Second Sunday after the Epiphany (January 15, 2023)

What an extraordinary, audacious, outrageous claim Jesus’ locust-eating cousin makes here in John 1:29.

“Here is the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist confidently declares as Jesus approaches, “who takes away the sin of the world!”

All of it, John? The sin of the whole world? How could that be? How could anyone even grasp all the rot and filth and failure and evil put out by the whole world across all time – let alone just “take it away,” as if it were a bag of last week’s garbage? Surely this is just more hyperbole from the half-crazy, camel-clad prophet whom we heard yelling a few weeks ago about fiery baptism and a Messiah who would clear-cut the world of bad guys.

What if it were true, though? What if every terrible thing I’ve done and every shameful failure to do what I should have done – and all of the ones still done and not done – are simply gone? Taken away two millennia ago by this dusty, sandaled Nazarene whom John called the Lamb of God, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the savior of all of us? To even glimpse such a thing leaves me dizzy. No condemnation at all? Not even a little bit? I am wholly and irrevocably right with God? I have nothing at all to fear? Are you sure, John? Could it be?

Hold on a minute, though. I’m all about having the left side of my own ledger erased. But I’m not so sure about everyone else having theirs wiped clean, too. After all, I personally hold the note on some of the debts this Lamb of God has declared null and void. That co-worker who screwed me over a few years back never has apologized. Hasn’t even acknowledged the wrong. And I’m still out all the money that my decision to trust that other guy – to try to help him, even, when no one else would – ended up costing me. And how about the venomous thing that toxic woman said to me, back when I was at my lowest point, when even if she couldn’t have offered something encouraging, she at least could have kept her mouth shut? Where’s my revenge for that?

Suddenly, this Lamb of God seems more robber than savior, more enemy than friend, and I’m not sure who He thinks He is, letting people like those scumbags off the hook for things they did to me, things he wasn’t even involved in, let alone harmed by. “Forgive us our trespasses,” I can pray, but not without adding, in the same breath, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

This isn’t the Messiah I want. I want one who will forgive me if I at least try to be a better man but who will countenance no such nonsense from my enemies. I want him on my side, smiting all who have wronged me the way he smote all those enemies of Israel in the ancienttimes.

Beholding the Lamb of God isn’t easy, John. Not easy at all. If seeing that my sin has been taken away means seeing that everyone else’s has, too, I fear the wounded, angry little man inside me, not far below the surface, just might prefer to be blind.

Baptism of the Lord (January 8, 2023)

Jesus said and did a lot of hard-to-explain things, one of them being his decision to wade into the Jordan River and ask John the Baptist to baptize him.

Understandably, Christians who see baptism as connected to the absolution of sin have a particularly difficult time figuring out why Jesus wanted to be baptized. If Jesus was sinless, why would need to respond to John’s call for repentance?

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what baptism truly accomplishes, and if it does have something to do with getting rid of sin, I don’t know why Jesus felt compelled to undergo it. It’s odd, too, that while the Gospels indicate that Jesus’ disciples baptized people at Jesus’ direction, they never depict Jesus baptizing anyone himself.

The explanation for Jesus baptism that I like the most, though, is rooted in the idea that baptism is about making a covenant with God, about identifying oneself both as someone who belongs to God and as someone to whom God belongs. It’s an overtly mutual thing. I don’t just take possession of God, and God doesn’t just take possession of me. In baptism, we take possession of each other.

Seen in this context, Jesus’ baptism makes perfect sense to me. He stepped into the Jordan with John the way he steps into the baptism with anyone who meets him there. My Anabaptist forebears tended to discount baptism unless one entered into it with willing awareness of what one was doing. Thus, they took a dim view of infant baptism, because babies who are being baptized generally have no clue what is happening beyond the immediate sense of being momentarily held be a stranger and feeling some perhaps uncomfortable wetness in the vicinity of their foreheads. How can a child make a covenant with God without knowing who God is, or even that God is at all?

The answer, perhaps, is that Jesus is standing there with us, having waded in to receive from us whatever we bring, no matter how little there is of it, and to give us more than any one of us could possibly fathom, no matter how sober and wise.

