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What is the purpose of your life? Do you know if your life has a purpose? I mean a real purpose, a purpose with guts, a purpose beyond the next game of bridge or the next movie, a purpose beyond the next paycheck. What's the purpose of your life ultimately, once the kids are gone and the house is paid for and you've played your last round of golf and you've taken your last trip and, indeed, your last breath? Or is that it? Is life without purpose? Is life, as someone once said, just one damned thing after another? Just one job after another, just one football game after another, until it's all over? Do we know who we are, and why we are? The Scriptures tell us that we cannot know who we are and why we are until we know whose we are. And the religions of the Bible, Judaism and Christianity, are the communities, the traditions, that seek to remind us of this Biblical message. Abraham Joshua Heschel reminded us that for a Jew there is one unforgivable sin, and that is not to remember. To forget, for a Jew, is the gravest sin of all. And that's true for the Christian as well, because it's true for human beings. The unforgivable sin is to forget whose you are, and therefore to forget why you are, so that life becomes just one damned thing after another, until you've got the house paid off and you've played your last round of golf and taken your last breath. Several years ago, the World Almanac polled 2,000 American 14-year-olds to learn which people they most admired, which people they wanted to be like when they grew up. The leading role model at the time turned out to be Burt Reynolds, followed by Richard Pryor, Alan Alda, Steve Martin, and Robert Redford. This list, of course, is dated now. A poll taken today would yield different luminaries. But I wonder if it would be different in any substantial way, or if it would just be a list of more contemporary celebrities. Because the really significant thing about the results of the survey was that there wasn't one single name on the young people's list who was not an entertainer or sports figure! No statesman, no scientist, no author, no painter or musician, no architect or doctor, no pastor or lawyer or explorer. Now that, friends, is a catastrophe beside which 9-11 pales in significance! I suppose it should come as no surprise that neither Moses nor Jesus made the list either. The purpose of life to 2,000 American 14-year-olds that year was to be like Burt Reynolds. The reason for church is to remind us that life has more purpose than that. The purpose of church is to help us remember, to help us remember whose we are, to help us remember who and why we are by reminding us of our story. The purpose of church is to help us remember whose we are and why we are by keeping continuously before us the center of all life, who is God. Week after week, day after day, we come here to church to hear our story again. We hear it in the Eucharistic Prayer - how in the beginning God created the world, how God created us, how he created us for himself in order that we and God might know and love each other, because that is who and why we are. And we are reminded of how we forgot that. We are reminded of how we forgot who and why we are, reminded of how we walked in our own ways and became lost. And we hear, once again, how God did not abandon us when we forgot and became lost, but how he sent his servants, the prophets, to seek us out and call us back. And week after week we are reminded of how we didn't hear, and how, finally, God's love for us was so strong that he sent his own Son to show us God's purpose in his own life, so that, through him, we might be found and brought back to God, brought back to our true purpose, redeemed. So that we might be brought back to the purpose of a life lived by walking in God's purpose. When Jesus was asked what is the most important law, he did the same thing for us. He reminded us of our story. "Remember," he said. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest teaching. Do you remember? And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two teachings." This is the purpose of our lives, Jesus reminds us, which is what the whole of our story is about and which is what every 14-year-old should know. Indeed, it's what every four-year-old should know. But how can they know unless we show them? Rabbi Stanley Wagner says that to love the Lord your God with all your strength means to love God regardless of circumstance, to love God regardless of what life metes out to you. And the second commandment is like it: to love your neighbor, regardless of circumstance. Week after week, day after day, we come to the Eucharist to be reminded of this. That's the purpose of the Eucharist - to remind us of our purpose, to remind us that beyond every car payment and every bridge game and every football game and even beyond our last breath, there is God, the source of our being and both the subject and the object of our love. We belong to God. The purpose of our lives is to live God's purpose. Maybe some people don't need to be reminded, but I do. And I suspect that most of you do, too. I suspect that that's why we're here this morning. Being reminded of who we are and why we are, of what our true purpose is, being reminded that we are called to live the glory of God, not on the mountain top of ecstasy, but on the road of ordinary life, is what the Transfiguration is about, too. And that's why the Transfiguration is always our Gospel reading on this Last Sunday after the Epiphany, the threshold of Lent, the threshold of real life. Recently I read, once again, one of my favorite books, The Grapes of Wrath. And I watched the movie once again, for the umpteenth time. Once again I saw the Joads driven from their land in Oklahoma by the plague of dust and the insatiable hunger of the mortgage company. And once again I watched as the Joads made their exodus to the Promised Land. The journey, as you know, was one difficult thing after another. First, the Joads' neighbor and friend, Muley Graves, lost his mind and refused to go. Then Grandpa and Grandma died along the way and the son-in-law abandoned Rose of Sharon in her pregnancy. And then there weren't any jobs in California. None, at least, that paid a living wage. And then Preacher Casy was killed. And then Tom killed the man who killed Preacher Casy, and Tom had to run for his life. And through all this Ma looks back, and remembers. She remembers that there is a purpose in it all, a purpose in their journey - to keep the "fambly" together. And even as circumstances grow more difficult, as events take one person after another away from the family, Ma keeps her eye on this purpose, which is the meaning of her life, whether she's back in Oklahoma or on the road ahead. Ma, on the road to California, is Moses on the road in the wilderness. The people of God were making their exodus from Egypt and slavery, through the wilderness to the Promised Land. But on the road life became just one arduous thing after another, and people began to grumble and complain. And they began to forget, and to live according to other gods and to walk in their own ways. They began to forget that it was the Lord who brought them out of slavery into freedom, and they began to forget why he did it. So the Lord reminded