SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT

Genesis 12:1-4a | 2 Timothy 1:8b-10 | Matthew 17:1-9

Oh God, who have 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, God forever and ever, amen.

There’s a connection between the theme of this set of readings and one of the temptations that Jesus endured from the evil one.  It’s about trust, and Jesus made it very clear that you should never, ever test God to see if what he promises is really going to be worth believing in, having confidence in.  So this set of readings is about trust, and the first figure we look at is Abram, which turned into Abraham.  And the fascinating thing about Abraham is that the thing that is happening to Abraham, even the temptations of Jesus, these are all things we experience.  So what Abraham is promised is a place that’s better, that’s full, that’s rich, that’s wonderful, the land of milk and honey, and sometimes in the whole Christian tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the whole thing, the whole story, we can get caught up in everything in this life is getting us ready for a life somewhere else, in heaven, out of this world.  But that’s not really what the scriptures are saying.  They’re talking about something that can happen now.  They’re talking about the kingdom of God, and whenever Jesus is talking about the kingdom of God, he’s talking about a way of life.  And think of it not so much as the way the world is, but what is your world like?  What is the world you live in?  Is it a world of abundance, or is it a world of scarcity?  Is the world growing and becoming, or is it one that is deteriorating and being destroyed?  What do you trust in?  

So Abraham trusts in something that is, in a way, beyond imagining.  He’s longed for, waited for a son, Isaac, and the one thing about having that was proof that God could be trusted.  So he had that to rely upon, and then God asked the most unusual thing.  He said, “I want you to destroy your son.  I want you to sacrifice him, kill him.”  And it’s as if this story is really making clear how deep the trust was that Abraham had in God.  It was unshakeable, even to do something as horrific as killing the thing that he longed ⎯ the person he longed for most in his life.  And what’s interesting about it is the fact that, when he was getting ready to do it, scripture says, he reasoned that God would bring his son back to life.  He didn’t think he was going to destroy his son, which would go against his very nature as a father, as a human being.  No, he trusted in a miracle, something he couldn’t understand or figure out how it could be, but he thought, “God can do anything.”  And that’s the kind of trust that we’re presented with in this set of readings.  And it’s a gift.  That’s what’s most important to understand.  You don’t figure this out with your brain.  You don’t use logic.  You don’t use statistics.  You don’t test it.  So Lord, please, out of the love you have for us, place your trust in me.  Trust me to trust you.    

To look at the second reading, Paul is saying to the people, and this could be said to us today, “Bury your share of the hardship.”  He’s talking about the hardship for preaching the gospel, but it’s also the hardship of the way the world is.  The world is antagonistic to the gospel.  It is opposed to it.  It does things that the gospel forbids, and so he’s saying, “I want you to bear with what is going on, what is evolving, because I want to give you something.  I want to give you a light in the midst of all this that brings life,” a light that brings life, hope, trust.  So we have this moment in the history of the life of the disciples in the gospel, which was really the beginning of the most profound test he could ever put his disciples through.  Everything they worked for for three years was going to look like it completely fell apart and was destroyed.  The message of Jesus was stamped out, removed.  So Jesus has just revealed to his disciples that he is going to have to die, and they understood what that would mean.  And then he would rise from the dead.  They had no idea what that meant.  So they were confused, and certainly they were afraid to ask questions about it, and Peter even said, “This is a terrible idea.”  But then Jesus knew they needed some kind of affirmation, something that would help them trust, a light.  It’s a way of saying, “There’s a way of seeing the world where you can really trust in it.”  So he takes Peter, James and John into the mountain, and he is transfigured before them.  He is a light to their life, a light that enables them to deal with darkness, and so as he’s resonating this presence that he is, this gift that he’s going to give them ultimately when he fills them with his Spirit and they can see the world as he sees it.  He becomes like the sun and like light, and they’re looking at this.  And Peter’s response, who’s always the first one to speak, and he usually gets it wrong, thinks, “Let me make some tents so Moses and Elijah can have a place to sleep, and you can have a place to sleep, and we’ll all be here together.”  No.  No, this isn’t that literal, Peter.  Jesus is revealing that he is the goal of everything that Moses was trying to teach, the Ten Commandments, and every prophet like Elijah that was trying to get people to live that way.  To reveal how you should live and to demand that you should do it is certainly something that is important and is important in most people’s lives, and sometimes that’s as far as they can go with their own evolution and their own growth.  But here Jesus is revealing something more.  He is greater than Moses and greater than any of the prophets, and what makes him so great?  Instead of telling them what to do and holding them to do it by threatening some kind of punishment, he said, “I want to give you a way of understanding, a way of seeing.”  And what he’s doing is he’s revealing to them the very mystery at the heart of everything that is going on in the world, and that is we’re going to be dealing with things that are destructive, things that are negative.  

We’ve gone through a period of history that is unprecedented in terms of the amount of knowledge we have, and some of that knowledge is very exciting new ways of understanding how the world works.  But there is also a shadow to all that revelation of information, and that is that every single thing we know, every institution is filled with corruption, not only corruption, but corruption is everywhere.  It’s in the church.  It’s in medicine.  It’s in politics.  It’s in family life.  It's in individual’s relationships, abusive behavior.  All of it’s there, and we see it so clearly, and it’s easy not to trust, to say, “It’s all going negative, and what we should simply do is just shutdown and let it go and let it be destroyed and what a shame.”  If it was that neutral, it wouldn’t be so dangerous, but it’s more than ⎯ when you don’t trust that the world is moving in a way that is positive, you don’t believe that ⎯ to see that which is not what it should be is one of the greatest motives for changing it.  Evil has always been there, but we didn’t think about changing the system or checking into the system to see what was really going on.  We didn’t have any way of doing that.  Now we know.  Now we see, and instead of saying, “Oh, let it be,” no, there’s something inside of human beings that then become filled with fear and depression and darkness ⎯ fear and depression.  Fear and depression is a result of a lack of trust, and trust is a light that enables you to deal with everything that is happening.  God allows evil in the world so that we will change, so that we will grow, so that we’ll see that there’s something that needs to be better.  Without an awareness of when things are broken, how can you ever fix them?  So we’re looking at the brokenness of everything, and what does it leave us with?  Fear, depression or this mysterious thing called trust, trust that God is serious about leading us as he led Moses to the Promised Land.  Let us be led into a place of promise, a place of hope.  It is God’s will, and I long to trust in it and invite you to do the same.  Amen.

Father, with you, without your insight, without our knowledge of the plan that you are asking us to surrender to, we are lost.  We are so often caught in fear and darkness.  Bless us as you blessed Abraham and made him a blessing, an example of trust so that we can find the peace and the oneness of all things.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.