sermon Audio linked here

OT Reading:  Second Samuel 7:1-29

Now when the king was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, 2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, “See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent.” 3 Nathan said to the king, “Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you.”

4 But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan: 5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? 6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. 7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?” 8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the LORD of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel; 9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. 10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house. 12 When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. 13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. 15 But I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. 16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. 17 In accordance with all these words and with all this vision, Nathan spoke to David.

 18 Then King David went in and sat before the LORD, and said, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far? 19 And yet this was a small thing in your eyes, O Lord GOD; you have spoken also of your servant’s house for a great while to come. May this be instruction for the people, O Lord GOD! 20 And what more can David say to you? For you know your servant, O Lord GOD! 21 Because of your promise, and according to your own heart, you have wrought all this greatness, so that your servant may know it. 22 Therefore you are great, O LORD God; for there is no one like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears. 23 Who is like your people, like Israel? Is there another nation on earth whose God went to redeem it as a people, and to make a name for himself, doing great and awesome things for them, by driving out before his people nations and their gods? 24 And you established your people Israel for yourself to be your people forever; and you, O LORD, became their God. 25 And now, O LORD God, as for the word that you have spoken concerning your servant and concerning his house, confirm it forever; do as you have promised. 26 Thus your name will be magnified forever in the saying, ‘The LORD of hosts is God over Israel’; and the house of your servant David will be established before you. 27 For you, O LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, have made this revelation to your servant, saying, ‘I will build you a house’; therefore your servant has found courage to pray this prayer to you. 28 And now, O Lord GOD, you are God, and your words are true, and you have promised this good thing to your servant; 29 now therefore may it please you to bless the house of your servant, so that it may continue forever before you; for you, O Lord GOD, have spoken, and with your blessing shall the house of your servant be blessed forever.”

 

NT Reading: Romans 3:19-31 

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

 21 But now, apart from law,[2] the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

27 Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. 29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, 30 since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31 Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. 

Flags Bursting in Air

Our OT reading this morning introduces the tragic imperial reach of nations. David has been promised an eternal house by God and is determined to mirror that promise by building a house for God that advertises to his people his relationship with God. Unlike Moses receiving the specific instructions to build and detail the tabernacle, the first temple emerged from a dynastic impulse realized by David’s son Solomon.

Goethe wrote: "Are we not here for the very purpose of making the transitory everlasting? And this can happen, of course, only when we are able to value both."

Yet the OT is a story of the unfolding history of Israel as it inverts these relative values, favoring by seeking to construct and secure the permanent, seeking the institutionalization of state and religion, while devaluing what is transitory, what is manifold and fractal and dancing and generative of shalom rather than emplacing stones that can and will be thrown. As it submits to human priorities for security rather than God’s trustworthy promises, the political actors of the OT repeatedly and routinely put subsidiary things first, and the first things of God’s promises and covenants second. In these inversions, we see the theology of state symbols displacing obligations to neighbors. We see succeeding generations ever crawling through the mire of nostalgia, seeking improvement in stone rather than in the generative living stone, the danced, the fractal individuality of the snowflake rather than the institutions of snowforts. The bomb bursting in air rather than planting the flower blooming in the wind, even though it  is transitory, may wither and fade in its season to give rise to another season, another bloom, another dance. In activity and renewal is permanence, not in guarded towers.

The first things of God are never state theology; it is the neighbor love walked and extended in Jesus of Nazareth. What Paul in our reading this morning The Law of righteousness apart from law—apart from human institutions of criminological inquisitions. The Law of Love manifest on the Cross that unseparates us from the pragmatic philosophical state that ever tries to separate us from God and the obligations of the Golden Rule.

But first Israel in the promised land documented other ways. The house of David, by trying to mirror the initiative of God for dynastic and power-institutionalizing reasons, comes to advertise, by mirroring, a special relationship with the divine. At that point, the survival of these institutions becomes seen in the Biblical witness as contingent on the dynast’s and their proxies’ performances of intentions to mirror the divine volition; and to the extent they proclaimed such, they were held to that account.  God’s promises are never contingent, but human responses set themselves up in theologies of merit that becomes their measure for others. But Jesus says (Matt7: 2): by the measure you give will be the measure you get.

Once these institutions create false theologies of contingencies, they themselves are subject to those same contingencies, and predictably, they are doomed to fail because they are unable to live up to their own systematic warrants and claims. They become hypocrites. Their temples are ever doomed by their inverted theologies and false hearts.

This institutionalizing of religion in service of the state is ever behind these initiatives of rulers. This is behind the placement of flags: to confirm for ourselves of our performances that give us a sense of security for the covenant promises of god. But these grand initiatives are not only not necessary, for God’s covenants are true, but actually can mislead us as to how we are living secure—in a flag territory because we’ve linked that flag to our given places we hope permanent. And once we do that, our injustices get tied to that flag by the righteousness of God. Political symbols neither warrant god’s covenantal care nor advertise to others a special relationship. Instead,

We seek permanence of place and preferred order by tying church and state together, but in so doing we are held to prophetic standards of being just and provisional to all, no matter how impermanent inside the state structures we create. If we set ourselves up by institutions as representatives of God’s justice and God’s plan, we are held to the highest standard of that justice. This is the repeated prophetic critique of Israel’s monarchs.

But there is a preceding error in this construction of state theology. It misconstrues what it means to be a nation. A nation is not a state apparatus. It is not a Napoleonic reflection of the excellence and will of its leader. A nation in the OT and into the era of the church is not a kinship structure, nor in the last 300 years of tragic applications of biological science, a nation is not a race or genetic order.

The Day of Pentecost confirms that the nation was an historical language group that shared an historical archive and values embedded and derived therein. The Exodus from slavery led by Moses and Aaron expose too that the Israelites were liberated slaves from the Pharaonic world system. Some were descendents of the 12 tribes of Jacob, but the Bible speaks of fellow travelers in the Exodus who weren’t: the gerim. These were accorded rights of religious and political participation by virtue of neighborhood and shared, linguistically mediated values and commitment to the liberating God. Nationhood is ever deliberated linguistically, adhered to shared will and not coerced. Biblical nationhood is a spiritual project on the way to developing civilizations of care, not punitive, exclusionary, and purified social orders according to some hegemon’s nostalgia seeking eternal return.

Into this fitful but progressive sequence of nation building in the church has repeated various redefinitions of nationhood to justify claims of controlling their narratives and their orders. First going by the name of “dominionism,” where religious authorities claimed rights over the non-religious. The medieval church formulated the doctrine of discovery that transferred land tenure from indigenous natives in the New World to Old World Christian masters on the basis that the natives were not exercising western methods of efficient exploitation-- that the European masters would improve husbandry and evangelize the pagans.

We see from this power-extension an inverted—perverted--sequence of hegemonic hierarchies and authoritarian tragedies that don’t always originate in the church, but come to recruit the church’s symbols and speak its language because of the prestige of Jesus Christ and the claim of a special relationship with the absolute:

Behind the Doctrine of Discovery of the medieval church: “God designed the Europeans to rule over the indigenous.”

