Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 12:1-4a | 2 Timothy 1:8b-10 | Matthew 17:1-9
Oh God, who commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
The most powerful thing about the story that unfolds in the Old and New Testament is how beautiful it is in terms of our understanding it. It’s our story. It’s a story that makes total sense to anyone who is aware of who they are and what they’re here for and why we need something besides ourselves. This story is both theological and anthropological, theological meaning it studies God. Anthropological, it’s a study of human nature, and the beautiful thing about this story is it’s a story of God just entering into, more fully, a relationship with men and women and men and women’s struggle to receive it. It’s really a love story. It’s a story of intimacy, God working with human beings as they evolve, as they grow, as they change, and each time they reach another level of consciousness, there’s a new image that he gives them of who he is until ultimately it gets to a mystical union of oneness.
So let’s take a broad look at this Old and New Testament story. The first reading we have is the call of Abraham, and that came about early in human beings’ relationship with God. And what had transpired before that was the story of Adam and Eve. So we know that, when God created us, he created us to be engaged in a world that was beautiful, sensual, good for the eye, good for the heart, good for our stomachs. It was beautiful. It was a garden, rich and full, and then human beings, when they were in this garden, revealed to God something about them. They really didn’t want to be just taken care of in that kind of passive way, but they wanted more. And so when they were tempted to take on a role that was more than what God intended, wanting to be just like him, they made this mistake, and it’s an easy mistake. It’s like, “Well, I would like to be as effective as I can be, and one of the ways I can be effective is if you let me know what’s good and bad. And then I’ll make the choices, and I’ll be in charge of my life. It just demands, unfortunately, that you take this mysterious thing called life and divide it up into two sides, one good, one bad, one light, one dark.” And that’s the first mistake human beings made, an oversimplification of what this human experience of being with God was going to be like. And so God gives them what they want. They want to be in charge of their lives, so he sends them and allows them to go to the earth. No sooner do they create a place on earth, and they have two sons, Cain and Abel. So the real sin of Adam and Eve was basically that they wanted to be autonomously like a God without needing God. So we see the next part of human nature revealed in Adam and Eve’s first children, Cain and Abel. What do we see there? Abel is the man who is taking care of the livestock, and his brother Cain is the one who takes care of the fields. And they each offer their sacrifice to God, and it turns out that the one that is offered is the younger son’s. And all of a sudden, you see in Cain some kind of intense jealousy over the fact that he’s not the best. It’s like in Adam and Eve reveal in human nature this need to be in charge autonomously, and then we see in their sons this image of, “I want to be better than everybody else.” And then there’s that wonderful story about the Tower of Babel where a group of people get together, and all they want to do is do whatever they can — they feel like they can do whatever they want to do. They all speak the same language, and they’re smart, and they can build a tower even to heaven, which might imply that they have a way of even figuring out how to get to the higher realms without the help of anybody else besides them. So all of a sudden we have these three images of the beginning. God working with individuals was difficult in the very beginning, because they were of such low consciousness, and then God makes a decision.
In the first reading, we see he calls not just individuals to a new way of life, but he’s calling a people. He needs a community. He’s realizing that individuals on their own need more than just their own ego, their own self-centeredness to lead them. They need a community of people that can be vehicles of teaching them how to grow, how to become more of what they’re intended to be, and so we have this community founded, and there’s a promise that God makes to Abraham — freedom. “I’ll take you to a place of freedom,” ultimately most clearly shown in Moses. But the image is God is going to work with the people, and he’s going to do something for them, with them, in them, and it’s going to bring them to a different place. What we call that is holiness.
So Paul, in the second reading, says, “All right, the deal is, when God entered into the world, he wanted to enter into a relationship with God that would enable people to become holy.” And I’ve always thought holiness was perfection, no sin. It’s not. Holiness is like wholeness, authenticity. He’s calling us to be fully ourselves, who God intended us to be. In a way, that’s a lot harder than just a strong will that overrides your passions and your wants and desires by surrendering to a system, a set of laws that take away anything that might sound like selfishness, because look at those first three stories. They seem all about human beings being selfish. Selflessness, being open to the needs of others, compassion, empathy, is a wonderful goal, but it doesn’t mean a rejection of my own value, my own individuality, my own destiny. So we have God calling a community together, and the work of the community is to become holy.
Now, how did that unfold for the rest of the Old Testament? We had Abraham. Then we had Moses. These are patriarchs. So God worked through the people that he spoke to directly, and they talked to the people, and then there were prophets that God would speak to, and the prophets would talk to the people. And so there was a communication begun in these communities where God was speaking through others to the people, telling them how they should live, and it didn’t work very well, wasn’t very effective. But then something changed. Two thousand years after the call of Abraham, we have the story in the gospel. Jesus has appeared. He is the Messiah. He is the one to reveal the truth, life. The three things he promised: “I want to open your eyes to see the truth. I want to free you from everything that keeps you from your authenticity, and I want you to live in peace, not stress.” How does that work? How do we achieve that? Well, it’s in becoming holy.