First Sunday after Christmas Day (January 1, 2023)

Christmas probably will always look to me the way it does in Luke, with May, Joseph, and the shepherds clustered around a manger and gazing, awestruck, at the baby Jesus. And I’ll always place the several angels in our ornament collection in the upper branches of our tree, as if they were assembling, as Luke says they did, to announce a saviour, peace, and good will.

But the older I get, the more Matthew’s version of the story captures the way Christmas feels. Matthew focuses immediately on the fear and conflict pervading Mary’s unexplained pregnancy and the dilemma it presents to Joseph. Next, the wise men take the stunningly unwise step of showing up in Jerusalem to announce that Herod, the tyrannical king running Israel for the Roman Empire, has a newly born rival growing up in defenseless anonymity somewhere nearby. Predictably, Herod orders an atrociously bloody offensive aimed at eradicating the threat. Divine intervention saves the Christ child, but none of the babies and toddlers whom Herod’s soldiers stab to death in search of him. Having packed up Jesus and fled in the middle of the night, Mary and Joseph escape to Egypt, finding shelter, most likely, among the Jews who had lived there since Israel had set up an outpost in Egypt some 750 years earlier. Only after Herod finally dies do Mary and Joseph bring the family back to Israel. And even then, they cautiously settle in Nazareth, a town in Galilee away from the center of what had been Herod’s kingdom.

We rightly feel outrage at Matthew’s story of a ruler so corrupted by power that he would slaughter children to keep it. And we wisely direct our own children’s attention away from Matthew’s violent scenes and toward the fluffy lambs, gentle shepherds and singing angels on display over in Luke. The kiddos have trouble enough as it is going to sleep in Christmas Eve. Indeed, if preachers in some areas of Christianity these days mention Matthew’s story at all, they tend to deflect the outrage toward those involved in abortion. I think that’s a conveniently narrow take on what the passage indicts, though.

Herod got away with slaughtering Bethlehem’s children partly, and probably mostly, because nobody who wanted to stop or penalize him had the power to do so. That’s how tyranny worked then and how it still works today. But it’s worth noting that Israel prospered greatly under the Roman Empire and the various henchmen, like Herod, whom the Romans put in charge. Among other accomplishments, Herod famously expanded the Hebrew temple in Jerusalem, the same one Jesus’ disciples would express admiration for later in the Gospels (only to have their enthusiastic nationalism smacked down by Jesus), and the same one that, until its destruction, rested on a foundation buttressed by the still-visible Western Wall in modern Jerusalem. Herod may have been an evil tyrant, but tolerating his rule had advantages that made overthrowing him and his kind costly.

That’s the uncomfortable truth Luke’s angel doesn’t mention. The Messiah has come, the angel tells the shepherds. Rejoice! But Matthew warns us that what the Messiah has come to challenge won’t go down without a fight. All four gospels will converge on Jesus’ agonizing death as the price of evil’s defeat, and the transformation his resurrection will unleash in the world still gets plenty of pushback. I could join the antiabortion preachers in singling out others whom I can comfortably denounce as present-day Herods, but I think Jesus would have me focus first on all the ways in which I am Herod, doing my worst to keep God from doing God’s best, and all the ways in which I am just another ordinary guy enjoying the perks of not paying too much attention to the atrocities happening around me.

I need that peaceful manger scene. We all do. But Christmas ultimately isn’t about where the baby Jesus lies. It’s about where our allegiance lies in the struggle the baby Jesus will grow up to lead.

Nativity of the Lord – Proper I (December 24, 2022)

People felt amazed, Luke’s Christmas story says, when the shepherds told them the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem. And it seems to have been exactly that point that people found amazing. The angel, the blinding glory, the spectacle of heaven’s hosts singing in the night sky – maybe the shepherds described all of that, too, and maybe people found it impressive. But what really got everyone excited, Luke seems to say, was the news that the Messiah had finally come.

Perhaps I would have felt amazed then, too, had I been around. But amazement simply isn’t among the emotions the Christmas story stirs in me. It never has been, as far as I can remember. The nearest thing I feel to amazement is a hopeful longing that the story of Jesus really did mean everything the Gospels say it meant. What gets in the way of amazement, for me, is all the evidence to the contrary. I may be full of hope and longing, but I also read the papers.

For having been visited by its savior, the world still looks very much in need of saving tonight. Violence, disease, hunger, injustice and suffering seem everywhere. Our Messiah may have come. But what did he accomplish while he was here, where is he now, and why isn’t he doing anything about the mess we are in? I believe he can clean things up, and I fervently hope he will. But his performance to date seems far from amazing.