Behind the Dred Scott decision and the Confederacy: “God designed the white man to rule over black men and women.”

Behind patriarchal dominionism: “God designed men to rule over women.”

Behind Christian Nationalism: God designed Christians to rule America.

God designed OT corporal punishments to structure the American Social order and soul.

And Behind Religious flag realism: God designed America to subjugate the world orders by force of arms.

Christian nationalists are perverting religious language, which, as the foundation of an ethnos,[1] a biblical nation as language collective, is actually ethnic treason. Political lies, propaganda, and conspiratorial shams are linguistic treason:

what Pinker [ Enlightenment Now, 358–59 emph. orig.] calls the Tragedy of the Belief Commons which rejects, misquotes, and misapplies “expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning,” instead to ingeniously and ruthlessly manipulate these for the purposes of generating in-group boundaries and demonizing opponents.  This process of bludgeoning the truth crawls and may be recognized in

"blue lies and [sham] beliefs are expressed for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones."  We call this propaganda, but I’m calling it ethnic treason. The purposeful degradation of language for sucking others into the void of violence and fascism and lies, and the eternal regret that follows because this ethnic treason to the language group disestablishes love and neighborliness. Melancholic nostalgia and its distortion in catastrophic apocalyptic expectations is the mother of all treachery and noxious theology underlying it.

For demonizers of enemies like Gen. Mike Flynn, interogating Beliefing, always beliefing attempts to make secure by exclusion, never  by ethics that gentle and create civilizations of care. Christian nationalist belief is performance of malice at outsiders, criminalizing them, not belief aligning with empathy and GR care and repair. These christian nationalist authoritarians who collect around symbols of “heritage:” the Confederacy’s flag, the Pine Tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag of the Am. Revolution that is residing outside Mike Johnson’s speaker’s office. That “protestant’ flag in the back that mistakes territorial institutionalism and offices with the deinstitutionalization of the reformers. 

Increasingly the far-right is adopting Christian charismatic language because the characterization of political enemies as “demon possessed” serves murderous sets of applications, desensitizing ourselves to think of others as nonhuman and deserving of scorn or elimination.  Vladimir Putin compares himself to Jesus as he faces off against 'satanic' West. See the pattern of misusing Christianity by the power hungry, who use threats to make an impression that they claim is orthodox? They use codewords that give them plausible deniability as to their intent, but in reality play games with language which they try to cover with flags and false sentiments and bastard anthems and thank you for your service for dropping bombs and threats of conformity and call these traditional values but are far from the Law of Love, the Golden Rule.

This outreach of Christian nationalists to the young, like hill staffers, some of whom are confused about Christian life, others who want to join the power base forming Christian nationalism that uses political and religious language to demonize and dehumanize. And win no matter what the cost to the Logos of our language and the Christian values embedded in it to be shared with newcomers and new borns.

It is a surprise that mainline Protestants align in some way with the goals and methods of Christian nationalism, and this warrants analysis and understanding. When we think of PCUSA mainline, we don’t think of Davidic monarchic politics and building of temples. Often considered more liberal or progressive than rightwing evangelicals drawn to the inquisitions of “belief”, mainliners have a different approach to scripture—not holding to inerrancy and simple and static meanings that literally endure through historical epochs and ground nostalgia. They have a different approach to ethics, which I wrote a book about—that bottom-up virtues calm neighborhoods in contrast with strategizing top-down authorities. Mainline  churches take care of framing social justice In their approach faith and raise it  beyond simple affirmation of “beliefs.” They believe in historical progress, not a recurrence of historical forms leading to apocalyptic catastrophe. When we think of Christian nationalism, we think of conservative evangelicals,

When, in the mid-20^th C, mainline protestants drove civil, religious policy in this country, it was more demographically homogeneous. The right wing performance of malice hates this social change and wants to restore the US to some 1965, pre-MLK, and in some cases pre-civil war vision of social order. Their claim is that God is found in the past and that sin has taken over. Let me be very clear: this is wrong and theologically toxic. God is driving social change, which includes demographic change and deinstitutionalization of authorities of preferred social orders. The church is not living for a time of social restoration and nostalgiaic return, but is being led to individualize responsibility for neighbors and create the civilization of healing that has always been the waystation in the Kingdom of God. We are advanced on the path that tolerates and incorporates others with different commitments. We are not meant to “heal a social order” by exclusion and criminal investigation of beliefs, but by reaching out to every neighbor encountered in our daily walk.

By the 20th century the mainlines exercised tremendous cultural and social influence. Whether naively or cynically they believed that what was good for the mai line WAS good for society and vice versa. This was termed in the 1950s the civil religion discourse that said to adVance the cause of Christ from our tradition is going to be good not just for the church BUT for wider society under challenge of communism. Civil Religion was founded on a more homogeneous society coalescing around what was becoming termed the american way of life. When Eisenhower attended a mainline church while president, the alerted preacher made his sermon about putting the phrase “under God” into the pledge of Allegiance where it had not been before. And this sermon framed atheists as social parasites.

Into this muscular moment for mainline Protestantism, some darker Presbyterian elements came in: RJ Rushdoony and his reconstructionism proposed to define the American way of life on OT terms. He proposed a certain way of reading the OT that called for death for heresy, for false teachings (as he defined them), for Adultery, and other behavioral challenges to authority. Corporal punishment for children. This Reconstructionist/OT “dominionism” claimed it was the only way to understand Christianity and interrogate Christian claimants, and it was legalistic and criminological in nation-state terms. It entirely missed the message of Pentecost that a nation was a voluntary assemblage of language groups. Reconstructionists proposed to put under capital discipline those who opposed their one, inerrant way of ‘belief.’ The evangelist John  (16: 2b-3) warns of them:  "Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. 3And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me."

According to recent polling 1/3 of mainline protestants are sympathetic to Christian nationalism. To the relationship of Cross and Flag.  I’m not your pastor, but your moderator which in our denomination is tasked with knowing the big picture, to consider the times we are leaving in, to lead its councils to address challenges, dangers, and opportunities for the church as social conditions change. We are in one such moment, which reformers call “Kairos,” to address the two paths open to social change: to find a home in nostalgia of the 1950s-70 when “civil religion” was defined by bombs bursting in air and “one nation under God,” the Christian God. My friends, in the PCUSA a moderator is a prophet: those times are not coming back. Nostalgia is always a dead and death-dealing end, at best in melancholy and disappointment.

While mainliners have done much good work in redressing their responsibility for slavery and its legacy in this country, there are calls to which I join that the PCUSA needs to study and acknowledge its participation in Christian nationalism that continues to call for the criminalization and corporal disciplining of otherness, esp. beliefs not endorsed by a religious institutionalism and authoritarianism. The price of this acknowledgement is eternal vigilance. Rushdoony like others have written favorably about slavery and hypothesize its return.

