You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Hey, disciples, can you take a hint? How many times did Jesus have to say what was going to happen? He mentioned that “rising after three days” thing coming down the mountain after the transfiguration; he mentioned it when he talked about what was to happen to the Son of Man – arrest, trial, execution… and after three days rising again. And he says it here, speaking of raising the temple in three days.
But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
We can’t blame them for being unable to comprehend these words of Jesus’. They must have sounded like some strange figure of speech – and Jesus said a lot of strange things. How should they have known he meant this one literally, this one really impossible thing?
After Jesus is risen, he shows up to his followers huddled in that upper room. Thomas missed the first visit and would not believe Jesus was resurrected from the dead until he saw him in person. When Jesus comes a second time and Thomas gets the confirmation he seeks, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have come to believe.”
In truth, none of Jesus’ followers really believed until they saw the unbelievable right in front of them. So we can cut ourselves some slack when we need help believing without the benefit of seeing Jesus in human form with our physical sight. We have to work harder – or trust harder – and remember all the ways we do see resurrection at work.- Cancer patients who have experienced healing and are now cancer-free are resurrection at work.
- Addicts who have come solidly into recovery after years of self-destruction and self-loathing are resurrection at work.
- Communities that have moved from blight to habitable housing and secure neighborhoods are resurrection at work.
- Countries that have managed to choose peace and end years of bloodshed are resurrection at work.
These examples lean to the obvious, and maybe all these transformations could take place without God's involvement. I say ‘maybe’ because such “back from the brink” transformations require one or more people to give sacrificially, to humble themselves, to resist hostility and refuse the temptation to “win.” Such transformations require vulnerability, submission to a person or process, a truly self-giving love – and I suspect that can only come from God, whether or not God gets named.
What are some examples of resurrection life that you can name, in your life, in your community, in the world? Name them, claim those stories, remember them, tell them when you’re with someone who says, “There can’t be a God – look at all the evil and death and destruction.” That’s when we can say, “And look at all the life where it didn’t seem like life was possible. Here's a story...”
We don’t have to wait for the afterlife to see that our faith is valid. God shows us “risen from the dead” all the time. We just need to open our eyes and see Life.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
The temple complex where Jesus cast out purveyors of sacrificial animals and turned the tables on money changers was the second one since King Solomon's splendid edifice. Foreign powers overrunning your small nation can be hard on the architecture. The plans for this rebuild must have been ambitious, for at this point it is decades into construction and still not finished.
The temple leaders did not eject Jesus after his scene. But they sure had a few questions for him: “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The leaders then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body.
It’s an audacious challenge Jesus lays down – and a safe bet, as there’s no way they would have risked harming the temple. (Within forty or so years, the Romans would demolish it.) The leaders take his words literally – “You’re going to raise it up in three days?” But our narrator tells us what Jesus apparently does not tell his interlocutors, that he’s not talking about the bricks and mortar in which God was said to dwell on earth. He is talking about the fullest revelation of God on earth – himself, the Son of God, made human flesh and yet containing the fullness of the Godhead.
During his time on this earth, Jesus was this living temple, Emmanu-el, God with us, mediating the presence of God to those who drew near. That’s where his power to heal and teach and forgive came from, God in him. That’s why he was so threatening to those who held power. They couldn’t put their finger on why he was so unsettling – it was God in him. That’s a pretty scary force.
But God’s plan was even bigger. Jesus told his followers that after his ascension God would send his Holy Spirit upon all flesh; that happened at Pentecost. Now anyone who believes that Jesus is Lord becomes a temple in which God’s presence is made known to the world - not little “gods,” but vessels of the one true God. That’s why Paul exhorts us to honor our bodies and treat them with holy reverence – because our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. Wow.
Does it feel like God’s presence is powerfully present in us? Do we feel like temples? We are also vessels of accumulated detritus that has nothing holy about it, that in fact can obscure the holy in us. The work of the spiritual life is to become aware of, name, and transform everything in us that is not holy, and to become aware of, name and lift up all that is. Gradually the God-Life in us becomes more and more apparent and the natural, passing-away life dims.
How might we become more conscious of our “temple-dom?” Like any spiritual practice, we can develop this with, yes, practice. Sow reminders into your day – when you eat something healthy, when you take a rest, when you stop and pray, when you offer a kind word. “Oh yeah – I am God’s temple.” We can also remind each other, when we make choices that are destructive or not life-giving – “Hey, remember, the Spirit of God wants to hang out in you.”
There are those who await a third temple to be built as a sign of God’s reign breaking out. The third temple is already here. Christ-followers can see that it every time we look at one another, for God’s reign has already broken out and we are helping it spread.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Where should they begin, these leaders of Israel’s spiritual life? Jesus, in his tirade at the temple, offended in so many ways. He threw around the furniture. He attacked the system of sacrifice and the economic engine that drove it. He showed no respect or decorum. Yet these transgressions likely paled in comparison to his words: “Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!”
His father’s house? This was the holy temple where God resided on earth. It belonged to Israel. It was the only place where holy rituals could be enacted, where ordinary people could come into contact with the Holy God. And this itinerant teacher presumed to call it his father’s house? This was blasphemy.
When Jesus called the temple in Jerusalem "his father's house" he may have been referencing Israel’s history and the tradition of King David who wanted to “build a house for God.” God replied that it was not David who would build a house for God, but God who would establish a house, a lineage for him, a line from which would come the Messiah. Was Jesus citing his Davidic heritage when he called it “my father’s house?” Not that it would have sounded any less blasphemous to his listeners than calling God his father.
Are places of worship meant to be houses for God? Is that what they are, and is that how we treat them? Or are they spaces for us, places we set apart, hoping to find in them a moment of holy connection, buildings in which we enact rituals that sometimes mediate the divine for us, in which we offer prayers and praises and portions of our wealth in hopes of encountering God? Is that what a sanctuary is for?
