Last Sunday of Epiphany Year A

The psychologist Abraham Maslow studied what he called 'peak experiences.' We might call them mountaintop experiences. In this sermon I explore how understanding peak experiences informs our understanding of the Transfiguration.

Last Sunday of Epiphany Year A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

March 6, 2011

At St Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

In 1964 a psychologist named Abraham Maslow wrote a book in which he wrote about what he called ‘peak experiences’. These were experiences in which life is transformed for a moment or a short period of time. Experiences of a sense of peace and joy and unity. Experiences in which colors are brighter and sounds clearer. Experiences that change peoples lives. He called them peak experiences, but they could be called religious experiences, or mystic experiences or mountain top experiences.

As they researched this they discovered that almost everyone has had this kind of experience. Some moment, some time, in which everything is clarified, when there was a sense of unity, a sense of oneness - a mountaintop experience. I bet that almost every one of you sitting here has had at least one such experience in your life.

The other thing they found about those who had had such an experience is that almost no one had ever told anyone else, not even their religious leaders or their spouses. Because after such an experience there was a sense in which we are not sure I want to share it.

The readings today describe two archetypal mountaintop experiences. In the Gospel we hear about the transfiguration. And in the Old Testament reading describes Moses going up on the mountain with God for forty days.

Jesus takes time away from the other disciples and goes up on a mountain with three of his closest disciples, Peter, John and James. While they are up there something happens. Something profound happens. Jesus is transformed.

 One of the ways that these mountain top experiences have sometimes been describes is that because we are caught in the material world, because of our attachments, because of the anxiety and concerns and worries that we have, we can’t see the truth of what the universe, what existence, is really about. It is said that there is a profound difference between what we see every day and reality, that there is a background something beyond our perception. It is as if we walk around like we have a hand over our eyes, or a veil over our eyes, and we just can’t see.

A peak experience is walking around with a hand over your eyes, or a veil over your eyes so it is always dark. Or you are wearing really dark sunglasses, and then all of a sudden they are taken off for a moment. Suddenly you see the truth of what is out there. You get a glimpse of a reality that is beyond anything that we can imagine. We get a glimpse of the spiritual presence that underlies all of creation, and then the veil comes back down. We get those momentary times when we see something else. When we see something beyond.

Now these can happen when you are deep in a spiritual program or you go off on retreat or you are fasting and praying. They can also happen when you are driving down the highway and suddenly you see the sun and the rays and the reflection on the water or whatever it is and it is so profound that it is more beautiful then anything you ever imagined.

Sometimes it happens when you are listening to a truly great piece of music. I still remember one time when I heard Beethoven’s Ninth performed live and there was a moment that was just transcendent.

Such mountaintop experiences come in all types and forms. They are a gift. And most of you, I’m sure have experienced that. And that experience that might be part of why you have any interest in coming to church, because you have had an experience that has told you that there is something more. You might not understand what that something more is. You may not be ready to identify it or agree to any creed or certainty of the nature of it, but you have experienced that there is something more. That is the mountaintop experience.

Now like the disciples, when we have those mountain top experiences we have a tendency to want to hold on to them. We go back to that spot in nature where we had that mountaintop experience, and it is just not the same. We listen to the piece of music that transformed us, and it is nice, but it is not the same. We go back for another retreat, and maybe it happens and maybe it doesn’t because these mountaintop experiences are gifts of grace. We can’t control them; we can only appreciate them. Like Peter we want to build a house around them. We want to hold on to it. We want to take a picture of it. We want to record the music; we want to somehow stay there. But the thing about mountaintop experiences is that you can’t live on the mountaintop. You have to come back down into the valley. We are not allowed to stay there.

