Enter the Cloud
“Enter the Cloud”
Exodus 24:12-18 2 Peter 1:16-21 Matthew 17:1-9
Transfiguration Sunday, Year A
February 23, 2020
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Andrew Kennaly, Pastor
It was funny, and kind of strange, the other day when I was talking with someone about my leading worship every week as a Pastor. This person is a couple generations removed from attending church, and they looked at me with an expression of shock and new insight as they asked, “You mean, you have to write something new for your sermon every week?” I simply smiled and said, “Yes, every week,” as I filtered out my thoughts on how to respond.
I added it up one time a few months ago. I’ve been ordained 25 years, and when you apply some averages on how many pages, how many weeks per year, it comes out to about 5,625 pages. If you figure a book is around 200 pages, this comes to the equivalent of 28 books. Quite the creative process!
Sometimes people ask me if I have a sermon already written, just in case I get sick or something. I don’t. I go week to week, and every week is new and interacts with life as it unfolds. Others, who notice my weeks can get rather busy, have asked if it’s possible to simply reuse old sermons, rather than write a new one every week. This doesn’t usually work very well, because the context has changed, and I’ve changed, and perspectives shift. I actually have read some of my old sermons. They have a very high cringe factor, and I wonder how in the world I ever said stuff like that. I certainly hope those who were listening have grown anyway.
Earlier in my ministry I bought into the company line, I wanted to be a good pastor and I trusted the system that taught me to perpetuate views promoting transactional faith, a faith largely based on thoughts, and constant talking, on having the correct cognitively agreed upon ideas about God. We typically call this a belief system. Like fundamentalists passing out printed tracts, this belief system could be charted out as it teaches about a gap, a chasm between us and God, and Jesus dying on the cross saves us from this sin, the only way to bridge the separation, so that when God looks at us, God is appeased because God actually sees Jesus. Even today we read, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” This saves us; its called atonement, and if we pray the right prayer, we will live with Jesus in heaven for eternity and celebrate with Jesus when he comes back at the end of time. This life doesn’t really mean as much, it’s the next one that counts.
Church tradition has really hammered this home in Western Christianity, such as Jonathan Edwards in the 1700’s preaching about Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God under the threat of eternal torment in hell, or the Popes of the 1500’s creating the Doctrine of Discovery, saying Christian nations can seize the land of the New World and take it forcefully from aboriginal inhabitants, who, if they don’t convert to Christianity, can be killed as you plunder their resources. Or the promotion of the Doctrine of Original Sin as construed (more accurately misconstrued) from St. Augustine in the fourth century. The Penal Substitutionary Atonement Doctrine, where Jesus dies in our place to appease God, continues it’s influence to this very day, even in the bounds of the Inland Northwest Presbytery, saying blood must be spilled so we wretched humans can be saved; and it is human focused, anthropocentric, as the larger creation is viewed from traditional levels as a resource, a commodity to benefit human use.
I can’t preach my old sermons because they have hints of this type of toxic thinking, even though I also mentioned love and forgiveness, grace, peace, and promise. I can’t preach the company line like a good branch manager anymore, so I can’t use my old sermons.
Truth works, until it doesn’t. This is a saying I learned from a friend of mine. It’s a saying I’ve experienced as the limitations of conservative evangelical Christianity played out in my life until it reached it’s limit, and then the image of God it promotes, and the boxed-in theology almost killed me, and my world crumbled. It’s very disconcerting when you don’t fit into the system anymore. At one point, I almost left the ministry entirely, and it took years to recover, and I’m thankful that God revealed the Contemplative Path as an alternative, rooted in Christian history, orthodoxy, and the life of Jesus.
Christian mysticism, and experiential, contemplative prayer is like putting on a whole new set of glasses to read the same old books and discovering there is so much more to the story that I was told. The story gets better, beyond the mind’s limitations, deeper and deeper as the heart awakens and the soul expands as it watches self-imposed boundaries dissolving and is invited to experience the transformational Presence and unity of Christ’s Consciousness, who is there all along, waiting to expand vision and trust beyond the human plane and two-dimensional, dualistic thinking. The Contemplative Journey is not transactional, it is transformational.
The Contemplative Path reveals that the definition of sin is the illusion of separation, for we are never separate from God. Egocentric thinking promotes separation and superiority as people project out unprocessed pain, transmitting the fear of their shadows out into the world so they can point the finger at others and call them evil. The Western church has bought into this repetitive cycle of empty teaching.
But unity, grace from God who needs no appeasement in order to love us: these are aspects of a larger Reality that’s revealed, not to the mind, but to the heart and soul, and usually not as a teaching or formal lesson or lecture, or even in a sermon or through attending church, but through felt experience as a child of God, created in the image of the divine. Reflection, meditation, and ongoing spiritual disciplines invite God to heal us from the inside, to help repair this image from damage as we claim the divine core of our existence as Christ living in and through all things.
