Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 26, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I make the drive between this area and Eugene, Oregon, where my parents live, quite often, at least twice a year. I’ve been doing that since 1970, when I first moved to Seattle. I’ve gotten to know the stretch of I-5 between Seattle and Eugene really well, so well that that trip has become almost unbearably boring for me. Along the way there are many landmarks that I’ve come to recognize. Two of those landmarks are billboards. One is the sign down by Chehalis that’s maintained by an individual on which he displays various extreme right-wing political and patriotic messages. Perhaps some of you know it. It’s the one with the big picture of Uncle Sam. I always look for it as I drive past--for a good chuckle if for nothing else.

The other billboard is a bit farther south, down by Kelso. Unlike the slogans and rhetorical questions that appear on the Chehalis sign, the message on this one doesn’t change. For at least the last thirty-five plus years it has read, in ornate Gothic script: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." That line is the King James Version of Acts 16:31. Apparently in the early 17^th century when that translation was done you believed "on" someone or something rather than "in" them. This billboard says "believe on," and some good soul believes that this verse is so important that they’re willing to pay to maintain that billboard on the freeway for all these years.

The message is of course one that’s familiar to us. The most common understanding of Christianity today is that it is about believing in Jesus Christ. For these folks, the way you save a person is to convince them to believe in Jesus. That understanding has been the impetus behind Christian missionary work virtually since the founding of the faith. For most Christians over most of Christian history, the faith has been about believing in Jesus and about very little else.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think believing in Jesus is a very good thing for those of us who find our way to God through him, and there certainly is a Biblical foundation for this approach. That line on the Kelso billboard is after all from the New Testament. Moreover, unlike the other three Gospels, the Gospel of John is mostly about calling people to believe in Jesus. The emphasis of these later New Testament writings on believing in Jesus is understandable as an historical matter. The Christian communities of that time were struggling with the Jewish communities of which they had been a part, and belief in Jesus was the main thing that separated the two groups. So that defining characteristic got emphasized--I would say overemphasized--in the later first century Christian writings.

All of which is a build up to today’s Gospel lesson. It comes from Mark, the earliest Gospel that we have, written perhaps 25 to 35 years before John and maybe 15 to 20 years before Acts. It is the story of the Transfiguration. In it, Peter, James, and John go up a mountain with Jesus and have a transcendental vision of their master glowing with holy light. In the vision he is speaking with Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets. It is in effect a vision of the resurrected Christ given to these Disciples before Jesus’ death and actual resurrection.

There’s another detail of this story that I want to focus on this morning, however. It is the voice from a cloud that overshadows the scene. Mark doesn’t expressly identify the speaker, but he doesn’t have to. It is the voice of God. In the story, God says two things. First God says: "This is my Son, the Beloved." Jesus is none other than the beloved Son of God. That presumably is at least part of what we’re supposed to believe about him when we’re told by freeway billboards, or by the New Testament, to believe in him. What strikes me most about the story, however, is what the divine voice says next. Given all the emphasis in Christian history on believing in Jesus you’d expect the voice to say "Believe in him." That is perhaps what a lot of Christians wish the voice had said. It is, however, not what the voice said. Rather, the voice of God in this story says: "Listen to him."

Now listening and believing are very different things. Believe can mean many different things, but in much of Christianity today it means mostly giving intellectual assent to certain propositions about Jesus. He’s the Son of God. He is God Incarnate. He died as an atonement for human sin. Agreeing to those things is what believing in Jesus mostly means today, and I’m willing to bet that that’s what whoever maintains that billboard down by Kelso means as well. Listening is very different. Believing in Jesus has to do with how we relate to him more or less passively, in our minds. It is about what we think about him. Listening to him has to do more with how we respond to him actively. Listening of course begins with hearing, and truly hearing isn’t all that passive a process. Really to hear him means hearing what he has to say. It means paying attention to his teaching. Learning it. Immersing yourself in his words, his stories, his parables. Studying what they meant for him and his listeners when he spoke them. More importantly, discerning what they mean for us today. Hear him deeply, prayerfully, intentionally. Hearing like this--real hearing--is the beginning of listening.

