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SERMONS

Last Sunday in Epiphany
February 22, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

There is a delightful story about St. Augustine strolling a beach in the Fifth Century. Augustine is suffering from writer’s block. He is stuck. He is mulling over a problem; how can the one, true God, be three persons: Father, Son, Holy Spirit? He is writing his treatise: De Trinitates, On The Trinity.

Augustine kicks the sand, and notices a small child. The child digs a hole in the sand, takes a shell, and trots down to the ocean, fills the shell with water, and trots back to the hole – pours it in. The child does this over and over again.

The great saint stands, watches, smiles to himself.
“What are you doing my child?” he asks.

“Emptying the ocean into this hole,” says the child.

Touched and amused, Augustine says, “Well, even if you spend your whole life trying to get the ocean into this hole, you could never complete it. The ocean is far too vast and deep to be contained in so small a hole. There is no end to it.”

The child looked up with seriousness. “At least I will complete this task before you can ever understand the Mystery of God upon which you ponder.” And with that the child vanished; and Augustine was left alone.

Do you ever think of yourself as an ostrich? A kiwi? A penguin?

That is how I often think of you; and of myself. It often seems to me that we are creatures with vestiges of some other purpose, some other journey, some other way of being, written into our very nature, like the wings of an ostrich, a kiwi, and a penguin; something is present, but unable to give us flight. What an everlasting frustration, to have the wings, and not to fly; what an everlasting frustration, to ponder the mystery of God, and never have enough ideas, words, or life to make an “end,” to have an “answer.”

Augustine’s dilemma is our dilemma; each of us in our own way trying to pour the ocean, to pour God, into a very small hole. We can’t run fast enough.

PAUSE:
It is the middle of Mark’s Gospel. We join Peter, James, and John, as they go with Jesus “up a high mountain apart.” It is a kind of bookmark and turning point in Mark’s Gospel.

In the first half of Mark, we have Jesus of Galilee. It is a time of healing, teaching, and preaching about sowers, seeds, fields and birds, fishes and loaves. Jesus in Galilee is very much the icon of the Good Shepherd; the one who seeks the lost, the one carrying medicine for our souls and bodies, the bringer of abundance, the vessel of miracles.
In the first half of Mark the twelve are gathered and the crowds throng about Jesus, so much so that they forget to care for themselves and he must feed them, so much so that the disciples cannot get enough rest, and he calls them away.

While Jesus is walking the green fields of Galilee, and crossing the Sea of Galilee in boats, it seems that the great political and religious machine of Jerusalem is miles and miles away. We only hear its rumblings in the comments made by a few stray Pharisees, who follow Jesus around like village hecklers.

Throughout the first half of Mark’s Gospel, it feels as though Jesus is inviting those who follow Him to begin an Ascent; to see with new eyes, and hear with new ears. Peter, James, and John go with Jesus to have this very experience.

On the top of this mountain Jesus is transfigured; he is the hinge of salvation history. Standing with Elijah and Moses, Jesus receives the mantle and the blessing of all that has preceded him in the long story of God and his people. There is a passing of the torch from the old Israel to the new. The light of that torch illuminates Jesus, and lifts him for just a moment, so that He is suspended between heaven and earth, between what has been, and what will be.

And Peter is like the child on the beach, looking for a hole into which to pour the ocean that is God’s power and light. Let us do something, let us contain the vision, let us build shines. Perhaps Peter thought he was seeing the completion; climbing the mountain, seeing the vision, perhaps Peter thought that they were near in the “end” of something with Jesus. Perhaps Peter, James, and John thought, “What more? What more could there be than this vision, this moment, this climax to the Jesus we have known in Galilee?”

As Jesus is the hinge, the story must turn; it must turn to Jerusalem.

Those gorgeous days in Galilee are not enough, not a large enough hole – Jesus must go to Jerusalem, so that the story of God’s love might continue; so that more of the ocean of God’s love might be poured into the sand of this world.

Augustine’s life might have actually been easier had he never met that child speaking the truth on the beach.  Peter’s life might have been easier if he could find some way to keep the Jesus of Galilee on that beautiful and radiant mountaintop.  To have a Jesus who is only and always a Good Shepherd, who never becomes the sacrificial lamb.

But then, that is not a large enough hole; it does not hold enough water of the ocean that is God’s love.  And Jesus comes down this mountain of glorious Transfiguration to begin writing with his own blood a story of salvation that contains your name, and my name.  And that is a story that no theologian, no matter how great, could ever write for us.