When I admit to myself that I have these questions, I discover something else I feel in addition to hope and longing. I feel anger. I feel angry that this Messiah of ours seems absent without leave when the world desperately needs him on the job, and no amount of Christmas sentimentality is going to keep me from demanding to know just where in the hell of this world he is, or whether he even is at all.

But as I lay these thoughts before my Messiah tonight – why try to hide them from the likes of Him? – I think I hear an answer I have heard before, but never quite so clearly:

“I am where I always am: among the poor, sick and discarded people you accuse me of ignoring. But where, my child, are you?”

Fourth Sunday of Advent (December 18, 2022)

There will be sermons aplenty this Sunday praising Joseph for showing faith. That’s fine. But I’d like to hear one praising him for keeping it, because raising Jesus can’t have been easy.

As an adult, Jesus could be startlingly brilliant, achingly compassionate, and downright handy to have around in crises ranging from running out of wine in the middle of a wedding party to getting caught out on the water in a storm, contracting a terrible disease or even dropping dead. But he also could be irascible, provocative, exasperating, appalling, and bewildering. We can only imagine what he was like during his terrible twos or – good grief! – as a teenager. A sinless kid would not necessarily have been a low-maintenance one. From what I have read, Jesus certainly wasn’t.

Trouble found the new family quickly. For Joseph, simply sticking with Mary despite her unexplained pregnancy carried risks and invited gossip. And the second chapter of Matthew describes how the arrival of the gift-bearing wise men alerted Herod to a possible rival, prompting Herod to condemn to death every Bethlehem male age 2 or younger. Warned in a dream, Joseph had to flee to Egypt and sneak back to Nazareth only after Herod’s death.

The Gospels tell us nothing about most of Jesus’ childhood. Imagine him, if you like, as a finer carpenter than Joseph from the start. I’ll go along with the assumption that he was probably a quick learner, but I’ll bet he banged his thumbs, sliced his fingers, whined about splinters, cut his boards too short, and ruined his share of projects, just like anyone else learning a trade. And through everything, I picture Joseph rolling his eyes and thinking, “Son of God, come to save us all, the angel said. I just wish he could cut a straight line.”

Our one glimpse of the adolescent Jesus can be found toward the end of Luke 2. Having been brought to Jerusalem, as was the custom, at age 12 to prepare for his full induction into the Jewish faith community at 13, Jesus gave his parents the slip. Discovering his absence a day into the trip back home, a panicked Mary and Joseph rushed back to Jerusalem, searched for three days, and finally found him doing what he evidently had been doing the whole time: discussing scripture with the Temple teachers and wowing them with his insights.

Called out by Mary, Jesus seems as indifferent to their anxiety as he would seem later, when his panicked disciples awakened him from his nap to demand why he didn’t care that a storm was about to drown the whole company in the Sea of Galilee.

“Why were you searching for me?” Jesus replies. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my father’s house?” Joseph was standing right there. That one must have stung.

Joseph’s story ends with a final indignity in Luke 4 as Jesus, by now an emerging celebrity, returns to Nazareth to give a sermon in the town’s synagogue. It all starts well, with Jesus doing a fine job of reading a passage from Isaiah, and everyone nodding in approval and murmuring, “That’s Joseph’s boy, isn’t it?” But then Jesus backhands his erstwhile neighbors with an insult by suggesting God had bypassed them in favor of – gasp! – foreigners, the way God had sent Elijah to a widow in Zarephath, and Elisha to a leprous Syrian called Naaman. Enraged, they mob him, planning to toss him off a nearby cliff.

Joseph’s boy? By then, the crowd probably thought of him as Joseph’s insolent little brat. We don’t know whether Joseph was around for this near-murderous riot or any of the fallout after Jesus mysteriously disappeared from the scene. Joseph just fades away in the Gospels, having never uttered a single recorded word. Classical art showing Mary and Joseph together often depicts Mary as substantially younger than her husband, on the theory that Joseph must have died of old age early in their marriage.

But through it all, whatever all of it entailed, Joseph seems to have kept his faith in what the angel had told him: This boy will save his people from their sins, and you must call him “Jesus,” so that you will repeat the promise each time you say his name.

