picture - Before the plunge at the February Freeze - Feb. 13, 2010 - Cape Charles Beach
Since it is Valentine’s Day, I have been thinking about romantic comedies. It seems like there are only two types of movies in the theaters these days – big budget action thrillers featuring comic book heroes or blue cat people and romantic comedies. We love them. Or at least a lot of us seem to – many of them female, if I can make a broad generalization.
One of the oldest tropes in romantic movies is the discovery that your soulmate is the person who has been there next to you all along. You think you’re searching for the woman or guy of your dreams and all of it sudden it dawns on that she or he has been their waiting for you to discover it. The scales fall from your eyes, there’s a big, sloppy kiss, cue the music to swell and it’s a wrap.
I think about a movie like Roxanne, which is now over twenty years old but which is based on a much older story – the tale of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the movie version Steve Martin plays a fire chief named C.D. ‘Charlie’ Bales who is infatuated with a beautiful astronomer named Roxanne, played by Darryl Hannah. What keeps him from expressing his love for Roxanne directly is his nose, which is huge, and which he can’t get surgically altered because of an allergy to anesthetic.
Roxanne is taken with Chris – a dim-witted fireman who works with Charlie. Chris is extremely nervous around women – he has a bad habit of throwing up when he’s around them – so he asks Charlie to write him love letters he can give to Roxanne. Charlie does – writing three letters a day – even though he knows Roxanne will believe that Chris has written them.
You know how this story has to end, right? Eventually it all comes out that Charlie has written the letters. Roxanne, though initially mad at the deception, sees something in Charlie that she had never seen before and is awakened to the possibility of love and romance. She tells Charlie:
“You know, I've been thinking about what attracted me to Chris. It wasn't the way he looked. Well, that's not true, at first it was the way he looked. But it was how he made me feel. He made me feel romantic, intelligent, feminine. But it wasn't him doing that, was it? It was you. You and your nose, Charlie. You have a big nose! You have a beautiful, great big, flesh-and-bone nose! I love your nose! I love your nose, Charlie. I love you, Charlie.”[i]
This is where you go, “Awww.”
Awakening to something that has always been there but you have never quite seen. It’s a big part of our human experience. A big part of the Christian experience, because when you think about it, entering into a relationship with Jesus can do the same thing for you – it can help you to see the wonder and magic of the world in ways you never could before. Suddenly life is filled with the glory of God.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to talk about the disciples and to ask the questions: Why is it so hard for us to stay awake? And when are we going to learn that being a Christian is an unnatural act? Are you interested in coming along with me to discover answers to these and more of life’s persistent questions? Come on and join me in the broken world of Jesus’ disciples.
We have talked before about the struggles Jesus’ disciples went through. Their failure to understand or comprehend what Jesus is talking about is well-documented throughout the gospels. Last year we followed the gospel of Mark and saw that that was one of his consistent themes and this year we are looking at it in the gospel of Luke.
In Luke…our gospel for today…we have plenty of instances where the disciples don’t get it.. Jesus tells them to humble themselves and be servants…they argue about which of them is the greatest. Jesus tells a parable about seeds and a sower…they don’t get it. Jesus tells them he must suffer and be rejected and die and three days later be raised from the dead…and they really don’t get it.
By the middle of Luke’s gospel, the disciples were getting pretty good at following Jesus physically. He even starts to entrust them with missions of their own to heal and to release people kept captive by dark powers. But they still can’t understand what Jesus has come to do. They have a story in their minds about how the world ought to work and in their story the Promised Liberator will come and claim power, use power, and reveal power. The disciples will rise up as agents of victory. They just don’t realize that their story doesn’t work. It can’t handle brokenness. It can’t handle the truth.
So after telling the disciples exactly what’s going to happen to him in Jerusalem…after telling them that some of those listening will not taste death before seeing the Reign of God revealed…8 days after this…he took three likely candidates to “get it”…Peter, James and John…up a mountain to pray. You can feel a sense of expectation in the air, can’t you? In the Bible, when you go up on a mountain something special is going to happen…something life changing. Bushes may burn and not be consumed…Stone tablets etched with commandments will be given out…Prophets will compete for God’s attention…Promised lands will be revealed…temptations will come…God will speak in a cloud with thunder or in a still, small voice. When you go up on a mountain, something’s going to happen, and I know you feel the tension and the expectation, don’t you?
Sure enough…something amazing happens. Jesus is praying and the appearance of his face starts to change…his clothes flash with the brilliance of lightning…Moses and Elijah, who know a thing or two about mountaintop experiences, appear to talk with Jesus about what is about to happen in Jerusalem. It’s an amazing event…a transfiguration other gospels call it. And what are the disciples doing…Peter, James and John…who are given front-row seats for the show…whom Jesus hand-picked for this revelation…what are they doing?
They’re falling asleep. Well, you know, it’s hard hiking to the top of a mountain. They’d been busy preaching and healing down below. They had the crowds to deal with, the travel arrangements to make, the book promotion tour to plan. They were busy guys and Luke says they were just pretty sleepy and were barely able to keep their eyes open for all of this.
But, NO, you know there are no excuses! These disciples were not sleepy for any of those reasons. They’re sleepy because that’s how they are throughout the whole gospel. They aren’t awake enough to see the fish Jesus calls them to catch. They aren’t awake enough to understand the parables Jesus is telling them. They aren’t awake enough to comprehend Jesus’ predictions of his imminent death or the conversation about his ‘departure’ that he is having with Moses and Elijah. When the end comes and Jesus takes them up on another mountain to pray before his arrest, is it any surprise that these same disciples fall asleep again? They just can’t grasp it.
