2nd Sunday of Lent, February 28, 2010

2.c.2010.stmb.moments.of.transformation

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18; Phil 3:17-4:1; Luke 9:28-36

       Lent is about going into the wilderness. Whatever or wherever this wilderness might be for us. It is there that we lay aside everything that is unnecessary and extraneous to living.  It is there that we try to stay with just ourselves and try to get to know ourselves. And if we stay there long enough, with no usual distractions and diversions, without any noise helping us to cover our little or big falsehoods, we are finally forced to enter into a conversation with ourselves and with God. And this usually becomes a moment of transformation, the moment when our true character and who we are is revealed. I am convinced this is one of the reasons why at my younger age I got into first desert hiking and later into high altitude climbing.  I was very fortunate to climb in the Himalayas in Nepal, in the Andes in Central and South America, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, in Alaska on Denali, in Washington State on Mount Rainier. I have many memories from all my climbs but today I would like to share with you the memories of the summit day climb of Aconcagua, almost 23,000 feet mountain located in Argentina, the highest peak in the western hemisphere, which took place when I was much, much younger, and which has changed me for ever.

Harvey, my friend from Richmond and I, went for the summit bit from our camp at 19520’. Everything was going well for us. We were just moving up and up, closer to our goal. Being a little faster I moved ahead of Harvey with an intent to wait for him just before making a summit. I was so absorb with my climb that I did not paid enough attention to changing weather. Finally above 22000’ finally it hit me that weather was changing. The big storm was coming in. If you have ever been in high mountains you know that weather can change in a blink of an eye. My friend and everyone else on the mountain turned around. But I was so closed to the summit that I thought I was going to make it. I was finally going to summit. I continued climbing for the next several hundred vertical feet until I knelt on a slope of the mountain to take care of my freezing hands and heard a voice: Remi, if you do not turn around now, you will not make it back. This was it. I did not need to hear anything else. I stood up, turned around, let go my summit bit and started walking down the mountain. The storm kept intensifying and then so to speak the whole hell broke lose. I have found myself in the middle of the major storm with winds blowing I guess at least 50-60 miles per hour, limited visibility, sometimes close to zero. I had to remove my sky goggles from my face for ice mixed with dirt was constantly forming on them and I was not able to see anything ahead of me. I just hoped  I was not going to lose any of my flesh from my face as I almost did on Mt. McKinnley in Alaska

All my emotions were frozen. There was no one else there. Just me and the mountain. I knew if I did not find my way back I was going to be a history, one more number in the tragic statistics of the high altitude climbing. Then I heard my named being called again. All hair on my body stood up. I was convinced it was the mountain calling my name inviting me sit down to rest a bit, and to freeze to death like the other polish climber whose body the guides were trying to recover from the mountain for the last several weeks. For whatever known reason, I made at that time the correct turn leading me back to our high altitude camp. I saw flags, wands left by my friend Harvey leading me to safety. Obviously since I am here you know that my number was not up, and I made it back. But only after many falls on my face since I was so exhausted that I was losing my footing quite often. I wandered into the camp with my face covered in ice, went into my tent and prayed through the tears – God thank you for giving me a second chance.

We all have different moments which change our lives. Those moments give us a new perspective and appreciation of who we are and what we have, perhaps what we have been taking for granted. They allow us to see things which we have not noticed before. Quite often they prompt us to make life changing decisions. 

This is what happened to Abraham about whom we have heard in today’s first reading. God made a covenant with him and then tested him asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. These were life changing experiences for Abraham.

This is what happened to Peter, James and John in today’s gospel. They experienced Jesus in the way they never did before. They saw a glimpse of God’s glory shining through him. And although they were scared they wanted to be part of that glory.

There are many moments in our lives which change us: the good ones: the birth of the baby, wedding, ordinations, first day of school, the birth of a grandchild, and the bad ones: illness, death of the loved one, a car accident, a divorce. All these moments give us a new perspective on life. Hopefully they also help us to understand that we are called by God to sanctity and holiness, to being with Him. Our challenge is to allow those moments to keep transforming us.  I believe that the Lenten season and its practices are to help us to appreciate and to understand those moments so we can be brought closer God and one another.

1st Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2010

1.c.lent.2010.stmb.temptations (based on The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentaries)

Deut 26:4-10; Rom 10:8-12; Luke 4:1-12

Temptation is a universal human experience. Had Jesus not been tempted, he would not really have been human. So we are presented today, on this first Sunday of Lent, with a story of Jesus being tempted. The first temptation he faces attempts to divide his heart between love of God and craving to satisfy his physical needs. The second one to compromise his devotion to God for the sake of the world’s wealth. And the third one to demand from God protection of his life while deliberately placing himself in danger. What today’s gospel tells us is that Jesus was fully human and he knew very well what it meant to be tempted.

