When Julie and I think “Super Bowl,” we go
back to 1967 and the Peace Corps volunteers from villages where we were in
southeastern Turkey huddled around the shortwave radio Uncle Jim gave us for
our wedding to hear the very first Super Bowl game between Green Bay and
Kansas City. Then we go to 1986. Anybody remember this one? “We didn’t
come here looking for trouble / We just came to do the Super Bowl Shuffle!”
Sweetness and the Fridge, Coach “Dikka” and “the Punky QB” -- all the
rollicking Chicago Bears of that era. Now, of course, the Bears don’t have
“much of a prayer,” as we say about teams we love and can’t help. Save for
an occasional “hail Mary!” In a culture where prayer is more luxury than
necessity, people thank God for teams, and teams thank God for victories,
and players thank God for each home run and touchdown.
Speaking of the Super Bowl Shuffle, here’s
John Aurelio’s version of what happens with Jesus and company on the
mountaintop this morning –
When they reached the mountaintop,
Jesus with his arms extended was dancing and laughing and calling out to
Elijah to carry him home. The wind was blowing and the dust he kicked
up swirled around him like a great cloud. The sun blazed behind him so
that they had to squint to see him.
“I have never seen him like this,”
Peter said to John.
“Nor I. Isn’t it wonderful?” John
and James took Jesus by the hand and they circled and danced together.
“Master,” Peter called to Jesus, “Let
us never leave this place. Let’s stay here forever. Let us set up our
tents . . . in Galilee.”
They sat down to rest. The effort
had exhausted all of them. They were still breathing heavily yet
relishing the magnificent moment.
“Master,” Peter said again, “Why not
stay here. He tried not to look in the direction Jesus had set his
gaze, south toward Jerusalem.
The sun was setting. It had been an
extraordinary and eventful day. They were tried and happy. Jesus
stared toward Jerusalem.
“There is one more mountain to
climb,” he said. “In Jerusalem.”
Sisters and brothers, with Jesus, with us in
relation to Jesus, there is always one more mountain. The mountaintop gaze
of Jesus this day takes in for all time the ritual fear and frustration of
peace and hope, for Jerusalem and for the world. Were it not for Jesus, at
least in our view from here, the world really would not have a prayer. In
fact, for us, Jesus is the prayer of the world. Jesus is that dancing
spirit of life and love, justice and joy, who refuses to let the world die.
Jesus has been there himself, and God refused to let him stay dead. The
point of this transfiguration of Jesus, as he sets out to face certain
execution in Jerusalem, makes clear his resurrection is not the reward for
his life. It is his life’s very motive and power. Jesus lives his whole
life in respectful defiance of death, -- his own death and all of the
deaths, -- by sickness, by lameness, by blindness, by poverty, by pain, by
violence, by war, -- Jesus meets with life-giving living.
Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her people in
slavery, used to say of her prayers as she ran the Underground Railroad to
the North: “Most times I pray with my heart in my throat. Sometimes I pray
with my lips, out loud. But I always pray with my feet!” Prayer is this
perpetual “freedom movement” of Spirit in us. Often we pray with what Paul
calls sighs too deep for words, -- way before or beyond the time we can
articulate everything plainly. There is no right or wrong way to pray.
There is only the way of offering our whole selves up to God as if our lives
depend upon both: God and prayer. Prayer is free conversation with God as
Source of our very being, of all that we are, all that we have, all that we
say and do. Prayer is free conversion to the promise and future of God, in
the moment and in the end, for my life, for the lives of others my life
touches, and for the lives of both church and world. Prayer opens us to
free comprehension of all that is.
Prayer is always a leap of faith by
imagination. Imagination is our calling to be in the image of God. In
prayer we come to imagine both what we may have to say to God and what God
may have to say to us. In prayer we try to capture, in precious and
fast-passing moments, gently but urgently, the view, the vision, the voice
of God in and for our lives. Prayer is self-opening and self-offering,
full disclosure and full exposure, that “appropriate vulnerability” of our
lives, -- in mind, in body, in spirit, and in relationships, -- the spirit
of our anointing and praying for healing next Sunday. We pray, -- that God
might, as the song says, “melt us, mold us, fill us, use us,” – in whatever
ways God will in these moments.
We pray to be as freely in God as God is in
us, uninhibited, unself-conscious, naked, as we read of Adam and Eve next
week, yet not afraid, not unashamed.
Prayer for us is letting ourselves be
“enlightened” by Jesus, as Jesus here is enlightened by God. Jesus brings
light to our worlds. Jesus makes the invisible visible to us, within us and
around us. We see and hear what and how we never have seen and heard
before. We would love, with Peter, to remain in such awesomely enlightened
time and space forever! We would love never to have to see in our old dim
ways, our old lost ways, again. But God is not done with us yet. There is
always another mountain. And some of them lie in deep valleys. Prayer is
that light living in us. With prayer we “make light” of our lives, -- both
literally, the courage to see in the darkness, -- and figuratively, the
capacity to laugh at ourselves, even, like our athletes, to play as we pray,
pray as we play.
Last summer our wonderful Youth Group, who
so lifted our hearts and freed our spirits in worship last Sunday, took
their “mission and mystery trip” to the mountains. I sent along with them,
as preachers will do, some songs and poems and passages touching on
mountains. Some of the words I offered to them I offer now to us all, for
the whole “mission and mystery trip” of our lives –
May you stay naturally “high” and
rejoice in who and where you are the whole trip! The Bible says God is
over everything. The life of the earth takes place under God. God, so
to speak, sits up high and looks down low. That’s why there are so many
mountains in the Bible! They are seen as a kind of home for God, where
people go to meet with God, to talk with God, to listen for God, to pray
with God. Mountains may be seen as pointing the world in the direction
of God. We know how much the mountains around us mean to us, how much a
part of our lives. People are like that with mountains in every country
and every culture . . .
The big “mountaintop experience” of
Jesus’ life is called his “transfiguration.” He goes up the mountain to
meet and to pray with God. When the disciples see him, it is like he is
on fire and glowing with God. It is a picture for us of God being
visibly “in Christ.” We take that to mean God is in us, too. Moses and
Elijah, who died long ago, hook up with Jesus in that moment. They give
Jesus comfort and courage to take his mission of preaching and healing
to Jerusalem. It’s like Jesus becomes the new law of Moses he teaches
in what we call the “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus also looks out on the
“promised land,” that lies beyond his crucifixion and resurrection, --
in the life and the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the body of
Christ, to the ends of the earth. Jesus looks out on us! In fact, the
words he hears on the mountaintop are from his baptism, -- and ours!
“These are my children, my Beloved; with them I am well pleased; listen
to them!” . . . Travel with love and lightness.
Amen.
Rev. John Auer
