tabernacles

Maybe it was a wedding. Or a first kiss. The birth of a child. Or a grand promotion. Maybe you saw the Grand Canyon from the window seat on a plane.  Or maybe you climbed an actual mountain. We’ve all had mountaintop experiences, those moments, usually brief, where the line between the sacred and the profane dissolves and we find ourselves on holy ground. It takes work to get there, climbing and bushwhacking and breathing heavy. But when we get to the top, whether it’s a graduation or a house purchase, a life changing vacation or paying off the student loans, when we get to the top, something sacred is there, and we need to mark the moment. 

We mark our moments with rings, with signatures, with fancy clothes, special dinners. We mark our moments with monuments and toasts, songs and hopefully, some human connection. We want to hold on to the moment for as long as possible, treasure it, keep it safe, make it memorable, never let it go. Peter wants to do the same. He and James and John experience Jesus in a new way, dazzling white, shining like the sun, speaking with the prophets who have defined and framed their faith for centuries. We all want to house the holy, find a way to keep it still, keep it memorable, keep it safe. “So let’s build some houses,” Peter says. “One for Moses, one for Elijah, one for you.” 

Now Peter is one for two so far. He’s scored some points for naming Jesus as the Messiah in chapter 16, but almost in the same breath, as Jesus predicts his own death, Peter is rebuked. He’s told, in the harshest of terms, “Get behind me Satan!” But Peter, bless him, has the audacity to try again. He wants to build some tabernacles, some houses, a place where the holy can be kept, high upon a mountain, where the sacred and the profane have collapsed in on each other, where they’ve experienced the presence of God. 

Now this is totally within his tradition. Mountains were sacred places, and to build a monument high upon one was the natural thing to do in this situation. And it’s the highest of honors, to equate Jesus with Elijah and Moses, to say they’re all deserving of monuments high upon this mountain. Jesus, the same in stature as the prophet Elijah and the emancipator Moses, was the highest honor Peter knew to give him. It’s the “natural” response, if there can be any, to this dazzling, awe-inspiring, God revelation. Let’s build a thing, a house, a place for people to travel to, a place for people to come to, to experience God. 

So it’s natural for us, too, to want to mark these sacred occasions in our lives with symbols, buildings, monuments and photographs. We want to hold on to them, keep them safe, treasure them so that we can go back to them and experience some part of it all over again. That’s why we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and holidays. That’s why we mark our experiences with rings and presents and certificates and diplomas. 

So, Peter says, “Let’s build a building. Let’s erect a monument. A tabernacle. A house. A place where God can be experienced again and again, a place to mark this amazing experience that we’ve had.” 

The Hindus are really good at this. When they have sacred experiences, they mark it, right where it happened, and this invites others to the same sacred place, where they experience God, where they mark the place, and that encourages more people to come to that same place to experience that same experience. These, then, become sacred, holy spaces. Places where the presence of God has been experienced and touched and known, even just a little bit.  All throughout India there are sacred trees, sacred mountains, sacred buildings, sacred columns and walls and sidewalks and shrines and temples. These are places where the divine has been experienced, where something sacred has happened, epiphanies and theophanies and transfigurations where the ordinary has turned extraordinary. 

But this time is a little different. This time, in our reading for today, God reveals God’s self in three different ways. There are three different theophanies, three visions, in this one transfiguration. 

The first is the obvious one: Jesus transforming before their eyes, blindingly white, shining like the sun. This has the disciples gobsmacked, astonished, but still standing on their feet, awed, but still functioning. This revelation shows Jesus’s majesty, his glory and his awe-fullness, and Peter is able to be amazed by this, he’s able to name it, he wants to build a house around it, to mark it and remember it. 

It’s a once in a life-time revelation, an eye opening, extraordinary vision where the sacred comes down to us and reveals us some of its glory. So of course Peter wants to mark it, wants to note the time and the place, wants to build some kind of monument to it - it’s a monumental experience.

But the next has them all lying prostrate on the ground. It’s the voice of God coming through the clouds. God reveals God’s self through a booming voice and the naming of Jesus as God’s son. This revelation reveals God’s power, God’s transcendence, God’s immanence made present. It’s enough to knock them to the ground. They pass out. They can’t handle it. “This is my Son, the beloved. Listen to him!” 

God doesn’t often speak from clouds, but when God does, it’s to point to Jesus. This is God’s response to Peter wanting to build three tabernacles for Elijah, Moses and Jesus. It’s to point to Jesus, to highlight him, to lift him above every other name. This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him!  And so we’re given instructions, we’re told what we’re to do, how to function as Christ’s followers. We’re to listen to him. 

