February 22, 2004
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture
Psalm 99, Luke 9:28-43a
“Anointed Ones: Saved and Set Free, Healed and Made Whole”
From the beginning of our time together as congregation and pastor, I have promised to be honest with you.
What you see and hear is pretty much what you get. I have promised to be open, accessible, available.
I am willing to talk any time any place with anyone about most anything. I have promised not to be boring to
you, not to put you to sleep. Neither of us ever knows exactly what I will do or say next. Now we
are two-thirds of our way through an appointment year together. We have barely begun to scratch each other’s
surfaces, to get under each other’s skins, so to speak, with so much more yet to discover and learn from and
with one another! Yet our church and world around us will not always wait for us to be ready for them.
God is always happening now!
Our worship and preaching this first year are like so many ways of offering, of giving and receiving, opportunities
and possibilities for us to grow with together. Another year and we can do more picking and choosing among all the
options. We all will feel sometimes comforted, sometimes challenged, sometimes both at once in a single service.
So much of what we experience now derives from who and where we have been. Our position in life gives perspective
to our view. No two of us, by the creative grace of God, are ever the same, now or again. Just as with
the Baptism of Jesus several weeks ago, Reconciling Sunday last week, Jewish-Christian Relations the week after Easter
Sunday, so with Transfiguration and Healing today, we offer our worship, our preaching, our selves, up for the “Spirit
of the Living God” to melt us, mold us, fill us, and use us as God will.
Healing Sunday! Who do you think you are, Oral Roberts?! Anyone who was here last Sunday will assure
us, I am no Oral Roberts. I have enough trouble just being John Auer, one more sinner saved by that same creative
grace. In fact, there’s nobody here but us sinners, right? We who would sleep on the mountain, as again
in the garden but a few short weeks from now, while our leader Jesus prays! Such consciousness, such awareness,
drains us, makes us tired. Stop the world! We want to get off! We who would build safe, gated churches
here, well above and beyond life’s fray, escaping, avoiding, the depths of the world, and our own depths. We
who are terrified by sights and sounds of our own gifts and graces for ministry and for mission. We who are
of what Jesus here calls, somewhat testily as someone who has just been re-sent on his own death-defying mission,
this “faithless, perverse generation!” Yet Jesus still stands with and bears us. Jesus yet is rebuking
convulsive spirits in us that paralyze witness and service by our foaming fears and fetters. We who each day
fall short of the glory of our Creator God, -- transfiguring, transforming, vision-and-voice-shaking, life-changing
glory we see and we hear in Jesus this day! Yet we go on.
We are just one-fourth of the way through our first liturgical year together. Transfiguration marks a tipping
and turning point for Jesus, a tipping and turning point for us, -- the end of the Winter Cycle of the Earth Church
Year. We have been through Advent/ Christmas/Epiphanytide, seasons of the God the Creator’s promise to save.
Ash Wednesday begins the Spring Cycle, Lent/Holy Week/ Eastertide, seasons of God the Redeemer’s passion to set free.
Pentecost marks the Summer Cycle, God the Sanctifier’s presence to heal; and Labor Day the Fall Cycle, God the Sustainer’s
power to make whole. As “anointed ones” who name Jesus of Nazareth “Christ,” “messiah,” “anointed one” to us,
we are to believe, and to act as though, not only the church but the world has been saved and set free, healed and
made whole. All things, with God, are possible now!
Rabbi Michael Lerner, writing in the current issue of Tikkun magazine, -- “A Gospel of Love and Hope: How
to Respond to Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion,’” -- puts it: There is a strong temptation afoot, specially since 9/11,
for us to give up on the Jesus story as foundation for our most humane and caring instincts and options, -- to give
up on “ the Jewish Jesus, the Jesus who retains hope for building love right here, the Jesus who unabashedly proclaims
that the Kingdom of Heaven has arrived (which is to say, that it is here on earth, that the world right now can be
based on love and kindness, and that we don’t have to wait for some future time or ‘the end of days’ as described
by Isaiah, because it is here now, we can make it happen right away by the way that we live our lives)!” We
must resist any claim to obscure, to silence, further to marginalize this vision, this voice, of this Jesus.
The challenge really to follow Jesus as “messiah” is not a challenge to Jews, to those who never have claimed that
for Jesus, or for themselves. The challenge is to us, to those who have claimed it without counting the cost
to us!
Please, come out this Ash Wednesday, -- to start the desert, to hear Willis Barnstone speak of this Jesus, to put
on the ashes of resistance, ashes of last Palm Sunday’s most hopeful parade. Palm Sunday is when the children
of our “Hosanna Arch” greet and cheer Jesus on, as Moses and Elijah do on the mountain this morning. God knows
Jesus needs it! Two years of preaching, so little to show for it! They, we, cheer Jesus on to save and
set free, to heal and make whole. These are the children whom, Jesus admonishes us, are only believing and acting
upon what we teach them in Sunday School! Can I get a witness? Do we believe and act upon what we preach
and we teach?! Take on ashes mixed with Transfiguration’s oils, anointing Jesus, confirming the words of baptism
over him, over each one of us, every child of God, in his name!
Remember that wild wonder of walking through our baptismal waters just a few short weeks ago? To the stresses
and strains of “The Saints Go Marchin’ In!” Jesus on the mountain hears confirmation of those baptismal words
today: “You are my Child, the Beloved One, you are my Chosen One!” I am with you still, fulfilling my
promise as God the Creator, ever no less now than then! God is with Jesus even as he faces, even as all of us
face, the desert wilderness journey up to the Jerusalem confrontation with all of the “powers that be” who would have
us give up on the way, and the ways, of God in this church and this world. God knows Jesus needs, we know we
all need, all the help we can get! So come for healing and for making whole today, -- for and with loved ones
and for ourselves.
Come to be touched with new life today. Come to be restored to new creation, new communion this day.
Come in compassion, in capacity to “suffer with” all who suffer this day, and the suffering of each one of us.
Come in solidarity, in ability by the grace of God to stand with each other in struggle, no matter how different we
are, -- in body, in mind, in spirit, or in relationship – from God, from others, from one another, even from our own
truest selves. Come. God is with us. God goes before us. God goes behind us. We are anointed,
-- saved and set free, healed and made whole. We can face anything now. Come! Amen.
Rev. John J. Auer