It’s the beginning, but it’s not the end. Listen has other meanings. When a mother tells her child to listen to her, she doesn’t mean only hear my words. She means hear what I’m telling you and then obey me. Do what I tell you to do. Stop doing what I’m telling you not to do. True listening has consequences. True listening leads to action. When we truly listen we respond to what we hear. True listening can even transform us. That’s particularly true of listening to Jesus. When God in the Transfiguration story tells us to listen to Jesus, God doesn’t mean just hear him. God means hear what he has to say, and then follow him. Hear--and then respond in action grounded in faith in Christ and in what he said. You can believe without responding. You cannot truly listen and not respond. If you don’t respond, you haven’t listened. You may not even have heard. That’s probably true even of listening to another person. It’s really true of listening to the beloved Son of God. If we listen to a person we admire, we may perhaps still not take action in response to what we hear. If we listen to one we worship, to the One we confess to be the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, we must take action in response to what we hear.

In the Transfiguration story God tells us to listen to Jesus, and that means both hear him and respond to his words in action. But that’s awfully vague, isn’t it? What does it mean, precisely? What exactly are we to do in response to what we hear Jesus saying? Well, that all depends on what it is that we think we hear him saying. The Gospels report him as having said a great many things, and what one Gospel reports him as saying is not, in many instances, what another Gospel may report him as saying. So we have first of all to decided what we think he is saying to us, here and now. That of course is a huge topic that we never fully discern in an entire lifetime, but let me tell you at least a little bit of what I hear him saying to me.

First of all, because God’s voice in the Transfiguration story tells us not to believe in Jesus but to listen to him, I will exclude all of the passages in the Gospels that report him as having said that what we’re supposed to do is believe in him. That eliminates virtually the entire Gospel of John. In John, Jesus preaches himself and the need for us to believe in him. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he says very little about that. He doesn’t preach himself, he preaches the Kingdom of God. If God in Mark’s Gospel is telling us to listen to Jesus, God is saying most of all that we are to listen to what Jesus has to say about the Kingdom of God. Just what the Kingdom of God is all about is of course another huge subject, so let me just scratch the surface with some suggestions about what it is. To do that I direct your attention very briefly to the greatest collection of the sayings of Jesus about the Kingdom of God in the entire New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. What does Jesus say there that we are to listen to? He says lots of things. The ones that leap out at me include: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit--or in Luke’s version of this saying, blessed are the poor. Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy as yourself. Do not violently resist the evil doer but engage in active, creative resistance by turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, giving the cloak as well as the coat. There isn’t time this morning for more. This very brief recap of Jesus’ central teachings will have to do.

And what do these and a lot of Jesus’ other great teachings add up to? They add up to two things, two things that if we truly listened to them would change the world. They add up to justice and peace. When we listen to Jesus we hear him calling us and the entire world to do justice for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. We hear him calling us to change the very structures of human society that result in poverty. We hear him calling us to end oppression, every oppression of one human being by another or any group of humans by any other group. We hear him calling to those whom human society scorns and rejects saying: "You are God’s especially beloved children. Come. Enter the Kingdom ahead of the rest." We hear him saying: God’s way is the way of peace. Let God cure your warring madness. Beat your swords into plowshares and your spears into pruning hooks. Never give up the struggle against poverty, oppression, and prejudice; but struggle against them with the ways of peace, which are the ways of God. That’s what I hear Jesus saying. I think if you’ll truly listen, you’ll hear him saying it too.

And if you hear it, you have to respond. How can we who call ourselves Christians not respond to the calling of our Savior? How can we not respond in lives committed to the things he died to teach us? How can we not struggle to eradicate poverty allover the world? How can we not resist oppression and bigotry in all of its myriad forms? How can we not be committed to the ways of peace? How can we not spurn the violence which he condemned even when one of the Disciples tried to use it save Jesus’ own life? If we listen to him, we can’t. If we listen to him, and don’t just hear his words and say "well isn’t that nice," we have to respond. Believe in him by all means. We are Christians after all. Believe in him, and then respond to him by living out your belief in lives committed to justice and to peace. He did. We can too. Amen.