Finally, though, the disciples receive God’s presence through Jesus’s own touch. He reaches out to them, he touches them, and then he reassures them, saying, “Get up. Do not be afraid.”  This is Jesus. God’s son. Listen to him.

Jesus says, “Get up, don’t be afraid.” These are the words we should listen to. He doesn’t give details on how to build the right size house or what it should be made of. He doesn’t lecture about what’s just happened. He doesn’t reprimand or scold. He doesn’t even explain it. Instead, he goes back down the mountain with them. Back down to the people, down into the valley, where the work is, where the hurt and the dirty and the poor are. He goes back down with the disciples to the people. Because this is the way that Jesus reveals himself to us on the regular. This is the way Jesus comes to us; this is our theophany. It’s the touch of Jesus, him reaching out to us, telling us to get up, to not be afraid, and then to go back down the mountain. 

God reveals God’s self on mountaintops, through clouds and bright whites and shining like the sun, sure. But God doesn’t want us to stay there. Because God also reveals God’s self through touch, through the humanity of Jesus, and through our own humanity.

Don’t be afraid to go where Jesus reveals himself. Sometimes it means climbing a mountain. Sometimes it will be wild and overwhelming. It might be impractical, too bright, hard to see anything else, or it might be somewhere close by, somewhere familiar, somewhere earthy and real, but when we go where Jesus reveals himself, we will hear God, we will be transformed, too. 

Jesus also reveals himself in the every day, through his touch and his assurance to “Get up. Do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid to go back down the mountain, to go to the people, to leave the “sacred” space and enter in to the profane. Because God is there, too. We are not meant to stay on the mountain. We’re meant to go back down. Things won’t make sense to us until after we go back down, until after we enter back in to the everyday. Things won’t make sense to us until after Jesus’s humanity is on full display through his death and resurrection. That’s why he tells them not to say anything just yet. 

And so, in this way, this God, this God who reveals God’s self in the touch of Jesus, cannot be preserved, cannot be kept safe. We cannot build this God a monument, we cannot encapsulate this God, this God will not fit in a box. This is the God who comes back down the mountain with us, who enters in to humanity with us, who tells us, not to build houses on mountains and attract people to come to them, but to go back down, to enter in to the humanity, to go to the people, to find the lost and the least and ourselves. 

The God who touches us, who tells us to “get up. Do not be afraid,” is a God who goes with us back down the mountain. Back down to where things aren’t the mountaintop of extraordinary experiences, but in the valleys of human experience. 

So often we think, “If we build it, they will come.” 

But Jesus says, “No. Get up. Don’t be afraid. Go back down the mountain to the real world where real, fleshy, messy humanity is.” And he touches them — a reminder that God’s glory is present not just in clouds and light and voices from the sky, but in the humanity of touch. 

God is present in our touch, in the breaking down of boundaries between us, in the connection with one another, in community, in our humanity. God occasionally shows God’s self with fireworks and lasers, with talking clouds and blinding sunlight. Although, I’ve never been so lucky. But most of the time, God shows God’s self in us and through us, through connecting with each other, through the building of bridges between those whom we think we don’t have much in common. God wants us to go up the mountain to experience God, sure, but also to come back down, to enter in to the world, because that is what the incarnation is all about. 

We can do all sorts of things to attract people to our church, but what God really wants, what God is calling us to do, is to get up, to not be afraid, to go back down the mountain where our visions and transfigurations will make sense to us, to go to the people, to serve them, to see the face of Christ in them. 

We need to mark the sacred moments. We need to label them and cherish them and reflect upon them. Those mountaintop experiences are sacred. The weddings, the graduations, the promotions and the vacations, these are all important monumental experiences. But let’s not forget the life that happens in the in between. Those are sacred moments too. Those are the times when Jesus touches us with a human hand amidst a broken and human world. 

In this way, we are all tabernacles. We are all houses for God. We can all touch and be touched. We can all go to the people, go down the mountain, into the valleys, and touch one another. God is in the mountaintop experiences, this we know for sure. But God does not let us stay there. God calls us to be the presence of Christ for each other, down in the valley where the people are, where the need is, where the messy and the hurt and the broken are. God calls us to be tabernacles, not to stay up high on a mountain, but to bring Jesus down into the city, the valley, the place where the people are. May we, like Peter, like James, like John, may we become tabernacles for Christ. Get up. Do not be afraid.

Thanks be to God.

For No Reason.

A few short years ago, if you came to Big Dog coffee on the South Side, you’d be served up one of the most overeducated lattes you’ve probably ever had. 

