7C The Sound and Music of Silence, Kings 19:1-4, 5-7, 8-15a, June 19, 2022, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Joanna Seibert

7C The Sound and Music of Silence, Kings 19:1-4, 5-7, 8-15a, June 19, 2022, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Joanna Seibert

Thomas Keating, one of the leaders of the revival of contemplative or centering prayer, writes, “Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation.”1 Many years ago, Keating’s message gets my attention. I long to spend time in silence, but the busyness of our lives prevents it. I have this committee in my head that likes to run the show, especially when I try to quiet my mind, body, and spirit. I see how silence has changed the lives of friends. I will not give up./

 Music quiets my soul. I start listening to the popular Chant series of Gregorian chants. My mind is quieted, but am I doing it all wrong? Is music keeping us from silence? Sometime later, I pick off my shelf/the book accompanying Chant. Its title is The Music of Silence. Interesting. This companion book to the chants is an invitation to journey through the day by keeping the monastic hours in some form. Each of the eight hours is prayerfully described, using the images of the Fra Angelico angels. 

Two cards drop out of, The Music of Silence, both from deceased spiritual friends. The one from Nyna Keeton is an encouraging note about writing. Another from Joanne Meadors is on a card from San Marco Museum in Florence depicting the Fra Angelico angel beating the drum. Cards of angels playing the harp and the trumpet from another spiritual friend also drop out of the book. 

There is even a photograph of the musical Fra Angelico Angels on the altarpiece of Pierce Chapel at Trinity Cathedral. This book, the cards, led me on a journey to Florence solely to see these angels. Also, between the pages of the book is a Forward Day by Day pamphlet about following the monastic hours. One of our young children picked it up from a tract rack at All Saints Russellville many years ago when we visited Pat Murray, their priest there, and friends from Cursillo. Our younger son, John, brought the pamphlet to me and said, “Mom, I think you will like this.”/

 Our third-grade son, Fra Angelico angels, The Music of Silence introduces me to praying the hours over thirty years ago. Later, I read Phyllis Tickle’s writings about keeping the monastic hours.

A book full of angels, a young son, a search for silence, a book full of memories still being communicated from spiritual friends I no longer see physically—calling me to the spiritual life of connection and silence.

This has been my road to silence. I long for it, but there no longer seemed time for it. Instead, with the help of art, friends, and family,/ the Holy Spirit leads me to music to quiet my soul, then introduces a daily prayer routine to quiet the mind. I confess I still have spurts and stops with the Daily Hours, but I am changed when I can do it./ Today, our children are grown with their own children, and my husband and I have hours of daily silence. I hope Nyna is pleased that I spend a great deal of time writing in the silence. Writing has become my best prayer and spiritual practice for the present. Experience tells me this can change./

This is how the Holy Spirit has worked in my life, knowing I am not ready for certain practices, so introducing me to others until it is time.

A longing for silence, however, has always been the driver. The famous Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence” lives in my head whenever I hear it. It explores the difficulty of communicating truth, so we will hear it. While we may believe that truth is told in the booming shouts of the powerful,/ in fact, it is often uttered in the whispers of the vulnerable:/ “The words of the prophets / Are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls / And whispered in the sound of silence.”

Much earlier than Garfunkel, Elijah’s experience from

I Kings tells us the same story. Elijah is scared and exhausted. He flees to the desert, attempting to escape his calling, overwhelmed by the task ahead, mistakenly believing he alone must eradicate idolatry./ God then answers Elijah by feeding him for the journey and coaxing him out of his cave with a powerful wind, earthquake, fire, and finally with the “sound of sheer silence.” In silence, Elijah encounters God and receives direction. God later instructs Elijah to return to his ministry and mentor a new prophet, Elisha. Elijah must complete his part of the task at hand, but God assures him there are others called to the ministry as well. God never intended for Elijah to carry the full weight of challenging the halls of power on his own shoulders. /

Does this story speak to you? It does to me. Elijah’s encounter with God/ in the sound of sheer silence/ tells us God offers us that same nourishment and hope as we peer out from our caves, overwhelmed by the work God has left for us to do. When dismayed, we need only remember where to listen for God’s voice. We are to seek silence.2

Our Community of Hope training taught us that our church is like a wheel. The hub is silence, community, prayer, worship, Eucharist, spiritual practices, and a rule of life. Our different pastoral ministries are spokes radiating from that hub that generates our momentum and growth. The rim represents the Trinity that Michael talked about last week. Our Triune God, whose love and constant presence nourishes, circles, and sustains us. This was Elijah’s story, and it is ours as well.