Paul in Romans says to avoid these guys, because they are ADJACENT to the woe they wish on others but destined as their mirror. They thrive on rejecting and judging anyone whose beliefs don't completely align with THEIRS, BUT LIKE The rest of us, THEY ARE BLIND TO THEIR flaws, but these are MAGNIFIED BY an identifying INTOLERANCE AND bitter rejoicing in nostalgia they hope to institutionalize.

“Rom 2.13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14 When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness…They have the appearance of godliness [in their talk about belief], but they deny the power” of love by withdrawing into the Christian national security state and the nostalgia and false consciousness of fixed social orders based on tribal (not spiritual) kinship.

Paul goes on in the next chapter to say that

Christians are to uphold the Law, the Law of Love. This is righteousness apart from (anarthrous) generic human legalism and disciplining.  Do you see that transcendent law in the flag? I don’t. Maybe love for our families, for our lineages, for our “heritage.” For our modern plantations and gated communities. But love for our neighbors, each and every one, in that flag which has a history of a social order founded on the enslavement of people defined as 3/5 a voting being? In a shrinking world where more and more come into our view, a crowding world ever challenging us to love strangers and enemies. Is the flag part of this? Christian Nationalists talk like only a government run by Christians could possibly be run in a just and moral way. But Paul the Apostle talks as though sometimes “parasites” and atheists have a better sense of justice and morality than Christians do. This is behind the USA political experiment that puts deliberation into the primacy of ethnicity and excludes criminal inquistitions of beliefing.

 

CONCLUSION:

God’s righteousness is not criminological. That is the tired realism of misdefined ‘nationalists’ always seeking to drum up scares of the enemies within.

If you preach with flags behind you, I’m going to assume you’re a puppet of those who control, interpret, and plant those flags in the backs of the fallen. Having any level of certainty that God wants you to use violence and hegemony for God’s purposes is the mark of false prophets.

Brothers and Sisters, the bureaucratic state is never primary in the Kingdom of God. Virtues, shalom, and the Golden Rule are. Where are these in flags, their false flower? Where are these in institutions of authority? Paul says that apart from human administrative legalism we are righteous when we uphold the Law of Love. Let us Give Paul’s message prolonged consideration as we move, generationally into the civilization of care and leave the stone throwing temples of nationalism behind. Leave the bombs, make space always for new flowers to plant and bloom. In this we come to recognize and embody hope. Praise the Lord, the Lord alone. May it be so for you and me, AMEN.

---

[1] Nation and language are linked in God’s estimation per the Scriptures. Not only at Pentecost: 

“I will record Rahab and Babylon

among those who acknowledge me—

Philistia too, and Tyre, along with Cush—

and will say, ‘This one was born in Zion.’ ”

Indeed, of Zion it will be said,

“This one and that one were born in her,

and the Most High himself will establish her.”

The LORD will write in the register of the peoples:

“This one was born in Zion.” (Ps. 87:2–6; cf. Ps. 49:1-4, 11)

[2] Note, in distinction with later Pauline notes of "the" law, that this is anarthrous law. It lacks the article, so it is distinguished from the Torah of love that concludes this section. That Paul's followers "uphold." The generic law, distinguished by this lack of an article, is human legalism based on categorical and contingent constructions of criminology and interrogation. 

 Short Note on the Theoretical Physics of Grace

(with an application to politics)

Rev. Douglas Olds

March 14, 2024

The Second Law of Themodynamics informs us that entropy degrades every closed system, so that only the constancy of renewal—the earth’s essence—from the open system of sun, spirit, rain, new generations of vitality and genius of language and art can keep the church from becoming first chaotic, then tepid, then saltless and insipid. What the Shema calls us earth imagers (Trustees) of the divine to: the endless expansion of purpose, empathy, intelligence/logos, and kinesthetic schema (soul). And teleology emerges from the renewing earth and is recognized as its essence that becomes part of the human essence of repair. In this, teleology is attended as a Trinitarian feature, a union of the human trustee and the earth divine imager of grace's heart. 

Teleology can either be denied—and resisted as a force instead to wallow in walled-off, separate, static definitions of “nature" [1]--

cast in secular terms in neoliberalism’s updating of mammon: the moral horror of consequentialist “thinking,” (non-empathetic and inconsiderate of moral claims and duties—the disparagement of “moralism”,)  aligned with the warrant of ignorance by bourgeois anonymity, crowd mirroring, celebrity-careerist vapidity, “bro-sports speak” and  “I think you’re pretty, do you think I am?” that never goes anywhere but to serve appetites for security-- 

or it can become part of an awareness, an alignment, a caring attendance. This is the crux and touchstone of humanities portraying character development by the Golden Rule. Grace is the eternal and infinite reaching into and leavening closed systems (institutions) to reform them and so to sustain and heal neighbor. Grace Reforms and Always Reforming. By this the earth is repaired, humanity is redeemed, and through which eternity is launched, peopled, mirrored, and won.

APPLICATION:

To enclose and sustain power, inner circle culture is an entropy-spreading system that climbs mountains on the backs of subordinates and is thus the palette of the prophetically goat-doomed. As David French notes (NYT 12/7/23), its religious forms are marked by certainty, ad hominem “ferocity, and solidarity (loyalty + confidentiality)” to maintain an elite’s control of narratives, especially those that privilege their “power” at the expense of enemy outsiders, esp. traitors to this culture.

Instead we come to recognize, by the Spirit of Pentecost, that an ethnos/nation is a language group (Acts 2:1-12), we discern political lies & propaganda function as ethnic “treason.” Beware the ad hominem sleight, redirecting questions of intent (logos) into disputes about “numbers.”  And the “spirit of perpetual, unrepentant, anger-filled derision towards dissent:” revilement of the Kingdom of God, to be avoided. (1 Cor 5:11, 6:10). Concocting enemies is the Machiavellian proclivity, mode, and ploy of [Schmittian] religious politics to justify strong man saviors and warrant their violence.

Note:

[1] the error of organicism applied to theology and self- focusing or group-sustaining systems.

 

 

A Sensorium of Brokenness and Delight: 

An Anthology of Metaphysical Poetry

(Douglas Olds, February 2024 In process)

Linked here

 

SERMON "The Lenten Walk with The Condemning"

March 10, 2024

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Rev. Douglas Olds

The AUDIO of this sermon (which departs from the following text at places) is linked HERE  

[n.b. correction: for the use of the word "trumpet" in the audio, replace with "festal shout."]

 

First Reading Numbers 21:4-9

4From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” 6Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” 9So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

 

NT Reading: Gospel of John 3:13-21

13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.14“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

---

Our readings this morning explore how the spirit of condemnation, lifted in the hand’s of God’s OT people, works in God’s creation by grace, lifted up in the NT Christ. These stories tell us what God is not and what God is. The OT story of the serpent lifted up is what God is not and what is defeated, and the Christ lifted up is what God is and how God is victorious. The supposed divine condemnation versus the God of sacrificial love who pulls out every stop to keep God’s creation alive.