I wasn’t all that great with the latte art, sometimes I could do an acceptable leaf or heart, but I’d be happy to serve you a tasty latte with a side of theopoetics, philosophical discourse, or narrative theology. With a bachelor’s degree in English literature, three masters degrees and a slew of years teaching college classes and preaching in pulpits, I was the most overeducated barista in the store. (Although actually, I hear there are a lot of us out there in the coffee world these days.) 

Some days would be so discouraging. All those papers written, all those years of study and sacrifice, all those books that still line my walls, and here I was, making eight dollars an hour slinging coffee and toasting bagels for college kids and retirees and millennials with their fancy dogs and their fancy purses. Tears would come to my eyes as I mopped the floors, cleaned the toilets. I’d won all these academic awards, gotten all these scholarships, learned how to parse Hebrew and Greek verbs, written hundreds of thesis statements, all for what? To scrape gum off the bottom of tables and tell the fancy millennials with their fancy purses that they can’t stay inside the store with their fancy dogs. 

Was I just wasting my time? 

In some ways, yes. I was biding my time, giving myself a little bit more time to heal from a destructive year and a mental breakdown. I was just treading water, waiting for the storm to pass, waiting to see what I was supposed to do next. 

But in other ways, I was doing exactly what Jesus was calling me to do. I was supposed to offer myself others, to struggle, to serve the coffee drinks with a smile and a story. I was overqualified, sure. But I had so much yet to learn. I was just an ordinary person with an ordinary job. My degrees and qualifications were worthless. 

I was back at square one, starting over, learning how to froth milk to just the right temperature and to make change quickly and to work with a partner when the line went out the door and down the street. The kids I worked with called me “mom,” and I loved and supported them the best I could — with my ordinary skills and my now-ordinary life. I learned the names of our regulars, memorized cappuccino and latte recipes, made smoothies and took orders from a sleep-deprived Bulgarian boss and his giant German Shepherds. I spent some time being ordinary. Doing what I had to do. 

But that’s just whom Jesus chooses in our reading today. Jesus chooses ordinary men. Not the super poor and destitute, not the rich or powerful. Not the educated. They’re just fishermen. Making a living the best they know how, with skills passed down to them from their fathers, working by the sweat of their brow and the burn of their muscles. 

They have all the qualifications needed to be fishermen, but that’s about it. They can repair nets and navigate the seas, they can row a boat, they can catch some fish and provide just enough sustenance to support themselves and their families. 

And they’re good at what they do. They can move quickly; they know the right times and places to find the fish; they can read the weather and the stars and the position of the sun. But they’re not preachers or rabbis. They’re not cut out to proselytize — they have no marketing degrees, no fancy computer graphics skills, no diplomas in systematic theology. There’s no reason for Jesus to be attracted to these guys in particular, no reason at all. In fact, they’ll hurt and betray and disappoint and neglect and run away and hide from Jesus before it’s all over. They’re your everyday John Does, doing everyday things, trying to make an everyday life out of this everyday, mundane, world.

And for all they know, Jesus himself is just an ordinary guy. He hasn’t done anything remarkable, not yet in the Gospel of Matthew at least. In Matthew, we get Jesus’ birth, and then we fast forward to his baptism, where some people, maybe? hear the voice of God, then he’s kicked out into the desert where he’s alone and then Jesus hears of John’s arrest, so Jesus withdraws to the desert again, alone, again, and then moves to Galilee, to the big metropolis of Capernum. 

He’s a loner. A wanderer. That’s it. That’s all we get of Jesus so far. There have been no miracles, no healings, no profound, awe-inspiring teachings. We’ve gotten one pronouncement that Jesus is God’s son at Jesus’ baptism, but there’s no clue that Peter, Andrew, James and John are there to hear it. 

From their perspective, Jesus is just a man. A man, walking along the beach.  These fishermen have no compelling reason to drop everything and follow him, except that that’s exactly what they do. There’s no compelling reason. There’s just a compelling man. 

Now if I were these guys, I’d want to ask all the questions. Jesus says, “Follow me,” and I want to know “Where are we going? How long will it take to get there? What are we going to do? Why are we doing it? And who the heck are you, anyway?” These are logical questions that the disciples simply don’t ask. I mean, Jesus could be the creepy guy in the white van, tempting them to come inside and go for a ride and eat his candy for all they know, and they don’t say a word. 

They simply drop everything, including their fishing expertise, including the things they’ve worked all their lives for, including their friends and their families and their way of life, including their reason and logic and sense of the practical. They drop their resumes and their promotions and their letters of recommendation. They drop it all, just to follow Jesus. 

What is it about Jesus that makes these guys drop everything, every single aspect of their lives - their livelihoods, their families, their security, their homes, everything. They give it all up for this stranger who simply asks them to “Follow me.” Literally, Jesus tells them to “Come behind me.” To “Do what I do. Act like I act. Learn from me, and then proceed likewise.” 