Or is a sanctuary a place to welcome people who don’t yet know the living God, but know they are missing a connection they crave? Should we decorate and arrange our churches for God – who likely doesn’t care where we meet, as long as we come in love and openness; for ourselves; or for outsiders who are hungry for God? How would it change the way we arrange and decorate them, and how we conduct ourselves in them, if we saw them as houses for God’s hungry people rather than as places for ourselves?
Just next in our passage, Jesus refers to his body as the temple that cannot be destroyed. Peter describes the people of God as a holy temple built of living stones. I suggest that God’s house is anywhere God’s name and power and love are invoked – every heart, every relationship, every place of prayer and desperate hope can be “my father’s house.”
What if we began to treat parks and street corners as holy spaces? Living rooms? Doctor’s offices? Shelters? Police stations?
Where do you pray? Where do you invite Jesus to make himself known? That is his father’s house today.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Funny thing about the derivatives of the word “zeal.” We think of “zealous” as “on the case” or “committed,” while “zealot” conjures images of bug-eyed maniacs raging about. The word originally referred to members of a Jewish political group in Jesus’ day who were eager to overthrow the occupying Romans.
However, Jesus’ zeal is directed not at the Romans but at his own religious leaders. Presumably he had an opinion about Roman oppression and cruelty visited upon his fellow Jewish citizens, but the concern the gospels speak to was the corruption of God’s message and heart which he saw in the temple leadership. After his rampage in the temple, John tells us, "His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”
What is the place for zeal in the Christian life? The early monastic hermits whom we call the Desert Fathers and Mothers, men and women who went into the desert to seek union with God away from the temptations of society, preached the spiritual virtue of apatheia, a detachment from worldly concerns and agendas that they saw as the goal of the spiritual life. The point was not to be passion-less, but to channel our passion into relationship with the God who loves us passionately. I wonder what the abbas and ammas taught about Jesus’ scene in the temple.
Where do we find our balance between wholehearted passion – for justice, for evangelism, for liberation, to name a few, and apatheia, the spiritual value of letting go?
One way to explore this is to discern when we hear God’s call to a particular area of justice-making, and when our interest might be driven by personal needs. I have a friend who began taking real leadership on the issue of sex trafficking. I asked her why that issue, and she said she felt God clearly tell her to work on that. She avoided it for years because it is such an ugly area of human life – but ultimately she said yes. She is galvanizing communities to shine a light on perpetrators and bring freedom to survivors. She is engaging in God’s mission, not furthering a personal agenda.
What issues get you “hot under the collar?” What about that matter hooks you, do you think? Do you feel God has invited you to participate in that aspect of God’s mission to reclaim, restore and renew all of creation? Do you feel the power of the Holy Spirit with you as you work, and speak, weep or rejoice – or are you drained by the effort? Those are some ways to know where our passion is to be expressed.
However we discern our motivation, let's constantly invite the Spirit into our passion. When we are gripped with outrage over some injustice or corruption, start to note our reaction and pray right then and there – “God, is this a holy anger? Or is this anxiety or guilt or something else?” And if we sense it is a holy anger, we can take the next step and ask, “How would you like me to proceed? Show me where to hold back and wait on you, and where to move forward with all the fullness of your Spirit working in me.”
We call the great sacrifice our Lord Jesus endured for us – the whole thing, from his arrest through his crucifixion – his “passion,” from the word passio, or suffering. And yet this is also the word we use for ardent love, which is what drove Christ to endure his passion for us. If we let Christ live in us, we will know when to bring it on and when to dial it back. It has to be his work in us, or it’s for nothing.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Jesus must have walked past those tables and vendors and stalls of doomed animals a hundred times. He must have checked out the tellers exchanging Roman coins for temple currency. Maybe he shook his head, even seethed inwardly. But to our knowledge he never said a thing. Until now:
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”
Why all this commerce in the temple courts? The place had become a killing floor, awash in the blood of animals being sacrificed to meet arcane demands in the Law of Moses. For the requirements and regulations of the Law came with some loopholes. Instead of committing your firstborn son to God’s service, as the law required, you could offer a sacrifice. Over time, these loopholes accumulated and widened enough to drive a wagon through. Any demand of the Law could be satisfied with the blood of some animal, if you had the cash.
An economy developed to satisfy this bloody business. You didn’t have to bring your own sacrificial animal – you could purchase one right there, one stop shopping. No temple currency on you? No worries – we’ll exchange your Roman coins for our own, and take a little fee for our pains. The whole place had become a well-oiled enterprise – what Jesus called a “marketplace.”
What was it that caused him to go ballistic now, driving out people and livestock, knocking over tables, generally having the kind of fit that got so many zealots before him into trouble with the temple leadership, and then crucified by the Roman authorities? Or was that the point? Was this part of the plan to move toward his own passion and death, to play out the mission to which he was called by God?
Could be - but I'm puzzled why he seemed to lose his temper so thoroughly, when elsewhere we see him exercise such grace under pressure. This scene launches months of increasingly heated exchanges between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day (in Matthew, it comes at the end of his ministry). Over and over he accuses them of having lost the heart of the Torah, the Law of God, and having distorted it. And they, from their vantage point of power – limited as it may have been under Roman rule – can’t help but resist his challenges to their authority.
Later, during the events of his passion, Jesus appears to accept his treatment meekly. Where is this outrage then? He was certainly capable of expressing his anger. Perhaps he reserved his ire for those who would pervert his Father’s love and oppress the weak, not for his own preservation.
And maybe that’s the lesson for us, as we wrestle with when and how to express our anger, with what social justice looks like for Christ-followers. There is one way to handle personal anger, however reasonable it may be – we can invite Jesus to hold it with us, ask God to transform it into something life-giving. But righteous anger at injustice and distorting God’s Word? There are times for letting that anger show, even when it means knocking tables around.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
LENTEN RETREAT MORNING SATURDAY MARCH 2!
