Beloved Everyone Everywhere
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – February 19, 2023
Beloved Everyone Everywhere
The February before last I discovered virtualvacation.us, a website where those of us who have that No IL February wanderlust can go to virtually travel the world without taxing our budget. I spent a lovely 20 minutes on a walking tour outside the Louvre in France, all while still in my pajamas.
Another evening all four of my family members crowded around a computer screen to guess which US city we were virtually strolling through. You may be unsurprised to hear we found it so enjoyable, it was hard for us to stop.
I do know some people who are traveling right now. I know some too who are dreaming of traveling, when the budget, the schedule, and health conditions allow. Many of us, who have been experiencing stress, isolation, anxiety, or boredom over the past three years, are ready to get out and go--anywhere.
While lots of us may be suffering from a case of wanderlust, Peter had the opposite experience. He never wanted to leave the mountaintop he was on with Jesus. Or at least, that’s what I so often hear in his awe-filled stammering. He wants to build three dwellings--one for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. He wants to stay and dwell in that wildly holy and wholly unexpected moment.
But of course it is not to be. A voice from heaven booms in their ears, and the moment passes before Jesus can so much as laugh at sweet, stammering Peter.
Maybe what many of us, modern day hearers of this story have most in common with Peter is knowing what it’s like to want to be, go, or stay somewhere we can’t. Some of us have had more practice than others experiencing life when it doesn’t go the way we’d like.
All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of something coming to an end. All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of something beginning. All of us, sooner or later will live through the hard and beautiful experience of the mundane muddy middle between beginnings and endings. Like it or not though, change is always with us.
Change was what Jesus was up to on that mountaintop. He was being transfigured or transformed. Metamorphoo is the Greek word here, which sounds a lot like what caterpillars are up to in the cocoon.
I can’t imagine what kind of change this experience must have worked on Peter. He was still getting used to this wild way of Jesus. Peter hadn’t heard the voice that was just for Jesus in the first chapter calling him Beloved. But now, as Jesus stands shining on the mountaintop, surrounded by prophets of old, Peter hears that voice loud and clear,
“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”
How would Peter have gone down that mountain changed? Even stuck as we may sometimes feel in our own circumstances, are there ways we too, can have a moment like Peter did? How can we find the change we seek--whatever it may be?
I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s the real reason I come to worship. Yes, this is my job and the paycheck is nice. Thank you. But I’ve been showing up to worship on my own account for a long time before that, and I’ll tell you I come to be astonished. I come to meet Jesus, in all his transformed and transforming glory. I sure hope the music is good and the company and the coffee and the sermon, too. But the truth is, for me, all those things are just a vessel for the good stuff.
My oldest son and I have a joke about how various things like baked goods, bread, etc. are all just a vehicle for butter. Anybody hear me on that one? We love butter.
Friends, Jesus is the butter. If you don’t love butter, you can pick your own favorite condiment. But for me Jesus is the butter. He’s the main attraction. And here’s why:
That voice from heaven calls him the Beloved, and that’s the only way he ever treats us, like we are whole, beloved, children of God, too. The world is full of messages that would have us believe we are not enough. We are not enough to be really loved. If anyone really knew all about us, they would know how not enough we really are. No place we can be, stay, or go will make us enough either. It’s a good way to keep us tamed. To keep us fearful and ashamed.
Jesus has a different message. It doesn’t matter where are you are or how long you’re gonna be there. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, or what you’re gonna do. It doesn’t matter who you are, how you’re made, what you struggle with, or what your gifts are. Wherever, however, and whoever you are, you are enough. You are enough. You are more than enough to be loved.
That’s the message Jesus brings to us over and over again. You are enough. You are loved. You are more than enough to be loved.
Make yourself a mountaintop and go meet Jesus. Find the way you need to receive that message. Maybe you don’t need to go anywhere at all. Maybe all you need to do is find yourself at home in this very skin of yours, beautiful and beloved, despite any broken bits. Maybe the only change you need is the change that comes from believing you, you are enough. That’s a change that has the power not just to heal us but to offer healing to all those who come after us, too.
In today’s story Jesus stands on a mountaintop with the disciples’ ancestors, and whether they knew it or not those disciples were becoming our ancestors, too. They were witnesses to a love that has always been and always will be. We are inheritors of a shining story of eternal love, transformational courage, and blessed enoughness. That story is written in all creation, in the stars and the mountaintops, and it is written in our hearts, too. If we want to pass on that holy, healing love, all we need do is let it shine forth wherever we go and wherever we stay.
May it be so. Amen.
It may be scary to really believe that, because the changes it brings may be profound. It may seem far too wild and far too good to be true.
Like midwives who accompany women and babies through birth, we too can accompany each other through the fear and disbelief. We can say, yes, yes indeed we are enough. God loves us and everyone else. Imagine the change we could bear into this world together with that good news.
In the book of Exodus, the midwives Shiprah and Puah attended to Hebrew women in bearing children into slavery in Egypt. As devotional writer Anna Lisa Gross puts it,
They knew how to sound domesticated when Pharaoh questioned how all the baby Hebrew boys he ordered dead were mysteriously alive. But their merciful actions were wildly out of Pharaoh’s control. Their wildly merciful actions led to Moses being born whole and set adrift to his destiny in a basket in the bulrushes. That merciful courage and compassion was enough to free a whole nation and it is still setting us free whether it shows up on mountaintops or in seemingly mundane moments.
Following midwives through the 1918 pandemic in Dublin, Ireland in Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars, I learned that influenza comes from the Italian word for influence. Before viruses were discovered, ancient Europeans had all manner of explanations for the illnesses that cause sickness and death, including the influence of the ever-moving stars overhead.
We may have come a long way as a species in understanding immunology but we still struggle to free ourselves from influences that would have us domesticated and controlled. We still so often struggle to free ourselves from the yearning to have more of a domesticating, controlling influence on our world than will ever be ours to have.
If we set our course by the star that is Jesus, shining, dazzling, and changing our world with a faithful love, then we need not fear, we need not worry about all that is beyond our control, we need not wish we were anywhere or anyone we’re not. All we need do is be our wild, beloved, enough-just-as-we-are children of God and walk with Jesus, wherever he leads.
May it be so. Amen.