In the church we have a church year, a cycle, that begins at Advent when we anticipate the coming of the Messiah, then we have the season of Christmas when we celebrate the incarnation, currently we are in the season of Epiphany in which Jesus is making himself known to the world. Then we move into the season of lent, and then the season of Easter and then after Pentecost we have that long green season that is sometimes called ordinary time, that represents life after Pentecost. Today is the last Sunday before Lent, the last Sunday of Epiphany. It is the last Sunday in which we sing Alleluia at church, so we have lots of alleluias in the music, because we put the alleluias aside during Lent. And every year on the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent we read about the transfiguration. It is always there on the last Sunday.

In the story in the Gospels Jesus takes the disciples aside and has this magnificent experience just before heading to Jerusalem. Before that time, he was a Rabbi and an amazing healer. And then for those three chosen disciples, he took the veil down for a moment. He let them see a glimpse of who he really was and is.

Now in the story of Moses encountering God the people did not want to go up the mountain with Moses because they were afraid of seeing God face to face. There is this sense that if you saw God face to face you would die. Moses went up and spent those forty days on that mountain and when he came back his face shone so brightly that the people couldn’t stand to see it, so he walked around with a veil over his face.

Now imagine if Jesus truly was who we say he is. If he truly was the manifestation of God on earth. If he let himself be fully seen it would have been very difficult to be around. The light would have been so bright it would hurt your eyes. It would frighten you. People would feel they were going to die. So he veiled himself so he looked like a normal human being, but up on that mountain, for that short period of time, he let the disciples see a glimpse of who he was. It is a gift he gave to those disciples perhaps to help them with what he knew was ahead. You see the gift of a mountain top experience is that when we go back down in the valley and things get difficult, when we feel alone and we don’t have any sense of God’s presence, when we begin to question and begin to wonder, when we struggle in so many different ways we can remember. We can remember that experience that told us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is something more to life than just the everyday struggles for existence. It helps us through those dark times, those times of doubt and question. I imagine that this time on the mountain with Jesus must have helped Peter, John and James as they risked their lives, as they were afraid for their own safety, as they watched Jesus die.

So we remember the transfiguration before we start Lent. Lent is a time for us to go down into the valley, to look at things, to reflect, to take some time as we prepare ourselves for Easter

In the service for Ash Wednesday the celebrant reads “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.”

So there are three things to do during Lent. It is more than just not eating chocolate. Lent is about self reflection, acknowledging our short comings, and asking for repentance. It is about giving something up, about fasting and about prayer. But I’d encourage you that if you are going to fast whether it is by not eating chocolate or not going and having you half and half vanilla, decaf, whatever it is, that in addition to what you give up, whatever money you would have spent on that, give it away. If you spent $2.50 a day on coffee, put that away and after forty days you are going to have $100 dollars and you can give to some charity. And I invite you that if you are going to give something up that you also take something on.

In the invitation to a holy lent it talks about study and reading scripture. I invite you to take on some kind of spiritual discipline, whether it be a prayer time, or it be reading scripture, or perhaps if you have never done the Day by Day program you can do that.

I also invite you to think of it as being part of a community. This is a time when the church traditionally prepared people for baptism, so I invite you to also be part of a community. We have several different programs going on this year. We are going to be having every Wednesday night the Stations of the Cross so you can come and reflect and meditate on that. We are going to be having on Thursday evenings a soup supper followed by an education program, where we are going to explore the nature of forgiveness in terms of different cultures and religions.

(At this point the recording of the sermon ended.)

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

3/5/2003

The Rev. Valerie A. Hart

St. Alban's, Brentwood, CA

I remember the first time I had the opportunity to be the celebrant at the Ash Wednesday service during the first year that I served here at St. Alban's. I remember how incredibly powerful it was to place the ashes on each person’s forehead while repeating “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Over and over I said those words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” With each repetition it moved deeper into my heart and my soul. The old stalwart of the community, whom I had grown to respect and love, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The vital and very alive young mother, who had become my friend, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And hardest of all was when I came to a young child, three or four years old, looking up at me with the eager expectancy of childhood. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Each of these people whom I had come to love and deeply care about I was reminded were but dust and ashes. At this service, with those words, we are all reminded that we are already dust, reminded that this physical body that we hold so dear, and the physical bodies of those we love, came from dust and will become but dust and ashes.