 In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites are wandering in the desert after they have been liberated by the miracle working of Moses, but they quickly fall away with very tragic results by building the Golden Calf while Moses is up on the mountain of Sinai receiving the commandments of God.

This is a most serious transgression—these idolators have turned away from their relationship with Moses’ God who liberated them from the Egyptian system and return to that system seeking security in an idea of a god who is fashioned of gold as if it will, by being worshipped with gold annealed to its body,  dispense gold back!  This is the false transactional theology that “feeds” a deity. Transactional theology is the epitome of idolatry. Idolotries of transactional relationships with God and neighbor are everywhere today, monetized. It comes forth in every generation, even in Christianity if not especially.

This offense of the Golden Calf leads to what the Torah presents as a 40 year period of wandering and testing in the desert. Only after the entire Golden Calf generation has died—Moses too--are their children and grandchildren allowed to cross the Jordan River into the promised land under Moses’ lieutenant, Joshua.

During these wanderings, the Israelites reveal themselves to be “stiff-necked,” recalcitrant, grumbling, back-biting, gossipy. This is not an inherent character, what Darwinians might call “genetic” (with all the tragic results of reducing a people into their DNA), but the wandering people who had been slaves (and which included non-descendants of Jacob) were people who shared a historical language, now a language being shaped by liberation and their realization that they were living with and in and by God—the God of Abraham and Jacob. This is important: “ethnos”--nation--in the Bible is a language grous, not kinship structures, and certainly not an administrative unit organized by politics. Think of this whenever you hear the word “ethnic.” Do they mean it as a DNA lineage, or in the Biblical sense of language group?

It is thus ever important to parse the speech acts in the Bible. And in this reading from the Book of Numbers, we have no quotes, but we have an implied culture and expression of gossip and grumbling. And the symbolic dimensions of lifting up the serpent  symbol after the grumblers were bitten indicate three important theological points:

1)        Grumbling, gossip, scoffing, innuendo, sneering, snark, slander, and haughty poses of bemused detachment valorized as ironical but withdraw from fellowship reveal a spirit of condemnation in their practitioners. What is condemning will be mirrored. What is healing will be mirrored. This derives from the metaphysics of the heart.

2)        Mirroring is the operation of “accountability,” and the virtue of accountability is to recognize and accept that mirroring, as the course of God’s justice. The wandering Israelites, in their verbal doggerels of condemnation, reveal their spiritual participation in the serpent’s spirit transmitted to humanity by the disobedience of Adam. We are, as Luther says, enslaved by that spirit which acts out in all forms of condemnation, violence, backbiting, conspiratorial thinking, plotting, revenge. The list is long.  To the extent that the Israelites can come to appreciate that their spirit of condemnation—which we might call the demonic—is of the serpent and that the serpent comes against them as a warning and mirror, they can learn accountability to a different spirit. It takes 13 centuries to get the Egypt of the Golden Calf out  of them and get them to the place of the Golden Rule of the pure living lamb. 13 Centuries of mirroring—doubling back in the desert of generations to learn accountability. This wandering and mirroring and warning repeats over and over again in the histories, wisdom, and prophetic books in the OT. Look for it. It's why many think history repeats, but indeed it is our shared experience of doubling back in the wilderness, our conduct being mirrored until we learn accountability and are released into the sunshine of grace, learning grace, attending to grace, walking in the way of Jesus. History does not repeat, but generations have to learn the lessons of accountability ever anew.

3)        God, with God’s primary attribute of grace, heals the injustices of the serpent spirit by sending a program that awakens the awareness of the Israelites beset by snakebites. God initiates repair by sending a symbol for recognizing our condemning nature and overcoming our false sense of  justice that mirrors the condemning demon—which all human culture shares in biases and prejudices and preferring its privileged ideas of favored social orders and kinship. The serpent of condemnation is overcome in this story by an act of grace in a visual (and certainly deliberated) symbol: the lifting up of the serpent as the vanguard of the advancing people who are trusting God’s promised victory over the serpent. They are receiving God’s assurance that the serpent demon always condemining is conquered, and that those who encounter from the outside this vanguard and symbol may come to deliberate its meaning. We are those outside that vanguard, reading of this imaging of grace and accountability and deliberating of the virtues and the theology nested in this story.

 

Application: new demons of condemnation have morphed in modernity—changed their tune: We see it boredom and the affects of irony (acedia) which may not condemn, but it resists accountability to participate in progress and healing. Acedia has societal implications that posits a virtue in withdrawal from a culture it doesn’t understand. Withdrawal in chronic melancholy has a foundation in condemning, of finding fault with the world, rejecting the world.

Acedia, a blend of bored withdrawal and ironic detachment from things that ever go wrong. This is a religiosity of fatalism: that things never go our way as we’ve planned them. Because, don’t’ you know, they are bringing God’s judgment on us. Their Beliefs are flawed; their love is flawed. Yours and mine, gossipers agree, are the preferred ends because they are God’s ends. Our forms are God’s forms. Our social orders are God’s social orders. Religious authoritarians see themselves and their preferences guarding "God's order" against the excesses of mob democratic rule.

This bias is the danger of Platonic thinking which underlies all condemnation of otherness. Platonist reactionaries going by his name of "republicans" take confidence in the continuation of forms and institutions, so when these fall or are replaced or reformed, the condemning spirit can their sensibilities and comforts that are hurt by change brought by the new. Evil, then, is seen all around encroaching in these new neighbors flooding in. We see it in the over the top alarm about immigrants and open borders these days.

Condemnation and conspiratorial innuendo is "acedia's sin," indicative of love grown cold within a Christian community. Its cult of fatalism is fostered by obfuscation and obscurantism to inhibit original thinking that only derived from a supposedly evil, surrounding culture. 

The tongue's gossip likened to a "chilling rattle," referencing James's depiction of the tongue as a destructive force.

Things seemingly ever go wrong because our ethics are misplaced: we think we have the knowledge of God to bring about God’s will in terms of forms and orders. But we image God not by our foresight of consequence—our knowledge of what the future holds in terms of forms and orders. Instead, we are to image God by our virtues that heal and reconcile the local by the Golden Rule in the moment.

 I wrote a book on this Pastoral Christology centered in virtues to guide Christians away from strategic thinking that ever tempts to become the authoritarian, top-down and coercive serpent of hegemony. Yes, this demon in us will be mirrored to us until we come to feel the power and sublimity of God’s love “lifted up” on the Cross. And then we will lay down our strategic plans that, because it is based on our ego preferences on not on the common good of others. We will move on from anxiety and the consternation we feel at unintended consequences because by virtue we align with God. Our accountability to this God’s justice proceeds by seeing how the blowback of consequences is earned, and is intended to awaken us from false consciousness of beliefs that our intended consequences are not God’s.

When love grows cold within the Christian community, it withdraws into expecting the worst. Love grown cold acts outs in gossip that mirrors the inner condition of its speaker. Love grown cold acts out fatalistically by sitting static and secreted in front of a screen, interjecting condemning  and malicious comments about secret evils lurking in conspiracies in neighbors.  Social media’s "anger-tainment" and performative malice perpetuate a cycle of cynicism and judgment.

