Scripture Reading:
​Mark 9:2–9

Beloved, I think that what happened to Jesus on Mount Tabor is happening in some sense to all of us, not physically, of course, transfigured, but in a spiritual sense. We are, through our faith in Jesus Christ, being changed, being transformed, and in the process of transformation, we find ourselves to have so many questions, so many concerns along the way. So this is an "Ask Me Anything" opportunity. Anybody have a question they would like to ask Pastor Jeff? It will be answered on the spot and if I can't answer it on the spot, I'll put it in my pocket and I'll bring it back up some other time in a service. Does anybody want to go first? Jan, you want to go first? How unlike you, Jan.

Jan: I would like you to make some comparisons to the major religions of the world and what we believe, especially about love and equity.

Okay. I'll mention a few. First of all, I think it's very important to know, well, we all know what we believe in terms of love and equity. I hope. Basically love your neighbor as you love yourself. That's the most important principle of the gospel. The whole of the law is contained within that we understand, and Jesus of course, was Jewish. He was commenting on the Jewish tradition. We could say that Jesus is a reformer, but we know for a fact that love your neighbor as yourself is not something that Jesus thought up as an original thinker. He received it from his Jewish tradition. And so Judaism and Christianity really stand shoulder to shoulder in this regard. We love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and Jews have this wonderful idea that we share in Christianity, but they have this word Tikun. And Tikun means to sort of be a repairer of the world—somebody who is a part of God's plan to redeem the world in some sense for us all, maybe in some ways to become people who love and change the world with God in partnership with God, which is an idea that we share very much.

And another tradition I know fairly well is Buddhism. And so I'll just talk a little bit about Buddhism. One of the major tenets of Buddhism is compassion and to have compassion for everybody—every being—and understanding. And I think in compassion we begin to recognize that there is no difference between my neighbor and I and that in fact we're all we really have down here in the world besides God and the spiritual powers. We have one another. And to understand that the life another person is living is only a hair breadths away from my life and it could have been my life just under different circumstances (right?) is something that draws us closer together to those who are our neighbors, to those we might consider to be our enemies to those we think we could never understand how they think or how they live, but we can. And the way through it is compassion, which is a trait that I think also Jesus recommends to us over and over and over again. So those are three religions. I can't do 'em all. Jan, you get three and maybe we'll come back to some other ones, some other time.

Craig: In the gospels we read about a person who asks, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus responds, "Obey my commandments." Suppose some 20 years later the same person meets the Apostle Paul and asks the same question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Paul's going to say believe in Jesus Christ, his death, and his resurrection. Totally different from what Jesus said! And Paul's going to point to Abraham, who lived before all this, and in reading Genesis it was said his belief in the Lord was accounted to him as righteousness. So, Pastor Jeff, what must we do to inherit eternal life?

Oh, an easy one. Thank you, Craig! What must we do to inherit eternal life?  Well, I think that Paul gives us good guidance, right? Because Paul directs us back to Jesus. And Paul says, Hey, my experience of this whole thing is you have to believe in that Jesus, that real spiritual power who can come down from heaven and nail you between the eyes, knock you down and change your life through the power of what was Paul's direct spiritual experience. Paul didn't live with Jesus. He didn't know Jesus in the flesh. He wasn't a disciple. He didn't walk with him. He never heard him preach one sermon. He never saw him do one single miracle. He was not there. He didn't sit at a table and eat with him, right? He was sort of maybe off on the periphery, persecuting some of the disciples at some point, but he did not know Jesus. His experience of Jesus is that resurrected, real, living spiritual power who will come down from heaven and nail you and take over your life in a way that changes everything. And we should believe the witness of Paul: God can do that to your life. And if you let God do that to your life, if you let God change you, that's one of the definitions of eternal life, of being saved, right?

And we should be grateful that we have the gospels and we have the tradition of the disciples and the churches who also bring down to us Jesus's teachings. And so we should always listen to Jesus' commandments because what Jesus had to say is extremely important to our understanding of how it is that we ought to live as people who have been seized and transformed by the power of Christ. Not all of us are as lucky as Paul, okay? We don't necessarily have that supernatural experience of God reaching down, blinding us and just taking over our life. I mean, the Holy Spirit just took Paul over. It wasn't his intelligence, it wasn't his will, it wasn't his idea. He didn't say, you know what? I think I'll let the Holy Spirit took me over. That would be a wonderful thing (maybe!) to experience. But not all of us are so lucky. And so when we feel the movement of God in our life and it's not a total takeover, how are we going to live? Paul was lucky. He was completely taken over and he lived like a wild man on the edges of the world and he did his penance for the life he had lived before. But for the rest of us, how are we going to live? We're going to follow the commandments of Jesus. We're going to follow Jesus' commands.

