The relationship of cause to effect is not the same thing as the relationship between cost and benefit, or what I would describe as a transactional relationship—one in which I do something for you and then you do something for me. When it comes to our relationship to God, it’s definitely not a transactional one, however much we have tried to describe it with the language of contract law, or covenant. Jesus was clear about that early and often in his ministry, and that’s one reason why we so often hear him talking in language that upends our expectations using statements such as “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it,” or “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” He might be talking about biological life and death, with these sentiments, but that was HIS journey, and don’t assume yours is like it. Jesus might as well have screamed, “Let go you silly people! It’s not what you think! Let go of who you think God is, because however much you believe your hearts and minds can contain the depth and breadth of God’s love, they cannot.”

The Lenten journey of self-discovery is meant to loosen our death grip on our expectations of how we should relate to God and our neighbors. It is meant to help us learn to be in relationship with God and with our neighbor purely for the experience of joy and wisdom without defining a reward that we presume to be commensurate with our goodness. When we recognize that we can relate to God as we relate to our vitality—to the breath of life, we can then engage in a cause and effect relationship. HOWEVER… that is because God is consistently pure and steadfast love, freely offered, whether or not we do this or that thing. We cannot earn God’s love and that is why we say we are “saved from sin” by grace alone; not by works, however good they may be. And because sin is simply whatever it is that separates us from God, the meaning of being saved from sin is the explanation that it is the nature of God that keeps us from ever truly being separated. After all, we live in God—the whole universe lives in God. As St. Paul is quoted to have said to the Athenians in the Acts of the Apostles, this is the same God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” When we enter into the experience of deep relationship with God, we simply must refrain from assuming we know what our lives should look like and what our rewards should be. It’s not “fee for service.” That’s why we had the reformation 500 years ago. Neither the sacraments nor God’s love are for sale. They’re freely given—no strings.

It’s hard to even choose words to talk about these things because our very language is so replete with words that make so much of human interaction sound like a commercial transaction. But if we look deeply at the words Jesus said to his disciples and the crowds: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Even though he did prophecy his coming suffering and murder to the disciples, he’s not telling the assembled crowd that they will be tortured and killed. What he is saying is that one must deny self-centered focus. They might have to buck the civil authorities—he’s using the language of the cross, because it was common for the Romans to crucify political opposition or whomever they perceived as a threat to the social order, forcing the convicted to carry the horizontal cross beam from which they hung on the cross. Jesus is telling the crowd, “don’t be obsessed with a problem as small as the fulfillment of worldly needs when instead you can be thinking in the context of eternity.” He points out the folly of transactional living when he asks, “What can they give in return for their life?” There is nothing we can offer God that is commensurate with the value of life in Christ Jesus, so don’t even try to think that way. Accepting the grace means turning away from petty self-interest and turning toward God. When we turn toward God, the Body of Christ is reflected back. Not just our own image. We can’t even see it if we are holding on to our ideas, which hang like a cloud of dense fog between us and God, obscuring that beautiful glimpse of divine glory.

Lent is the season of self-reflection and discovery. These forty days are often referred to as a journey, because we are on a mission to learn more about who we are in light of God’s ultimate revelation of love—Jesus Christ. My prayer for you today is that you will discover something new and maybe unexpected about yourselves during your forty-day journey. No matter who surrounds you in terms of family and friends, this is a trip that is customized for each one of us, because of our unique gifts and calls to serve God within the Body of Christ. But just like Jesus, during his forty-day journey through the wilderness, you are never really alone because the angels are waiting on you. I hope you will know them when you encounter them, because they don’t necessarily conform to your expectations.

Now the thing about self-discovery is that it’s often hard to do in the midst of all of the distractions that surround us, begging for our attention. The people in our lives, the stuff we possess, like phones, computers, cars, musical instruments, and sports paraphernalia. And even ideas and schedules that tend to imprison us under their weight. Whether you’re nine or ninety, there are always things outside of our own selves that call for our attention: we have to get to school, to work, to the grocery, to church, to the TV. That’s why we love a change of scenery and a good vacation!

However, labor statistics show that we Americans don’t take much vacation time when compared to our counterparts in other countries. Some of that is cultural history; some of it is a decision that work is more important than we are, some of it is fear we will be seen as unmotivated by our peers or bosses, and one big reason that Americans have less vacation than Europeans is that employers just don’t give much vacation time to most workers, even though the benefits of taking a break are well established.