The "chilling rattle," a snake, a destructive spark, takes hold, spreading into conflagrations of conspiratorial thinking and accusation. The coldness of the rattle mirrors the coldness of heart. When you hear its rattle, you are in the presence of the condemning, who project their own suspicion into the hearts of others.

There is a Christian Ethic Against Conspiratorial Thinking:

The cultural endorsements of violence and hegemony are grounded in conspiratorial projection about “enemies” plans for another social reality. The Christian ethic of love your neighbors is the foundation of anti-conspiratorial gossip and strategic planning. God says, do not repay evil for evil. I will repay. God’s got this. The strategic outworking of God’s world is in love. Love will conquer the serpent in every generation.  As my friend John Anderson says, “the victory is in the bag.” The Kingdom of God is here in love, and it will NOT be extinguished. Not possible. Though every new generation needs to learn accountability to God’s justice before receiving the magnificent pardon of God’s grace: what John said in our second reading:  14“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

What the Cross washes out in this love grown cold in fatalistic withdrawal and postures of innuendo is the tendency to scorn others. What washes out is the possibility of reconciliation with human others who differ from ourselves or our expectations. What is washed by the Cross is the disheartening fear that God is the supreme condemnation, that we under wrath, and this false picture creates so much dysfunction.

The Psalmist has learned to appreciate this message of the desert wanderings and mirroring switchbacks that builds accountability of awareness:

 

Psalm 107: 17-22

17  Some were sick through their sinful ways,

          and because of their iniquities endured affliction;

18  they loathed any kind of food,

          and they drew near to the gates of death.

19  Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,

          and he saved them from their distress;

20  he sent out his word and healed them,

          and delivered them from destruction.

21  Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,

          for his wonderful works to humankind.

22  And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices,

          and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.

 

And the apostle Paul says this to his church in Ephesus: (Ephesians 2:1-6):

 

1You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — 6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

My conclusion this morning is ever to embrace the sacrificing goodness and provision of God who will get us out of every abyss into which we fall. But along the way, we come to embrace the Virtue of Accountability as our Lenten Walk in a condemning culture.

Purple is the liturgical color of Lent, a color of swollen wounds that signify penitence but otherwise traditionally associated with royalty. Like I’ve preached before, semiotic (symbolic) meanings are inverted by the NT. Lent is a training of kings—My King is righteousness, Melchizedek lives in shalom-- by defeating the angry, condemning and violent schema (1 Cor 7) of contemporary dynasts and those souls which aspire to such. This purple is the liturgical color of swollen and wounded royalty, which our Lord brings us forth into share his realm. We are battered, and we reach out to the battered, and sustain them as our subjects from our placement as their servants: in Jesus Christ we are responsible for the oppressed, for the battered, and for the enslaved, because God’s creation is entirely intended by God to come in to this world of mutual service, grace, and provision. We align against that messianic vision of a universal course for creation at the risk that we are excluded when we follow an unaccountable path that condemns others’ ends as less valid than our own. Our own gifts, our own children, our own backgrounds, our own monumental forms and institutions, our privileging of our own stories. We have been bitten by snakes of accountability that come from God. Let us recognize how we’ve been left to live for the other story—the righteous, true and beautiful story, of Christ lifted up for our sakes. And may we lift him and up that we may be lifted up ourselves in our service to God and neighbor that sustains and liberates and flourishes all creation. May it be so for you and me, AMEN.

 

 An Autopsy's Durruti

(Douglas Olds, August 2023, posted on the occasion of the death in prison of Navalny. A politics of the tangible puts Putin on the table)

Who gallops with Valkyries, 

Done in by mistaken kinship, its vengeful spear, the stepfathering maw of reason that seeks its forms, 

I sing of the bullet that felled Siegfried castellano 

His measure hijacked by triremes ever re-ballasted 

Aimed to ram into shadows heaven’s gate,

with cyclamates to salt sleeping spring:

Not by talc and brain grease this destiny by rationality’s gritty kiss so

by autopsy as incantation refined and whip assigned:

This Bullet’s Durruti

Climbs the guard of flaming angels over

These walks in a telluric cauldron,

that bullet lands a bane walk, scopes it though we Durruti’s funeral cloak array, 

a cleric’s disguise wagered.

To feed the bullet song of

such hero’s procession-- 

How triumvirs grasped your cold and unmasked hand!

Anarch redivivus by these shapeshifting reports 

Do bullets that cover priests in peasant backs land?

It can only be so! Testify angels of ballistic resonance 

Who ascend to refine the guided autopsies of birthing heroes, their vaporous allegation

      good guns to gin the raven skin, those

a family tombed plots to the future circumcise 

As we autopsy our interpreted evil’s author and knight it

over and over, this redacted Autopsy until lands scripture--

to repowder Durutti into fork’s Intent, to plant its seed in backs ever more

 

“Why Not Joseph and David?”

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Transfiguration Sunday February 11, 2024

Tomales (CA) Presbyterian Church

 

Bulletin Quote:

A form without form, you say: silence, and yet a voice—a powerful effect from a formless figure, and so it must be. . .The more closely defined its features, the feebler would their effect become. Form and definiteness are incompatible with our notions of Spirit. it is the offspring of the wind that preserves the character of its origin.

 --J.G. Herder

The audio of this sermon (a condensation of this prepared transcript) is linked here

 

[n.b.  error in the audio: David is anointed king by the prophet Samuel; it is David's son Solomon who is anointed by the prophet Nathan.]

OT Reading 1 Ki 19:1-13

19 Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7 The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

 

NT Reading: Mark 9: 2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

 

“Why Not Joseph and David?”

[Importance in Mark's Gospel]

a.       Mark’s is the first gospel, and scholars believe that Peter was Mark’s main source of these stories. This fits especially well with his perspective and role in this story. Simon who Jesus calls Peter, the Rock, and Paul calls Cephus in Aramaic

b.      Is no doubt hugging the stones as he falls down in amazement at this dazzling revelation.

Peter's role and his proposal to memorialize the transfigured/transfigurers in tents

a.                The English translation of “dwellings” is unfortunate.

Better would have been “booths,” as in the Festival celebrated then and is condensed in Holy Week that we will celebrate at the end of Lent that Starts this Ash Wednesday.

But the word skene here is what John introduces the incarnation of the logos, and sets up a tent of meeting in the heavenly temple in 

 John’s theology frames Jesus "the word of God as tented among us.” (GJ 1:14) And he is in the heavenly place now, a new kind of temple, in a tent of meeting. Revelation 15:5.

So the Markan theme of Peter’s messianic recognition is that the transfigured personalities are tented in an indwelling relationship with God that emerges, dazzling in the flesh.

In addition to Peter, other disciples are present,  an inner circle that includes John, important to understand John's key to the theology of the messianic appearance to Israel and the world. These thereby make even more profound the one who speaks. In this, Peter is central. Readers are meant to identify with his report. We may take it as symbolic, metaphoric, or historical in a journalistic sense.

