St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday,
February 22, 2009
Keeping
Up With Jesus – Rev. David Mundy
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark
9:2-9
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A couple of years ago I was
leafing through one of my Christians journals and I noticed an advertisement
for Jesus. You might think that this would be normal in a religious magazine
but it caught my eye because it was so different from the usual ads for theological
books and continuing education opportunities.
There was a photo of a Jesus
figure a little over two feet tall with slightly swarthy skin, longish hair
that looked a little like dreadlocks, and a robe and sandals. I thought it
would be a tangible way to remind our children about Jesus, so I decided to
order one. As I talked to the woman who owns the company, In Stitches,
which makes liturgical stoles and hangings, as well as the Jesus doll, casually
about the popularity of this figure I was totally surprised to hear that 30,000
of them had been sold in fifteen years. Apparently Jesus is everywhere: in
churches, in therapy offices run by Christians, in nursing homes. People who
suffer from dementia often relate to this Jesus figure even when they lose
touch with other aspects of daily life.
It was an unusual experience to
get the mail-order box which contained our Jesus and ever since I have been
mindful of his proximity. There are three chairs at the front of our sanctuary
so for the most part there is room for Jesus, Cathy, and me but the weeks when
Cathy stays and someone else is involved at the front we have to play a version
of musical chairs! I’m not a superstitious person but I’m not keen on putting
Jesus on the floor and it seems a bit odd to perch him on my knee.
While our Jesus doesn’t make it
to the children’s time every week, he keeps up his side of the relationship,
which is all we can ask for. The hope of course is that all of us, not just the
children, will be more aware of the person of Jesus, the Christ, whom we read
about in the gospels. Following Jesus seems to be getting more complex and
demanding all the time, so we need all the help we can get.
This morning we arrive at the
last Sunday before the beginning of Lent in the Christian year, and as always
this is the day of Transfiguration, which refers to Jesus’ radiance and
otherworldly appearance on a mountaintop somewhere in Galilee. This is a story
told in a slightly different way in three of the four gospels but the
similarities are stronger than the differences.
According to the version we
heard from Mark, Jesus leaves most of the disciples behind when he goes up the
mountain, but he does take three of them, Peter and James and John with him. We
aren’t told whether they consider this a privilege or if they consider this to
be drawing the short straw as they climb this mountain in search of
God-knows-what -quite literally.
You may recall from your Sunday
School days that Jesus called the brothers Peter and Andrew, as well as
brothers James and John away from their fishing nets at the beginning of his
ministry and says to them “do not be afraid: from now on you will be
catching people.” Little did they know that what probably seemed like a
radical act of forsaking family and work to follow Jesus would eventually seem
like the easiest choice they made as followers of Jesus.
From that point on they work
hard to keep up with Jesus as he goes about healing and teaching and offering a
way of understanding God that is often perplexing. The disciples are not so
much afraid as they are befuddled and even frustrated. And just when they think
they are “catching on” to what Jesus is about, he says and does something which
throws them off guard.
When Jesus asks them to climb
with him, it isn’t just their hearts and lungs which get a workout. This time
there is a mystical experience of Jesus which virtually defies description. The
three disciples simply don’t know what to do, and actually their response is
rather pathetic as they decide amongst themselves that will build a structure
similar to the ones which are still erected every year by Jews to celebrate the
Feast of Booths or Tabernacles.
In other words, when they are
faced with something they don’t understand they respond with an action which in
their minds is both familiar and concrete. We can hardly blame them. This experience was just one of many which
allowed them to form their image of Jesus, which culminated with the
life-changing events of the day of resurrection.
Are you managing to keep up
with Jesus these days? Of course we’re
not expected to trail around after him from day to day the way the first
disciples did, although we use that language of discipleship which suggests
that after two millennia we still have a relationship with a living Christ,
even though we too have our moments when we struggle to comprehend who he is
and how to follow him.
You might think that with the
benefit of the gospel accounts and two thousand years of our tradition of the
resurrection, our portrait of Jesus would be fairly clear. But in our day we
are not so much trying to keep up with Jesus as keeping up with the scholars
who write about Jesus.