       For some of us, the problem with this temptation story is that it seems very unreal, far removed from our own experience. For most of us the devil does not appear to us and transport us from place to place. And the temptations we experience are often not so clearly recognizable.

Quite often for us the choice is not between good and bad but between bad and worse or good and better. We deal in “gray areas” and do not have the choice of rejecting “Mr.In-between.” Though we live in the western part of our diocese, the good guys do not necessarily wear white hats and the bad guys black hats, and they do not necessarily settle their differences on Blacksburg Main Street at high noon. And even if we have the moral fortitude to handle the clearly recognizable evils, we often lack the wisdom to deal with the moral choices we face. For example:

·      When does what is good for the corporate body outweigh the need of an individual?

·      Which has the higher claim, the needs of the employment or anti-pollution standards that protect the ecology but close down certain industries?

·      Shall we support passing health care reform or totally reject it?

·      Shall we support war in Iraq although our church opposed it?

Where are the guiding words of Scripture for questions like these?

Although Jesus’ temptation story does not offer ethical instructions that cover every eventuality, it does describe however the persistent ethical challenges that we all face:

·      The temptations to forget our baptismal identity,

·      To attempt to use our religion for personal gain,

·      To try to be successful rather than faithful,

·      To be dazzled by the riches of the world,

·      To make compromises where we are called to stand firm,

·      To avoid the path of sacrifice and suffering.

It does also offer us an example to follow. Faced with pressing decisions regarding his identity and vocation, Jesus allowed himself to be led by the Spirit of God.

Christian ethics does not come prepackaged. Our call in not to adherence to a list of rules and regulations but to faithfulness to the call and purposes of God. When we are faced with temptations we need to look deep inside of our hearts searching for answers if our choices support God’s purpose for our life and the call to worship Him and to serve Him.

The Lenten season with its practices of almsgiving, fasting and prayer is to help us to remove from our lives the things which prevent us from doing exactly that, from being able to look deep inside of our hearts so we might be able to find necessary answers.

So the question might be paused to each one of us on this first Sunday of Lent:

What have I decided to do in Lent to make that a reality of my life?

February 17, 2010; Ash Wednesday

Ash.Wdnesday.2010.stmb.sign.of.the.cross

Jl 2:12-18; 2 Cor 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

Even though Jesus tells us not to make a public display of our religious activities, we will leave this church today with a black smudge of ashes on our foreheads. The whole world will see it as a mark of our piety, for everyone who will see us will know we have been to church today.

       But is it really a sign of our piety?

The season of Lent asks us to reflect on what it means to be marked with the cross of Jesus. We have been marked with it on a day of our baptism. We trace it every day as we sign ourselves with the cross admitting that we are frail and imperfect people who are in sore need of God’s saving mercy.

And so by wearing the sign of the cross on our foreheads today we proclaim not our virtue, but our intention to take a sobering look at ourselves and to make those changes which will allow God to be more present in our lives.

To achieve that goal we pledge to undertake some sort of Lenten resolution. We don’t do that to punish ourselves, for some of us probably have already done it by simply estranging ourselves from God and from each other in a result of our sins. Rather we undertake our Lenten resolutions in order to open our hearts even more to the transforming presence of God in our lives.

Lent calls us to conversion – from the Latin word for turning:

-        to turn away from those things that make us less than the people of God we are called to be;

-        to turn away from whatever unjustly and unfairly steals our time and energy from those we love;

-        to turn away from those idols of wealth and prestige that take the place of the Holy One in our lives.

February 14, 2010

6.c.2010.stmb.prophet.jeremiah

Jeremiah 17:5-8; 1 Corinthians 15:12,16-20; Luke 6:17,20-26

Last week we heard about the life of the prophet Isaiah. Today however in the first reading we hear the words of a different prophet – the prophet Jeremiah. Let us talk this weekend than about Jeremiah.  Who was this man?

Jeremiah’s book opens with his call as a prophet in the thirteenth year of King Josiah, about 627 year BC.  Many biblical scholars believe that this date actually refers to Jeremiah’s birth for as we all remember, it is stated in the book of the prophet Jeremiah that he was known by God before he was formed in his mother’s womb, was consecrated there and called by God to be the prophet to nations. Later at the age of 17 or 18 Jeremiah delivered so called the Temple Sermon which marked the beginning of his public ministry which lasted for some 45 years.

Jeremiah had seen many political changes in his life. At the beginning of his ministry Assyria was the world’s greatest power, but by the time he died in exile in Egypt, Babylon stood supreme. Jeremiah experienced destruction of his people and their holiest places in the city of Jerusalem – The Temple. He saw his people taken into captivity and into exile to foreign lands.