The other historical personages do not speak. Instead they communicate toward the messiah's “dazzling” appearance. They are historical figures, but they manifest an eternal and eternalizing contribution. We are meant to ponder who they are, what their role is in the historical people chosen by God to reveal what relationship with God entails. Peter understands it is to “tent” with the presence of God in this life. Not awaiting some rebuilt temple, or some realization “in heaven, the sweet bye and bye” someday. God says over and over to the patriarchs and to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,” and Jesus tells his followers that this was a living relationship that continues. The transfiguration makes clear that God is the God of Moses and Elijah, and as such remains after they fade from view, a special relationship with Jesus that incorporates the Mission of Moses and Elijah but extends them into something much more. Far more ranging in scale and scope. A cosmic shining forth of eternity in Jesus’ transfiguring work.

The figures who to me are tellingly absent include Joseph, a hero to the tribal confederations of Israel that predated the monarchy, and the founding of God’s promised monarchical house, David. They are missing on that tent-revealing mountain. Their absence tells of a tension of the solitary institutional reformers transfiguring here and the institutionalizers of systematized faith: Joseph as an ascendant functionary in the Pharaonic world system and its pyramids of power, and David who receives God’s promise of an eternal house and who then, on his own initiative, vows to mirror that promise by building a house, in the only way he knows from his context—a stone ziggurat--for God to dwell.

So to make theological sense of these three historical figures, let us summarize the germane themes of their mission up to what Peter takes forth into the church age in this story.

Moses, the liberator of the enslaved Israelites from pharaoh, was born to rule this  Pyramid of Power world system hegemony signaled by grandiose temples that enslaves. Instead he is called by God to lead the people out. He goes up to meet God on Mount Sinai, and as his meeting is prolonged, the people down below decide to construct the only god they had known, the idol of new birth by gold, a calf, a financial system in which to revel.

To repair this breach in relationship with God, Moses is instructed to meet with God in a tent, an ohel moed, where a covenant altar was placed. Services were specified for this altar, and then the tent of meeting became more formally designed by explicit instructions from God to make it into a traveling tabernacle, a mishkan, to accompany the people toward the promised land. The tabernacle is to be a place where the people are served and tested by their performances of service and obedience to this indwelling God.

So we see a process personified in Moses, from an unmediated relationship with God to a tented-off meeting, to a furnishing an itinerant set of ordained services in the desert. This process is not a progress of architecture, for which I make the case is actually regress, but in the progress of spiritual repair.  

These deinstitutionalizing reformers are thus agents of historical progress. They are the focus, not the structures. Do not be misled: Eccl. 7:10!

What later prophets call turning the heart from its focus on Egypt in all its idolatries to a focus—really a concern with the living flesh of others.

After 40 years in the desert, the people cross the Jordan, and after several hundred more years of new generational testing, God gives into their demand for a king. Saul fails, and David is ordained by the prophet Samuel and his son Solomon by Nathan so that the kings that follow in Israel have to meet with validation by the prophets. The way this plays out in the imperial period is known by scholars as the Deuteronomist history of the Bible.

 So now we may understand how Elijah fits with the transfigured transfigurer, a prophetic reformer. Moses has reformed the people’s living conditions and idea of leadership by liberation and begins the reform of their understanding of the living will of God. By the time of the kings of Israel, 300 years later, David received God’s promise of an eternal "house,” a beit, an eternal lineage of rule. David intends to mirror this promise by building God a house, which becomes his son Solomon’s project of a temple. While service elements are taken from the tent and tabernacle stages of the people’s history with God, the temple is something else, and it’s not simply a progress of  grandeur or exaltation of relationship with the divine, it is in an unexpected way, part of the process of reform & repair, an instruction in how to dwell with God mediated by a king. 

 Solomon’s temple is modeled on what a new monarchy knows of such temples from pagan neighbors. It is modeled on the stone ziggurat: as a path to heaven.  Perhaps not its Davidic idea, but becomes the basis of the tragedies of transactional theologies of God. Its service, performance, and reform fills multiple strands of the OT's commentary on the imperialistic aspirations and impulses of the collective ethnos (a linguistic group and archive, not a kinship structure as the Day of Pentecost reveals in the Book of Acts).

As later kings sin and point to the continuance of the temple, they and the people ruled take confidence that God’s  “house” with them stands. Continuation of form theology is behind institutionalization.

Until the temple doesn’t stand. Twice.

Into this architectural/imperial narrative strand, Elijah comes to present his reform of the prophetic role that Samuel and Nathan had begun by validating the Davidids as king. Elijah now comes to prophetically denounce injustice in the king and by his temple administration and call them to repentance. In the northern kingdom, Solomon’s temple had a breakaway counterpart at Shechem that became associated with the Omrid dynasty. At the time, Ahab and his consort Jezebel were ruling hegemonically and unjustly, zeroing out the prospects of many of the collective people. Elijah prophesized their doom, and Ahab and Jezebel in turn called forth his doom by sending daggers his way. Their mirror to prophecy is the dagger and the spear, mirrors destined ever to be shattered.

In the stormy chase and challenges that follow in the Book of Kings, Elijah is reduced to terrified “petrifaction.” His mission to reform the monarchy freezes him in fear.  Fear “stones” him, if you will. He sits down and prays to God for death.  God passes by to rouse him. Our first reading this morning notes how Elijah revives with a favored though oblique “appearance.” And a summons expressed in the most gentling and reformative way, that is to become the manner of all prophets hence:

“The word of God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

The translation “sheer silence” of the Hebrew  דְּמָמָ֥ה דַקָּֽה is to me better understood as a “slenderest calm,” picking up on the imagery of the opening of the Book of Genesis where the Spirit hovers over the deep. Elijah has been put into a deep sleep by terror, chased by storms of raging malice, and God here reveals that those storms and earthquakes are not God, but the sliver of light emerging from the terror is the briefest breath, a whisper really, a shadow of a whisper, a soothing stillness that revivifies and reforms the prophet and the prophecy. It is by this prophetic gift of voice Elijah now experiences that will set him to reform the rage of institutionalized power establishments whose exclusionary impulses turn murderous when challenged.

God’s voice originates in our nothingness. A shadowing whisper is our savior. Silence stills our inner turmoil and prepares us for mission. We are not commanded by thunder to go forth to reform institutions frozen in place, but with a slightest sense of call that centers and brings forth our own gifts and wisdom, our own commitment to experience and study. We both then recognize and counter the demon rage of false institutions. Their call for spiritual war, their calls to demonize empathy and the advancing civilization of care as the enemy.

