God In A Human Touch

Our lessons about the Transfiguration say
what I believe about Jesus better
than most any other Scripture.
Some of you may not buy this. You don’t have to.
I didn’t buy it myself even when I was ordained.
But after a lot of years of Christian practice,
this seems true to me.

Jesus was a mountain man.
He led his disciples up there mountains
– the one where he taught them the Beatitudes
and to turn the other cheek
– the Mount of the Transfiguration
- and finally the Mount of Olives.

We can spend our whole lives climbing mountains
- the career mountain, the money mountain,
the mental health mountain,
the happy family mountain,
even the religion mountain.
There are so many mountains,
each with a prize on top.

Moses was a mountain man.
He climbed Mt. Sinai.
It had the law on top.
It had God’s moral standards.
Moses climbed the mountain of ethical living.

Elijah was a mountain man.
He climbed Mount Carmel.
It had prophesy on top,
the awesome silence of God’s voice,
the voice we hear in contemplation.
Elijah climbed the mountain of spiritual experience.

Figuratively speaking, St. Paul was a mountain man too.
He climbed both mountains – ethics and spirituality.
As a Pharisee he practiced the moral life to perfection.
As a Mer-kobah mystic, he experienced the most advanced
states of spiritual contemplation.

But one day Paul,
like the disciples on the Mount of the Transfiguration,
had a vision of light shining from Jesus
– and that vision changed everything.
20 years later, he remembered all his mountain climbing and said,
“Whatever gains I had, these I count as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord.”
He no longer billed himself as a just man or a mystic.
He didn’t bill himself at all.
He said, “It is not ourselves that we proclaim.
We proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves as your servants
for his sake.”

Paul tossed aside every prize he had claimed
at the top of every mountain and said,
“I’d rather have Jesus.”

The disciples in our Gospel lesson
had already left most things behind.
They’d given up homes, families, careers.
But they still had their religion.
They had the law of Moses and the spirituality of Elijah.
So when they saw their rabbi talking on a mountain top
with the father of ethical religion
and the father of Jewish spirituality,
it all came together.
And Peter said to Jesus, “Let’s build three dwellings here
– one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

He meant it as a compliment, to put Jesus on a par with those giants.
But Peter had missed the point.
So God showed up as a “bright cloud” and thundered,
“This is my beloved Son . . . . Listen to him.”
And the disciples were afraid.

They were afraid because they had rashly answered
life’s ultimate question
– the question of what really matters
– and they had gotten it wrong.
The pushed the existential Jeopardy buzzer too soon.

In a multiple choice question,
with the answers being morality, spirituality, and Jesus;
they’d answered “all of the above.”
But that wasn’t’ God’s answer.
They hadn’t grasped what blind Paul saw so clearly
– that the ultimate value of God’s own self
was fully present in this human person, Jesus.
All of morality and all of spirituality lead to this point,
what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point.
The notion that the final answer is not
the moral order or a transcendent experience
but a person – that’s a lot to swallow.
But it is the key to intimacy with God.

The story of the Transfiguration shows us why.
The disciples thought the terrifying cloud was the Epiphany.
They thought the voice from heaven was the divine revelation.
So they fell on the ground and hid their faces.

But the real epiphany was what happened next.
Matthew Chapter 17 tells us this same story
with a little more detail than Mark.
The real epiphany was Jesus.
It happened when he touched them and said,
“Get up and do not be afraid.”

God is most perfectly seen and heard not as a thundercloud
sending us diving to the dust in fear,
but as a brother saying “Get up and do not be afraid.”

John Calvin, a man who was so often wrong, got this right.
He said,
“(A)ll thinking of God, apart from Christ,
is a bottomless abyss
which utterly swallows up our senses . . . .
In Christ, God . . . makes himself little,
in order to lower himself to our capacity;
and Christ alone calms (us)
so that (we) . . . dare intimately approach God.”

Jesus makes it possible for us
to be intimate with God.
In Jesus, we can embrace the perfect value
from which all good things derive their value
as we might embrace a friend.

Jesus brings divine love into the flesh of human life.
God can touch us only with a human touch.

A surgeon named Richard Selzer tells a story
from his medical practice that I believe
explains what happens for us in Jesus.
He writes:
“I stand by the bed where a young woman lies
. . . her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish.
A . . . facial never has been severed . . .
(T)o remove the tumor in her cheek,
I had to cut the nerve.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “It will because the nerve is cut.”
She nods and is silent,
but the young man smiles,
“I like it,” he says.
“It’s kind of cute.”

He bends to kiss her crooked mouth,
and I, so close I can see
how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers,
to show her that their kiss still works . . . .
(I) hold my breath . . . .”