In silence, we begin to live in the moment, which is the only moment we have. God meets us in that present moment, not in the past or future, but in the present. The past is irretrievable. The future is unknowable. In the present, we connect to the Christ within ourselves and the Christ within our neighbor.3/

I hope my story tells you that finding silence is not an instant experience. It is a process similar to settling impurities in a glass of water. At first, the impurities swirl around, making the water cloudy and opaque. But if we go with the flow, don’t interfere with the glass, let the Spirit lead us, the impurities settle. The water becomes still and clear. When the water is opaque, the water reflects. When it is clear, we can see right through it. 4

Joan Chittister reminds us that silence has two functions. The development of outer silence leads to a sense of inner peace. Inner silence then provides the stillness/ that enables/ the ear of the heart/ to hear the God/ who is not in the “powerful wind, earthquake, fire, but  in the “sound of sheer silence.”5/

I offer to you my journey and longing for silence. I encourage you to spend time with silence. Do not be afraid of it. It is a friend. If this is not the time for silence in your life, let the Holy Spirit lead you to other spiritual practices, as it did for me. But do not give up on Silence. It is a straight path to living in the present moment, the dwelling place of God in our mind, body, and spirit. So, join me for a moment as we briefly honor and give thanks for God’s gift of silence./ Quiet your mind by being aware of your breath,/ in and out. With each breath, pray for the Holy Spirit to come into your life. Come, Holy Spirit, Come.

Joanna Seibert

1Thomas Keating in Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation (Bloomsbury Academic, 1994).

2 Elizabeth Evans, “Living by the Word, June 19 Ordinary 12C, 1 Kings 19:1-15a,” Christian Century, May 24, 2022.

3The Community of  Hope International Lay Pastoral Caregiver Notebook, “Module Five: Prayer, Christian Meditation, and Silence, 2013.

4Laurence Freeman in Christian Meditation: Your Daily Practice(Medio Media 1996).

5Joan Chittister in The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century, p. 195.

Lent 4C Prodigal Son and a Seat at the Table, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR, March 27, 2022, Luke15:1-3,11b-32.

Lent 4C Prodigal Son and a Seat at the Table

St. Mark’s March 27, 2022, Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32

One time-honored method of studying scripture is practicing Ignatian Spirituality. Saint Ignatius calls us to place ourselves into the biblical scene with each character, get into their clothes, their minds, their skins./ When we first approach today’s familiar parable, we might try to be the father, the elder son, the younger son, or maybe even the mother who is not directly in the story. Instead, let’s get into the hearts and minds of the audience for the story, the Pharisees. This is not hard. Pharisees have so many qualities we admire. They are dutiful, responsible, faithful in worship, love scriptures, are faithful givers, caring for the poor and the hungry as God’s law commands. Sounds like good upstanding Episcopalians to me!

For the Pharisees, a meal is literally a religious experience. To eat together is to celebrate their faith with specific rules about what happens around the table. This is getting closer to home. Cleanliness is paramount: clean food, clean dishes, clean hands, clean hearts. A proper Jewish meal is a worship service where believers honor God by sanctifying the most ordinary details of their lives. Sounds something like a sacrament, one we practice here several times a week./

But Jesus seems to have a different view of the Jewish sacrament. He frequently offends people with his table manners at meals. He ignores the finger bowl by his plate. He eats whatever is put in front of him. He thinks nothing of sitting down to eat with filthy people whose lives proclaim their contempt for religion. The Pharisees see Jesus as someone who has lost all sense of what is right; who condones eating with sinners, condones eating with those who dishonor God. What’s more, Jesus seems to enjoy it, actually takes pleasure in their company!! Even more, at these meals, Jesus forgives people freely, without demanding proof of repentance first. Sounds like Jesus is soft on sin and low on church ritual./ 

One fine day, when Jesus sees some Pharisees frowning and muttering about how he ought not to be so accepting of sinners, Jesus tells three stories about how God sees sinners. The first story in the 15th chapter of Luke is about the good shepherd, who never gives up looking for the lost sheep, until he finds it, and how his joy is so great that he calls everybody to celebrate with him. You remember the second story about the woman who keeps looking for the lost coin until she finds it, and calls everyone she knows to rejoice that this single lost coin is found. And then there is today’s story of two lost children and a parent who never gives up on them. 