 When we move forth from this merest breath of summons we embark on a path to luminous transfiguration that mirrors the divine centering of and in uncreated light. The transfiguration is not portrayed in any physical dimensions; it lights the mountain on which these personalities meet in a quite different way. As I try to envision the Transfiguration I struggle to comprehend and sense something of the essence of the innermost altar, the uncreated light from which the earliest creation and now shines through history from Moses to Elijah into the world to accompany God’s creation-correcting reform. The unchanging, unchangeable light. The eternally enduring figure of which is culminated in the institution negating, creation-reforming, saving Messiah. That I cannot envision the unchangeable, I am emplaced on earth to participate in a generation's reform, not institutionalizing my guesses about eternal form. My participation in the historical and thus ever provisional that carries to new generations by the Spirit that leads humanity forward.

God’s voice originates in our brokenness to reform and reshape us. The prophet’s voice will be sent to the nothing-making of stones—to the hardened servants of temples that have taken hold of the dead hearts of people fallen from the Torah reforms begun in a tent with Moses. Elijah is revealed as the forerunner to the transfigured transfigurer who takes the next stage of reform to call the institutionalizers and the elites to the necessity to care for all the people, to exclude none.

And now let’s return to Peter as he’s making sense of Moses and Elijah appearing as they meet in conversation with Jesus in this dazzling moment. "Six days" before, Mark situates Peter on another mountain, likely Hermon, in ch. 8:

8: 27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”

This region was replete with a variety of pagan temples, and contemporary Palestine was replete with pretender messiahs, so that alternative visions of the divine messenger were readily at hand. As Peter and the disciples followed the country-side preaching of Jesus encountering real world struggles of the peasantry and other excluded Israelites, only Jesus among the presumptive messiahs and idols promised a program of peace, one that included the reforming impulse that sanctifies outside of institutionalized stones, transforming them.

So next in the narrative sequence in Mark of Jesus’ life is Peter’s identification of a dazzling lighted path unified by his tent-memorializing neighborhood of historical progression from Moses the liberator and reconstitutionalizer of the people, Elijah the prophetic reformer archetype who calls the selfish, unjust, and hegemonic monarch to account, and now Jesus who remains alone shining after being connected in glory on this transfiguring mountain. Standing now alone, Jesus has an integrity of person and role separate from Moses and Elijah and other prophets but as Messiah, he incorporates them all. All their gifts, all their assignments and missions. Peter, the rock, likely prostrate and hugging the ground at the vision, comes to know. Peter is us.

Jesus’ transfiguration is revealed as he approaches the (second) Lenten phase of his ministry that begins for us this Ash Wednesday. That part of the transfiguring messianic story becomes the next 6 Sundays’ preaching.

To summarize the institutionalization dimension of that story: Jesus goes forth to witness to the temple establishment in Jerusalem and is met with hope by the people excluded by the corrupt authorities. He foretells the temple’s destruction and he acts out [cf. Zech. 14] a condemnation of the false representation of God in the outer temple courtyards where money changing and transactional portrayals of God’s service represent the failures of the temple service and its institutionalizing of finance as witness to the living God. Which devours the houses of widows [Mark 12:40-44] and keeps women outside the inner proximity, and thus distanced from God. Insitutionalization represented and actualized in the temple is not just to be reformed, but destroyed. And the people’s restorative relationship to a tent of meeting with God will bring the Bedouin character and way of life of Abraham to its spiritual fulfillment in Jesus by his atonement on the Cross. The narrative of the crucifixion exposes that he was killed by the corruption of justice in an unholy enmeshment of temple authorities and the most brutal regime ever constructed by humanity. The ungodlike substitutionary ethics of Caiaphas (“better one man to die than the whole nation” John 11:50)  and the most craven politician, Pilate, who asks, “what is truth?” (John 18:38) as he washes his hands and sends Jesus to that death meant to warn other reformers.

 This injustice is transfigured by the supplicating merits that reveal the good news of God's character: God is ever given to mercy, and such "justice" performed on the Cross is not God's, and to the extent that God allows such, it is revealed as subsidiary to the operation of grace. In Christ's supplicating prayer and the blood that covenants it, God's judgment of Christ's followers is expiated on the Cross, dissolved by both blood and word and confirmed by the resurrection. That is the Gospel. 

I’ve tried up to now to portray the historical theology being revealed to Peter, who represents us, on the Mount of Transfiguration. These reformers who were sent to the death-dealing and stone-age making institutions of their day. They were beset with crippling fear and revived by the gentle and gentling voice of the Spirit. In the case of Moses, his heart set on the stone pyramid system of world hegemony became a heart of flesh. In Elijah, his reform of the prophetic call was preparatory to his calling hegemons in Israel to account for injustice. To me, this inner light, this slim still voice starts in the heart and pushes through to the appearance. These  reformers manifest to Peter on the Mount their participation in the messiah's star-skin, the dazzling light of that most inner uncreated light with God. Psalm 104 (cf. Hab. 3:3-4) says of God,

1b      You are clothed with honor and majesty,

2a        wrapped in light as with a garment.

Theirs is a different kind of royal clothing, a garment of a new kind of flesh that testifies to their de-petrified heart--an intention set on stone advertisements. The image of the transfiguration is not distorted by the garish and cartoonish images of superheroes implanted by too much CGI videogames-- the visuals of strategic compulsion: no shoot-em-up lightning bolts, no flames erupting from crowns, nor some strobing, stop action sound-track accompanying the axe-throwing 6-million dollar arm of Thor.

I will conclude with three applications of what I’ve presented of historical and spiritual theology of the transfiguration:

First, the religion of the messiah is reformed, always reforming. Our institutionalization of the church—the way denominations send down instructions about practice and about doctrine—is always provisional. We open the temple walls of religion to the excluded by age, background, gender and scrupling. We are mindful to reform where those walls have been tragically erected. This reform impulse of the medieval church got a lot of people killed before Luther barely escaped to set the modern Protestant reformation program in motion. And very quickly Calvin came to institutionalize it in civil governance, and at least in one case participated in an unjust killing of a political opponent. And yet it’s Calvin’s so-called magisterial, institutionalized reformation that we honor most today.

rather than the excommunicated John Wycliffe or the martyr Jan Hus. And the many others before and as the Protestant Reformation took hold in Europe.

 Second and flowing from the first, the greatest reforming theologian this country has produced, no doubt in my mind, is MLK. I know this is controversial for some. And—that the most tragic are those theologians in the south and at places like "Old Princeton" whose names are on their buildings and libraries--who died never having released their slaves or released their tacit endorsement of slavery as "adiaphora to the Gospel." They prayed the Lord’s Prayer, which calls for Jubilee, and either were too ignorant to make the connection—they did not tent with God-- or were too hypocritical to care. The institutionalizing impulse leads ever to injustice that transmits intergenerational traumas that we are still dealing with. It is up to us as reformers to transfigure the deadening legacies of the institutionalizing impulse. MLK was itinerant and polarizing while blessing, reviled by the entempling elites who construct gated plantations and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

And that was their last will and testament, their binding their slaves to their pyramid like Pharaoh,

but our transfiguring witness transfigures the meaning of the old institutional and binding impulses propagandized as “solutions” that instead sire stigma based on social comforts and so sire crisis after crisis.