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You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
You have to embrace paradox if you’re going to be a Christian. Our more fundamentalist brethren seem to have difficulty with paradox and nuance, and so twist themselves and the Word of God into pretzels trying to unify it in a linear, rational way. It won’t work. Just ask Nicodemus, whom Jesus told the Kingdom of God was truly knowable by spirit only, not by intellect alone. The very effort to understand circles as squares takes us further and further away from the Truth, whom we know as Jesus, the master of the paradox.
Here he is again, telling his followers about the cost of being his disciple. They must be prepared to deny themselves, take up their cross – a metaphor for complete helplessness, though in Jesus’ case, much more than a metaphor – and follow him. There’s no room in the suitcase for self-preservation: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”
How we interpret this hinges on our definition of “life.” If it’s just about breathing, this makes little sense. What person in their right mind would want to lose their physical life before it’s time? If by “life,” however, Jesus means the rich web of interaction and consciousness we call existence, then we might see how a willingness to let go of “the whole world” could make us more receptive to the Life of God, a life beyond what we can make for ourselves.
It is a matter of emptying ourselves and allowing ourselves to filled with God’s power, God’s love, God’s purpose. I don’t know about you, but I’m not crazy about empty. I do a lot of filling… my time, my to-do list, my conscious attention, just to avoid confronting the emptiness inside. And yet that emptiness is where God can show up most powerfully, if we will allow the space to develop and not rush to fill it.
What does it mean to you to “gain the whole world?” Another way of asking that is, what are you the most afraid of losing, of getting taken away from you? That’s the place to start in prayer, asking the Spirit to show us why we’re so attached to that thing or person or status. Ask God to help us loosen our grip, to feel the feelings that come up when we think about emptying ourselves of that. Ask Jesus what it looks like to “lose your life” in this world – and to gain the life that truly is Life.
A holy body suddenly filling an empty womb. The inexplicable absence of a body filling an empty tomb. From birth to death and beyond, Jesus’ life was one of God showing up in emptiness. As Paul wrote, "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are." (I Cor 1:27-29)
Can we give up our lives – all the “stuff” that we fill our minds and bodies with, and see what God might do with our emptiness if we offer God the space?
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
LENTEN RETREAT MORNING SATURDAY MARCH 2!
Register here by February 26!
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Sometimes I wish Christianity could loosen its association with self-denial. That emphasis misses so much of the Good News – the life-affirming, “…and God saw that it was good,” “God is love,” “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” “The Kingdom is now!” elements of the faith we proclaim.
On the other hand, we lose the essence if we stress only that happy stuff and ignore the sin and redemption, cross and glory parts of the story. If we’re going to be faithful to what Jesus taught and lived, we can’t just pull out this thread and hope to retain a coherent picture in our tapestry. This thread is woven into everything, the wholeness of what we proclaim Jesus did for us. Certainly, he said it often enough: He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."
What does Jesus mean by “deny yourself.” For many, this phrase connotes ascetism, doing away with comfort and frivolity and things that feel good. It’s hair shirts and pinched faces, dull clothing and hard work on behalf of others. It’s all vegetables and no chocolate. To quote a line from one of my favorite movies, Cold Comfort Farm, said in a sermon given to a sect of “quiverers, “There’ll be no butter in hell!” (Watch Ian McKellan’s masterful performance of that scene here; it’s a very fun movie!)
What if, rather than focus on behavior and consumption, we redefine self-denial as cultivating an orientation toward others and toward God? Denying self means laying aside our own prerogatives, our gratification, our convenience, our ego strokes, and giving our selves away to help others grow in faith. Of course, the phrase, “Giving our selves away” could seem to promote doormat-ship, a masochistic willingness to do for others until there’s nothing left of us. Certainly we’ve all known people like that – or been people like that.
But try this on for size: What if the “self” that Jesus suggests we lose is the one that is passing away in the first place, the natural human self before it becomes joined with the Spirit of the Living God? That self was never going to be robust enough to move us through life and into eternity. When we give our “selves” away for the Gospel, in the power and love of Christ, we become more fully our truest selves. Whatever we need from what we lay down will come back to us in a form we can use, as we allow God's Spirit to transform us.
Is that risky? Sure. Jesus demonstrated just how risky, as he laid down his life in this world all the way to death. That will not be the call for most of us. But anytime we give up something, a voice inside – and often outside – says, “You’re going to need that! Don’t give it up.” It takes faith and trust to put aside our own agendas and live a path that seeks to bring life to others, that seeks to allow God’s life to take up ever more space in us.
In what ways do you feel called to put aside your self, your prerogatives or agenda? Think of times you’ve done so successfully. Did you feel like a chump, or did you feel God’s pleasure as you saw someone else thrive? What is your response to Jesus today when he says to deny yourself? I believe we will experience that, far from a pinched and parched asceticism, denying ourselves is the most joyful thing we ever do.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Tiffs between friends don’t usually escalate so quickly. This exchange between Jesus and Peter went from 0 to 90 in two seconds flat. Jesus told his followers that he would undergo great suffering, rejection by the temple leadership – and then be killed: And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Peter may have been out of line, but his heart was in the right place. Did Jesus really need to toss around the S word like that? Maybe Jesus was just calling it as he saw it. Maybe he recognized too acutely the temptation in what Peter said, the temptation to look at his mission in human terms, in which self-preservation and security have the highest value. “Yeah. Who says I have to do it that way? Maybe I can do my father’s will by making more friends and fewer enemies…”
But he recognized it for the temptation it was, and knew full well where temptation comes from: the Evil One. So he called Peter, one of his closest human companions, “Satan.” And then he explained why he said that: “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’”
It’s not so easy, this following Christ business. Jesus repeatedly taught that there is conflict between the values of this world, and the values of God’s realm. When we let what we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell define what is real, we miss a huge dimension of reality, one that cannot be perceived with those senses but with the spirit. Our spiritual work is honing these other senses, becoming more attuned to where God is around us, and where we are being called to participate in restoring, reclaiming and renewing the whole universe.
