IT TAKES HARD WORK
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

February 22, 2009

Mark 9 9:2-9 & 2 Kings 2:1-12

It will always be easy for me to remember moving to Bloomington from our sixteen years in Greater Chicagoland. Sixteen good years is a long time to make a break from. I had done such a break only once before. I lived in my home of origin for eighteen years and left to go to college and only ever came home one time to stay overnight after that.

In my generation of farm families, like so many before us, one either stayed on the farm and worked or you left home and made it on your own. I know many a story of farm boys like me who upon getting to the age of eating too much, costing the family more than our perceived worth, were literally told to leave so that the younger more dependent ones could have enough to eat and a place to sleep. I come from both maternal and paternal sides of families that had twelve or more living children, often times with many more who had died either as miscarriages or in childhood. Availability to birth control has been a life enhancer for millions of women in my lifetime and has made the life of children in economically poor settings much more enjoyable with a lot less hunger and poverty.

Anyway, in the summer that we moved my fifteen-year-old daughter who had lived her whole life in greater Chicagoland needed one more thing to hate her father for and our move provided ample ammunition. I considered that rather normal. Our kids have to separate from us and I just provided an easy way for her to make the adjustment.

The more memorable event in my life was that my father died during our transition down here. My dad was a hot-blooded, basketball, baseball playing Hoosier farm boy. He was of a unique dying breed. He was the inheritor of the family farm system in the United States that was doomed to failure. The eight-acre farm that had supported his family for over one hundred and fifty years was suddenly, in his lifetime, inadequate. He sold after retirement and saw his land, from which he was born, sold into a larger farm conglomerate system.

I have a picture of my father and me sitting on the deck out at our cabin over in the hills of Brown County . He was petting my golden retriever Brinkley, who died the same year as my Dad. My Dad was looking down the deep ravine in front of us and said, "Well, this land isn't like home." And then he looked over at me and said, "Now what do you every day?"

I'm fifty plus years old at this point and I have had this conversation with my father before. He remembered me best out in the barn on a cold February morning pitching manure out of stalls, or out in the hot humid June weather baling hay and stacking it high in the barn, or walking and stooping on mile-long rows of tomatoes picking eight ton a day in the even worse August heat. Since we couldn't make a full living on the farm we also were the night janitors at our local school.

I attempted out in Brown County to give a picture of what a minister does and I even made it sound worse that I actually find it to be. But, my artful words were lost on my father. He looked at me and stated, not asked, “You've not worked since the day you left the farm, have you?”

I love my father, and I have only on occasion since my first eighteen years had to work my body like he worked his for nearly his entire life. But my father, as well as my mother and all those generations of farmers before them, they taught me how to work hard in the midst of community. My folks were hard workers not only for themselves and our family, but I watched my dad and mom dedicate themselves not only to the community in which we lived locally, but also nationally and internationally. My folks, the World War II generation, have been rightly called the great generation. In their time in history they took individuals and made them greater than the sum of their parts. They worked hard. They gave millions of their lives. Theirs was a transformational generation.

Jesus took a team from his generation to the mountaintop: Peter, James, John accompanied Jesus to meet Elijah and Moses. This was an amazing event, an incredible experience. Peter wanted to set up a tent, a permanent monument to this moment of transcendence. They had arrived at what they had hoped for. But, you remember, don't you? You remember that Jesus said, “No, this moment is not about having arrived. This moment is about getting start ed. This moment is about beginning. This moment is about focus and knowing you are on a good path, a path that has promise, and a path that is headed in the right direction. But, now it is time to go back down into the valley where real life is happening and it is time to work hard.”

I want to share just a few things about this Scripture story. It is a story much like last week's look at the creation narratives in Genesis. It is a story of interpretation, not a literal event in time. Most folks that I know say that this is a story that expresses what the early followers of Jesus came to believe. They believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of everything that Moses, the greater liberator and author of the Law and Elijah, the Prophet, had ever talked about.

This story of the transfiguration is a Kodak picture moment of early Christianity's holy trinity: Moses the Law, Elijah, prophecy and Jesus, justice, the one who was bringing the ultimate salvation of God to our world. It had all come together for them in that 1 st century in the midst of being ruled, controlled and oppressed by the biggest, boldest empire the world had ever known. The early followers of Jesus knew that Caesar was not God's son, though he claimed to be. Mark's gospel proclaims that God has brought good news, victory to all in the elevation of Jesus as God's child, alongside Moses and Elijah, that following the way of Jesus would bring victory to the oppressed citizens of Rome 's empire. Jesus taught that we don't need Rome . Jesus taught that loyalty to the empire's ways was a false faith. Now, that got Jesus killed eventually. But Jesus taught that, look everybody, if we pull together out of sincere love for each other and all of creation, sharing what we have, creating a community whose foundations have been laid out by Moses, by Elijah and all the prophets who have cried out calling people to be committed to the ways of justice, compassion, and humility for the poor masses, that a new community would be born that Rome, that any empire would pale in comparison to it.

How many of you watched the Presidential inauguration a few weeks ago? It was a huge event of untold proportions for many reasons. As national events go, this was for the 21 st century a mirror event to the transfiguration story that we have with Jesus. We have gathered in our national mall the three branches of government, the Legislative, the Judicial and the Executive Office of the President. We had played across our television screens images from the past, George Washington and his monument, very Moses-like. We had Lincoln sitting out in the distance in his monument cloaked with images of Dr. King saying he had a dream for this land. And then, out of the Capital, where the laws of our land are made, out walks one who is a product of the hard work and sacrifice of many from Dr. King's legacy. Millions feel as if they have climbed mountains, forded rivers and hiked through deserts to have arrived at this moment in history.

One of our parishioners was out in the mall that day and brought us back some Obama Water. She said she couldn't drink it. She said it is too special. My belief is that the water should be used to quench the thirst of the workers striving for justice for the oppressed of our day. It is time spiritually and politically to come down from the mountain top and let justice roll like a mighty stream through our land and across this globe. Hope might well be meaningfully ignited. But hope needs legs and hope needs the reach of our arms and the touch that can only come from our fingers and the light that can only come from the switches we turn on in the minds and imaginations of our students.

Sunday school teachers, the time is now and the opportunities are rich. Classroom teachers and professors of higher education, never has the time been riper for the progress you must lure your students to comprehend and lend their lives to. Business men and women, we need jobs created and maintained, we need good supervisors; we need to provide hope to those in the streets. To the retired from whatever profession, the children of our world need you more than ever before. There is nothing like the love of a grandparent-type to give hope and a reason and a model for children to grow toward what they could become rather than just going along to get along. While parents of our world are out there working themselves to the bone to make ends meet, be a grandparent to the children of the world. In most lives it is a touch, a smile, a gift, belief, perspective, a game played that often makes the difference between children living in hope versus despair. It doesn't really take much, but it takes an investment of us. And, I am certainly suggesting that we care about not just our children, but the children of the world.

You might remember that at Christmastime our offering went directly to the girl's school in Sri Lanka . Many of you know that is a war-torn little area and that the fighting has been intense of late. Our financial gifts alone to this school that is sponsored by the Indiana/Kentucky churches of the United Church of Christ, our dollars and cents that you have given, bring untold relief to those teachers and those young girls whose lives will be absolutely destitute without the education, food and medicine that our gifts enable. That school, its teachers, the students and the parents of those kids are in my prayers of concern and in prayers of hope nearly every day and I invite them to be in yours as well. The hope for our world is being born every bit as real in the Sri Lanka school program that we support as it is in any lab and classroom here at IU.

I have been an ordained clergyperson since December of 1979. It will be thirty years at the end of this year. I have yet to have served in a church in those thirty years that was not significantly grieving its past glory days spent on the mountain of transfiguration. Grieving for the past has pervaded the churches that my generation of clergy have been called to serve. After World War II in this country the churches thought that Jesus was smiling especially on them. We were jumping out of buildings faster than they could be built, classrooms were overflowing with students and offices could scarcely hold the staff needed to stay up with ministry demands. Since 1963, the year that President Kennedy was assassinated, the church world began to tumble. What did I hear last week, that even Robert Schuler's Crystal Cathedral out in California is now in financial difficulty.

Behold, God is doing a new thing and we are called to be the servants, the bearers of Good News to a new generation of seekers. When I was a boy my cousin Barb drove into our house one day dressed like an Old German Baptist woman, hair in a bun under a cap, wearing an Amish looking dress. She had obviously crossed over and become a Christian in our community's Brethrenchurch . I didn't see it coming. Just a couple days earlier I had seen her in mini skirt, smoking a cigarette with beer on her breath. “Oh,” my mother said, “Her folks offered her new car, now or never, if she accepted Jesus and joined the church.”

We have as a country tried the same sort of drama in our national foreign policy. Here, now or never, take our best offer or we are going to come in and force democracy on you. My generation has seen Korea, Vietnam, two Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and many other minor skirmishes and we have yet to be have brought peace and democracy anywhere and have in factparticipated in killing hundreds of thousands and made enemies of all of the relatives and friends of the dead.

The Book of Acts tells us in our Bibles that thousands rushed to join the Way of Jesus, the early Christians because of the way the early followers lived. They formed a community that shared most things in common. They were a countercultural community. They wore a lot of secondhand clothes because they were second and third class citizens. They did not eliminate poverty, they gave food and shelter to those who were in poverty and eventually found them jobs. They loved especially the slaves, the castaways, thosewho had no place in the normal society. They created a community that mattered around meeting basic needs, and so successful were they that it continues to this day.

My sense is that we are a lot like the IU Men's basketball team—we are in training and learning the fundamentals of being followers of Jesus in a brand new age. Our past glories do not make much difference. What matters is how we play, how we live in community now.

Success in our immediate future will depend on our living lives that reflectthat we are followers of the Way of Jesus. We will be successful if those who have a hard time seeing truth and justice and compassion as the preferred way of God, stop being blind. We will be successful if we stop being deaf to the cries of despair, the cries of hurt and the whimpering of joyless children the world over. We will be successful if we stop imprisoning people because of the color of their skin or the different-ness of their sexuality, or because they are not Christian or from our country. There is no future born of God in imprisoning our fellow creatures.

We will be successful when we come down from the mountaintops of plentyand share the totality of our wealth and possessions with those who thirsty and hungry and who are dying from lack of medical care. We shall overcome when we allow our souls to be taken over by the spirit of the living God.

We are called to be the presence of the transfigured Christ in the dark places of our world. Let us prepare to light our lamps and boldly go forth and shine a little love, no, a whole lot of love, because we have more to share than we ever allowed ourselves even to imagine.

Imagine sharing what you have with others and then make it so.

Amen.