The metacrisis today is the institutionalization of the closed off head and the subordination if not exclusion of the open heart, a strategizing logical structure to get ahead in the world of strivers, to get yours before others take your share of a fixed pie. However, it is not some transcendent light in our mind that breaks through to dazzle our skin’s appearance, but transcendent light of the heart that makes others the destination of the pie—the sharing Golden Imperative of neighbor love, concern, and the civilization of care. We are transfigured by our heart never solely by our head, which follows the heart's progress. The ongoing Reformation of the Church is deinstitutionalizing what I call, “the Church of the Discourse over Belief.” "Beliefers" who set up norms of no import, no ethics.  Instead the Reforming Church is becoming recognized in the individual practice of pastoral virtues that redeem the present moment encountered in our awareness as we sojourn through the streets and wildlands of daily existence, recognizing the divinely created emplacement of those, of every encounter intended by God to reform our heart from stone to living, shining flesh in small-scale moments, tented meetings with neighbor and God-in-Christ at the table.

In the end, MLK recognized that the contemporary temple is the military- industrial, predatory capitalist impulse. As every generation gets stuck in stationary darkness, feeling inexorably pulled into the suck of the world’s so-called “realists” ever sending them to war. Reformers who tent with God know the metaphysics behind the Book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount: it is impossible to bring peace through war. Impossible. When MLK moved from civic development to protest class exploitation and the Vietnam War, he was assassinated. Can we recognize that as a “transfiguration?”

Yes: it’s reform vs. institutionalization. It has ever been for the church.

Finally, it's important to note that the most effective reformers, the transfigured transfigurers, are seen as polarizing. They invade our comfortable places and get thrown into prisons like Paul and down wells like Jeremiah, and yes, are put to death as the Bible notes of so many holy men and history of so many holy women. Reformers and their missions are misunderstood because God and Jesus’ mission are misunderstood.

Their mission and their reforming personalities made them itinerant prophets and preachers. They lived out contemporary, Abrahamic expression of living in the tent of meeting.

Transfiguring reformers, on the other hand traveled like Abraham in a kind of spiritually Bedouin existence through hostile deserts with God their oasis. The interiority of such a life is manifest in the earliest Hebrew poetry, and in the Psalms. It is later the vision by the prophet Ezekiel [40—48] of the heavenly dwelling—a tent of meeting in Rev. 15 inside  the vision of temple centered by a Palm tree, its deep roots symbolizing  the processing holy water found in the driest places.

These itinerant reformers attend to God’s gracious will both within and without as they find provision. The bread of life they prayed for daily. They were in terms of their tented existence with God both itinerant and polarizing, blessed by and for the regular people for their sacrificial shepherding of them, and reviled by the elites who wanted their temples and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

 Instead of interpreting history’s heroes beckoning backward calls of institutional return [as if we were to put David and Jacob's son Joseph in a constructed pantheon of transfigured history], we become aware of the inexorable appearance of the anointed reformers in every generation stuck in stationary darkness. 

So now we arrive at this moment in your congregation. A new itinerant tent maker is coming to this building. Your new Pastor Lisa, who will bring change. New pastors always do, and some try to hold to the comfortable way things have always been done. Your committees can try to interview for it—I confess my anti-institutionalizing personality has failed many interviews. So now, how are you going to welcome this itinerant into your tents?

Lisa is a friend of mine: our sons attended pre-school together back at seminary and are joined 15 years later in exploring college options. They are in a place of transitioning into adulthood. They are joining the increasingly itinerant adult generations seeking their place in the world that they will come to know as broken. Lisa too is in a place of itinerant transition, and I imagine some prophetic anxiousness on her part. What I want to suggest is that a pastor has different roles. Like Moses, she has trained to seek liberation of those in bondage to sin, to trauma, to ignorance.  Moses’ followers repeatedly gossiped—the Biblical word was “grumbled”—about how they wouldn’t do it this way, a culture that repeatedly manifested itself in the Exodus generation from Egyptian slavery calling Moses to bring them back to the comforts of Egypt. To the institutions that enslaved them but fed them for their labor but denied them wine. These disgruntled followers of Moses in the desert, on their way to their promise, repeatedly felt the nostalgic call of a golden period when their ancestor Joseph was in charge there. These are the dynamics of the tented meeting place with God of Mosaic, liberating leadership. Please contain grumbling and comparing the way things were done in the past. These transfigurers are not servants of the way things always have been done. She may speak as a community servant to a different space or as a prophet like Elijah as wise to the destinies of the unjust. Lisa will have different audiences in mind as she learns to address you inside the chaos of a world in metacrisis, so that if she speaks on something that isn’t your concern that Sunday, please don’t tell her, “I didn’t feel fed.”

Feed her instead with your joy. Because Joy cycles.

In addition to a reconstitution of a witnessing and mission sent collective like the transfigured role of Moses, all new pastors are trained and gifted to act as prophet—a role for Elijah, by which I mean not that she is subject to direct visions of the future, but that she has a prophetic wisdom of how the world has been constructed to call for the practice of the Golden Rule and to predict that the violations of unjust leaders and rulers to zero out the marginalized will meet with doom. A prophetic pastor knows that if one zeroes out others, that one will become beset with a crippling and fulfilled anxiety that others will see that and mirror the same, first to others of their followers, and then to the unjust leader himself. Their suspicions become a mirror of the leader's own fallen intentions, and these will swallow all up in nihilism—the idea there is nothing to the world other than their own will and self-created methods of achieving power. The Elijah role, the John the Baptist role, is to prophetically call these persons and cultural forms to repentance. This the lonely and polarizing and misunderstood life of a prophetic pastor. Because God is misunderstood, the reformer is misunderstood esp. by those who think they already know God. This is what Jesus means when he says, “'A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.” This is a role too for pastors. Please pray for us. esp. when you are frustrated by us. By this, you pray for yourself as well, a prayer I believe will be approved.

I have attempted to present a critical reading of a traditional, historical text to de-institutionalize God’s word from inside a temple to an outdoors and peripatetic, tent-seeking of meetings. The Transfiguration symbolizes the glory of reformers, and appropriately, it starts the season of Lent when our personal journeys into reform begin by following Jesus into the wilderness.

This year, the fast of Ash Wednesday and the feast of  St Valentine’s Day coincide. The reformed paths of always reforming involves both. A feast of the inward place of meeting with others as joy, and a fast of struggle against the civilizations of stones thrown at others (they will be returned!) rather than bread shared with others.

The radical distance of God becomes human and beautiful in God’s imprint-- the energy, the strain, the joy, the polarizing lack of ready smiles, the grief, the triumph, and the failure of the ministry of Jesus. All of these you will see in your pastors. All these you will see in your neighbors. Transfigure them by your love. Transfigure yourself by your love. Put away the stones of your cultures. Invite others into your tents and serve them, extending them the Golden Rule. Enemies too.  Enemies foremost. Because in their own reform is God’s glory met. Shine a light. Share what is transfigured and transfiguring. May it be so for you and for me, Amen.