That means we are invited to learn to think like God instead of in our natural human way. Can we do that? Obviously, the mind of God is much too vast for us to comprehend – and perhaps too simple. So we have to use our imaginations and the revelation we have received – imperfectly, in Scripture, and perfectly in Jesus, whom we have to use our imaginations to understand. Easy, right?
It’s not as simple as “What would Jesus do?” or “What would Jesus think,” but that’s a start. We come at it by asking God to show us God’s view of a situation or a person or a part of ourselves. If we start doing that in prayer, “God, show me what you see when you look at this,” we might be surprised at the responses we detect. We will probably find that God’s way of thinking is much more compassionate than ours, and at the same time less lenient than we might tend to be. We may discover that God is much less interested than we are in making sure people “feel good,” and more invested in loving them, which means desiring their spiritual growth.
I can’t tell anyone how to do it – all I can do is join you in asking the question that way and letting the Spirit gradually change my perspective. We can invite Jesus to be more and more present in our lives, in our thinking, in our interactions. As we allow his life to transform our lives, we will find ourselves thinking more like God.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Most people walking the Christian path encounter times when we get disappointed or angry, maybe even say to God or someone we associate with God, like a clergyperson, “Hey, this is not what I signed on for.” It can happen when someone we love dies, or a relationship ends, or trust is broken, or we become ill or vulnerable in some way. Sometimes we even take a hike away from everything we connect with God. Those hikes can last days or decades.
Peter hit such a point when he heard Jesus talk about the suffering ahead for him: Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
“This will never happen to you!” Peter says. “How could it? You’re the most powerful person we’ve ever seen. I’ve just said that I believe you are the Son of God, the Messiah himself! How could the Son of God be killed?”
Though insubordinate, Peter’s rebuke was incredibly faithful. Our disappointment when we feel God has let us down is a measure of our faith; if we didn’t believe in God’s power and love, we wouldn’t be disappointed, right? Yet these letdowns offer an invitation to grow in our faith, to separate out the promises we think God made from the ones God really has made. My friend Peter calls these the “contracts” we think we have with God – such as, “I will serve you, and nobody I love will get hurt.” Only God never signed those contracts.
So what promises of God can we count on in this life? I count at least three P’s - Peace, Presence, Power.
Peace: “My peace I leave you, my peace I give you,” Jesus said to his followers. Paul reminds us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God, and the peace of Christ, which defies understanding, will guard your mind and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.” God never promised to change our circumstances but gives us peace within them…and sometimes that’s enough to change them.
Presence: “Lo, I am with you always,” Jesus said before ascending into heaven. “Even unto the end of the ages.” Hebrews quotes him as saying, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” That’s a promise we can live on, as his presence is not only with us but in us through his Holy Spirit, that living water that wells up within us to eternal life.
Power: “I have given you authority to… overcome all the power of the enemy,” Jesus said as he sent out 72 followers to proclaim the Good News and heal the sick. Paul reminded the Corinthians that, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
Human wisdom and human strength and human vision will only get us so far. We have been given the gift of divine wisdom, divine strength, the eyes of God to see a reality that to the world does not appear to exist. We live already that eternal Life that transcends life. As we learn to rely more and more on these promises of God, we can find disappointment transformed to hope we did not dream possible.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
The term “ Good News,” which is what “Gospel” means, is all over the New Testament. But do we find the “news” about Jesus Christ being the risen Son of God all that new (come on, 2,000 years?), or all that “good” in the “Wow! Yippee!” way we associate with “good news?” God’s promise of eternal life is not one we hope to collect on any time soon; God’s promise of forgiveness is great, on days we’re willing to acknowledge how much we need it. But if we’ve been in the church awhile, we know too much.
We know that following Christ does not make for an easier life. We know it’s no picnic – at least not the kind of picnic we’d choose; more like the picnic described in Psalm 23 – “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies.” Gee, thanks, God. I'll take the ants.
Jesus’ original band of followers discovered just how mixed this “Good News” was to be when Jesus started talking about what was going to happen to him. He did not mince words: Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly.
We’ll see later how this message went over with Peter. I doubt any of them liked it. They had given up a lot to follow Jesus – homes, jobs, reputations. And up until now they had seen one healing and brilliant teaching and miracle after another. Why would Jesus predict such dire events when everything was going so well?
The disciples were being asked to adjust their vision of what God was up to, as are we. We live on the far side of the events Jesus predicted, so far beyond them we have to re-enact them each year. We don’t experience the fear and protectiveness the disciples did; Jesus is not going to die again. But we too must continually adjust our vision of what God is up to, and what the Good News means.
That can be easier to grasp if we look at what it does not mean. It does not mean success, financial or vocational or any other kind we crave as human beings. We might be blessed with success in many areas of life, but let’s not confuse that with the Gospel. Even harder for many to accept, the "Good News" does not mean security or safety, for us or for our loved ones. It does not mean serenity and never-ending joy and love, at least not in this life.
It does mean what it meant from the beginning: Emmanuel, God With Us. In all circumstances. It does mean New Life – resurrection, that what we think are endings are never final because God always has the last word, and God’s Word is Life. God’s Word is Jesus the Christ.
And it does mean that all those things we cannot change can be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we invite the Spirit in. She seems to wait for our invitation – but boy, when we invoke the power of God, things become redeemed, transformed, made new in ways we cannot imagine.
In what ways has the “Good News” seemed less than good to you? Where would you like to see some transforming power at work, in the world and in your life? Invite the Spirit of God into that situation. Envision changed lives. Even picnics with our enemies are good news, if it means we become friends. That’s the Good News in action.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
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You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
When Jesus had finished his forty-day trial, he commenced his mission: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
That one sentence contains everything we need to focus on during Lent – and the rest of our lives as Christ-followers. We are to live in the Already – the time is fulfilled! We are to proclaim the Good News that the Life of God has come near. We are to repent of the ways we fail to live in the fullness of that message, and we are to believe in the Good News. Live it, proclaim it, repent, and believe it.