I confess that I am probably the worst offender because I load up my plate with an impossibly huge portion of things to do, which I justify by saying, “Well it’s God’s work, and Jesus probably didn’t take any breaks.” But we all know that’s not true. His forty days in the wilderness would certainly not look like a vacation to me, at least not the way it’s depicted in the Bible. But being driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of deep self-examination IS something that can and does happen to us. Whether or not you are sent to a geographic wilderness or sent in some other way to a place without amenities (which is the definition of wilderness) the key to allowing that experience to help you learn something new about your self is in recognizing that it was indeed the Holy Spirit who sent you.

In my case, it was the actual wilderness. After years and years, well, decades, really, of running away from the church, slightly less years of slogging my way through graduate school, moving across the country and finding myself in what by most measures of success would have been a dream job, I was angry. Not in any kind of obvious way, but frustrated with everything in life. At the beginning of a new century, I was tired and disoriented, having flown many miles and finding myself at the bottom of the world standing at the edge of the ice sheet and looking off to the horizon at the Royal Society Mountain Range. I had been obsessed with getting to Antarctica for reasons I did not know, and I had finally figured out a path to make it happen. Even though it’s technically summer at the start of the New Year, its still mighty cold that close to the South Pole. And as I stood there, staring out at the mountains, the winds that blow down off the polar plateau, were whipping by, making me squint, even with hood of my parka up, and drawn tightly around my face. And here is the eerie part. Something happened, and all of the anger and frustration I had felt drained out of me in a matter of seconds. I felt it leave, almost as if it had been carried off on the wind. And I could not stop crying.

One of the leaders of the expedition walked up beside me and stood there silently for several minutes. After a time she said, “It changes you doesn’t it? It doesn’t call to everyone the way it calls to me, and apparently to you. Soak up every minute.” And then she walked away.

That was my angel, sent to validate my call to the wilderness. And when I returned to Los Angeles, I was someone else. Not fully formed, mind you, but starting out on a very different path; one in which I was obsessed with building community. It took another ten years to get back to the church, but that’s another story for a different day. The point of this story is that sometimes the Holy Spirit really takes you to the actual wilderness, where nothing but survival is there to distract you from hearing the voice of God.

Our story of Jesus’ baptism and temptation is also for you. Because when Mark talks about the heavens being torn apart, he’s telling the story of how the boundary between eternal and ephemeral was breached and Jesus became the bridge between the two. The same thing was memorialized at your baptism—when you became not just a child to a particular family on Earth, but the eternal family of the great Cloud of Witnesses. The author of the NT book Hebrews (12:1) affirms, “ Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

You are all called each to your own wilderness during Lent to throw off everything that hinders you and the sins that keep your heart entangled so that you can figure out which race is marked out for you. Whatever Satan may be tempting you with, and whatever beasts you might be fighting, the angels are waiting on you, and so is Jesus.

The last time that Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s Day were celebrated on the same day was 1945. And what an interesting combination of a day that many celebrate with chocolates and other sweet indulgences with a day that we think of solemn and penitential, a time when we also begin a season of fasting and sacrifice in order to strip away the distractions that we allow to come between us and God. I think Jesus would have loved that conflation of a celebration of love together with a commemoration of the transience of life and the acknowledgment of who really holds all of the power—the source of love itself. In a mindset of “both/and” rather than “either/or” thinking, we can absolutely hold the celebration of love together with the initiation of the penitential season of Lent, because it’s that repentance, or turning to God, that causes us to gaze squarely into the eyes of love in the first place.

We humans are often more quick to judge than to love each other because it can be quite difficult to understand how two things that seem like opposites could be true simultaneously. Things like the feeling sadness and joy at the same time. Or feeling both exhilarated and terrified all at once. It’s easy to make an assumption about the contents of someone else’s heart because we don’t believe that they can feel two nearly opposite feelings simultaneously. But they can. Sometimes we read the signs wrong. Sometimes we read God’s signs wrong.

On days when someone we love has died, it seems impossibly cruel that the sun can be shining beautifully as if the whole world hadn’t just crashed down around us. It seems easier to be angry with God about our loss than humbled by the comfort of the sun’s warmth.