We sentimentalize each of the Christmas story’s characters – Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the wise men, and probably Jesus himself more than any of them. If the snoozing baby in the manger is the only Jesus you know, then perhaps you don’t know Jesus much at all. Real life with him is more like it must have been for Joseph: marked by deep love, to be sure, but also by frustration, weariness, bewilderment, offense, anger, doubts, and outrage at being asked to give yet more when so much has been given already. Sometimes, to know Jesus is to wish you had never met him. Blasphemy? Just ask John, whom we left, last week, sitting in prison, doubting everything and awaiting a fate that couldn’t have been difficult for him to guess.

The real Jesus came to love us, yes, but with real love, a love prepared to subordinate everything else – things like keeping us warm, preserving our safety, filling our bellies, protecting our egos, burnishing our reputations, growing our businesses, or even just letting us have a nice peaceful life among friends in a little place we can call home – to giving us the one thing we need most, and really the only thing we need at all: saving.

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A

I could be wrong, but I see more than doubt and despair in the message John the Baptist sent Jesus from prison.

I see anger. White-hot, sarcastic, malicious anger.

I think John wanted his message to sting Jesus the way John’s “brood of vipers” insult had stung the Pharisees and Sadducees back in Matthew 3 (and everyone back in Luke 3). John had warned everyone that the Messiah would wreak fiery judgment upon all who failed to repent. The Messiah’s coming, John had cried, would leave the landscape stubbled with the trunks of the sinful and the air thick with the smoke of their destruction. The preciously few righteous would be gathered and stored safely in the barn, and John, I think, had expected to be first through the door.

But there John sat, locked away in Herod’s prison for having dared to call out Herod’s sins, while the man he had dubbed “Messiah” was dithering in Galilee, far – too far, in John’s estimation – from the Jerusalem power centers John had expected his cousin to attack. Like the rest of Jesus’ family (see Mark 3, Matthew 12, and Luke 8), John had concluded that Jesus had gone off script and maybe off the rails, and someone ought to do something about it.

Never one to self-censor when he thought the powerful needed to hear some hard truth, John sent his disciples with a public ultimatum for Jesus: Start acting like the Messiah, or get off the stage.

But Jesus reacts to John’s insolence in a way characteristically uncharacteristic of the Messiah John had foreseen. John has gone over to the side of the chaff and the fruitless trees. By rights, he should burn along with them. But Jesus does what he would later do with the post-denials Peter: He offers John a way back.

“Go and tell John,” Jesus says – and I picture him saying this before a crowd, as loudly and publicly as John’s disciples had delivered John’s ultimatum – “what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus is echoing words from the prophet Isaiah 35 that describe the Messiah’s coming, and in tones considerably less foreboding than John’s. If he isn’t quite the kind of Messiah John wants, Jesus seems to be saying, maybe John wants the wrong kind of Messiah.

Then Jesus, having reminded everyone who he is, sets out to remind John who John is.

“And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” Jesus says. John’s disciples turn to go. As they are leaving, Jesus asks those in the crowd what had drawn them to John’s wilderness. Not the scenery, not a spectacle, not even a hot-looking celebrity, but rather a prophet – and not just any prophet, but the prophet, the second Elijah that Malachi had foretold (Mal. 3:1), the greatest man ever born.

“Whoever has ears, let them hear,” Jesus concludes. I think he is speaking particularly to the ears of John’s departing disciples and, by proxy, to John himself.

As the Messiah we want, particularly when facing a crisis like the one John was facing, when evil seems poised, for the millionth time, to lop the head clean off of what is good and right, Jesus can seem like a disappointment at best. What good is a Messiah who dithers in Galilee, finally makes his way to Jerusalem, then just gives up, dies, and disappears? Maybe he was just a nut, or even a fraud. And if he was, what does that make us, his followers? Aren’t there better messiahs to be found, ones more capable of protecting us and putting the hurt on our enemies? If this one isn’t going to get the job done, maybe we should ditch him and look for one who will. Maybe we are fakers and fools if we don’t.

The problem with butt-kicking messiahs, though, is that they just might kick yours if you ever dare speak to them the way John spoke to Jesus. We don’t know, of course, what John thought about Jesus’ reply, or even whether he still had a head to think with by the time the message arrived. What we do know is what we hear and see in this passage. We hear and see Jesus – the only true Messiah we get, and the only one we truly need – knowing and forgiving the limits of John’s faith. I think it’s reasonable to hope Jesus knows and forgives ours, too.