Before this past summer I had never seen gangrene. My father-in-law, who has diabetes and circulation problems, developed an infection on his toe. An innocent beginning, an ingrown toenail that had been trimmed by a podiatrist, but it never fully healed because of the lack of good circulation to his foot. Once it became infected, even with the best of modern medicine, it would not heal. Without blood flowing to the toe there were no resources with which to fight the infection. A black spot developed and began to grow. Soon the entire toe was black. Gangrene is horrible to look at, for the infected part quite literally dies. The toe became shriveled and black. It was like a corpse with a unique odor, and it was excruciatingly painful. The only treatment was amputation. To see what a toe looks like when life-giving blood is no longer flowing through it was for me a vivid reminder that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

This community has known a lot of grief this year. We have watched parents, siblings, and dear friends die. We have lost jobs, financial resources have shriveled, dreams have been crushed, and relationships have been shattered. We have known what it means to feel things turn to dust in our hands. We have been painfully reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Throughout the Bible images of dust and ashes reoccur. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground, and Abraham refers to himself as but dust and ashes. When Tamar has been raped by her brother she put ashes on her head and tore her robe as a sign of grief. Mordecai, upon learning of plans for the destruction of his people, puts on sackcloth and ashes. Job, that one who knew unbearable grief in the loss of all of his children and all of his material possession and finally his health, sat among the ashes. The psalmist, in psalm 102 writes “For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink.” Jesus uses the image saying  "Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”

And so today, we take ashes and put them on our foreheads and are reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, the first step on our journey to Easter. Why, you might ask, do we remind ourselves of our own mortality on this day? In fact you might wonder why anyone would ever want to remind themselves of their own mortality. What could be the advantage of thinking about our own and our loved ones deaths?

There is something incredibly powerful about confronting death. Human beings have a tendency to live in fear, and the foundation of all the fears in our lives is the fear of death. There are many kinds of death, the death of this mortal body being the most obvious. But there are many little deaths in our lives. Any time we are confronted by the impermanence of the things of this world we experience a little death. When our pride is hurt, when someone we trusted lets us down, when we can’t have what we want, when we lose what we do have, all of these are kinds of death. And we don’t like it. These experiences are painful. We want to shield ourselves from experiencing this pain, and so, over time, we create a cocoon around ourselves. Bit by bit we weave a self-protective coating, a veil that shields us from truly feeling the pain in our lives.

Each person’s is unique, but you can recognize it easily. It is the false pride and bravado that keeps us from feeling the discomfort of not being the best. It is the anger we use to keep love away. It is the disinterest that keeps us from disappointment. It is the addictions that numb the pain through drugs or alcohol. It is the busyness that keeps us from stopping to really feel.

Over the years we create this cocoon, and it helps to keep the pain away, but it also numbs us to the joy and isolates us from love. If we build a shield to keep the pain out, we have also built a shield to keep the joy out. We may feel safe from the pain of experiencing the transitory nature of life on this earth, but it comes at the cost of being kept from experiencing the blessed and transcendent joy of life.

But there are moments when this cocoon is rent. Times when our best defenses are breached. Such is the grace that can come with grief. Grief sometimes comes upon us with such intensity that we can no longer hold onto the presumption of being in control. Deep loss tears away the levels of protection and leaves us stripped, emotionally naked, and feeling deeply. If we have the courage to be with that grief, to let ourselves experience the pain, we discover that we are more alive. It sounds odd, but many people who experience intense grief also describe moments of intense joy. After a deep and cathartic night of tears, the morning may bring a dawn more beautiful then you ever remembered.