I pulled out just a few of the
many books on Jesus from my shelves to give you an idea of how varied the
discussion about him has become. They include Living Jesus: Learning the
Heart of the Gospel by Luke Johnson, Prophet and Teacher by William
Herzog, Rabbi Jesus by Bruce Chilton, and Jesus the Village
Psychiatrist by Donald Capps.
One book I do not have, but
have perused is by the Canadian author Tom Harpur,
who has written The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light in which he
argues that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as a flesh-and-blood human being,
nor did Peter and James and John did, for that matter. Harpur
contends that Jesus was invented to convey a cosmic truth, using Egyptian
legends as the basis for this theory. If you think this
sounds like a “stretch”, you are not alone. Even the most liberal of
credible biblical scholars agree that a person named Jesus walked this Earth,
but controversy tends to get attention, so there has even been a documentary
made on this book and shown on the venerable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
not the Fox Network.
While we might want to say that
these opinions about Jesus, especially the more controversial ones, don’t
really matter, or that they might actually give us a broader picture of Jesus,
they can have the effect of confusing us and undermining the essence of our
faith. For many people, Jesus actually seems farther away rather than closer at
hand. That simple message of our children’s hymn, “Jesus loves me, this I
know; for the bible tells me so” seems rather naive and outdated.
And in the end there is the
danger that rather than keeping up with Jesus, we are so paralyzed by trying to
figure out which Jesus to follow that he all but disappears into the distance.
So can we come closer to Jesus
the Messiah, the Christ in a way that enriches and fulfills our lives? The only
way we can no for sure is by making that commitment
to follow, wherever he leads us, whether it is to the mountaintop or back down
into the valley.
As parents and grandparents and
mentors will do all we can to help our children understand who Jesus is for
their lives. Many years ago a woman began attending church with a daughter who
was in the Sunday School class for the youngest
children. It was a while before we had a conversation but she was quite
forthcoming when we finally did talk. She had been driving down the main street
in Sudbury, where we were living at the time, with her daughter beside her in
her car seat. As they passed a big Roman Catholic church,
the little girl wanted to know whose castle that was. It was a cute question
and the mother answered “it’s Jesus’ castle.” The next question, “who
is Jesus?” prompted the mother to find a church.
We can’t take for granted that
our young people will grow up simply absorbing the Christian message out of the
air, and we need to begin with Jesus. But in order to do this all of us as
adults will deepen our relationship with Jesus. We can start with some basic
affirmations about the historical Jesus provided by William Herzog in his book
on the historical Jesus.
1. Jesus was born c 4 BCE, near
the time of the death of Herod the Great
2. He spent his childhood and
early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village.
3. He was baptized by John the
Baptist.
4. He called disciples.
5. He taught in the towns,
villages, and countryside of Galilee (but not in its cities.)
6. He preached “the kingdom of
God.”
7. About the year 30, he went
to Jerusalem for Passover.
8. He created a disturbance in
the temple area.
9. He had a final meal with his
disciples.
10. He was arrested and
interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest.
11. He was executed on the
orders of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.
12. His disciples, fled at
first.
13. They saw him (in what sense
is not certain) after his death.
14. As a consequence, they
believed he would return to found the kingdom.
15. They formed a community to
await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as a messiah.
This can be a starting point,
but from there we need to move to our deeper, more mystical and emotional
response to Jesus as our friend and saviour. Many of
you are aware that I am a PK, a “preacher’s kid” who was probably one of the
most annoying teenagers of any Sunday School because I
was constantly asking questions about the bible and challenging the conventions
of the church. When I was sixteen years old, I had my own experience of Christ
which was essentially a conversion, a movement from being on the outside
looking in, to an awareness that I was loved with an
eternal, radiant love in Jesus. That
experience became a touchstone for my life, although it was not the end. Rather
it was a beginning of a relationship which has led me along many pathways
through the years but always included the companionship of the living Jesus.
The invitation to all of us
today and every day is to keep up with Jesus and to realize that he will wait
for us and uphold us and show us the way. Not only can we see the transfigured
Christ, we ourselves can be changed, transformed, renewed. For this we thank
the God of life.