From the Pulpit - Second Sunday of Lent

The Lord be with you. And with your sins. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Lord, be with you, Lord. Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them conversing with him. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, "Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him." When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, "Rise and do not be afraid." And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone. As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, "Do not towel the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." The gospel of the Lord raised to the Lord Jesus Christ. Before I begin preaching on the readings and such this weekend, just want to invite you to a little bit deeper prayer, or if you've heard, but we might be on the verge of war with Iran and regardless of your political opinions on the matter, to echo Pope Francis before his death. The goal for us is Christians is that never again war. At the untold costs of people that fight it on the civilian casualties, all of those things. So just to invite you, prayer changes reality. The Lord wants us to besiege him. And who knows how history can be changed by the prayers of the faithful. So just to invite you to consider that. Regardless of what will come, just to ask the Lord to preserve us and preserve the world right from war. That has a little bit actually to what I want to preach on this weekend, but I just want to share with you a story first. I grew up in rural Wisconsin, a little place called Exonia. You don't know it. It was named by picking letters from a hat and then arranging them in a random order. I-X-O-N-I-A-Strange, Exonia. But it was distant enough from the closest city, about 10 miles, that we couldn't actually hear the tornado sirens when storms were coming. So we had a little no-weather radio that would go off if there were warnings being issued. We'd often look out the window and see the green clouds and things like that and watch storms approach from the west. We had a hundred-year-old barn that when the winds would pick up, would actually lean at like almost a 30-degree angle and was held up by strong steel bindings, right, to the ground. I-Shether with you, funny stories. My dad was precisely the person that when the weather radio said, "Don't go outside and look for the tornado." He would go outside and look for the tornado. But I-Shether with you, because I think it ties well to the common theme of our readings. For me as a child, that reality that happened pretty much every summer, especially like in the middle of the night when there were thunderstorms and all seven of us would actually run in time into mom and dad's bed in just the middle of the night and be reassured of the safety. I think it gives a good picture of what peace of heart actually is versus what we might think it is in relationship to the Lord. So the common theme in our readings this weekend is that of suffering and of an invitation into the suffering of an adventure with the Lord. So Abraham is invited to go from a place of comfort and familiarity, the land of his people. And he's invited by the Lord to leave everything behind and to trust that the Lord's going to make of his people a great nation. He will not live to see that promise fulfilled. In the apostles, they were waiting for a time like this. They observed a thing called the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles. Every year is Jewish people. They'd go up and pitch tents around Jerusalem. The point of that was they were longing for the coming of the peace of God and the presence of God in Jerusalem. So when Peter is saying, "Let us pitch tents here," he's thinking, "Okay, this promise has been realized. The Lord has come and manifested his presence again. Let us rest here with the Lord." That's what they were yearning for. But what he misses, what he misses is what the Lord has to prophesy at the end. And he says it elsewhere in the other gospel accounts of the transfiguration. "No first thing must go and suffer." First thing must go and suffer. Do not speak of this until the Son of Man rises from the dead. And we see in Abraham great sufferings that he would go through great trials, great difficulties. As he puts out in faith with the Lord, puts out from his homeland and he endures trials. But much like me and my siblings in the midst of thunderstorms and tornadoes as children, peace of heart when the Lord invites us into adventure, especially in the midst of the storms of this falling world, is something much deeper than just the emotional apathy of not feeling afraid. If you think again of the image of a young child terrified of a storm, uncertain of like, "Are we going to lose our house? Am I going to lose at that time?" It's like my video games and a couple other books that I really liked. But there's a fear that arises, which is a natural and a good thing. But peace of heart when the Lord asks something challenging of you, when he invites you deeper into holiness, when he asks you a particular vocation, when he invites you into a difficult situation where you know you are going to suffer. You're going to have fear. You're going to have an experience of uncertainty. You're going to have the emotional disruption of saying, "I can't see my way through this. I don't see how I'm safe." That doesn't mean you don't possess the peace of heart that the Lord can give. Peace of heart must more succinctly as put as a confidence in the will of God. A confidence that if we abandon ourselves to His will, and He is a provident and faithful father, that though we are tossed about by the storms of the world, His providence holds true. His promises hold true. This is a much more difficult reality to live in. But I find it helpful in my own navigation of the Christian life. Because one of the temptations that can happen is you begin to pray with the Lord more fervently, especially if you've done this during Lent. You begin to enter into relationship with Him. He asks big things of you, either to leave sin behind or step into greater holiness and virtue. And then difficulty in uncertainty arises. And you might say, "Wait a minute, I've lost my peace. I must have done something wrong." No one all likelihood you're experiencing the natural fear of someone who's asked to do something adventurous and challenging. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is the confidence that says, "Though I experience fear, I trust that if I step into this, there is a greater good on the other side." That's the reality of suffering in this life. It's actually why I think it's important that the cross is revealed to us. Because it shows us that what God does is He redeems the difficulty and the suffering of our life. He doesn't avoid it, doesn't step away from it, He steps right into it. And just as a young child who's being held by their parents in the midst of a tornado or a storm, they may not have the total like peace, they might still be afraid. What do they have? The security that mom and dad have them. That mom and dad are there. And that's the confidence I think that we're called to develop in relationship to the Lord. It's not so much that we walk through life apathetic, meaning we don't feel anything. But that we walk through life in the midst of all that turmoil, and we regularly cast our cares on the Lord saying, "Okay, but help me to believe that your will is still provident and your promises are still good." That is what we call the supernatural gifts of faith, hope, and charity. The ability to have confidence in Jesus and in God, that they are who they say they are, that He is who He says He is. And the hope that says, "The promises that I cannot see coming true, the promises that I don't witness bearing fruit in my life, are still trustworthy because of the one who made them, because of the faithfulness of our Father who said, 'I will do this.'" So in your life, when He says, "I will free you from sin." He's going to do it. He's going to do it. When He says to you, "This is what I ask of you." be a priest, marry this person, follow this path in life. When he says it, he's going to make it happen because he's a man, he's a God and a father who keeps his promises. But for us, the experience of faith has been charity and I think we can learn this from Abraham, we can learn this from Peter, James, and John. It's not given in a moment and then it's perfect and full forever. Like all virtue, it has to be practiced. So at times you may feel, "Okay, yeah, I have perfect confidence in the will of God." And there's a sense of serenity beneath the emotional experiences of life. But at other times, you might be like, "I don't think I have any confidence that God's going to provide like the next meal for me." Peter, James, and John and Abraham show examples of what it looks like to grow into, grow into the faith, hope, and love that we're meant to have in the Father. Abraham leaves hedging his bets. He's told to take no relatives with him. He takes a lot. He's a relative. He goes into Egypt and he uses his wife in a really inappropriate way. Pretends that she's his sister. He obviously conceives, right, Ishmael, by a slave woman, trying to bring about the promises of God by his own means. Peter, James, and John flee in the garden. Multiple times, Peter says to Jesus, "That's not the way it's supposed to be." One time Jesus says to him, "Get behind me, Satan." But at the end of their lives, Abraham, Peter, James, and John, what do we see? That the fruit of the promises of the Lord come true. Peter, James, and John, in all likelihood, were martyred for the faith. You think that in an experienced fear or disruption in their emotional life is they're facing the cross or burning or being boiled in oil or skin to life? That's inhuman. But what did they have? A confidence that the promise of the cross was true. But if I endure this, what Christ has won for us in the resurrection of the dead will also be one in my life. It took them time to get there. But the way that we do that is by in the subtle moments of our lives, where we start to lose confidence in God. And for good reason, because we don't always see the working of his providence or his promises. We instead cast our cares on the Lord with the humble acknowledgement of, "This is really hard to do, Lord, I don't trust you, and yet I want to believe." I believe, "Help my unbelief." A prayer that's helped me in this, and I will give you this in closing. It's a very familiar prayer, maybe, to some of you. It's called the Serenity Prayer. Many know the first stands of it, but it's a lengthy prayer and it's beautiful, because it places us in the right location and Jesus and God in the driver's seat. And it goes this way, "I pray this many times in times of distress or uncertainty asking the Lord to be faithful and casting my care onto his will and his providence." God grant me this as serenity. To accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as the pathway to peace, taking as he did this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that he will make all things right, if I surrender to his will, that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with him forever in the next. I encourage you to look that up, because what it does is it casts our cares on the Lord and surrenders to his will, especially in the moments of turmoil and uncertainty in your emotional life. Those fears are real, they matter at the uncertainty in the darkness of like, "Lord, I don't know if I can trust you." But then to say, "No, Lord, I believe by the witness of the saints and by your promises that you are a provident and caring Father, and because you have promised to redeem the world, to redeem me, to redeem your church, because you have promised that you will come again and usher us into heaven. I cast my cares on you and I ask that your will be done because it is what is good for me and allows me to trust even in the midst of the storm."