In Jesus’ day, sinners fall into five basic categories: people who do unclean things for a living (pig farmers, tax collectors), those who do immoral things (liars, adulterers), people who do not keep the law up to religious standards, foreigners such as Samaritans, and lastly gentiles.

So let’s put together a sinners’ table at Boulevard Bread Company in the Heights. The table might include a quack doctor over-prescribing narcotics, a suspected murderer, a Russian oligarch, the young man who breaks into our cars in the early a.m., a Muslim extremist terrorist, a homeless young man who has just come from St. Francis House, an illegal Mexican chicken plucker who gets food from our Food Pantry, a teenage crack dealer, a well known alcoholic hitting bottom, a politician on the take, and an unmarried woman on welfare with five children by three different fathers. Did I miss anyone? Let’s put Jesus at the head of the table, asking the young man to please hand him a Greek Sampler,/ and offering the doctor half of his Caprese Panini.

If this offends you even a little, then we are ready for the next part of our story. What then happens is the appearance of a group of proper Episcopalians, clergy, and lay, mind you not from St. Mark’s but from another nearby Episcopal churches stopping at Boulevard for lunch on their way to a meeting at the diocesan office… or they could be Episcopalians from out of state. The proper Episcopalians sit down at a large table across from the sinners. They all have good teeth, and there is no dirt under their fingernails. When their food arrives at the table, they hold hands and pray before eating. (Maybe not) They are all charming people, but they can hardly eat their Pastrami and Smoked Turkey sandwiches without staring at the strange crowd at the table by the window with Jesus.

The chicken plucker is still wearing his white hairnet, and the alcoholic reeks of cheap wine. The addict cannot seem to find his mouth with his spoon. But none of this is the heartbreaker. The heartbreaker is Jesus, sitting there as if everything were just fine. Doesn’t he know what kind of message he sends? Who will believe he speaks for God if he keeps this kind of company?/

As I keep imagining this story, I see other meals, which many of you prepare for the homeless, veterans at St. Francis House,  lunches at Stewpot or the library, or filling orders for groceries at our food pantry. I see you who not only handout, cook, or serve food, but also sit down and eat and talk with these men and women who are so different /and yet so similar to all of us.

All of these stories may seem different from the one about the man with two sons, but they really are not. “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them,” the Pharisees grumble, and everything that follows is Jesus’ reply.

Jesus in his preposterous love for all of us, connects God to the man with two sons, who also has difficulty getting his family to sit down around the same table. His sense of unworthiness so warps the younger son that he is prepared to eat his meals in the bunkhouse with the hired hands. His sense of entitlement so inflates the older son that he will not eat with anyone who has not earned a place at the table. Both sons suffer from the illusion that they can be in a relationship with their father/ but do not need to be in relationship with each other. So, what’s a father to do?

This loving compassionate father prepares a meal for both of them and lets them figure out what to do about each other. This is relatively easy for the younger son, who is so glad to be back at the table again that he is not going to cause trouble for his older brother or anyone else. It is more difficult for the older son, who isn’t even told when dinner is ready. When he shows up and finds out who has come slithering back home, he is convinced that he has been displaced. He only sees two chairs at the table, as if no one father can love equally two such different sons. This is zero-sum love. There is not enough love from the father for both sons. Despite his father’s assurance that everything he has is his, the story ends with the older son standing in the yard, while the father goes back inside to sit down with the sinner. Buechner likens the older son to what Mark Twain calls a good man in the worst sense of the word. He is a caricature of all that is joyless, petty, and self-serving about all of us./

Any way you look at it, this is a disturbing story about  unending love, mercy and forgiveness. It is about hanging out with the wrong people. It is about throwing parties for losers and asking winners to pay the bill. It is about giving up the idea that we can love God and despise each other. We simply cannot, no matter how wronged any of us has been. The only way to work out our relationship with God is to work out our relationship with each other.//

As I mentioned, Jesus tells this story to a group of proper Episcopalians, who question his luncheon guests at Boulevard Bread. Jesus sees this respectable group eating,/ and knows them/ and compassionately loves them,/ so clean, so proper, so confused. He also wants to be in relationship with them. Jesus turns to the Episcopalians and says, “I cannot hear what you are mumbling about from across the restaurant. Come on over! Pull up some chairs.”/// “Come meet my friends. Dessert is on me!” /

And as far as we know, Jesus is still waiting to see how this story ends.