And then I would also say this idea of a righteousness being something that saves us. I also think that that's an important piece of the puzzle. The reason we are transformed by God is to increase our capacity for doing good in the world, right? That's why God transforms us. And there are all kinds of ways that this happens. Maybe God reaches down out of heaven and slaps you around and you are in that moment seized by the spirit and saved. That's an incredible experience. Or maybe you get taken out by a terrible illness and suffering and loss in your life and then you come through it, you work through it with God. And on the other side of that terrible suffering, which was no fair, you discover that your capacity for goodness and love and justice in this world is 10 times greater than it ever had been before. So it's important to pay attention to that idea of faith and righteousness because that increases our capacity to understand where it is that we are going, who it is that we are going to be. You can follow Jesus' commandments and they point you in the right direction. But there's also, in the idea of righteousness and faith, an expanded spiritual consciousness about what is my purpose in my role in a world that is suffering and needs me. So my answer is all three, and probably a little bit of other things as well. 

Miles: Something I think about in context of faith, which is a little bit new to me in my life is the concept of a chosen people, which is something that comes up in different religions. I'm curious how you think about that.

Wonderful. So let's talk about the concept of the chosen people in our Christian context. We acknowledge through our history and through the Hebrew scriptures, which are a part of our Christian tradition as well, we adopted them in, incorporated them in through Jesus, that the Jewish people were God's chosen people that God had—this is our theological tradition—God had a special love for the chosen people, the Hebrew people who became the people of Israel. And God had a special plan for those people to be God's special people in some sense, maybe even God's priests on the earth. And then God said, oh, I have an even better idea now here comes Jesus, and Jesus is going to come through this tradition and he's going to come through this bloodline, these people and be a messiah, not just for those people, but for the whole world.
So it's important to recognize that we affirm the Jewish people's claim, and I think we still do theologically, that they are a chosen people.

At the same time, there are a lot of traditions that feel like they're the chosen people. And I think it's important when we think of ourselves as chosen people (And this idea has come even into our American culture quite a bit. The idea that the people coming into the new world were God's chosen people who were chosen for this land to take it over, which is maybe an unfortunate theological echo of what happened with the promised land—of taking it over from the people who were already here and turning it into God's productive land. We had this idea in our heads that we were the chosen people escaping from Europe and coming to this country). So it's important when we think of ourselves as chosen people to recognize that it has a shadow side.

Being the chosen people is a wonderful thing! Man! To be chosen! It's incredible to feel God's finger on you, to feel God's eye, to feel that incredible expectation and to know that there is some great future for you and your bloodline and your people. Wow, amazing. Great. But there's a shadow to it. When that idea gets inflated in your mind, you inflate yourself to believe, well, I'm the only person that God cares about. I'm the chosen one. What I think matters most. What I feel matters most—my life and my land and my rights are what matter the most. And that is something that can happen when we feel like we are the chosen people.

And I believe we are the chosen people, and I believe everybody else is the chosen people too, it just all happens in their own different way, from their own different perspective. What's important is that we remember we're all God's children, we're all God's children. And all of us were chosen to be God's children. So in the idea of being chosen, which is wonderful, incredible, amazing, live in it, feel it, know it, but don't go crazy with it. Remember that you're just a mortal. You're just a human being. You're imperfect. And God has chosen everyone around you too, and their perspectives are just as chosen and just important as yours.

Oh, Bonnie Mohan. For those who don't know, Bonnie Mohan's, my wife. So, this is going to be real good.

Bonnie: So, as your wife, I happen to know that there's a weirdo inside you that I think this congregation doesn't always get to see. And one of the weirdo elements about you is your interest in the paranormal—we went this weekend to a paranormal museum. So, I'm wondering how you see your interest in the paranormal alongside your beliefs in God.