Ash Wednesday is kind of a threshold to lead us into Lent. Lent too is a threshold, an antechamber if you will, into the greater mystery and promise of Easter life. And the life we inhabit in this world, embodied, governed by time and the laws of nature – this life is itself a threshold, a foyer, an antechamber into the Life we will enjoy with God for eternity. That’s our Good News, that that Life begins here and now, in this life, as we open ourselves to it.
Okay, but why, if we’re to focus on life, do we need to bother with the “downer” of repentance? Because big parts of us are not on board with entering that Life God invites us into. We fear too much will be asked of us, it's too hard to pin down, we can't see it. And the point of repentance is not to feel bad about ourselves. Repentance is about inviting our whole selves to join into the movement toward God.
And why stress believing? Because we’re more convincing when we talk about things we believe in. There is always room in belief for questions and doubts – but we don't have to make up a bed and invite them to settle in.
No one can get another person to put God first. All we can do is call out from our own place on the path, “Hey, the view’s pretty good over here. Come walk with me a ways.” That’s why clergy want their congregants to participate in everything, all the time – not to make us feel good, but because we’ve found satisfaction in shifting our center God-ward and we want that for everyone.
Lent is a time to walk intentionally so that we might find our center shifting… and then we’ll want to stay on that path all the way to its End.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Ash Wednesday behind us, we return to our gospel passage for Sunday, focusing on the two sentences about Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness. Mark may be short on information about the actual temptations Jesus faced, but he does include an odd detail: “He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
Wild beasts and angels: two kinds of creatures over which human beings have no control. Was that part of Jesus’ trial? To have to rely on help he couldn’t control, to get used to a ministry in which he would always have to depend on others for basic sustenance? Or are wild beasts and angels two kinds of creatures who recognized Jesus’ authority and helped him out? Mark doesn’t tell us. Mark doesn’t even tell us that Jesus fasted – Matthew and Luke throw that in. Maybe Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness was not so much about withstanding deprivation as boot camp for the spirit.
This line evokes stories about the prophet Elijah, who during his time on the lam from the wicked Queen Jezebel was fed by angels, and another time was fed by ravens. Is Mark drawing a parallel to Jesus as the new Elijah? I envision a beautiful wolf and a chipmunk and maybe an owl hanging out with Jesus, with tray-carrying angels hovering around. God’s prophets have it hard, but God provides.
Today we are fully in the season of Lent. We’ve crossed the threshold of Ash Wednesday and now make our first foray into whatever wilderness is drawing us. Let’s keep our eyes out for “wild beasts” – companions who may at first seem scary, but might have gifts for us. These “wild beasts” may be other people, ambitious callings, wrestlings with failure. They may come from inside us, what Jungians would call our "shadow” parts, even buried or wounded parts that are calling us to look, notice, welcome, re-integrate. Making changes in our daily life, allowing more silence or space, can invite these parts of us out of hiding. If we can bear with the discomfort their presence elicits, we might be able to receive their gifts and experience some healing.
And let’s stay tuned to the presence of angels bearing the gifts we need to most fully benefit from this Lenten sojourn. We do not do this work of growing in God alone.
Some indigenous American cultures teach that when one encounters a wild creature, it has a message for us. I pray we experience some wildness this Lent, within and without, and just enough angelic waiters, as we wait upon the Spirit.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
You want to dip that chocolate in ashes? Here's our mash-up of two incompatible holidays, Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. Yet it's a great reminder that Lent is really all about going deeper into the love story of our faith: the story of our relationship with the God who made us, and how we drift away or walk away or storm away, and are drawn back through the sacrifice of love. In this love story God does all the sacrificing; Jesus leaves home, lays it all down. We do all the receiving, until we are loved into being able to respond.
We celebrate that sacrifice and triumph of love supremely in Holy Week and Easter – a mystery so big, so vast, we take five weeks to prepare for it. In that season of preparation, Lent, we draw near to God, are drawn near by the One who made us, loves us, and will not let us go, who wants passionately for us to be close.
One of our earliest sacred stories speaks of temptation and primal rebellion against the goodness of God in the mythic tale of first man, first woman, a snake and an apple. That fateful bite, as our ancient forebears described it, resulted in four fatal breaches in relationship:- between humans and their Creator – suddenly they hide from God;
- between man and woman – they start blaming each other;
- between humankind and the natural world – animals are killed to make covering for the humans, newly aware of their shame.
- within the human psyche, as shame creates a divided self.
Our Good News asserts that these four breaches were healed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As we experience that healing, we become a people of restored relationship, of reconciled and reconciling love. Repentance and reconciliation can be hard work, shining the light of Christ into dark corners in our psyches and our world. This is healing work, love work, which we do not do alone. We do it with the power of God’s love running through us as sap through a vine. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you," said Jesus. “Abide in my love.” Keeping to his way, living a life of integrity and authenticity and holiness – that is how we abide in his love.
And that love spreads out. In God’s love story, the love cannot be contained between two. It spills over to encompass the whole community of love. “Love one another,” Jesus commanded, “as I have loved you.” The reconciliation we experience becomes shared, as we keep expanding the circle of love.
The beautiful hymn, “Come down, O Love divine,” comes to mind – in particular these words:
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear, and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn, till earthly passions turn to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
and let thy glorious light shine ever on my sight, and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
As we allow the fire of God to burn away everything in us that is passing away, as we embrace the ashes and the dust, let’s remember that we do this work in the glorious light of the One who showed us what it means to truly empty oneself. Lent is a season of sober reflection, not of stumbling in the dark. God will illumine our path, in love.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
“Tempted” is a loaded word, and can have associations beyond what Biblical translators may have meant. When we read that Jesus was “in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan,” we may imagine him out there with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit Issue, or faced with the loaded buffet tables I encounter at my churches’ annual meetings. Since Mark, unlike Luke and Matthew, includes no details about the nature of these temptations, our imaginations have free rein.