Joanna Seibert

Mary Harris Todd, “A House of Joy,” Lectionary Homiletics, March 2010, p. 51.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Table Manners,” Christian Century, March 11, 1998. p. 257.

Frederick Buechner, “The Gospel as Comedy,” Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, p. 68.

Good Friday. Where are you, God? April 15, 2022, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, AR. noon

Good Friday. Where are you, God? April 15, 2022, St. Mark’s noon

All of Little Rock mourns the death of award-winning photojournalist Brent Renaud, gunned down in Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, documenting the plight of fleeing Ukrainian refugees. Americans, especially Arkansans, cry out, “Where are you, God? Why did you let this happen?”

Tetiana Pere/by/in/is, an accountant, gardener, and avid skier, and her two daughters, /18-year-old Mykyta and 9-year-old Alisa,/ along with Anatoly Berezh/nyi, a 26-year-old church volunteer helping them to safety,/ didn’t make it. On a Sunday, they were also killed in Irpin, trying to evacuate, as they dashed across the concrete remnants of a damaged bridge. 1 The Ukrainian people cry out, “Where are you, God, in the midst of this bloody Ukrainian invasion?” 1/

Over 80 years earlier, Ellie Wie/sel, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, describes a scene at his concentration camp, Auschwitz. “The SS hang two Jewish men and a boy before the assembled inhabitants of the camp. The men die quickly, but the death struggle of the boy lasts half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” a man behind Wie/sel asks. After a long time, as the boy is still in agony on the rope, Wiesel hears the man cry again, “Where is God now?” And Wiesel hears a voice within him answer, “Here God is—he is hanging here on this gallows” suffering with the young boy…. 2//

On Good Friday, we bring our grief to this place, mourning others who have died, as we contemplate the why of Jesus’ death. We linger at this cross for a few uncomfortable moments. It is a reality. Jesus died. Like others, it is a profoundly unjust, sometimes overwhelmingly painful death, and we need one day more to deal with it. Probably more than one, actually. We stand on top of Gol/go/tha to decide what Jesus’ death means to each of us? How should all these deaths, but particularly the death of Jesus, make some sense of our living and our dying.3 /

The stark rawness of today does not bring many answers.

Of all the world’s religions, Christianity is the only one that has a God who suffers, who knows, has experienced firsthand our own pain. He is a suffering servant, which no one had ever heard of before. Jesus means to transform the world by loving it, not by controlling it, which makes his life hell most of the time. No other world religions have a leader who dies suffering. Buddha dies at eighty, surrounded by his followers. Confucius dies an old man putting together ancient Chinese writings. Muhammad dies in the arms of his favorite wife while he is the ruler of Arabia. Jesus is not so fortunate. But his suffering does make him our best company/when we run into our own bad times. He has been there. There is nothing that hurts us that he does not know about. At our most broken, our most frightened, our most forsaken by God, we have this companion who has been there and promises to be there with us. There he lives, sitting beside and inside us in the lowest places in our lives. Nothing we think or do can shock him. Nothing we say can make him turn away. If we say, “Where are you, God? I’m all alone here,” HE also said it from the cross, / as Mark and Matthew tell us. Good Friday shows us that the Christian faith has nothing to do with the removal of suffering. Instead, we are given a God who intimately knows our pain and agrees to suffer with us/and for us.4 This is love that crosses all boundaries.

 Jesus’ death may be beyond comprehension, but it is not beyond belief. We may later find it smack dab in the middle of our belief in life beyond death, ushered in by the humble death of this suffering servant./

Perhaps if we continue our window into the scenes of Good Friday, where Michael led us on Palm Sunday, actually placing ourselves on that hill, we may find answers/.

We come closer and hear Jesus’ first words from the cross recorded in John./ Jesus never observes our suffering from a distance, so we, in turn, must move even nearer to him. Jesus says to his mother: “Woman, here is your son.” And to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” Barbara Brown Taylor5 believes that when the beloved disciple takes Mary home, and when the other disciples crawl out from under their rocks, they will find themselves in the presence of two people whose contact with God’s love has become far more intimate than theirs. While the principalities and powers in Jerusalem believe they are tearing his family apart, Jesus lovingly is quietly putting it together again. My experience is also that Jesus constantly does this for us. When our sister or brother or mother or father or child is physically separated from us by death, Jesus gives us a new and different loving relationship with them/and others, if only we have eyes and ears to see/ and hear/ and believe/ and accept it./

On Good Friday, so much focus is rightfully on Jesus’ suffering on the cross. But as we stand below Jesus, we see next to us the courageous women of John’s story, Mary, her sister, and the woman from Magdala. To honor them, we pray for other women who now weep for their children, refusing to be comforted. We hold in prayer similar women standing on today’s Golgotha, who, in the face of horrible suffering, somehow find strength to hold each other up.” 6//

 Jesus’ last words we hear are “IT IS FINISHED.”