So Bonnie wants everyone to know that I'm a weirdo who's fascinated by the paranormal. And so she's asked me to comment on that. And let's talk about for a second (to just put it in a little bit of perspective) the Transfiguration, which we read about in our scripture reading this morning. Here's this incredible miraculous moment where Jesus is utterly transformed in front of three of the disciples. He's up there and he's talking with these two spirits, Moses and Elijah. They're there, they're speaking together, and God's voice comes down from heaven, Jesus becomes blazing white light—a miracle! If you were to go and experience something like this today, you would call it a miracle, you would call it supernatural, you would call it weird. It's incredible thing that's happening up there.

I believe that these kinds of miracles, transfigurations and maybe some of the other weird stuff that happens in our lives (it doesn't have to necessarily be a UFO or a ghost, but those moments where you get stopped in your tracks and you say, wait a minute, something outside of my normal humdrum day-to-day, boring, materialist reality is trying to get my attention here. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe it's seeing something out of the corner of your eye, or maybe it's just like you all of a sudden are seized by a kind of spooky feeling in the dark and you feel like something is watching you, something is trying to get your attention—a dream you might have), I believe that these kinds of miracles and maybe some of these supernatural phenomenon, paranormal phenomenon are the inbreaking of God's meaning into our physical world. That's what happened at the Transfiguration, right? God's meaning became so concentrated in Jesus and his relationship to his tradition and to those disciples that the meaning had to come out in the physical world and the physical world couldn't contain it as dead matter any longer. It came alive, spiritually alive. And so that's my answer about why the paranormal, supernatural stories of miracles and saints interest me so much is I see it as one way that meaning God's meaning, God's purposes and intentions and Spirit break into our world in an actual physical way. And if you believe in miracles, you believe that that's something that can happen.

Rita: Do you think physical God as man will walk on Earth again? Or more the miracle of a vision, for example?

Do I think that God in human form will walk upon the world again? Walk in the world again in physical form? Wow. What a wonderful question. My instinct, my intuition here is to answer it like this. I believe that Jesus Christ came into the world in order to show us the reality that that which is human can be so much more than human because Jesus was fully and totally human and at the same time fully and totally God. Now I believe that that was unique, and I don't believe that that's what's happening for you or for me. And yet God was showing us something that we couldn't have possibly believed before. And we even now today, have trouble believing that which is human is a perfectly acceptable, wonderful, beautiful, possible container for everything that is good, holy, sacred, beautiful, and divine. The human can fully contain, be filled up with to overflowing with that which is God. Now we're mortal and we're imperfect and we're never going to be Jesus. And yet there is a way, I believe, through faith in Jesus and through the process of coming to know God more deeply and coming to know our own self more deeply, that God comes alive in us and we walk a little bit more with God's feet and our hands even more become God's hands in this world. Which isn't to say that we are gods, we're not, but we're not "just human." We're more. God made us to be more. And Jesus is that absolute confirmation. You can be more than "just human." You can be more through your faith in Jesus. God comes into the world, not just through Jesus's incarnation, but through the incarnation of each and every one of us in a smaller way. That's what the Church is. It's Jesus's body on Earth now that he's gone, and each and every one of us is a part of that. So God is on Earth through the Holy Spirit, through our miraculous incarnations, through our associations and relationships with one another as a church reaching out into the world. Great question. Thank you.

Wonderful questions everybody. And we've got to stop, but we'll do this again sometime soon. And if you did have a question you didn't get to ask, email it to me or let me know and maybe I'll turn it into a sermon sometime. Thank you.

I know you have been thinking up real conundrums for me, head scratchers. So this is how it's going to work. If you have a question you'd like to ask, just raise your hand and I will point to you. I'd say you could just pull your mask down so everybody can hear you say your name please so that we all can hear your name and then ask your question. It's ask me anything. Any question is acceptable. There are no boring questions, only boring answers. So hopefully we'll see how I do. And I'm looking at the time because I have to pay attention. Yes, You don't have to stand, say your name.

Thank you, Catherine. So where are some places to turn for comfort in scripture in times of global strife and war? So there are two places that I consistently, this is for me, turn for comfort. And it's totally illogical one of them, because one of the places that I turn for comfort is I turn again and again to the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures. And that is not a place we usually think of as turning for comfort. That's usually the place you think of to turn. When you want somebody to cut you down to size and give you a challenge and say, "Whoa! You are going in the wrong direction. You have to get back on course." But I find incredible comfort in knowing that our God is a God who does not just offer a little bit of peace while the bombs are blowing up all around you.