Jesus seeks them out and then tells them to do what he does, to seek more people who don’t have the qualifications or the degrees or the accolades but who will follow, simply because they are seeking. Jesus is saying: “You’ve been seeking fish, now go and seek people just as I have sought you.”

Jesus seeks them out. They don’t apply. They don’t gather up their transcripts and pay the application fee and write the personal essay. They don’t seek out their Rabbi and beg for him to take them under his wing. No. These guys were going about their business, doing their business the best way they knew how, and Jesus comes to them. Jesus is the one with the application in his hand, saying come to me, trust me, I have something you want and need. 

These disciples give up everything in order to gain something. Maybe to gain everything.

But they’re going to screw it up.

They’re going to doubt and betray and neglect and leave Jesus behind. 

Jesus knows there’s no guarantee on these guys. He doesn’t check their references or read their resumes. He takes a chance on them. Again, this isn’t something these guys have applied for; rather, this is something that has pursued them. It’s a high calling. The highest of callings. One we can’t be prepared for. And one that we will most certainly fail. It’s a high calling of an eventual failure. 

But, still, “Follow me,” Jesus says, “even though I know you’ll fail.” 

They drop it all and follow Jesus, and it all goes great for awhile. They take Jesus’ teachings to heart and they’ll watch him do miracles and heal lepers and eat with prostitutes, and then they’ll go out two by two to do the same thing. Peter will get a few answers right and will call Jesus “The Christ.” But then he’ll fall asleep. And he’ll attack a soldier and deny Jesus three times. They will all end up doubting and betraying and leaving Jesus behind, scattering to the winds. They’ll all fail. And I think Jesus knows this from the very beginning. 

Still, he calls them. Still he calls us. Still, he says, “follow me.” “Even though you’ll fail and you’re under qualified and overqualified and you didn’t apply and you flunked AP Chemistry and you don’t know what you’re doing, follow me.” 

There’s no reason why Jesus calls these particular guys. There’s no reason why these guys say yes to him. At this point in our narrative, there’s nothing spectacular going on with either the disciples or with Jesus. They’re just a bunch of guys going about their day until they decide to hang out together, until they decide to form a community. 

Jesus calls the disciples because he knows that whatever he has to do, he can’t do it alone. He needs his people. And the only qualification we need to be Jesus’ people is that we say yes, that we keep saying yes, at least most of the time. Jesus doesn’t need theological experts or biochemists or brain surgeons or rich stock brokers or even meditating ascetics, although they’re all welcome, too. Jesus just needs us, just as we are, before the degrees and the job experience and the letters of recommendation. After the failures and the brokenness and the restarts at barista jobs. Jesus just needs us to get out of that boat and start swimming. Start swimming towards Jesus. 

Now, the remarkable thing is that Jesus uses our language, the language of our own expertise to get us to step away from all those things we think we’re experts at and to follow him. He tells fishermen to fish. Farmers to plant. Shepherds to follow their sheep. He uses metaphors and story to get this English major to drop everything, forget her accolades, and serve up cups of coffee for eight dollars an hour for awhile. 

Jesus uses your language, but instead of relying on your expertise, he draws you away from it, places you in someone’s story, tells you to tread water, to swim to him, maybe even to go and make disciples yourself. 

Do what you do — keep fishing — except do it for people. Leave everything behind — not to proselytize and threaten, not to hook and hog tie and tackle people into believing in Jesus — but to be in community with them, to follow Jesus with them, to join them in their journeys.

The disciples don’t know what it is about Jesus that makes him so compelling, but they trust their gut and follow him anyway. They join in on the adventure. They don’t get any evidence or proof texts or apologetics of who Jesus is. They just get Jesus, himself, without degrees or a voice from heaven, or even a note from his Calculus teacher. 

But once they get him, once they see him and respond to him and follow him, once they join him on the adventure, that’s when they get the proof. That’s when they get the teachings and the healings and the proclamations of the good news of the kingdom of God. 

Follow Jesus. Just because. 

Follow Jesus just because Jesus has followed you, has tracked you down, and has called out to you, “Come! Follow me!” 

There’s no reason. There’s just Christ.

Put down your nets. Put down your degrees and skills and bank accounts. Put it all down. Come fish for people. Make them a meal. Visit them in prison. Offer a cup of cold water. Wash their feet. Make them a latte. Scrub some toilets and mop some floors. Do the thing you love or the thing you have to, but do it because Christ calls you to it. Christ calls you to the thing that you love most, but not for yourself. Do it for people. Do it because there is hunger. Do it because that’s what Jesus did. 

Thanks be to God.