But is Jesus’ crucifixion indeed finished that afternoon 2000 years ago?/ We gather here at St. Mark’s because we are an Easter people, but our world is still more like Good Friday. Do we continue to be active observers and participants in Christ’s crucifixion still going on today?3/

There is no lethal injection in Jesus’ time. The whole point is to make everything as painful as possible. As we stand so close to that cross today, we agree that crucifixion is the worst.

As we look up at the wounded crucified Jesus, we recognize that he has become what we most fear: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and failure.7 We listen, but hear only silence from the God of our understanding. We receive few direct answers. We suffer in silence with the crucified one, wondering what is God’s meaning in all this. Perhaps we can connect to God’s love so immense that we now know God suffers with us. 8  //

It will be dark by the time we help take Jesus’ torn, naked body down from the cross and find a place to lay him. It will be the Sabbath. His time to rest. His part is over. His work is done.9 Some will tell us that Jesus is brutally crucified so that we might see the horror of it all and cease crucifying others like Brent, Tetiana, Mykyta, Alisa, Ana/to/ly.7/ Will it ever end?/

We will go home and prepare for the Sabbath. It will be hard to say our prayers.

 “God, where are you? We desperately want answers./ But we are not yet giving up on you, God./ Your history with us tells us that you have continually redeemed evil and turned it into good since time began. But this horrific event is too dark. Where can there be good  in this Friday?”10/

We will finally fall asleep, but out of respect for you, God, plan to come back, continuing our Holy Week walk together, hoping to find any answer. / We will return to this place near sundown tomorrow,/ or at least the following day.

Joanna Seibert

1 Andrew Kramer, “They died by a bridge in Ukraine. This is My Story,” New York Times March 9, 2022.

2 Elie Wiesel in Night (Night Trilogy) (Hill and Wang January 2006).

3Julian DeShazier in Christian Century, March 23, 2016.

4 Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Suffering of God,” God in Pain (Abingdon 1998) pp. 120-124.

5 Barbara Brown Taylor, “Mother of the New,” Home By Another Way, pp. 97-99.

6 Eileen D. Crowley, “Sunday’s Coming,” Christian Century April 11, 2017.

7 Adapted from Richard Rohr, On Transformation: Collected Talks (Franciscan Media: 1997), disc 1 (CD).

8 Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Silence of God,” God in Pain (Abingdon 1998) pp. 110-114.

9 Barbara Brown Taylor, “It is Finished,” Home By Another Way (Cowley 1999) pp. 103-105.

10 Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking.

Last Epiphany C, Luke 9:28-36, February 27, 2022, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock

Last Epiphany C

February 27, 2022, Luke 9:28-36 St. Mark’s

 My husband’s father, Bob, calls. He is experiencing excruciating back pain and can barely walk. My husband and daughter are in Greece. I get off the phone and seek advice from colleagues who perform tests, and then I go with Bob to a specialist. As I impatiently and nervously wait, a lone older woman in the waiting room briefly reminds me of all those who do not have friends or family with them and must wait for long hours alone in emergency and waiting rooms in pain before answers come./

 The specialist says that my father-in-law has advanced metastatic cancer to the spine. The medical team starts Bob on a trial protocol. Two days later, on my way home from church, I realize the hospital has been paging me. My father-in-law is in intensive care and has had a reaction to the new drug. My husband and daughter rush home from Greece. Bob is put back on a more standard treatment for his cancer. Our oldest son, Rob, takes a leave of absence from graduate school and moves back home to help care for his grandfather. Six months later, Bob falls and breaks his hip. We can no longer care for him at home and go through all the nursing home and assisted living decisions that many of you have faced. Each day presents a new, unfamiliar, often exhausting challenge of how to minister to someone we so dearly love.//

The disciples in our story today also have faced one new challenge after another. They are exhausted by the nonstop demands of the crowds. Recently, they were sent off to cure and heal the sick. They have an amazing run of success and return to tell Jesus all about it. But when he takes them for a well-earned respite, more crowds interrupt them. The weary disciples beg Jesus to send the crowd away, but we all know what happens next—“fish sandwiches” for 5000, or probably 15,000 if we add in the women and children.