Just so, “Jesus touched them, saying,
‘Get up and do not be afraid.’
And when they looked up,
they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.”

Limping Away From A Spiritual Crisis

Most people have a simplistic notion of the Christian faith.
That includes some people who believe it and the people who don’t.
The formula goes that you believe there is a God,
be reasonably nice, go to church some,
and ask Jesus to forgive your sins.
Do that and you go to heaven when you die.
In the meantime, don’t worry about things over much
since whatever happens is God’s will.

They often think that is what the Bible says.
Such people should be careful about reading the Bible.
It is actually a very strange book.
Christianity is a strange and wonderful religion.
The God we worship is a strange and wonderful God.

Take, for an example of strangeness, our Old Testament lesson.
Jacob had spent a lot of his life on the lamb.
As a young man he had swindled his brother Esau
who understandably set out to kill him.

So Jacob ran away to live with his Uncle Laban
in a far off country.
Laban and Jacob spent several years trying to outfox each other.
Eventually, Jacob had to run away from there too.

He was escaping from Uncle Laban
when he heard that his brother Esau was coming to meet him.
That was not entirely good news.
In our lesson for today, before Jacob confronts Esau,
he crosses the River Jabbok, a rapidly flowing mountain stream.
It isn’t easy to cross at any point or at any time,
but Jacob crossed it at night
with his two wives, two concubines, 11 children,
all his livestock and all his possessions.
Then he came back across to where he started
and he spent the night there alone.

It isn’t clear what Jacob was up to.
Probably he was moving his family and possessions
across the river to keep them safe from Esau.

But that night he ran into trouble bigger than his brother.
In the dark, beside the River, something attacked Jacob
and fought with him until sunrise.
They fought to a draw, but before the attacker left,
Jacob demanded a blessing from him.
The attacker blessed Jacob by changing his name to Israel,
which means “struggles with God.”
And Jacob renamed the place of the fight Peniel,
because he said, “I have seen God face to face and yet I live.”

This isn’t a moral example story.
Do as Jacob did because wasn’t he a good man.
Jacob wasn’t a particularly good man.
He wasn’t a hero of the faith.
He didn’t do anything right here.
He was running away from someone he cheated
about to face up to someone else he cheated.
Jacob was just scrambling for his life
when he found himself alone, in the dark, in a strange place,
attacked by a powerful stranger.
So he fought.

A strange story.
I don’t know what it’s doing in the Bible
except that it tells us how the people of Israel got their strange name.
But there are a couple of things we might learn.

The first is that we don’t really encounter God
until we are in trouble.
Karl Barth, the greatest theologian of the 20th Century said this.
He called it “crisis theology.”

Barth said it works like this.
Human nature and the way of the world don’t mesh.
So sooner or later, we all find ourselves in hot water.
What is the way out of the hot water?
There isn’t one.
We cannot save ourselves.

That’s when God shows up and saves us by his grace.
We talk a lot about spirituality these days.
We like to pray and meditate, listen to uplifting religious music,
and feel very good about everything.
Isn’t God nice and it’s a wonderful world.

That’s fine until our life falls apart
as Jacob’s life had fallen apart that night in the darkness.
Then God shows up with a blessing.

I have done major league spirituality in most of its forms and styles.
I have done contemplative serenity and charismatic joy.
I have degrees and certificates to prove it. It was all a rush.
It felt really good and I was proud of how spiritual I was.

But I didn’t meet God until I was in the kind of panic Jacob felt.
And I can tell you this.
God may be in the lovely sunrise and the babbling brook.
But we connect with God in the dark night of despair.

When God showed up for Jacob,
it was not as a kindly comforter.
God came to Jacob like mugger.
This is not a nice God, but a fearsome God.

So Jacob struggled. He fought tooth and nail.
There is a point in that too.
If we take God seriously, we don’t just smile and nod politely.
If we take God seriously, we don’t just sing songs
about how sweet everything is.
We struggle.

There are several ways to struggle with God.
We might not be so sure God exists,
and might want to say “Why don’t you just show yourself?”
We might not be so sure God is good,
since the creation seems pretty harsh.
We might not get how Jesus dying on the cross
does any good.


We might not like worshipping God
since it makes us feel small
-- as if God might be better than we are.
Or we might just want God to do something for us,
and God might not be coming through.
After all, what good is a God who does not conform to our will
and meet our expectations?

We don’t get to know God until we struggle with God.
That’s ok because getting to know God
isn’t actually that high on our priority list
– not until we need God desperately.

