Sermon Tone Analysis

My older brother and I have been caught up in a kind of contest for most of our lives concerning who is the most out to lunch member of our immediate family.

My brother, since childhood, has been unbelievably good at losing things.

We grew up in a neighborhood in Winnipeg called River Heights with — and this is no exaggeration — five rinks within three blocks of our house.

Two at the elementary school, and another three at the community center.

All winter long my brother would leave the house with two skates, two skate guards, a stick and a puck, only to return with some combination of two skates, no skate guards, a stick and a puck, or a stick, a puck, his skate guards and one skate, or a puck, his skates and skate guards and no stick.

Every time, guaranteed.

Either my mom or dad would be like — what happened to your…?

To which question my sister and I would reply in chorus, “he left it at the rink.”

Such was the contribution my older brother made to his and my ongoing battle to see who could exasperate our parents the most.

My contribution lay in my unrivaled ability not to pay attention to other people.

I literally cannot recall the number of the times someone has said to me, over the course of my life, Did you hear anything I just said to you?

Partly because this has happened so often, and also because I wasn’t paying attention at the time.

This tendency of mine has gone by various names in my family: “Johanna land” and the “rabbit-dog” effect, being two of them.

As in everyone is talking about rabbits, but I think they are talking about dogs.

And it has no doubt added to the challenge of being married to me.

Michael, at various points in our relationship, has said that his basic goal, with respect to me, is to get me to pay attention to him.

For the most part, he does this by making progressively more and more outrageous statements in my general direction until something finally registers.

He’ll stand in the doorway of my office and be like --

My next dog is going to be a Bichon Frise.

Or, I know you can’t hear me right now but Paul Manafort has a suit made out of ostrich.

Another of his techniques consists of his asking me purposely annoying hypothetical questions like, if you could have dinner with anyone in history who would it be?

Or better yet, if Macey could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be?

(Macey is the stray pit bull mix we adopted five years ago, who looks like the RCA dog and only truly loves one person in this world, namely, Michael.)

The answer is obviously Rudolf Nureyev.

At any rate, I was reminded of this hypothetical question this last week as I prepared to preach on today’s scripture, as it furnishes us with Jesus’ answer to the question, if you could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be?

Today’s scripture depicts what is traditionally called the Transfiguration.

Jesus has taken Peter, James and John up onto a mountain for a prayer session, during which something happens to his appearance.

His clothes become dazzlingly white and his face changes.

Jesus is then joined by two of the Old Testament’s most important prophets: Moses and Elijah.

It is an evocative passage, that raises questions about the transformative power of prayer in Jesus’ life.

His prayers in this scene don’t just change his heart; they change his face.

They have the effect of

The passage is also one of the New Testament’s most intriguing attempts to explore Jesus’ relationship to his tradition.

Throughout the gospels we see Jesus challenging the religious authorities of his day.

Luke’s gospel alone records ### arguments between Jesus and Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, chief priests and elders.

Over the course of this gospel he fights with them over issues as disparate as blank, blank, blank and blank.

At times it can be hard to believe Jesus’s own claims that “not a blank...”

And yet, passages such as this one suggest that Jesus did not so much reject his tradition as relate to it differently from the religious authorities of his day and even his own disciples.

Last Sunday I asked people to share some of the questions they have about Christianity or the Bible or faith in general for our new podcast.

We got some really good ones.

One in particular stuck out because of the relationship it bore to today’s reading.

The person asked this question...

[quote]

Over the years, lots of people have taken a run at this question.

They have tried to identify some central core scriptural principal over and against which everything else in the bible is to be measured.

This was Calvin’s approach.

Other people have tried to come up with a way of ranking things like scripture, experience, reason and tradition relative to one another to ensure that people are weighing the evidence for particular positions correctly.

This is Wesley’s approach.

Still other people have tried to find some extra scriptural authority to guide — or constrain — our interpretations of scripture.

This is the Quaker and Roman Catholic approach.

And all of these approaches have good things to argue for them — albeit none of them quite captures the tension we find in this passage between Jesus the listener and Peter the commemorater.

Furthermore, I’m not sure they do a good reflecting what this passage has to show us about how Jesus would answer this question

In this passage, Peter is living up to the meaning of his name, “Stone.”

Where Jesus is portrayed as listening as Moses and Elijah talk to him, Peter is looking to create some kind of monument to these three figures, to freeze their interaction in time and place, to “honor” them.

Where Jesus is receiving from them the message about his coming departure, Peter, weighed down with sleep, is looking to prevent the three of them from leaving by creating three separate, self-contained dwellings for them, apparently to foreclose the possibilities of any further conversation.

The church has collectively made a huge number of mistakes in the past and is still at it today.

So the person who contributed this question is right to ask, what do we need to do to have the best chance to take part in our time’s essential reckonings?

Perhaps the first step is to acknowledge that these reckonings will never end this side of the great divide.

It will always be necessary to repent mistakes and grow in awareness.

To be

We will also need to

The second step might be to resist with all our strength the tendency to commemorate the past, as opposed to listening to its great personalities “talk” or heeding them when they tell us the time has come to leave.

By resisting the impulse to commemorate

What this heeding might look like for us individually and as a community:

Actually reading the prophets.

Reading the prophets.

Start with Amos and Micah.

This is what people do.

They build things rather than

Practicing the art of leaving things behind.

Seeing departure as an accomplishment.

Praying in such a way that it makes our faces and clothes change.

I began the sermon by joking about a Wagner distinctive: a certain out to lunch quality that apparently was passed down to us along the paternal line.

I leave us with an observation.

Peter is described in this passage as not knowing what he said when he suggests “making the three dwellings.”

What is it that we do not know — or are not seeing — when we seek to protect or shelter in place the past?