The next day doesn’t feel like a vacation either, because Jesus starts telling them about his upcoming suffering and death, something they may experience as well. We can’t blame the disciples for missing the resurrection part on the third day. Heidi Neumark says, “When you think you are heading for the dungeon, anxiety, and panic tend to block out everything else.” 1

Eight days later, the disciples are still in no shape for mountain climbing, even if it is to pray, as Luke mentions. But there go Jesus, Peter, James, and John ascending up a steep mountain. You know they are wondering what is so special about praying on top of this unnamed mountain?/

 If I am honest, on most days, attempts to pray/ are a steep uphill climb on weary legs. The world’s insistent demands make it challenging to find a spiritual focus. I, like Barbara Crafton, keep thinking of a million silly things, like did I send out that last email, what’s for lunch?2  If I make it, it is only thanks to many faithful companions beside me in community here at St. Mark’s,/, as well as the communion of saints, past and present, that constantly support and pray with and for us.//

On top of this mountain, Jesus is doing all the praying. Peter, James, and John can’t keep their eyes open, which connects the disciples’ humanness on this mountain to their inability to stay awake later at  Mount of Olives. Suddenly, just as sleep is about to overcome the three, a brightness startles them. Their eyes open wide. Jesus, who reached the summit slightly above them, now shines with the brightness of the sun, says Matthew, and his clothes become “dazzling white as no bleach on earth could make them,” says Mark. The disciples have an unforgettable experience of seeing the divinity of Jesus./ They also see two other well-known figures talking to Jesus. All three synoptic gospels identify them as Moses and Elijah, who speak in Luke’s account to Jesus about his imminent departure in Jerusalem. “The word departure comes from the Greek word for exodus, referring to the trip down the mountain and into Jerusalem, but also to Jesus’ death.1” Moses’ presence reminds us of the exodus of the Jewish people through the Red Sea from Egypt, suggesting that Jesus will now accomplish a second exodus, leading God’s people safely through the waters of death to resurrection,/ just as Moses parted the Red Sea, leading his people safely to the promised land./

But Jesus’ brief dramatic change in appearance from man to God/ is lost on the three disciples. They are mystified, dumbfounded. Peter expresses the confusion of his shocked companions and a lack of awareness of Jesus’ true divinity by suggesting they stay on the mountaintop to make similar dwellings or monuments to all three.1///

On the top of a mountain, we sometimes do see the world differently. In the Hebrew Bible, mountain summits are stages for life-changing events. Noah lands on Mount Ararat. Abraham nearly kills his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah. God gives Moses the ten commandments on Mount Sinai, and today we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus on an unnamed mountain.3

We all have had mountaintop experiences of seeing God in our lives, even when we barely comprehended them, as did the disciples./ Yet, truthfully,/ most of our transfiguration experiences occur below /at the bottom of the mountain, / where we daily work and play, /where theological bones take on flesh. Flesh becomes divinity. / This is where we most often see the transfigured face of God, in places where premature babies are born and thrive, where loved ones and patients’ appearance changed as they return to life from near-fatal illnesses, where addicts and alcoholics find recovery, where we forgive those who have harmed us, and we are forgiven; where we forgive those who have not accepted us as the gender God created us to be, where we see Jesus, the Christ, in the face of a homeless man at the traffic stop, or in our neighbor who irritates us, or in the slow and tired checker at our local grocery/. In these times, for a brief moment/ we see someone as a real person, we see Christ in each other.

A priest friend, Pat Murray, believes that in reality, Jesus, God, is transformed all the time, but only at certain moments can we see the likeness of God in each other,/perhaps most often when we live in the present moment/ or in stressful times where we are experiencing “altitude sickness.” We, humans, seem not able to bear much reality, wrote T. S Eliot. It is too incomprehensible to look God in the face/ for any length of time.2 ///

We all take turns taking Bob for his many treatments. As I look about the crowded waiting rooms, again, I think of the ill who do not have family to support them. How do they get here? How do they survive and keep coming back?/