Second Sunday of Advent (December 4, 2022)

We have to listen extra hard for grace when John the Baptist is screaming things like “brood of vipers,” “wrath to come,” and “burn with unquenchable fire.” To hear John tell it, we can bet that the sweet baby Jesus we’ll all be adoring in a few weeks will grow up to be one fearsome butt kicker, and it’s our butts he’ll be aiming for.

One way to shield ourselves from all this vitriol, of course, is to assume it is directed at others, specifically long-dead people whom we judge to have been more depraved than we are, who had so much more to repent of than we do and, by extension, had so much more judgment to face. Isn’t it true, after all, that John holds back on all the scary stuff until the Pharisees and Sadducees show up? We are invited, it seems, to gather behind John and join him in flinging insults and condemnation at these obvious, ancient villains.

But in Luke’s account of the presumably same event (See Chapter 3), John directs his “brood of vipers” insult, and all that follows, at the crowd in general, not just at the delegation of religious elites. In Luke’s version, we’re all vipers, and John’s unquenchable fire is a universal hazard.

An odd thing happens in Luke’s account, though. In Luke, John gets specific about what this repentance he is prescribing entails. So what, exactly, does it take to avoid having one’s snaky hide burned to a crisp? Share your excess food and clothing with the needy, John says. If you’re a tax collector, don’t enrich yourself by overcharging people. If you’re a soldier, don’t use trumped-up charges and extortion to supplement your government-issued paycheck.

That’s all? I mean, I donate my extra stuff and give to charity, and I don’t think I routinely swindle or extort anyone, either in my professional or personal life. Most people I know are about the same as I am. Like me, they no doubt could be more generous, and they probably cut a few ethical corners now and then, as do I. But all in all, I and they are decent, upright people. Were the ordinary people of John’s time really that much more terrible?

It’s possible that they were, I suppose. Living under enemy occupation in first-century Palestine probably put most folks a lot closer to the edge than most folks today. When everyone is fearful and struggling to survive, selfishness and even barbarity can multiply. And this was a culture rife with slavery, warfare, injustice, oppression, prejudice, economic exploitation, and all sorts of other ills.

An honest listing of our culture’s ills would be no shorter, however. It would differ mainly in content. Our wealth today doesn’t depend, as theirs did then, on forced labor by enslaved people. But it does depend on industrialization at a level capable of rendering the planet unlivable. And while slavery may have disappeared worldwide, it hasn’t been gone for all that long, its effects still feed economic disparities today, and we – especially those of us in the U.S. – still have ways of forcing people to do intolerable, even dangerous jobs for pay so low they can’t afford basic necessities.

It seems, then, that this fiery sermon John preached more than 2,000 years ago remains hot enough for us to burn our fingers on today. And maybe a lot more. It could be that, even today, our occasional moral lapses have consequences far more serious than we surmise. And maybe John’s condemnation encompasses not only us as individuals but our whole culture, even our whole world.

In fact, that’s the only way to understand why John characterizes what’s coming as a “kingdom.” In John’s time as well as today, something as comprehensive as a kingdom doesn’t tolerate rivals, alternatives, or divided loyalties. A coming kingdom, by its nature, poses an existential threat to the existing kingdom. If the new is coming – and John assures us that it is – every bit of the old is doomed. Seen in that context, all of these terrifying metaphors John uses, like axes felling unfruitful trees and fire consuming deadwood and chaff, can’t be dismissed as mere hyperbole from a half-crazy wild man irritated by his scratchy camel hair clothing and utterly disgusting diet. These images really do portray what the new kingdom’s displacement of the old one will be like.

So, where’s the grace? It’s right there in the first word out of John’s mouth: Repent. This coming kingdom will destroy all that stands in its way. But there is a way to not stand in its way. Repent. It’s not even that hard. Just start doing what you already know to be right. You can begin, or begin again, right here and now, in the muddy waters of the Jordan, or wherever else you might be. Prepare the way. Make the paths straight. Pick your side. The new and coming king will handle the rest. He’ll chop away your deadwood, blow away your chaff, and burn it all out of existence, leaving the only version of you that can be real in the new reality he brings.