The other Gospels explain that Jesus faced temptations more cosmic than venial; not so much garden variety sin as being tempted to misuse – or relinquish – his divine nature. Perhaps a more useful word for what happened to Jesus in that wilderness is that he was tested. His faith in the unseen power he had received was tested. His trust in the guidance of the Holy Spirit was tested. His commitment to the mission for which he had come into human life was tested.
Thinking of Jesus' humanity, imagine how bewildering all the experiences related in the gospels must have been for him. Many of us have a sense of mission. But how does a human embrace the mission we believe Jesus had, to break the hold of sin and death on humankind, to release the cosmos from the grip of evil – and not be daily wracked by questions and doubts?
Perhaps this is why the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness, to test his confidence in his identity until he could withstand such doubts, whether they came from within or from others. Jesus could not have exercised the ministry the gospels describe were he not able to return time and again to his solid center as beloved, his sure knowledge of his Father’s love and power flowing through him. Indeed, faith in Jesus could not have spread so far and endured for so long had he not maintained that center to the grave and beyond.
What if we look at Lent as a forty-day period of testing rather than temptation? Do we really need to know we can resist chocolate or wine, or that we can sustain a spiritual discipline for six weeks? Wouldn’t we be better off, more joyful followers, more effective apostles if we knew our faith and sense of mission to be bearers of Christ could withstand the arrows of scheduling, convenience, complacency, embarrassment, priorities and their like?
We don’t have to go to the wilderness looking for testing. Life hands it to us (and I’m not even talking about tonight’s Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper, all pancakes and no shriving.) Every time we are tempted to allow an item on our to-do list to co-opt time we had planned to spend in quiet prayer; every time a friend or family member tries to talk us out of investing in our spiritual life; every time we are tempted to look at an area of pain or disease and agree with the world that God has no power there… such are the tests that come our way.
How has your faith or your commitment to God in Christ been tested lately? How might you respond differently? We may need to become more aware of the tests themselves, and then how to resist.
We can always call on the power of Jesus to help us and re-center us. After all, Hebrews 4:15 tells us that he was “tempted in every way as we are, yet he did not sin.” That means he did not give in to other demands or to what the devil told him was “reality.” With his Spirit in us, we can withstand those darts too.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Thirty years living at home, presumably apprenticed to his father’s carpentry trade, settled into the rhythms of small town life – work, meals, rest, punctuated by weddings and funerals and festivals… we know nothing about the longest part of Jesus’ earthly life. It was probably uneventful, the imaginative exertions of some novelists notwithstanding. Did he have friends? Girlfriends? Why didn’t he marry?
And then, suddenly, at the age of 30 he is activated, like a member of some sleeper cell who gets the cue to commence his mission. Did he ever know an “ordinary” day after that? Certainly the beginning of his ministry is marked by the highest possible affirmation followed by forty days of trial: In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
Immediately. No resting in the spiritual high of the anointing, the voice from heaven, the assurance of belovedness before embarking on a process of emptying himself. This Holy Spirit had no sooner anointed him than it drove him away from everything that sustains a human being, to be tested in a setting of deprivation and danger.
It can be like that for us. A time of felt spiritual connection may last days, weeks, even months – and then it seems like the line went dead, or we’re going through motions and rituals that used to bring us closer to God but now leave us empty. The literature of Christian saints and mystics tells that story over and over – “What happened, God? You were right here, and now it seems you’ve gone away.” Among the most eloquent was St. Theresa of Avila, writing about the loss of what she called the “consolations” God gave her. In our own day, we have the testimony of another Teresa, of Calcutta, who wrote that she experienced the absence of God much more than moments of connection.
When we are enjoying a time of spiritual engagement, we can bask in it and allow God to fill us, the way animals squirrel away food for times of hunger. In our connected times, we don’t need to think about the wilderness. But when we find ourselves in more desolate spaces, let’s remember this is also part of the deal. It’s not an aberration, only another way in which we can open ourselves to receive more of God’s life. (Desert Song explores these different states, affirming that in every season, God is still God.)
We are about to embark upon a six-week season in which we invite desert time into our lives. Some years that matches where we are spiritually and other years it doesn’t. That’s why I’m more keen on taking on spiritual practices than giving up comforts during Lent. How are you feeling about your relationship with God going into Lent? Are you already in a "dry" place, or feeling the flow of Spirit? What spiritual practices might you take on to grow toward God?
Whatever you choose to do this Lent, which begins Wednesday, remember that Jesus in the wilderness was still “my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Wherever you find yourself in your spirit, know that your belovedness has not gone away; perhaps God has just allowed some other space to open up in you, to increase your capacity for love.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
What an amazing series of events Peter, James and John experienced on that mountain. They must have been bursting to tell what they’d seen and heard. But Jesus said otherwise: As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
Maybe he did them a favor - what would that story have sounded like? A very, very weird dream?
“Well, all of a sudden Jesus' face completely changed, and then his clothes became a blinding white, like the whitest white you ever saw…"
"And then two guys were with him – Moses and Elijah!”
“How did you know it was Moses and Elijah?"
“Well, you know, we just knew… Moses had that staff, and Elijah that cloak…. I don’t know. It was obvious.”
“Okay….”
“And then Peter wanted to build three little huts so that Jesus and Moses and Elijah could just stay up there—”
“Oh, but all of a sudden we were in the middle of a huge cloud; couldn’t see anything!”
“But we heard a voice, a booming voice…"
“God’s voice—”
“Saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved! Listen to him.”
“And then it was all gone – everything was back to normal. Just us and Jesus. Like it never happened.”
"Yeah. Right. What were you smoking up there?"
Perhaps more perplexing was Jesus’ bizarre reference to the Son of Man “risen from the dead.” Mark tells us, “So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.”
Did they think it some figure of speech, a metaphor, perhaps? How could one conceive of someone rising from the dead – until it happened? Perhaps this surreal experience, accompanied by Jesus’ prediction, prepared them to comprehend that incomprehensible when it came about. And once they received the Holy Spirit, they no longer “kept the matter to themselves.” They couldn’t shut up about Jesus and his resurrection.