The Vatican Council did a most interesting thing when it met in the 1960s, finished in ’65. One of the things it proclaimed is there is this promise from God that every human being has a right to being holy, whole, complete. If there’s anything we learn from the Old Testament, it’s human beings cannot ever become whole and complete on their own. They just can’t. It’s a way uphill battle where they just never can reach it, and so we see in the New Testament the revealing of the secret that is the essence of how it is that we become who we’re meant to be. It is through union, communion with the divine, not God speaking through a prophet, not through any other system but God speaking to human beings directly. You know what we call that? The one word we use often is mysticism, mystics. We’re all called to be mystics. I know that sounds kind of strange, because our image of mystics are these weird kind of people that live on mountain tops that never think about anything. They don’t watch TV. They don’t play sports. They just contemplate, contemplate, meditate, meditate, and out of this incredible life of meditation, they get direct insight from God. Well, that’s our inheritance, yours and mine. That’s what the New Testament is saying. That’s what’s so scandalous and beyond our imagining about it, that we have to break the wall and get into this place that we’re destined to be. So look at this experience that God gives to his church, and he picks just three members, Peter, James and John. And perhaps they were the only ones out of the 12 that would be open to something like a mystical experience. He takes them up on a mountain, and he then reveals himself to them. But the way he does it, he’s not sitting there like on the mountain, giving the parables or giving a long talk or whatever. No, it’s not words coming from Jesus. It’s just Jesus revealing, through a mystical experience, who he really is, and so they’re there, and all of a sudden, Jesus, his garments, become brighter and brighter and brighter until they’re like the sun. He’s light. He’s enlightenment. He’s more than human, and as they’re looking at this, all of a sudden, there appears two figures, and they’re the pivotal figures in the Old Testament, Moses, who gave human beings the law, which is the word of God in a written form, a legal form, and the prophet, Ezekiel. So there we have it. God has spoken for centuries through the law, the truth of who we are, how we’re meant to live, and the prophets, who continue to advise us and teach us what we should be doing. That’s the normal way in the Old Testament that God spoke to people. Unfortunately it’s still the way most people feel that God can only speak to them, but there’s so much more.
Mystical experiences are these mysterious times when we have an insight, an awareness of something that goes so beyond the logic of our mind, and we have this experience of oneness, connection. It’s euphoric. It’s erotic. It’s a feeling of being a part of something so much more than us. It’s the way human beings relate. It’s what happens when a person sees their first child for the first time. It’s when we have this vista that we see that we’ve never seen before, and we are all of a sudden one with it. It’s an encounter with something so beautiful and so much more than we are, and all of a sudden, we feel like we’re one with it. That’s mysticism. That’s what liturgy is about, trying to get us into that mystical experience. Eucharist is a mystical experience of God in us, and yet we often don’t realize that we have to be attentive to the way this works and be open to it and receptive to it. When somebody starts talking to me, or they talk to you perhaps, about mystical experiences, you’re kind of rolling your eyes and, “Yeah, yeah, okay.” We have a kind of anxiety and a fear about mystics. In fact when the church had these wonderful women through the Middle Ages that were mystics and they were having these ecstasies with God and talking about the love of God for us, they burned them at the stake. They said, “No, no. We’re not going to go to that. That mysticism thing is too risky. No, we need to be in charge of who you are.” Church still has — all religions have that as a shadow. Religion’s work is to create environments and experiences and even practices that enhance our capacity to be in touch with this God who is there to become one with us. That’s what a mystical experience is, oneness, and I think we’ve all experienced it, mostly through human relationships, but it can be also through nature. But the most important thing is it should be part of our religious life. It should be part of what we are working with, working for, receiving. It can be in the moment of a song. It can be — I can think of so many mystical experiences. Sometimes it’s that feeling you have when you know every single thing is the way it should be, and it’s all perfect. Oneness with everything, that’s what we’re made for. It’s the way God loves. It’s the way God enters into and said, “Look, life is hard enough. It’s always going to be difficult.”
Religion that we all love, it can lift us to mystical experiences, and then through its own humanity and corruption, it can break our hearts. But still, as long as we see it as the means, not the end — as long as we see it as a means of putting us in touch with the oneness that is our inheritance from God, then we’re going to be there, and we’re going to be open to those moments. It’s always just moments, and what a gift, to be called by this God from a place of unconscious envy, jealousy, rage, all that, in the beginning, to a place of higher consciousness where we’re actually ready to receive this incredible presence of a God who, when he’s with us, in us, we are one with everything, that’s your inheritance and mine. It’s what we celebrate at Easter, the gift of intimacy and mysticism.
Father, the story that you have given us to ponder and wonder and examine is so rich in its potential to bring us to a place of oneness and hope. So please bless this season for all of us, this season of Lent, as we move closer to the gift that we are asked to be aware of more than ever, the gift of redemption, so that we can feel this incredible power of you in us bringing us to the place of empathy and compassion for our brothers and sisters, for ourselves and bringing life to the world. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.