The same is true of experiencing and acknowledging our own mortality. After my brain surgery, where I had consciously confronted the possibility of my own death, on the way home from the hospital the colors of the trees were a multitude of vibrant greens, the blue of the sky was iridescent, and the touch of my children was an unspeakable delight.

When that cocoon we develop to avoid the fear of death is stripped away we come to experience the world more directly. Our hearts are freer to receive the love of God that always surrounds us, and we also more clearly see the ways in which we have not lived our lives in harmony with that love.

Our attempts to protect ourselves from pain often end up inflicting pain upon others. It is impossible to truly love others and remain safe, for love always involves a reckless abandonment of oneself. And so, our fear of death, our attempts to be safe, interfere with our ability to love God and to love others. And that is the foundation of all sin.

Lent is a preparation for Easter, a preparation to receive the gift of the resurrection. One cannot acknowledge resurrection without acknowledging death. We cannot know the light of Easter without walking through the shadows of Good Friday. We cannot know love, without risking everything. We cannot know the freedom of forgiveness without acknowledging our sinfulness. We cannot be free to love and forgive without acknowledging the pain we have experienced.

Paul states in the reading today “We are treated as…..dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

Lent is a time to acknowledge our nothingness so that we may receive everything. Lent is a time to acknowledge our sinfulness so that we may know we are forgiven. Lent is a time to know our dying so that we may live the resurrection.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Choose life or death, blessings or curses. Make a choice. Every day we have many opportunities to make the only choice that really maters, which is do we choose to turn toward God and toward love or do we turn away from God and away from love. 

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany Year A

Transcribed from a sermon given on

Feb 13, 2011

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

Matthew 5:21-37

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Wasn’t it a beautiful day yesterday? It was the most perfect weather I have ever known. It was so nice that I went down to the beach and everybody, everybody, was on the beach. There must have been a million dogs, all running around having a good time and there was this one poodle, I’ve never seen such a big poodle. It was the size of a horse.

Now, most of you figured that the poodle was maybe this big, certainly not the size of a horse. And everybody knows that there were probably about 65 dogs not a million dogs. And not everybody could possibly have been on the beach because you are part of everybody and you weren’t there. So you knew that. You knew that I was exaggerating. It’s a figure of speech called hyperbola. It is commonly used in rhetoric in order to get people’s attention and interest and to make a point. We all know it. We all use it. Who doesn’t, when they are in the middle of a fight or debate, happen to say, “You never do the dishes!” You don’t say 95 percent of the time you don’t do the dishes; you say you never do the dishes. And of course the response is, “But I always take out the garbage.” It’s not, “I take out the garbage 95% of the time.” We use hyperbola all the time. It makes our speech and our conversations more interesting.

We as Americans and 21^st century people have gotten very much into facts, and getting it precise and correct. But it doesn’t make for an interesting speech. Just think about Al Gore.

We expect some exaggeration, some hyperbola. In the middle east it is even more expected than it is in our society. You always exaggerate. No one would have a meal with a friend and leave and say, “That was one of the better meals that I have had.” You would have to say “That was the best meal that I have ever had.” And if you didn’t exaggerate you could insult the other person.

Jesus was a great speaker. One of the things we can be sure of is that he wasn’t boring to listen to, otherwise he wouldn’t have had crowds coming out to listen. So he used all the various tricks of a rhetorician. He used humor, although the way we read scripture we don’t necessarily recognize the humor that is there. And he used hyperbola, which he certainly used in this particular passage.

We have to think about this Gospel passage in context. It’s a continuation of what we have been reading each Sunday and takes place within the sermon on the mount. He has shared the beatitudes, which are a whole new way of saying who are blessed by God. In the line just before this passage that was left out Jesus says, “And your righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees.” So he has just said that you have to be more righteous than the Pharisees, and then now he is describing what that righteousness would look like.