How about us? This isn’t a bad description of many church-goers today – “…they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.”
Those who have trouble “buying” Jesus’ resurrection are more apt to “keep the matter to themselves.” There is always room for questions and even doubts; yet, if we want to grow in faith, there is a point at which we need to accept this spiritual reality we claim as foundational truth for Christians. Our questions can persist beyond that point, but we are also released into greater ministry and faith-sharing.
Our whole Christian story sounds far-fetched on first hearing. That’s why it needs to come from each of us in our own words, as we talk about how our stories have intersected and been enriched by The Story. As we feel settled enough about who Jesus is, and his resurrection from the dead, we can stop keeping it to ourselves and let a thirsty world hear our Good News.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
A few years back, I attended an eight-day retreat for clergy. Oh, there was some work to do, but it was self-nurturing work – reflection on who I was and who I wanted to be, how I could best serve God and God’s people. There was wonderful and abundant food, interesting people, beautiful surroundings – and enough prayer and worship that I was able to connect with Jesus in a way that I hadn’t done for a long time. By mid-week I was wondering why I ever had to leave this place, ever had to go back to my day-to-day life and to-do list. Only when I was actually at the airport did my thoughts begin to turn back toward home. When we are in a sweet spot, the urge to remain is powerful.
Maybe Peter was having one of those moments, blown away by the spiritual revelations coming one after another on that mountain top. He had proof he’d backed the right horse. He was experiencing holiness and the holiest men he knew of. Why not try to fix it all in time and space, right here, right now? Or was he just babbling out of fright, as Mark suggests?
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.
We often associate holy encounters with heights. We talk about “spiritual highs” and “mountain-top experiences.” Such encounters usually come when we’ve stepped out of our quotidian patterns and gotten away geographically or temporally, on retreat or in an unstructured Sabbath day. Just as people in the throes of “in-love-ness” can’t conceive of their relationship ever becoming dull or predictable, It can be hard to believe, in a time of spiritual connection, that life will ever go back to normal, that our spiritual life might become hum-drum.
It doesn’t have to become “ordinary” – but it will never stay at the same pitch all the time, for God is always on the move, leading us forward. God is rarely in the last place we caught a glimpse. God can be found around the next corner, down the next road, in the next person we meet. In this life of faith we are invited to live in a delicate balance – present and aware to the fullness of joy around us in this moment, and always open to where the Spirit is leading us next.
When did you last experience an intense time of connection with God? What were the circumstances? How long did you feel connected? If it was less time than you’d like, you might ask the Spirit to help you stick around longer next time.
If you can’t remember a time when you felt close to God, are you holding yourself back? Why do you suppose there is this distance? Lack of trust? Disappointment? Unwillingness to put our weight in the unseen realm? We may feel God has gone away; in reality, it is we who come and go.
We know we’re growing spiritually when we are able to exult in those times when we feel the Spirit so close – and look forward to the next adventure God has for us. It may not be on a mountaintop, and it may not feel exhilarating – but if the Spirit of God is with us, it’s real and true and will move us deeper into Love.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
How much more likely are you to respond to an email or phone call if it’s prefaced with, “Our mutual friend So-and-So suggested I get in touch with you…?” Knowing that a stranger is connected to someone we know makes us more open. So it’s significant that the next event in this “long, strange trip” the disciples enjoy up on that mountain is the appearance of Moses and Elijah with Jesus. Leaving aside the question of how they knew who those two were, here’s a deeper one: why Moses and Elijah?
I can think of at least two reasons: Tradition and Testimony. Moses and Elijah represent the Law and the Prophets. Jesus and his followers took care to communicate that Jesus’ teaching and ministries were a fulfillment of previous revelation, not a departure. On Easter afternoon, when the risen Jesus comes upon a couple of sad disciples on the road to Emmaus, we’re told: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” (Luke 24:27)
Moses was the great giver of the Law, the commandments sent from God. And Elijah was one of the greatest of the prophets of Israel, said to have been carried up into heaven in a chariot of fire at the end of his life. This is why the Jewish people held an expectation of Elijah’s return.
These two great heroes of the tradition had something else in common – they were both recipients of “theophanies,” encounters in which God made himself known to them. Moses spent time in the presence of God, both on Mount Sinai and in the Tent of Meeting. And Elijah was told, in a moment of despair, to stand outside the cave in which he was hiding, and that God would pass by - and God did.
And then there is the matter of testimony. I suggested earlier this week that Jesus was preparing these three followers to bear witness to his true identity after his resurrection. Jewish law required at least three witnesses. Perhaps Moses and Elijah appear here as witnesses to the witnesses – their presence a vivid testimony that this vision was real and true.
Does it matter to us that Peter, James and John saw Moses and Elijah with Jesus on the mountain? Well, it connects this odd revelation with the great tradition out of which our religious heritage emerged. While that might not be persuasive to a skeptic, it was enough to ground the claims about Jesus in a larger story, and that did help Jews of his day believe.
Perhaps this is how the communion of saints functions for some. Those who have spiritual encounters with saints (and I don’t mean ghosts…) can find their faith encouraged and strengthened by the testimony of people who have been with God. Nothing beats being in the presence of Jesus himself, of course, but we all have different filters and different ways of connecting, and sometimes we believe more readily when people we trust have gone there first.
Which gets us back to telling the stories of our encounters with God. You never know when you might function as a Moses or Elijah to someone trying to get a grip on this strange and wondrous revelation of ours. Maybe if people see us hanging out with Jesus - or at least hear about it - they’ll be more eager to meet him themselves.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Maybe women did have a hand in writing the gospels; would a man use a laundry image to convey how white something was? And Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.
It’s easy to associate "light" and "white" with God and godliness. Jesus said he was the “light of the world,” and light is generally white. Often we use these terms without questioning their impact. That impact, though, can vary according to one’s skin color, geography and temperament. Always equating whiteness with goodness, light with purity, can be hurtful, even distort someone's self-image.