Our God is a God who sees the whole world and calls all people to justice, to correction, and to holding themselves accountable. And that for me is a source of comfort. Yes, God does offer us comfort when times are hard. And when there's strife, God is that shepherd who lays us down in the valley. And strokes the hair on your head and reminds you that you are a child of God. And there are many places to turn for that in scripture. But I turn to those prophets who say, God is a God who holds the whole world accountable to justice, to mercy, to peace. That for me is where the comfort is. The second place I turn, I turn again and again to the gospels and to Jesus' message, especially the message that is so encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount, blessed it are the peacemakers, blessed it are the meek.

Again, it doesn't seem to make sense. Why are they blessed? Why are the poor blessed? Why are the meek blessed? And it is because Jesus' vision of the kingdom of God is a total reversal of the world that we live in. It's a world of justice and it's a world where the last shall be first. And knowing that is Jesus' vision, and that is God's vision for us, brings me comfort to know that we can work towards that vision and that what we pass through along the way is momentary. And there is suffering and it is hard, but God has a vision for something better. And I find great comfort in that. Thank you, Catherine. Yes. Your name please?

Oh, okay. Five names. Do you know what the five names are? Did you write them down? No. Okay. So Audrey says that and I think I know the question here. She says there are, she has, and going through reading some of our readings, she has found five different names for the large freshwater lake in Israel. And so you're wanting to know why are there so many names or which is the proper name or something like that?

Yeah. So there are a lot of different names. So one of the things we've heard it called is the Sea of Galilee, which is confusing because we think of a sea as a salt water body, but it's actually a fresh water body, but in the ancient world, a sea was any large body of water. So it's called a sea because it is such a large body of water, even though it is a fresh botany water. So we call that a lake.

It's also known as Sea of Galilee, Lake of Gennesaret. Today, it is actually called, I don't even remember what it's called today. It's called something completely different. And the issue was just different people in different places, referred to it in different ways. The interesting thing about Israel is that it is a place all throughout its history where different conquering empires were passing through it. It's an extraordinarily strategic piece of land, right on the Mediterranean, a gateway into the whole middle east. And so from the north, from the south, from the east and from the west, Israel was always being fought over and there were always conquering armies at the border or coming through. And as different people were naming things and carving things up, they called things by different names. And that is why there are so many different names. And there were so many different languages and in every different language people had a different name for it. So that's why that is sometimes recorded in the Greek. And even in the Greek, you read that people are calling it by different names. Yes. Your name please? 

Okay. Great question, Jan. So Jan's question is there's all of these different Christian religions and she wants to know specifically about the Eastern Orthodox religion. Where do the Eastern Orthodox churches come in? Where do they fit in? And I think she's especially thinking about the church in Ukraine, as we've been hearing about Ukraine a lot. We're learning that there are some Protestants of some Catholics there, but there's also this Ukrainian church. And what is that? So a long time ago, 1051, oh, somebody will Google me, who's watching online at home. There was something there was used to be just one church, one universal church that spread over the whole world. And in 1051, there was a split called the Great Schism. And the Eastern church broke away from the Western church. Now we live in the west.

So we typically think there are Catholics and there are Protestants. And we forget entirely about everybody from Constantinople east, who did not become Catholic. They broke away from the Roman church and the Roman church broke away from the church of Constantinople. And those churches are known as the Orthodox churches, the Eastern Orthodox churches. And there is an Eastern Orthodox church in Greece, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Egypt, in Ethiopia, in India, all over Eastern Europe, the middle east, the far east and north Africa, you will find the Eastern Orthodox churches. And the Great Schism, it was a power dynamic when Rome fell that sort of created, there was a cultural difference between the two churches and there was a power difference, but there were also some differences in theology.

The Eastern church had different theologies than the Western church. The Western church was all focused on the Pope in Rome and they were sort of wanted to be independent. Today, the Eastern churches are very interesting for us to learn about as Western Christians, because the Eastern vision of Christianity and theology is so different than ours. Now, as a sort of liberal leaning, even if sort of Protestant denomination, sort of theologically liberal, it's very interesting to encounter the Eastern Orthodox tradition because we encounter a tradition that in some ways is more traditional and conservative than our tradition. And in other ways is more liberal in the sense that they have not followed all the traditions of the west and they have their own traditions. For instance, one of the great Eastern Orthodox theologians of our time has written a wonderful book called that all may be saved, which is all about a sort of a Christian vision of universalism that hell is not eternal.

