Word of Life Church Podcast

We tend to make a hard theological distinction between sin and sickness, between iniquity and illness, between guilt and death; but Jesus doesn’t seem to make that kind of hard distinction. In his great compassion Jesus looks upon all of us as soul-sick sinners broken by a terrible fall, and he comes to help us, to heal us, to forgive us, and to restore us. The salvation we find in Jesus Christ is holistic.

You have heard it said, God helps those who help themselves. But I say unto you, God helps the helpless and leaves the rest to help themselves. We are saved when we call upon the name of the Lord—and we call upon the Lord when we know we can't save ourselves. When we go into the ashes and wait in the place of loss, we admit that we need God.

Scripture references are NRSV.Transfiguration Sunday, February 27, 2022Mystics on the MountainsOne of the most remarkable aspects of the Transfiguration is the appearance of Moses and Elijah—Moses who lived twelve centuries before Christ and Elijah who lived nine centuries before Christ. Moses and Elijah were mystics who had had their own encounters with God on a holy mountain. They were Mystics on the Mountains.

During the season of Epiphany leading up to Lent, the Gospel readings in the lectionary are focused on the early ministry of Jesus—that is, from his baptism to his transfiguration. What we find in the first half of the Gospels is the healing and teaching ministry of Jesus as he travels throughout Galilee. This sermon will look at the core of Jesus’ kingdom message—The Politics of Heaven.

When Jesus began his public ministry in Galilee around the age of thirty, the thing that drew the crowds and spread his fame was that he was a healer. John the Baptist was famous as a preacher and baptizer, but Jesus was first of all famous as a healer and miracle worker. From curing Peter’s mother-in-law of her fever in Capernaum at the beginning of his ministry to resorting Malchus’ severed ear in the Garden of Gethsemane at the end of his ministry, Jesus was a healer. When we look at the ministry of Jesus we can say…Hence Comes the Healer.

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown by God is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. … The secret of my [true] identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God."—Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Jesus was rejected in his hometown. What are we to think of the people of Nazareth? Were they just more dull-witted or hard-hearted than the people of Capernaum? No. They had simply stumbled at the offence of familiarity. And today in Western society, we're all from Jesus hometown.

My life has become so intertwined with the story of the Wedding Feast at Cana that it has become the primary way that I tell my born again again story. Every time I read about how Jesus turned the water to wine, I feel a deep personal connection with the story. It’s become my story—or at least some of my story. And when the Gospel stories become our stories, this is when Scripture is doing its most profound work in our lives. I love the whole Bible, but I have a particular love for the story of Jesus’ first miracle. My love for this story is such that whenever I just hear the word Cana, it makes me happy. When I hear the baffled steward say, “But you have kept the best wine until now!”, I think, “That’s my story too!” The story of how in midlife Jesus turned the water to wine and I discovered the vintage I’d been looking for all my life.

The spiritual genius of the lectionary is on display when the water and flame poem of Isaiah 43 in the Old Testament is connected with Luke’s account of Jesus’ baptism in the New Testament. By making this connection, we are shown that God’s promise to be with us as we pass through rivers and waters, through fire and flame, is fulfilled, as all the promises of God are, in Jesus. For Christ Jesus is the one who joins us in the waters of baptism and the one who purifies us in the baptism of fire.