Every artist knows that it’s the coexistence of both light and darkness that we call shadow that enables us to perceive three dimensions—depth to a two-dimensional canvas. And thank God that there can be love and beauty in an environment of chaos and fear, because it is acceptance of that very thing that allows us to believe that God is right there beside us, even in the most unimaginably awful situations.

Solemnity and joy are never very far apart during Lent. Our introspection and hope are redeemed by the steadfast love and faithfulness of the same God who says, “Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.” Turning to God, or “calling” to God as Isaiah puts it, is often the very action that can help us to rediscover joy when it seems elusive.

So here we are putting ashes on our foreheads and then going out into the evening, when Jesus is quoted as saying, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” What Jesus was saying is that the reward you receive from spiritual disciplines is not the result of everyone talking about how holy you are, but rather it’s the deepening of your relationship to God that results from those practices. When we focus on the divine source of all that is, relationship purely for love’s sake, we get to revel in that love. When we cry for help, if we are crying to God, our answer will be, “Here I am!” Lent is not a time for holding a contest to see who can give up the most beloved attachment. It’s a time for remembering how we are here only for the blink of an eye, and thinking about what will really make it count. The ash on your forehead will likely be washed off before you go to bed tonight. Just like the chrism with which you were anointed at your baptism. But that you are marked as Christ’s own forever, is irreversible, and He will not abandon you, even beyond the grave, when you truly will return to the dust from whence you came.

“O God, who on the holy mount revealed to chosen witnesses your well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening: Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the king in his beauty.” Amen.

For six Sundays we’ve received scriptural teachings that chronicle the revelation of Jesus as the Christ. Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, or the day that the infant Jesus was revealed to first the shepherds and then the wise men. The period of liturgical time that ends today was the season of discovery about the nature of Christ. So it’s fitting that this is the day when we remember the story of the transfiguration. The Episcopal Church celebrates the Transfiguration of Jesus as a major feast day, but not until August 6th. We take the lead from the Eastern Orthodox Church, who chose that date because it was the dedication of the first church to be built on Mt. Tabor, which is thought to be the site of the Transfiguration.

Jesus brought his sidekicks, Peter James and John up a high mountain to pray. And that’s when it happened. The Glory of Jesus was revealed to the three disciples along with the vision of the two holy men from their faith history: Moses and Elijah. And what does Peter do? He reveals the thing that we all feel when something amazing happens. And that is the human instinct to hold it tightly so that it never ends. He wanted to freeze that awesome time by building three dwellings, one each for Moses, for Elijah and for Jesus, now revealed in glory himself. But it was not Peter’s call to stay on a mountaintop to commune with Jesus and Moses and Elijah.

It wasn’t exactly a rebuke that Peter received when God spoke from a cloud to the disciples, saying “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” just like the day Jesus was baptized. God was not only essentially telling Peter, no, you’re not going to be staying up here,” but he was also telling all three of the disciples from whom he received his authority: from God’s mouth to their ears!

But just as quickly as the transfiguration of Jesus was revealed, the vision was over, and the three disciples were left alone with Jesus on the mountaintop, Moses and Elijah once again vanished to the realm of the divine.

Just like an awesome dream that abruptly evaporates, that special time was over, and they went back down the mountain with new wisdom about the teacher they had been following. No tiny houses were built that day. Peter could not hold back the inevitable change that comes with the passage of time, because that’s what time is—the memorializing of change.

And that’s a fitting story for us to think about today, because in addition to this being the last Sunday of Epiphany it’s also the first Sunday of our parish’s operational year. We’re about to elect some new vestry members, a convention delegate, and we are going to talk about the year that has just past, and about the one that lies ahead.

Just as Peter wanted to hang out on a mountaintop with the transfigured Christ and Moses and Elijah, many of us want this church, the mountaintop where WE go to pray, to look and feel like it did a generation ago.

It’s clear you love the memories you carry from your childhood in this place. I want your grandchildren to be able to tell those same stories someday. So in just a little while, we are going to come together here on our mountaintop and celebrate the things we accomplished during the last year, and we are going to do the very thing that God commanded Peter to do—listen to the voice of God’s Son, the beloved, so that our church home can do its best to discern what kind of church God is calling us to be in the coming year and on into the future.

Jesus had already spent time in the synagogue teaching, praying and discussing Torah, even casting out a demon that had possessed a person.