And that in their vision of Christianity, all Christians, all people will eventually be saved. And so there's ways in which the Eastern traditions can really inform us as Western Christians show us a totally different side of Christianity. But sometimes we see these things and we think, well, that's not the way it is. That's not traditional. That's not Orthodox. In fact, these are traditions that date way back that predate us and that predate is some of the ways that we think, and they're beautiful to engage. And I will say this about the Eastern Orthodox churches. They have one of the differences between the Western church and the Eastern church is in the Eastern church, they venerate icons. And so you've probably seen these Eastern Orthodox icons. It is one of the most beautiful art forms in the world, the iconography, and one of the most beautiful spiritual practices in the world for the Orthodox churches these icons are more than art. They're sort of art. Plus it is a direct encounter with God or with a Saint to commune with the image in an icon.

And when you go to an Eastern Orthodox church, you'll see these icons everywhere. And it is an incredibly different way. When you look at this would look like very spare, if you were in an Orthodox church, you walk in and it is a completely different way of engaging with the spirit of God in a visual way. I want to give a chance to see if there is anything since I've hit the 12 minute mark, I believe. And I want to see if there is anything online. If anybody has a question, let's see.

Marsha W. wants us to know that there is an Eastern Orthodox church in Armenia. That's true. I'm not seeing any questions online. Does anybody else have a closer, a real kicker? A stumper? Oh, I know this man will have one. Will you tell us your name, sir?

So wonderful question. John is saying we've got four gospels in our Bible. I have heard according to a rumor of a book on my bedside table, there's a whole bunch of other gospels out there that didn't make it into the Bible. Can you tell me what those are about? And he understands, those are frequently called Gnostic Gospels.

So the first thing to understand is that there are a whole bunch of other gospels that didn't make it into the Bible. When Christianity was young, there was not yet a cannon. There wasn't a set of books of the Bible that everybody agreed on and read. And you remember, I just told you about the Eastern Orthodox churches. There were churches all over the place and the world was a lot bigger then. It took a lot more time to get from Alexandria to Rome, to Constantinople, right?

And so different Christian communities in different places had different books that they were reading. So Matthew was a gospel over here, and John was a gospel over here and Thomas was being used over here. So there were these different gospels. Now, at a certain point in the time of the Roman empire, when Rome became Christian and the emperor became Christian, and there was this sort of desire to create order because there was a lot of division and disagreement. They decided that they were going to determine which gospels were in and which were out. But before that time, there were lots of different books. And then not just gospels, there were hymns, there are Psalms all kinds of writing that were early Christian writing that didn't make it in. Now, the term Gnostic is actually a modern scholarly term. So there wasn't some movement at the time called Gnosticism.

And what happened is that some of the books that didn't make it in, modern scholars wanted to dismiss those books as not sort of worthy of study and modern Christians wanted to dismiss them as not worthy of spiritual engagement and the way they did that was just to put the label Gnostic on all of them and not translate them very well. And just say, these are interesting little tidbits that we don't necessarily need to read. And that's kind of where the term agnostic came from. Some of these gospels have what we would think of as Gnostic tendencies and Gnosticism was this idea in early Christianity. It was one of the ideas in early Christianity that didn't make it into the modern era is not Orthodox that, the God who created the universe was actually a Demi-God and a Fallen God.

And there's actually a higher God. It was a very sort of platonic idea that this world is totally and completely sinful. And there's nothing good about it. This is one of the big Gnostic ideas. And so Jesus himself was not a part of this world. Jesus was not incarnated. He was purely spiritual. And so some of the gospels have this Gnostic tendency. They usually have Gnostic means wisdom. And there's some sort of hidden or secret way in the gospel that you learn the real truth. It's sort of like a conspiracy theory thing, but not all of the gospels are gnostic. And even the ones that do have gnostic tendencies in them, not all Gnosticism is the same. And you could sometimes find little Gnostic hints in the gospels that we read. I think it's incredibly important to read the early gospels that didn't make it into scripture because you learn a lot more about what early Christians were thinking, how diverse they were.

And you learn a lot about how we developed the core theological principles that we hold to as Orthodox Christians. So I have one question for all of you to wrap this up. Did you enjoy hearing me speak off the cuff to your questions? Did I do okay. I did. Okay. Okay, good. So we'll do this every once in a while. It is really nice to have a break from preaching and just to get to directly respond to all of you. So thank you for doing this with me. Amen.