 At one visit, Bob is too weak to dress himself after his examination. I see our son, who looks so much like his grandfather at an earlier age, / dress Bob, / pull up Bob’s baggy trousers, / tighten his belt/ and lift Bob up to stand. / The young and the old man hug each other./ I see the look they give to the other; one, the look of loving surrender, the other, the look of a loving servant. / They see the face of God in each other. / They are each transfigured in front of each other at the bottom of the mountaintop. / “Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it is almost beyond bearing.” 4

Transfiguration again occurs the night Bob dies, as he is cared for in his last hours by both of his grandsons. Bob lies in his nursing home bed/ unable to speak/, but his face shines like the sun as he radiantly,/ continuously/ smiles at his two grandsons he so dearly loves/ as we sit at the bottom of the mountain and he begins his ascent. //

Today, if we listen carefully, we can still hear the voice that interrupts Peter: “Listen to him.” Listen for dear life. Listen to words of forgiveness and mercy, promises of paradise, words we will soon hear from the cross. Listen without ceasing, on the edge of glory/and on the brink of death. We have heard this voice before at his baptism, “Here is my only begotten son with whom I am well pleased, listen to him.” Listen on this hill, but also listen soon on another hill when darkness closes in.1////

“When cures and healing are beyond our powers, when the shine on a loved one’s face comes from tears reflected in the fluorescent lights of intensive care, / on such days remember to put yourself inside this story, listening for the voice that urges us to stop and listen for his Voice. When you are overcome with weariness and difficulty, remember to look for the transfigured face of God in all you will meet./ The Beloved, the Son of God, the Son of Man, will always be there/ beside us/ and will shine in the darkness,/ and the darkness will never,/ ever overcome it.1”

1Heidi Neumark, “Altitude Adjustment” in Christian Century, February 6, 2007, p. 16.

2Barbara Crafton “Last Epiphany” in The Geranium Farm, February 1, 2008.

3Thomas Jay Oord in Christian Century, January 17, 2017.

4Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark.

Joanna Seibert  joannaseibert.com

Epiphany 5C Call of Peter, Luke 5:1-11, February 6, 2022, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock

Epiphany 5C. Call of Peter

February 6, 2022

Luke 5:1-11 St. Mark’s

“Hello, yes, this is Mrs. Simon Peter. What! My husband has not been at the docks for two weeks! His boat is filled to the brim with dead, rotting fish! You are going to confiscate our boat! And the boat of his partners as well! Could you give me a little time to look into this? I have been taking care of my mother, who has a recurrent febrile illness, and we have just started building a new home in Capernaum.”

Do you ever wonder what is really going on between the lines of this familiar story about the call of the first disciples? There is often more that is not said than what is said. For centuries, students of the Hebrew scriptures have been trying to fill in the blanks, the conversational details. This is called midrash, and that is what we are doing this morning to Luke’s version of the story of “the catch of the day.”

Peter and his brother Andrew are in the family fishing business, in partnership with Zebedee and his sons, James and John. They have all been intrigued by the teachings of this new itinerant preacher. Jesus has even come to Peter’s home for dinner and miraculously healed his mother-in-law so that she can serve dinner. This particular morning, a huge crowd is following Jesus along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Peter and his partners, however, are out trying to make a living and haven’t had the luxury of free time to spend with Jesus. They have been fishing all night with no results. As they pull into shore, they are running their bruised, tired hands along miles of worn wet netting to tighten knots and take in the slack of frayed cords. They are hungry, tired, and want to go home.

Jesus then spies his dinner partners and asks if he might use their boat for a pulpit for his impending sermon. Of course, Peter cannot refuse the one who has just healed a family member, especially in front of all these people; but this interruption is not what Peter has on his agenda or even his radar screen. Peter nods his head, but grumbles under his breathe while Jesus gets into his boat and begins to preach. Luke doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus’ sermon. Perhaps it is his first draft of the Sermon on the Mount or an early version of his series on the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. Poor Peter now has yet another job trying to keep the boat in place offshore while Jesus speaks. There is no indication that he listens to the sermon, for it probably takes every bit of his last energy to steady the boat off shore, work the live stream sound system, so that the crowd can now hear more clearly the voice of Jesus magnified from a cove in the lake. Finally, after about an hour, Jesus finishes. It is now midday. Jesus then shows us his flexibility, how he lives continuously in the present moment. He sees Peter’s fatigue and frustration. Jesus senses that Peter needs fish, not words. So he tells him to go out into deeper water and put down his cleaned nets and fish again.