Don’t get me wrong, and be fore warned: the Contemplative Path is not an easy journey, and shifting beyond perceived Doctrinal certainties into mystery is like entering a cloud. No wonder God’s appearing throughout Scripture often happens on a mountain, away from known routines and systems, God’s Presence is shown as that mountain top is enshrouded by a cloud. Like Moses on Mt. Sinai and Jesus on the mountain in the Transfiguration story, this morning we read of people giving God extended time and focus, patiently trusting God’s Presence, even though we often don’t know how to handle mystery, and embracing the cloud can be frightening and disorienting, like a fish swimming upstream, or even more, like a fish out of water.
It’s no wonder a fourteenth century Christian mystic anonymously wrote a book called, the Cloud of Unknowing. Truth works, until it doesn’t. Our mind can only get us so far, and you can’t grasp mist or hold it in a box. Unknowing is what Peter shows us as he goes on an on about how great it is to see Jesus with Moses and Elijah, and then goes face down in the dirt because he’s scared.
This story illustrates movement, showing Peter as an example of our ego trying to control, define, and take advantage of spiritual truths, but reaching limits and at that threshold, experiencing fear, disorientation, and what we might call, our bubble bursting. This rarely happens, because we are very good at defending and moving against anything threatening the status quo.
As God speaks about Jesus, the contemplative knows that Jesus is the archetype, and what happens to Jesus happens to us as he embraces the fullness of humanity as a created being. “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” is a statement shared by God about Jesus, and about us. We are beloved by God, and God is pleased with us. No separation, only relationship; no appeasing necessary, for God is already pleased. Like the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches, God is not a judge, but a doctor, not condemning us for sin, but seeking to heal us because thinking we are separate does great damage to our soul. Claiming Unity in Being changes everything and transforms the world.
Too many aspects to preach about in these passages. Like Moses, he’s on the mountain for at least a week, 7 days is symbolic of a very long time. How often do we retreat, taking time alone, in silence, to spend days and days prayerfully focusing on God’s Presence? Like the mountains themselves, it takes effort to climb them, the spiritual journey is not a restful experience, but involves struggle, even suffering as we learn to shed that which weighs us down. I love the fact that God totally interrupts Peter. We can trust God to know what we need even better than we know ourselves. Other aspects, like Jesus bringing Peter, James, and John, to show that we are not alone in this journey, but it’s important to have companions, while at the same time, not all the disciples went, just a minority, which is indicative of why the Contemplative path is not embraced by mainstream Christianity. Only a few, it seems, go the distance toward transformation on the mountain. Yet even those few return to the valleys. It’s Jesus who touches them. While Mystery leaves us fearful, Jesus gives us courage; while encountering God in unfiltered ways can be humbling, Jesus teaches what a life of humility looks like.
Most people aren’t really interested in this Jesus way. For example, Jesus was a pacifist, he didn’t use weapons, didn’t hurt or kill anyone. Even when he tipped over the tables of the money changers and used a whip in the Temple Courtyard, this was on behalf of the Gentiles, who were supposed to be allowed to pray there, and a whip is a tool used by shepherds, not for hurting or causing injury, but for guiding and protecting those who are astray. We don’t live a nation that promotes pacifism in the Jesus way, and the Western Church supports this through Empire Religion and the many doctrines we mentioned earlier. Once again, it’s only a few who hear the voice of God from within the cloud of unknowing. But maybe God is calling us to take the effort of entering the cloud.
Peter didn’t ask for a cloud, and it’s the cloud that enveloped him. We don’t ask for challenging times in our lives that move us to question all the assumptions we’ve ever had; it’s no picnic getting pain riled up. But within the cloud, God’s voice speaks and we’re invited to listen. Jesus is a human being. Moses was human, Elijah was human, and look at the radiance of this multi-dimensional experience! If you’re waiting till the end of time to see Jesus, you aren’t paying attention and your spiritual imagination has fallen asleep. Let Jesus touch you, let God’s Presence shape you as love expresses through you truths that cannot be boxed in.
To close, let’s try and wrap this up somehow. I’ll close with a quote from Clare. In twelfth century Assisi, Italy, St. Francis and Clare led communities of men and women, in learning an alternative orthodoxy based on simplicity, poverty, humble trust, seeing God present in all creatures, relating to things not as objects but as subjects, like Brother Sun and Sister Moon, and embodying the loving acceptance of God even for that which people would reject. Here is a quote from Clare as we on Transfiguration Sunday come alongside that great cloud of witnesses transformed by the Living Presence of Christ:
“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God’s compassionate love for others.” (Clare of Assis)
May God’s humble, vulnerable love, transform us NOW, even as forever. Amen.