Jeremiah’s fatithulness to God’s call and his prophetic ministry put him in trouble many times. For his prophesying Jeremiah was arrested by the king and sent to a prison. The officials as well as his own family wanted to kill him.

He was hated by his own village of Anathoth, which was about three miles north of Jerusalem, for choosing to live a celibate life and not being an active partner of God in His deed of creation as a husband and a father, and by not joining them for their wedding and funeral celebrations. The behavior that was considered as one of the greatest insults against your own community and family.

Jeremiah suffered a lot in his life: physically from being persecuted by his own people and family, from feelings and emotions of rejection and loneliness, by his own internal fights against God.

So what did Jeremiah prophesized to suffer so much in his life?

His prophetic message was mainly directed against two main evils present among his people: idolatry and injustice. The same evils the prophet Isaiah spoke against.

 Jeremiah was also placing religion in the heart of the person. The most important to him was that each person praised God deep inside of his or her own heart. No public institutions or words and deeds of a person were able to express real devotion to God. For Jeremiah religion had its root not in what was being acted out but what was inside of each person’s heart and conscience. Each man and woman had to develop their personal relationship with God for in his eyes institutions could not provide for that.

Although it has been many years since Jeremiah lived and his message was proclaimed. And although we live in a different world and different powers are ruling the world, Jeremiah’s message is still as important as it was in his times.

There is a lot injustice and idolatry in the world we live in. Many of us are more eager to trust institutions and what they tell us than our own hearts. We feel much more at ease being told what to do and how we do it than to take a risk of having a personal relationship with God.

Some of us are also so absorbed in pursuing the good things of life that we devalue:

-     the real riches of the love of family and friends,

-     the special sense of joy we experience in giving of ourselves to others,

-      the peace and serenity that is realized only in centering our lives on our relationship with God.

Mother Theresa of Calcutta often said:

“The spiritual poverty of the West is much greater than

the economic poverty of the East.

In the West, there are millions of people who suffer loneliness and emptiness, who feel unloved and unwanted.

They are not hungry in the physical sense;

what is missing is a relationship with God and with each other.”

February 07, 2010

5.c.2010.stmb.safety.and.security

Isaiah 6:1-2, 3-8; 1 Cor 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

      Things were changing dramatically for a while. Tiglath-pilser III, the ruler of Assyria, adopted a policy of territorial expansion and looked to states in the west. Local states were not only forced to pay tribute but they were incorporated as the provinces of the empire. In 738 BCE the kingdom of Israel became a vassal state and about five years later was divided up into provinces of Dor, Megido, Gilead, and Samaria. At the end the Northern kingdom of Israel disintegrated politically.

In the southern kingdom of Judah, King Ahaz was trying to ally himself politically to defend his land against Assyrian expansion but to no avail.  King Ahaz  was first forced to paid tribute to Assyria, and then to become its vassal in 733 BCE.

It was during these times, very insecure and violent times, when Isaiah lived. Then one day on the feast of Yom Kippur, as stipulated in the Law, Isaiah went to the Temple and mediated before God on behalf of his country men and women. As we have heard in today’s first reading he was in the Holy of the Holies, that sacred area of the temple where the Ark of the Covenant was. There Isaiah the high priest received the vision which turned his life upside down and caused him to become Isaiah the prophet. He let go safety and security of his life to respond to God’s request and his new life mission as a prophet.

And what was the Isaiah’s new mission?

This unfortunately is missing from today’s reading but it can be easily found in the Bible. God asked Isaiah to:

“Go and say to this people: Listen carefully, but you shall not understand! Look intently, but you shall know nothing!

You are to make the heart of this people sluggish, to dull their ears and close their eyes;  Else their eyes will see, their ears hear, their heart understand, and they will turn and be healed.”

Prophet Isaiah’s was commissioned by God to prevent repentance and healing of His people. Let me repeat it again prophet Isaiah’s commission was to prevent repentance and healing of God’s people so God’s judgment of the people for their social injustices and unacceptable worship might have been administered.

In the eyes of Isaiah, the Assyrian king was an instrument of God’s justice which was to be used to purify the God’s people, and his commission was not to be fulfilled until the land of his country was to be completely destroyed, not just cities and houses but also those who lived in them as well.

Isaiah received this horrible commission from God and he accepted it letting go safety and security of his life.

In today’s gospel Peter, James and John, are also asked to let go safety and security of their lives and their profession as fishermen. Paul, from whose letter to the Corinthians we also heard this Sunday, was asked by Jesus to let go of his vocation as a Pharisee and to become his apostle.

Perhaps the word of God directed to each one of us this Sunday challenges us with a question:

 How much of our own life safety and security are we willing to let go to respond to God and the commission He has given us? Regardless of our own profession, vocation or opinions and convictions of people who surround us.