There are a lot of people who say they take the Bible literally word for word, but they are not all blind. And my guess is that most of them at some point have had their eye lead them astray. But they didn’t follow the bible literally and pluck out their eyes. And we don’t have very many people who are missing a hand that they chopped off because they did something wrong with a hand. Everyone know that Jesus didn’t mean that literally. He was using hyperbola. He was using exaggeration.

He was reacting to the Pharisaic mind set, which was to try to follow all of God’s commandments literally. But there are a lot of commandments in scripture and then there were a lot of other rules and regulations that had accrued over time. Following them became quite a difficult process. The lawyers to tried to interpret exactly what it meant. So, for example, one of the ten commandments is remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. It was generally agreed upon that you should not work on the Sabbath, but what did it mean to not work on the Sabbath? Well you weren’t supposed to cook, but you could take food out and put it on the table. You weren’t supposed to load your donkey down, but what about taking water to your donkey? Well a donkey that would go an entire day without water would not be healthy, so you were allowed to water and feed your animals even though that really is sort of work.

So there was a whole process of trying to figure out exactly what these laws meant and how are you going got follow each and every one of them. Its sort of like today trying to figure out the tax code. It is so complicated, and there are so many different situations, that you have to hire somebody to figure out how to follow it. So the Pharisees claimed that the were superior because they followed all the laws and rules. Jesus is saying if you are going to be prove your righteousness by your own behavior, you must be more righteous than the Pharisees This is what you really need to do. You can’t use an excuse like divorce to say it is okay to be with another woman. You can’t say that just because you didn’t murder someone if you have hate in your heart that you are not sinning. He used this to make the point that God’s law is not about getting the details right, but about getting the heart and essence of it right.

Today we are celebrating a baptism and we will be sharing something called the Baptismal Covenant. The Baptismal Covenant is the essence of what Episcopalians decided was the most important essence of what it means to be a Christian. I’d like us to take a look at that right now.

It is in your bulletin, and it starts on page four. I am going to be talking about the ones that are on the top of page 5. I am going to start with the last two.

The last one says, Will you strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being.” Well if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not liable to murder them. And if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not liable to swear and use nasty language about them. And if you respect the dignity of every human being you are not likely to commit adultery because you are not respecting the person you are with or with their spouse.

The one before that is, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” These statements are positive and not negative. They are not “Thou shalt nots.” These are things you are supposed to do, and if you really do them, if you really love your neighbor as yourself, you are not going to hurt other people. You are not going to steal from them. You are not going to lie to them. And if you are striving for justice you are not going to swindle people. You are not going to be concerned primarily for your own good.

So you can look at those last two as the foundation of how do we live a good life - not specifics, not a whole list of laws. The thing I like best about our baptismal covenant is the top one on page 5. And it says, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and and whenever you fall into sin repent and return to the Lord?” It doesn’t say if you fall into sin, it says whenever you fall into sin. We know we can’t follow every law. We know that there will be times when we will be attracted to someone we shouldn’t be attracted to. We know there will be times when we will say or do things that will hurt another person or hurt ourselves. But we have the gift through Christ to know that we will be forgiven if we repent and return to the Lord.

In the first reading today, God says to God’s people, choose life or death, blessings or curses. Make a choice. Every day we have many opportunities to make the only choice that really maters, which is do we choose to turn toward God and toward love or do we turn away from God and away from love. That’s what repentance means. It is to turn around.

In the early centuries of the church, when someone would come for baptism they would quite literally turn around. They would start the service facing to the west which represented that which is not of God and at some point during the service they would physically turn around to face the east which represented God and light and new hope.

Each day, each moment of each day, we make a choice. We choose life, God and love or we choose what leads to death which is that which is not of love and not of God. So one aspect of our baptism is that choice. That choice to turn to God.

Today we are having the privilege of witnessing and participating in the baptism of Savannah Grace. And even though she is too young to choose, she will be growing into that. Her parents and her God parents will be making those vows for her, so I would like to ask the baptismal party to come forward.