“What in the world is he saying? We have tried that before, and it doesn’t work. Everyone in first-century Palestine knows you fish in deep water at night.” Peter is a professional fisherman who knows this lake like the back of his hand. Jesus is a carpenter turned teacher. Well, you know what Peter is tempted to say, but exhausted, Peter does as he is told, hoping that he will eventually get to go home. And then, to his amazement, he catches extreme abundance, more fish that he and his partners can bring in or their boats can hold. Finally, exhausted and overwhelmed, Peter falls to his knees in a sinking boat full of flipping fish and confesses to Jesus that he was so wrong. Peter is ready to turn his life and his will over to Jesus. And Jesus’ answer is even more astonishing: “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching people.” When they come to shore, Peter and his partners have changed their priorities about fishing, and leave their boats and follow Jesus.

All of us desperately want to know what it is like to be Peter, to be called by and hear the voice of God, or we would not be here in this place. Today, Luke clearly tells us what that call looks and sounds and smells like.

Where is Peter, and what is he doing when he is called? Peter is not doing anything particularly religious when he has his life-changing spiritual experience. He is not following Jesus, but is busy trying to make a living at his workplace. We may hear God call us in this church, but we are more likely to hear that voice in our everyday lives, at home, school, and work.

My experience also is that this call will come in an interruption from our routine. So pay very close attention to the interruptions that come when you are much too busy for them: people and places that are not scheduled on your desktop or Google Calendar.

God also comes to us where WE are. Luke tells us that Jesus begins his ministry in synagogues, but he doesn’t call his disciples by putting an ad in the Galilee Hebrew Democrat-Gazette saying, “Local teacher needs staff. No experience necessary.”/ Instead, Jesus makes personal appearances at the homes and workplaces of those he calls.

What do you think motivates Peter to go out into deeper water and try a new way of fishing? My experience is that we only make these life-changing decisions when we are like Peter, exhausted by how our life is going, when we are “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”/ We hit a bottom and have no more answers. One of our children gets into trouble, and we cannot fix it this time; our spouse is sick and is not getting better; we lose our job and have difficulty finding another one. Suddenly we are open to a memory from childhood, a conversation with a stranger or an old friend. We read a scripture passage again, or see an old movie like “Field of Dreams” or “A River Runs Through It,” or “Places in the Heart,” and it is as if we are hearing and seeing it for the first time. And God comes to us/ and transforms us/ in the ordinary, small kindnesses and acts of self-sacrifice from strangers, family members, friends,/ even simply from a child’s smile,/ and our nets are filled to overflowing in ordinary ways. //

Have you wondered why Peter’s confession of his humanity, his shortcomings, his inability to be in control is so essential to his call? Fishing is Peter’s talent. He must recognize the source of that talent and who gives him the direction to make the catch. Part of Peter’s greatness is this ability to surrender and see his own powerlessness. But that same power that causes him to fall on his knees also lifts him up. Jesus says to him, “Fine, now we are ready to get to work. If you hadn’t been able to see and confess your true self,/ you would be no good to anyone.”

What does Jesus mean by telling Peter he will now be catching people instead of fish? Is he saying Peter should now give up fishing? My experience is that God uses the talents we have perfected in our worldly vocations for his purposes. Peter’s skills in fishing will now be used for the kingdom. Nothing, nothing is ever wasted. Fishing may now be the best way Peter will meet others seeking the Christ, just as Jesus first met Peter at his workplace.

Many of you know better than I the skills you learn at fishing and hunting that can be used to further the kingdom: patience; working in community; putting out a net, a feeler, a fishing line, to find something utterly unknown beneath the surface of your life; becoming an artist, seeing God’s presence in nature, feeling God’s pleasure in the sun and wind on your face and the salt in your hair, being constantly surrounded by images in a natural world more significant than yourself.  This is where Peter finds God in his ordinary life, as we can as well.

One last thought to ponder. Isn’t it also interesting that none of the disciples Jesus chooses are from the religious community of his day? Instead, all of his followers are people called to a second career, people seeing their present occupations in a new light.

 So, this is the call. Do you hear it? God is calling each of us, most of us a bunch of rank amateurs, who don’t know a trout from a salmon or who can’t distinguish port from starboard./ We are not called because WE are able,/ but because God is able. God constantly gets into the boat with us,/ usually at odd and inconvenient times, /leading us and going with us to deeper waters where our nets will be filled to the brim.

Joanna joannaseibert.com