them who they were and what their purpose was. He gave them his Ten Teachings. He gave them his Ten Words to remind them that it was he, the Lord, who brought us out of slavery and gave us the promise and purpose of life, which is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, regardless of circumstance. And it was Ma, Moses, God's prophet, who brought God's reminder to the people. And when he did, his face was radiant with the presence of the Lord, for the Lord reminded Moses of the purpose of his life, and Moses was transfigured. And Moses went down the mountain with the Ten Words to remind the people of the Lord's purpose for their lives down on the road. And once again this morning we hear the story of the transfiguration of Jesus. Once again we hear how Peter and James and John went up a mountain with Jesus, and how they saw Moses and Elijah there. And we hear how Jesus' face shone with the glory of God himself. And we hear how that was when Peter and James and John knew for sure that Jesus was who Peter had said he was - Messiah, the Anointed of God, the very Word and Purpose of God himself standing in flesh and blood right there in front of them. Once again we hear how Peter wanted them all just to remain in the ecstasy of the mountain top forever. "What would Jesus do now?" they asked then as we ask now. What would Jesus do now that he has appeared in glory? And once again we hear how Jesus reminded Peter and James and John of the purpose and glory of life, the glory of his life and of theirs. We hear how he spoke about their exodus, about his journey and theirs, about their road back down the mountain to real life, to Jerusalem and the Cross. And once again, during Lent, we watch him do it. We watch him make his exodus, his difficult road down the mountain back to real life on earth with all its trying circumstances and difficult people and painful events, all the way to the Cross, taking Peter and James and John with him along the way. Once again this morning we hear Jesus remind us that he had to walk the way of the Cross, and die, to realize his purpose. Again this morning we hear him remind us, as we heard last week as well, that the purpose and glory of life - blessedness - is to keep the family together, to make peace and to hunger for righteousness, "to act justly, and to love mercy," to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Regardless of circumstance. I was reminded again this week in one of their emails that The New York Times is fond of claiming that Sundays were made for The New York Times, because on Sundays, they say, there is plenty of time to catch up on "Arts and Leisure," the Nasdaq , football, the Michael Jackson thing, and on war and terror and murder and mayhem and business as usual. But I suspect that you are here this Sunday morning, rather than at home reading The New York Times or The Gazette or The Denver Post, because you are hoping to find something greater in life, some vision of life that's larger than what the Sunday papers offer. Roger Lovett, a Baptist pastor in Birmingham, Alabama, insists that Sundays were made for transfiguration. He says that Jesus' transfiguration reminds the Church, as Jesus reminded Peter, that it's not our purpose to stay on the mountain top, but to live the transfigured life on the road of life - in Jerusalem and in Colorado Springs, where life is complicated and sometimes painful, and where there is always a need for an excess of justice and mercy, always an opportunity for loving God by loving our neighbors as ourselves, regardless of circumstance. "Above everything else," Lovett says, "we learn [from the Transfiguration] that God was there" - not only there with Jesus on the mountain top, but also there with Jesus and his disciples as they hike down the mountain on the road back to real life, back to their work for justice and mercy, back to all the difficulty and suffering as they make their way to the hill of Calvary where the extravagant glory of God was conclusively revealed to all. Lovett invites us to consider the struggle for civil rights in our country as an instance of transfiguration. "This revolution would have been far different without pastors, churches, worship, and singing," he reminds us. "Something powerful happened in those [little] clapboard churches on [the] side streets [of life]. People came to see that God was in what they were doing. Black folk came to realize they counted, even though life was hard and difficult. They discovered again that they really were somebody, and that deep in their hearts they would overcome injustice, poverty, and a world that treated them as outsiders." A transfigured perspective - a vision of the presence of God to them, not only on the mountain top, but also in their excruciating search for justice and mercy - "that's the big picture," Lovett says, "that kept African Americans going when nobody wanted them to vote or have equal opportunities." They came to see that "God was infinitely concerned about their lives and their futures." "I have a dream" is the way Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed it from the heights of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But "I don't know what will happen now" is the way he expressed it five years later from the motel balcony in Memphis on April 3,1968, the day before he was killed. "We've got some difficult days ahead," King said that day. "But it doesn't matter to me now, because I've been to the mountain top. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.... But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. [God] has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that we, as a people - we will get to the promised land." King experienced the glory of a mountain top experience. On the mountain God reminded him of his purpose. On the mountain he had a vision of a people transfigured by the living out of the content of their creed. And there, on the mountain, he was reminded that his life, his purpose, lay down the mountain in the streets and alleys with the sanitation workers of Memphis and on the trails of every hill and molehill from Mississippi to Colorado, where there was still work to be done for justice and mercy. And that is where he died, and where he lives. On the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples experienced the glory of God in Jesus. And God himself spoke to them. "This is my beloved Son," the voice assured them. There on the Mount of Transfiguration - Glory, clouds, Moses , Elijah - the whole experience supplied the conviction that they had met God there, that God himself was with them. But Jesus reminded them that they couldn't stay on the mountain, that the purpose of their lives was down in the city as well, down on the road and in Jerusalem where life is sometimes rough and crowded and difficult and painful and where, as Robert Campbell reminds us, "the glory of God shines not just in the transfigured face of Christ, but in the disfigured face of Christ, for the face we see on the mountain is the face we see on the Cross, [because] the God who was there on the mountain is the God who was there on the Cross." The test of any vision, the transfigured Jesus reminds us, is what we do when we get back down to the bottom of the mountain. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |