All at once

Wednesday's service had the verses that are all about a combination of the transfiguration and the burning bush. These readings have strong themes of holiness of place attached to them. Moses is told to take off his sandals, as he is standing on Holy Ground. In the same vein, when on the mount of transfiguration, Peter wishes to build shelters to stay on that mount, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

But that misses the point of what the incarnation is all about, really. The idea of holy ground is a topic that you'd think would make perfect sense - you go somewhere to find God. God holds court somewhere, and it is the job of humanity to tread very carefully around sanctified ground. But that implies that there is a place, or multiple places on earth, where the presence of God is more fully manifest or realized. There is a place you can go, somewhere, that the holiness of God is not just more fully felt, but more fully is. If you're looking for God, you can literally find him there. Now, is he everywhere else as well? Maybe. But not absolutely. And that's the issue right there, which is that if there is a place where God is, then there are places where he is less. Those places where he is less would be the vast, vast majority of places. And that' the trouble, isn't it? 

We are people who have a lot of trouble finding God. He isn't as easy to track down as we might want. For a lot of time, experiences of the numinous are rare, and few and far between. That is, the dreadful mundanity of life really shows itself early. So much of life is taken up with general, bland mundane activity, and very little of that is rapture and bliss of encountering the divine. It's like it is with everything else, too. When you get married, everyone is in their absolute finery, they look terrific, they are eating great food and dancing the night away. Will this be every night of your marriage? No, it won't. It won't be any night of your marriage, really. But the deal with your marriage is that you carry the finery and majesty with you for the rest of your marriage. Because you carry your spouse with you.

When you get married, it's not the party that makes your spouse special, rather it's the spouse that makes the party special .And you can test that, because you've been at weddings that weren't your own, and nice as though they may have been, they didn't fundamentally change everything about your life. Your own wedding did. There's a good chance that your spouse may very well have been your plus one at those weddings that you attended, but even though you and your spouse both attended the wedding, it wasn't a life changer to the extent that your own wedding was.

And that's the key. The act of being present at the wedding ceremony isn't what makes it important. The location, the food, the party, all of that is nice, but it's not what makes it important. What makes it important is that it's your wedding. And that makes everything about it special, and the fact that you bring your spouse home from that wedding is what changes your life. So, holy ground, as described in Scripture, isn't where God lives, but it's where Moses encounters God. But from that point on, God goes with Moses, throughout his journey from Egypt all the way to the holy land. Part of what is so profound about the story of the Exodus is that God liberates the people of Israel from slavery, but not because Israel is where God lives. It's clear that he is operating right the way through the book of the Exodus, whether the Israelites are in Egypt or not. This is true to the text, unless you think that someone else was parting the Red sea, turning the Nile to blood, and causing darkness and hail in Egypt. It seems pretty clear that even though Moses meets God up on the mountain at the burning bush, it's not as though God stays or lives there. God is present everywhere. 

Like Moses, we tend to have certain spaces set aside in which we can experience the divine. Churches, cathedrals, monasteries, these are places set aside for that purpose, where our spiritual batteries can be recharged, where we have time and space for God to speak without interruption.  But this is for our benefit, not for His. It's not as though he's bound by the doors of that space, and that you will only find him there. Rather, it's a situation in which, like at the mount of transfiguration, you can see and experience Christ with astonishing clarity, but then he goes down from the mountain with you.

Peter wanted to stay up there, where there was clarity, where there were Moses and Elijah, where there was a voice from the clouds and where Jesus was dazzling in his divinity. But when the prophets were gone, and Christ looked the same as he did before, he came down from the mountain with his disciples and continued his ministry alongside them. As said before, that's the nature of worship as a Christian. Where you can see God with clarity is great for you, but don't forget that there's nowhere that he isn't.

New Year, new you?

 The new year is something that is both arbitrary, and not, at the same time. What I mean by that is that there is objectively a point at which the earth completes a revolution around the sun, yes, but based on what as the starting point? There are multiple cultures that measure the new year in multiple ways. Hopefully by now you've heard of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, taking place in late summer or early autumn. Or you're aware of Chinese New Year, taking place between the end of January and the end of February.  These are different in terms of dates to our New Year taking place on January 1st, but are functionally identical. That is, a year has elapsed, even though the start date and end date of the year differ. 

So what that means is that the New Year as a concept is empirical, and immutable. But the new year start and end is arbitrary, and you can start measuring, well, whenever you want I suppose. If you decide that the new year begins on March 10th, then every year you can count down on March the 9th, and it's every bit as valid, because a year has elapsed in the meantime. 

Now that's an important concept, because as a society we have determined that the end of a year, the beginning of a new one, is a good time for introspection, change, resolution and so on. But there are a lot of good resolutions that get made at this time of year, a lot of them get broken, and people become disheartened, and call the year a wash, waiting for the next year. But in the Christian faith, we are encouraged to do something else. Introspection and resolution. In the church, though, it's called 'silence for reflection on God's word, and for self-examination.' |And that right there is a much much faster way of slicing through the issues. For you don't need to wait until January the first to figure that out. Say you're at January 3rd and you've already blown through your resolution. I know, seems unlikely but bare with me. You can either shrug, say you've blown your resolution and wait for 364 days until you can make another one, or you can be introspective now, and deal with you missing the mark today.

People like to talk about guilt in church as a big problem and a great failing, but it actually isn't guilt the way you would think it would be. Rather, what you have in church is a way out of guilt, not a means of being mired in it. It is a way for you to deal with your sins, your failings as they arise and to not internalize them as a problem integral to yourself. It's arbitrary, yes, it's not based around the change from one year to another, but it's crucial for your own individual growth that you not just give up on January 10th and say 'this is just who I am now.' You have a chance every day to give up the consequence of your sin and to divorce that from yourself completely. Once you've realized that, then you'll work out that the church insistence on pointing out your sins isn't to give you more guilt, but to take your guilt away. 

Otherwise, you end up with resolutions made, broken, and abandoned. Not wanting to feel guilty about a lack of progress leads to you excusing every last bit of progress not made. No, the law highlighting your sin leads to you having a chance to get the guilt gone. And that opportunity is available every week, constantly, every time confession and absolution is offered, it's a chance for any of us to be introspective constantly, to be able to say 'what I have done so far will not govern my future simply based on the fact that it was me that did it.' If you do that, then you can take resolutions, whether made at the beginning of the year or on the spur of a moment, and say 'these were good things to do. Good resolutions to make. And it was the right thing to do to follow through with it.' 

Will that increase your chances? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly will allow you to make the decisions you want to make, not the ones that you feel bound by.