This baby in the manger will, indeed, grow up. But he will not become your tyrant. He will become your liberator.

First Sunday of Advent (November 27, 2022)

Advent begins this year with Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 24:36-44 to “keep awake,” and “be ready.”

For what? For change, evidently. Sudden, massive, even calamitous change. Change that sweeps away all that is routine and familiar. Change on the scale of the Genesis flood, or Jerusalem’s destruction, or the “coming of the Son of Man” on a day known only to God. Nobody nods off in the middle of such calamities. But the run-ups to them often invite complacency and inattention. “Don’t be caught unaware or unprepared,” Jesus is telling his disciples (and us). “Be alert. Be prepared.”

But hypervigilance is the last thing I want to practice right now. All I want to do is make it to the end of the semester, sit through winter commencement in my professor’s robe and funny hat, file my grades, and coast into winter break, when I can sleep in, fix lazy breakfasts, lounge around the house, and worry about nothing more vexing than what to get my wife for Christmas. Maybe I’ll fiddle with that coding package I’ve been wanting to figure out. Amy wants to go to a light display in Nashville. Some movies are coming out that we want to see. We’ll drive home, of course, then drive back – things as routine today as the agricultural routines Jesus alluded to then. By the time the spring semester starts, I may actually feel bored.

My holiday torpor stems more from a perceived than actual lull in what is going on around me, though. As I do most semesters these days, I showed my students just a few weeks ago how to map tract-level poverty and food insecurity rates for Rutherford County, and I noted how the county’s struggling households tend to cluster in neighborhoods right around campus and along the I-24 corridor that runs though Smyrna and LaVergne toward the Davidson County border. The problems the people in those neighborhoods face won’t disappear over the holiday break. If anything, they will intensify, as heating bills rise, children go hungry without weekday school lunches, and family stresses mount. I know of people staring down their first Christmas since losing a loved one. I know of places where people will sleep outside tonight. Perhaps my willful obliviousness to the ever-present, always-unfinished work at hand is part of what Jesus is warning about.

I think there’s at least one other part, though, and naming it gets at why this scene, lifted from the Olivet Discourse toward the end of the Gospel story, makes a fitting a reading for the kickoff of an Advent two millennia after the story of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection played out. During this time in between Jesus’s ascension and return, the struggle to stay watchful can be a struggle see that anything at all is happening. Here on the boundary between 2022 and 2023, God’s redemption of humanity can seem like a story paused on the last frame of the last Gospel. After a while, the pause can feel more like an end, and the story, increasingly irrelevant. It doesn’t help that all the action seems to be happening elsewhere, in places where superstars strut and pose, politicians wrangle for power, and the best things in life are just a few dollars out of reach. And whatever happened all those centuries ago, in a since-destroyed capital of a since-destroyed nation subjugated by a since-collapsed empire, it often doesn’t seem to have made things any better. Wars come and go, but keep coming. The greedy still exploit the vulnerable. Diseases still bring suffering and death. This vaunted redemption looks a lot like plain, old neglect. Or perhaps nothing more than a myth.

Thus, Advent isn’t merely a call to retell the story. It’s a call to believe that the story is still unfolding, to see that there was no pause, and to understand that being wakeful and ready means watching for our cues and performing our parts. It’s OK to rest by the manger and wonder at the love of a God who would put on our wounded flesh to save us. But can you see God, too, in all the improbable places? Can you meet God in them, and join in whatever God is up to there? All by yourself, you can’t. But I don’t see Jesus ever so much as hinting that we would have to do these things alone. Weren’t we remembering, just a few weeks ago, what he said on his way into the sky? He would be with us always, he said. Even to the end of the world.

(Matthew 17:1-9, from the readings for Transfiguratioin Sunday)

Preachers sometimes poke fun at Peter for the way he lost his head on that mountaintop after witnessing the blazing glory of a transfigured Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah.

“Lord, it is good for us to be here!” Peter blurts out. “If you wish, I will put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah!”

Matthew’s straightforward account offers a relatively kind portrayal of Peter’s disorientation. Luke adds a comment that Peter “did not know what he was saying” (9:33), and Mark opines that Peter “did not know what to say, they were so frightened” (9:6).