But up there on that mountain the three disciples saw a dazzling light, whiter than any bleach could achieve. It’s a wonder they weren’t completely blinded, like the Israelites when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, glowing so brightly after his time in God’s presence they had to veil him. In this story light and white are linked to divine revelation. I like to think that Jesus wasn’t just revealed as being like light, but as light itself – a beam of pure energy, in which there is no darkness at all, as God is pure good without a trace of not-good.
Darkness can have spiritual gifts for us – Barbara Brown Taylor published a book with that theme, Learning to Walk in the Dark. But this Sunday we celebrate Jesus as the Light of the World, and this moment when that Light was made known to three witnesses who made it known to the world.
How have you experienced God as light?
What is your experience of light spiritually?
What impact does Jesus as “light of the world” have?
Jesus said not only that he was the Light of the World – he said his followers were also the light for the world. “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)
If what the disciples saw was Light itself, the light we shine is reflected light, the way the moon reflects the sun’s light rather than being a source itself. As we make it our intention to put ourselves in the way of the Light of the World each day, and keep our reflectors cleaned and polished, we will indeed let our lights shine before others. If it’s Jesus’ light we’re reflecting, they may well be dazzled.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
Passages in the gospels often begin with phrases like, “On the third day…”, or “In the sixth month,” that require you to look back and see what came before. So it is with this week’s passage, the story of Jesus’ transfiguration: Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.
Six days earlier, Peter had identified Jesus as the Messiah. Then Jesus had told his followers about taking up your cross, and how the Son of Man would have to suffer and die. Maybe Jesus thought his closest disciples needed an experience to match their head knowledge. Maybe it was time Peter saw how right his first answer had been. So up they went, to a high mountain. Apart. By themselves. Just the three fishermen and Jesus. Quite a treat – and retreat.
The Transfiguration is one of the odder stories in the gospels, one that we read at the end of the Epiphany season every year, maybe because it was the penultimate revelation of Jesus’ divinity. For a short while on that mountain, these men saw Jesus’ true nature revealed. Why do you suppose Jesus gave them that glimpse of glory?
Perhaps he was setting up his witnesses. Peter already believed Jesus to be the Son of God; now let him see it, and other witnesses with him, so these men could later testify to Jesus’ messianic identity. Afterward, he instructs them not to tell anyone until after “the Son of Man is risen from the dead,” a phrase that doubtless made no sense to them. But later it would. And then this experience would reinforce their faith so that they could boldly testify to the truth of that greater revelation.
One New Testament definition of “apostle” is a person who knew Jesus in his earthly ministry and could witness to his resurrection life. I’m intrigued by the notion that here Jesus is giving those who will later serve as the key witnesses to the in-breaking Kingdom of God a crucial experience to strengthen their faith. Because it is the witness of these men and women that laid the structure of the Church. They are the reason we are here.
And we are here to carry on their apostolic witness. We are here to testify to the glory and power and love of the Risen Christ as we experience him in our lives. Perhaps we don't get the dazzling display Peter, James and John got to see… and maybe we don’t need to. We are apostles on the other side of Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus gives us experiences that strengthen our faith; we can see his power poured out whenever we speak or pray or love or act in His name.
If we don’t feel we have had enough experience of Christ to truly bear witness… well, there’s a prayer. Ask the Holy Spirit to make the presence and peace and power of God known to you. I believe God will answer that prayer, as we open ourselves. I truly believe God wants us to experience God’s goodness. Jesus is still preparing witnesses - you and me.
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here are the bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.
The people of Capernaum, where Jesus stayed when he wasn’t traveling, must have been thrilled that someone of such wisdom and power should settle among them. They wasted no time bringing to him everyone in need of healing and deliverance, and when he went off to pray in private, they went looking for him. But Jesus’ mission was much larger than one town. When his disciples found him and said, “Everyone is searching for you!,” he answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.
As we know, Jesus’ mission was greater than Galilee, greater than Israel and the Middle East, greater even than the boundaries of this world. He did not belong to any one community, but to all. Jesus’ mission was to redeem all of creation, to proclaim the reign of Life over death, disease, despair, the demonic. That is the message he proclaimed and that is the message he demonstrated over and over again as he set people free.
The phrase, “Let us go to the neighboring towns” snags my attention. An early theologian, John of Damascus, used the Greek word perichoresis to describe the active, ongoing, interrelated life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This word has connotations of movement, of swirling, even of dance – and one definition is “circulating about the neighborhood.” It suggests that the triune, relational life of God is not static but circulating, bringing life to the whole cosmos.*
We might say that that Jesus, the incarnate Son, or second person of the Trinity, continued to live out that principle of perichoresis, circulating with his followers among the neighborhoods of his region. And his followers continued to live out that principle of perichoresis, circulating among the “neighborhoods” of the Roman Empire, starting new churches and baptizing new believers, who circulated among their neighborhoods – until even we received this proclamation of Good News and transformed Life.
This moving, communal life of the Trinity is our inheritance too. We are invited, called to circulate among the neighborhoods in which we find ourselves, proclaiming the message of renewed life to the people we encounter, casting out demons of fear, injustice, complacency, disease, despair.
Where do you feel called to exercise the ministry of an apostle? Among what people? In what neighborhoods? The Love of Christ is desperately needed in every neighborhood, poor, rich, urban, suburban, blighted or beautiful and in between, and we are called to make it known.
And we need not go alone. Jesus goes with us. No longer confined to a body in time and space he is available, as it were, to indwell every single person through his Holy Spirit. We carry him “around the neighborhood,” and he directs us when to speak and when to listen, when to challenge and when to offer healing. I pray we will all get moving out of our comfort circles and church life, moving with Jesus to the “neighboring towns,” eager to proclaim the gospel of peace – for, like him, that is what we are sent to do!
*Many thanks to Dwight Zscheile for making me aware of this translation, in People of the Way: Renewing Episcopal Identity (2012, Morehouse Publishing), pp. 46
© Kate Heichler, 2024. To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here. Here arethe bible readings for Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to ithereon Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.