What’s it going to take for them to get it? A voice from heaven saying, “Listen to Jesus”? Well, that’s exactly what they get. Peter makes a silly suggestion, (because he doesn’t know what to say), that they have a campout with Moses and Elijah and just as he’s beginning to talk a cloud comes and overshadows them. The disciples are awake now. In fact, they’re terrified. And a voice which can only be God’s voice says, “This is the Chosen One; listen to him.” The cloud leaves. Jesus is standing there alone.
The disciples are speechless. In fact they don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. They still don’t “get it”. They’ve still got to walk to Jerusalem. They’ve still got to go to the Garden. They’ve still got to fall asleep, and betray him, and deny him, and abandon him. They’ve still got to disbelieve the outrageous reports of the women who claim the tomb is empty. They’re still waiting for him to die and waiting to live. But maybe now they’re beginning to see that something they didn’t expect is happening. Maybe they are seeing in Jesus something they hadn’t seen before. The new story isn’t yet clear, but the old story is beginning to fall apart.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the mountain, it’s starting to unravel for the other disciples, too. A man who has an only child has come to the disciples to get them to cast out the spirit that seizes the child and convulses him. The man is grieved because his son is hurting. In fact, he says, “My son is broken by this spirit.” But the disciples, who had so recently been healing up and down the land, are powerless here. They can’t handle brokenness. They can’t restore a son to his father. Only Jesus can handle the brokenness. Only Jesus can reconcile the child to his parent. Only Jesus knows the frustration of having so short a time to reveal so much. Only Jesus sees in this healing a foreshadowing of great things yet to come, of his own resurrection. But it has its effect. The disciples, and everyone else, are astounded, Luke says, “at the greatness of God.” The old story is starting to unravel.
It’s really not fair to pick on the disciples for being sleepy, dopey, and all the rest of the seven dwarves, because they could be stand-ins for us. They ARE stand-ins for us. It’s not just the disciples who get too comfortable with their own expectations…WE get too comfortable. I get too comfortable.
Do you ever think it’s comfortable to be a Christians? If you grew up in the Church you could start to think that it’s a natural thing to be a Christian. Because so much of our culture is built around the assumption that most Americans are Christian, it’s not that difficult to be Christian. Though your friends may shake their heads in wonder at you, most of them are not going to scorn you because you go to church on Sunday or a Bible Study on Wednesday night.
There might even be some strokes in going to Church. When people see you in the congregation on Sunday morning the cockles of their hearts are warmed and they will tell you how much your being there means to them. And the fact that I’m still asked to write recommendations for folks going on to jobs or grad school tells me that it’s still a positive thing for religious professionals to weigh in on these signs of cultural advancement.
I know it doesn’t always SEEM easy to be Christian, and it’s not always, but the fact is that Christians are still pretty acceptable figures in the United States and that’s dangerous because it is not natural to be a Christian. Christians are made not born. They trace their transformation to baptismal waters that represent death to old ways and rebirth to new ones. Christians are important to the world, not because they are good citizens of the nation, strong pillars of the community, or all-around nice people. Christians are important because they know that Jesus changes everything.
Christians aren’t trying to make the world more humane, they’re trying to tell the truth about it…that it’s not humane, but it’s still God’s. Christians aren’t trying to look good…they’re trying out what it means to BE good and they discover that by living on the edge every day. Christians don’t ignore the brokenness of the world…they celebrate the good news with broken bread to remember a broken body that means broken people like you and me can be made whole. And we put ourselves in places where we would not be if we did not believe that the words we say are trustworthy and true.
Another season of the Church year ends this week. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and we begin the 40-day journey of Lent. It’s good to stop on this mountaintop before we take that journey. It’s good to be reminded of how strange and unnatural this Christian thing is. Because if we get too comfortable with what we’re doing, we might just start building tents and forget that we don’t live on the mountain. We live down below where God is still at work, turning the world upside down and inviting us to join in. But that may seem hard because, you see, to join in this work, we have to be awake and see the world through the eyes of love. God’s love for every living thing. Thanks be to God.
Luke 9:28-43
Now about eight days after these saying, Jesus took Peter and John and James with him and went up on the mountain to pray. He was in the midst of prayer when the appearance of his face changed and his clothes flashed with the whiteness of lightning. And, look, two men were talking with him--Moses and Elijah. These, who appeared in glory, were speaking about his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Now Peter and those with him were weighed down with sleep, but having kept awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were leaving from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Teacher, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents -- one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” not knowing what he said.
While he was saying this, a cloud came and covered them and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. A voice came from the cloud saying, “This is my Son, the chosen one; listen to him!” When the voice began, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one anything about what they had seen.
On the next day, having come down from the mountain, a great crowd surrounded him. Look, a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, because he is my only child. Look, a spirit takes him and all at once he cries out and it convulses him so that he foams and it scarcely leaves him--it breaks him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they weren’t able to.”
Jesus answered, “O you faithless and perverse generation, how much longer will I be with you to put up with you? Bring your son here.”
While they were bringing him, the demon threw him to the ground and convulsed him. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy and restored him to his father. And everyone was astounded at the greatness of God.
[i] The Internet Movie Database, Memorable Quotes from Roxanne (1987), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093886/quotes.
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