Given these digs in the text, you can’t really blame preachers for piling on. The ribbing often transitions into a critique of Peter’s apparent preference for awesome spiritual mountaintop experiences rather than the slog of everyday discipleship and kingdom work waiting to be done back down the mountain, back down in the real world. Such sermons urge us to enjoy the spiritual highs when they come our way but caution us against getting addicted to them. We’ll have all the glory we want after we die. Until then, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get busy.

But I think I understand at least something of Peter’s reaction, here. And I don’t think he’s all that far off the mark.

On my bedroom dresser is a not-especially-extraordinary giant Atlantic cockle shell. Despite the word “giant” in its name, it is only about as big as the palm of my hand. When I hold it, I can curl my fingertips and thumb around its edges. It is mostly beige colored, with touches of darker brown. In a shell shop, it would sit on the discount rack toward the back of the store. It is nothing spectacular. But it is, in a way, one of Peter’s glory shelters.

It came into my possession during one morning of a beach vacation several summers ago. I had gone by myself for a sunrise walk on the cool, smooth, hard-packed stretch of wet sand just above the reach of the waves.

Despite the scenery, my mood was dark.

For reasons I don’t have time to go into, I had been feeling God was far away, and maybe even nonexistent. I had headed for the beach that morning thinking that maybe he and I would reconnect in some way. But I had been walking for a while, and I had felt precisely nothing. Despairing and a little angry as I turned to head back to the condo, I prayed – demanded, really – that God give me some kind of sign to show me that he really was there. Was … anywhere.

The shell on my dresser is one of a dozen giant Atlantic cockle shells that began washing up on the sand right in front of me a short time later. They appeared one by one along a perhaps 50-yard stretch of beach that I had passed no more than 20 minutes earlier on the outbound portion of my walk. Each was practically unscathed, which was rare. The ocean left nothing comparable to them on the beach at any other time during the week-long trip, just tiny shells, or chips and chunks of larger ones. But nobody had dumped the shells there; the only footprints on the wet sand were my own.

Perhaps there is some rational explanation for how the shells came to me on that morning, but I can’t imagine what it would be. I think that finding one unscathed shell in the surf under those circumstances would have been a stroke of luck. But finding a dozen struck me as a miracle.

I gathered them sheepishly. As I picked up each one, rinsed it in the water and inspected it, I sensed God telling me to look closely at its graceful curves, rippled surface and smooth inside and try to explain how such a thing could come to be, let alone the living creature it had protected, without at least a touch of divinity. Hadn’t the same divinity been practically shouting – or maybe singing – to me all morning as the waves had crashed and the wind had blown and the darkness had faded and the sun had risen? Hadn’t I experienced it all with a mind and body that, themselves, were improbable, and even inexplicable, without a Creator? I had been impressed by the seemingly miraculous appearance of a dozen sea shells. Hadn’t every preceding moment been just as miraculous? Wouldn’t every succeeding moment?

I think that is a key lesson of the Transfiguration. I think God lifted the veil muting the glory of one moment to show Peter, James and John – and us – that every moment is bursting at the seams with glory, be it on the mountain, down in the valley, or anywhere in between. If we saw that glory in full at all times, it would consume us. We would go as out of our minds as Peter had, and there would be no coming back. But the glory is there at all times nonetheless. God does not “show up in a big way,” as we sometimes excitedly claim he did after a particular mountaintop experience with him. And we do not conjure up his presence in church on a given Sunday morning if the music is just right and the sermon perfectly on target and the congregation’s hearts sufficiently open. The question is never whether he will come to us. The question is always whether we will discern that, as Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, “He is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Did you catch that? God does not commute to work, or travel back home at the end of the day. He does not run to our rescue from some other place that he was when our trouble began. He cannot arrive too late, or fail to show up at all. We live and move and exist “in him.” I am surrounded by him as I write this. You are surrounded by him as you read this. He isn’t “here” in the sense of being here with us. He is the very place we call “here,” no matter where we are.

Thank goodness I don’t have to live on that beach to be in the presence of the glory I encountered there. It would be hot in the summer and cold in the winter and wet more often than not. But the shell on my dresser is, in one sense, a shelter that I have built, one I can visit now and then to remember the lesson I learned that morning:

Glory is everywhere. All the time.

(Matthew 5:1-12, from The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany)

Perhaps we should read the Beatitudes on every Super Bowl Sunday.

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