A young man went to see a Zen master and said “I want to learn Zen.”
The Master grabbed him by the neck, pushed his head into a stream,
and held him down.
When the young man came up gasping and coughing,
the Zen master said,
“When you want Zen the way you just wanted a breath,
then you will know Zen.”

That’s when we know God – when we need God like our next breath.
Then, and only then, do we get honest.
Then and only then do we struggle with God.
Remember what God named his chosen people,
not the beautiful and the good people,
not the nice and the moral people,
not the people who always obey God like children,
but Israel – the people who struggle with God.

And struggle they did. Read the psalms and the prophets.
For centuries, Jacob’s descendants continued to fight with God.
The honest spiritual life is not all flowers and valentines
anymore than the honest marriage is.
It’s a struggle.

Oh, there’s a final point.
Jacob did not come out of the struggle unmarked.
God blessed him and dislocated his hip.
So Jacob walked with a limp after that.
We can know God and still live in the world,
but we will never be the same, never quite at home here.

Honest religion isn’t about getting our spiritual sunshine vitamins
and smiling all the time.
It’s facing reality without blinking.
After that we will be stronger, wiser, saner, but not the same.

Building A Civil Society: Reflections On The Moral Legacy Of The First Lady Of Las Vegas, Helen Stewart

Helen Stewart is the kind of hero we need to keep in mind today.
She is a hero for women – pioneering the place of women as leaders
in the public square.
She is a classic Western hero – making a go of ranching for decades
in this hard land.

To me, she is most of all a hero as a builder of civil society,
a former of community.
The first great work of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh from Ancient Sumer.
In it, young Gilgamesh is something of a super hero run amok.
Although he is the king, he does not care for his people.
He lives for himself.

His reckless youth comes to an end when he discovers that people are mortal.
So he sets out on a quest for the way to overcome mortality
or to live with enough gusto that his life can be worthwhile
even if it will end.
After many adventures, he realizes his quest is futile;
so he returns home to Uruk, the capital of his kingdom.


On his arrival, Gilgamesh looks up and sees the walls of Uruk.
At that moment, he finally realizes that authentic human life
is lived in a community, a civil society, a neighborhood of people
who are intentionally neighbors to each other.
He realizes his quest for his own individual well-being is futile
because our individual well-being cannot be split away
from the common good.
So he dedicates himself to the service of his people.

The myth about the Westerner is that we came here to escape civil society.
The truth is that Westerners began constructing civil society
from the time they got here.
The myth of ranchers is that they lived in their own fiefdoms
Ignoring -- or even riding roughshod over -- townspeople and others.
Helen Stewart is proof that is far from the case.

As a widowed rancher and mother, she had her hands full.
But she was determined to build a civil society in this Valley.



Aside for providing the land for the railroad,
she was a founder of Christ Church – a church which has never
been a haven of spiritual escapism but has always been
committed to the welfare of all of Las Vegas
– a church from which many charitable and civic organizations
have been born.
She was a founder of the Mesquite Club,
Nevada’s oldest women’s charitable organization.
As Postmaster, she worked to help us to exchange messages
essential to social and business life.
As a founder of the Society of Nevada Pioneers,
she worked to preserve our history
because a culture has to know its own story.
On the school board, she worked for the education of our children.
While she sold the land that became Las Vegas,
she donated the land that became the Paiute Colony.

The list of her accomplishments goes on.
But the point is simple:
she was dedicated to our common good.

We do well to honor her with this excellent statue.
But this statue should do more than remind us of a time
when people cared enough about each other
to do their civic duty.

Helen Stewart would want us to remember
that the task of building and sustaining a civil society in Las Vegas
is as challenging today as it was then.
The challenges are different, but just as great.
Our sense of community is wounded today.
The institutions Helen Stewart helped to build -- from the Postal Service
to the education system – are in trouble.
We see a reversal of her efforts
in the neglect of our schools and public institutions,
and in the neglect of needy people which the First Lady of Las Vegas
would never have countenanced.

But there are people today working on several fronts to continue
the good work Helen Stewart began in her day.
Communities in Schools works to restore our education system
so our children have hope for a better future.
Las Vegas Valley Interfaith unites our people across lines
of race and religion to work for the good of families.
3-Square combats hunger on our streets.
Not For Sale combats the sexual exploitation of children.
We might ask: if Helen Stewart were here today,
in which of these organizations would she be a leader?
The answer is clearly most of them, and maybe others.
She would be a leader in different groups so she could network them
together for the benefit of everyone.
I believe that is what she would hope we will do.

As we dedicate this statue to the memory and honor of Helen Stewart,
we rededicate ourselves to building a community of decent folks
who care for each other – neighbor to neighbor –
to make this city a home where all our people can prosper and thrive.