I don’t know if the synagogue had an equivalent to coffee hour, butMark says Jesus and his disciples left and went to Simon and Andrew’s home. Simon’s mother-in-law was ill with a fever, and when they told Jesus about it, he came and cured her by taking her hand and lifting her from her bed. As a woman, I can’t help but notice that she immediately got up and served the men, but I don’t think we should get stuck on that, because the point of the story is that Jesus was getting stuff done: healing stuff. And word spread rapidly, because Mark tells us that the entire city of Capernaum was gathered around the door of Simon and Andrew’s home.

Archeological artifacts put the estimate of Capernaum’s population at about 1500 people in Jesus’s time. That’s a lot of people! And Jesus set about curing many of those that were sick or possessed by demons; that is, those who were spiritually sick. The guy must have been exhausted. How did he get the energy to get through the Sabbath—the day of rest, when he had people surrounding him, begging for attention?

Those of you who have been parents or even pet owners know that sometimes your dependents will stop at nothing to get your attention, no matter what else you might be doing. So I wonder, how did Jesus feel, when in what I presume to be utter exhaustion, he’d gotten up from sleep while it was still dark, gone off to a deserted place to pray, and his disciples virtually stalked him, finding him and saying, “Everyone is searching for you.” The text does not say, “He rebuked them.” He did not raise his voice in irritation and say, “Can’t you see I’m praying?” He just calmly said (and this is my paraphrase), “OK, let’s go to the neighboring towns, so I can proclaim the message there also, because that’s what I came to do.” So how DID he get the energy? How do WE get the energy to do the things we came to do?

Well first off, he was Jesus. But he was as much mortal human body as he was Son of God. That body faced the same challenges that any of the humans of the first century faced. That was the point of incarnation in our form: to fully experience it. Isaiah tells us, “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles! They shall run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint.”

And Jesus knew those things about God and went directly to God in prayer and deep communion, because nurturing that relationship gave him the strength and clarity he needed to recognize his purpose and go get it done.

He didn’t need a Five Hour energy drink because he knew that those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. I don’t suggest that Jesus didn’t need to sleep, nor do I suggest that YOU don’t need it. So here is an interesting idea to consider. Historian Roger Ekirch has researched the nighttime activities and sleep habits of people through the ages. He has argued that there is a body of evidence that before the industrial revolution, people did not sleep straight through the night but had a two part sleep cycle divided by a time of wakefulness that lasted one to three hours. In contemporary experiments, it turns out that this is a more natural biorhythm than sleeping straight through the dark time as we do today. The onset of the first sleep cycle was a little variable depending upon circumstance, but in the first century when Jesus lived, by the time it was dark, people were asleep. But they awakened after three or four hours and did those things that didn’t require light or for which moonlight was sufficient.

After people did whatever it is that they were going to do with the dark time, people typically had a second sleep cycle for about three or four hours. Perhaps it was routine for Jesus to spend his nocturnal awake time with God? After all, this is not the only story in the Bible that tells us he went off by himself to pray after teaching and healing and being surrounded by people. And come to think of it, not the only time he went off to charge his batteries in relationship with God when it was dark.

I think it’s kind of a two-part thing. First there’s forming a deep connection—a strong relationship with God, the source of ALL power. Isaiah asks us twice: “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” This is NOT a secret: Jesus got his strength from God, who never gets tired! God who gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless! Those who wait for the Lord renew their strength! This is not just for Jesus— it’s for all who came before him and after him as well—it’s for us!

The second thing: when you get into the groove and you find your calling, you feel amazing. We know that Jesus knew what he was there to do because he comes right out and says, “That is what I came out to do.” Don’t compromise when you are trying to figure out who you are and what God is calling you to be. Fulfilling your potential is the path of least resistance. It might seem like an uphill fight to get other humans on board, but I can tell you from my personal experience, it’s a bigger up hill fight to get through your life doing something other than what God has made you to do. It’s not always what we think—it takes discernment, but you will be amazed how much energy you have when you’re the most you that you can possibly be. These are the two things that provide you with the energy to go and be you:

(1) Do the things that God has given you the gifts to do and (2) spend as much time as you can strengthening your relationship with God. Just you and God.

Maybe you curse a need to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night. But perhaps, it’s the Holy Spirit using whatever means necessary to call you to an ancient rhythm of waking and sleeping where God is waiting for you to have a conversation in the dark. You shall run and not be weary; you shall walk and not faint. No caffeine required.