Listen to the Lamp: Hearing Jesus from Epiphany to Lent

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When the season of Epiphany began, right after Christmas, we read about the baptism of Jesus.

And as Jesus came out of the water, God spoke, This is my Son,

the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.

And today epiphany tide

is ending and as we prepare to enter lent

and walk with jesus toward the cross god speaks again and this time god repeats

that affirmation of jesus but adds an instruction for us this is my son the

beloved with him i am well pleased listen to him.

Listen to him for peter

and james and john who were there it was at

least in some ways an easy instruction to

follow after all jesus was right there in front of them they walked up and down

the mountain together they ate their meals at the same table they could hear

a familiar voice and lean against a sturdy shoulder and ask a follow-up question

if they if they were confused,

listening to jesus feels harder

for us now it might

not actually be harder the holy spirit lives in us after all and jesus isn't

just present in one place on earth as he was then but present everywhere all

at once present in the eucharist at a thousand thousand churches across the globe this very day,

but it feels harder for us.

We're only human, and we would like an audible voice and the chance to ask a follow-up question.

So how do we listen to Jesus now?

You know, some decades after that mountaintop experience, Peter was still thinking about it.

And in that letter we read today, Peter, or someone writing in his tradition,

he writes to a church that has fallen under the sway of false teachers.

They're having trouble knowing if their leaders who claim to speak for Jesus

are telling the truth or not.

They are having trouble knowing how to listen to Jesus.

And peter says this is what you listen

for you don't listen for what

sounds like the cleverest person talking you

listen for a story that rhymes with the long

tradition of god and god's people a story that glows with that same sort of

intensity of light and love that jesus glowed with on the mountain that day

a story that glows with the same kind of fire that moses once entered into on

top of a mountaintop to receive the law from God,

or the same kind of fire that Elijah once called down upon false prophets.

Peter says, I saw the glory of God firsthand in the person of Jesus,

and when I did, everything the prophets had said about God was confirmed.

And Peter says this, you would do well to be attentive to the prophetic message

as confirmed by Jesus as to a lamp shining in a dark room.

And so maybe one way of asking how do we listen to Jesus is to ask how do we

attend to a lamp in a dark room? Okay.

It strikes me that to light a lamp first requires that we recognize that a room is dark.

We begin by admitting that we can't see on our own. We begin by being honest about the darkness.

And this is not always easy because the reality is that when the light comes,

it does expose things. And sometimes those are things we would rather not see,

things we would rather stick our heads in the sand about.

They're things we will have to deal with.

They're troubling, that are hard to look at.

And some of those things that the light exposes are things in our own lives and hearts,

realities we'd rather not face about addictions or relationships or,

you know, the kinds of things we become especially aware of or attuned to in the season of Lent.

And some of the things the light exposes our realities in our larger world.

I know that when you come to church, you want to be comforted, and that's not wrong.

But the reality is that to truly be able to receive comfort,

we have to first be willing to name the pain.

This month, I've been reading the words of Sophie Scholl.

She was a student activist in

Nazi Germany who was killed for handing out pamphlets on a college campus.

Before she died, she warned that the biggest danger she saw was in people who,

weren't willing to light a lamp, people who weren't willing to be honest about the problems.

The real damage, she said, is done by those millions who just want to survive,

the honest men who just want to be left in peace, those who don't want their

lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves—those who don't like to make waves or enemies.

That's a danger. And the first thing we're called to do is to admit that things

are dark, to name the darkness, and to say that we're in need of light,

even if that light will disturb things.

And then, once the light is lit.

Well, one funny thing to me about this instruction to attend as to a lamp in

a dark room is that when I turn on a lamp in a dark room, I then pay no more attention to the lamp.

I don't attend to the lamp. Once I've turned it on, I forget about it,

and I attend to the things its light makes clear.

I turn on the lamp, and then I go do the dishes.

So,

One thing, perhaps, that it means to attend as to a lamp in a dark room is to

attend to the things that the light makes clear.

The work that the light reveals needs to be done.

So maybe one way to listen to Jesus is to look at our dark world as it is lit by him.

In the light of Jesus, what do we see?

For peter in this letter looking at his world

as lit by jesus one thing he sees is

the difference between false prophets and true teachers false

prophets he says in chapter two can be

identified by their actions they're greedy he says they exploit the people who

follow them they are licentious that is they lack restraint when it comes to

the normal moral standards and when it comes to their sexual appetites.

Peter calls these kinds of people waterless springs.

They claim to be one thing, and in fact, they are the opposite.

True teachers, though, Peter describes them as aligning with the tradition of

the prophets, a tradition he describes in the first part of this chapter as

being characterized by knowledge and goodness and self-control and endurance and love.

The trustworthy teachers are those who are not moved by self-interest,

but are in fact willing, like Moses and Elijah and Jesus himself,

to confront the pharaohs and the king Ahabs and the Herods.

They are people who are moved by compassion for their neighbors,

not by their own carnal desires.".

I wonder what you see when you look at our world as lit by the light of Christ.

What becomes clear? What work needs to be done?

Another thing I notice about attending to a lamp in a dark room is that when

I turn my back to that lamp,

my own shadow falls in front of me in front of the of what i'm trying to see,

if i turn my back to the lamp i can't see as clearly it's only when the lamp

is in front of me that i can see beyond myself at all so perhaps if i want to

see i need to keep the words of

Scripture and my experience with God before my eyes without turning away from them.

I've said that once a lamp is lit, we don't really need to tend to it.

We just turn it on and go, but that may have been less true for the people that

Peter was actually first writing this letter to.

Their lamps, which had only just begun to be mass-produced, were small clay

lamps that held oil and a wick.

You might remember we talked about these lamps a few months ago,

how sometimes people would carve sort of lucky symbols into the clay lamp,

and Christians would sometimes etch words from Psalm 91 into their lamps.

All this to say, these lamps may have actually needed some tending.

The oil would run out faster than my light bulb needs to be replaced,

and the wick might slip out of place.

And so maybe attending to a lamp means making sure the oil stays full,

and maybe having a lamp that's printed with symbols that will encourage you

and making sure that wick stays in place,

perhaps for us to attend to Christ as to a lamp in a dark room is to check in on a daily basis,

every day, some prayer and some scripture reading and some meditation,

keeping the lamp lit.

This is also how we remind ourselves that the light is more powerful than the

darkness, that darkness disintegrates into nothing, in fact, when a lamp is lit.

And one more thing. An oil lamp is beautiful.

I could let that wisp of fire mesmerize me for a really long time.

I even love the shadows it casts dancing on the walls as people walk by in the room.

To attend to jesus as to a lamp is to be delighted by his beauty and by the

beauty he brings forth in others we must practice attending to beauty just as

much as we practice naming the darkness.

You know, before reading this passage, the last real time I gave any thought

to lamps at all was just a few weeks ago, when we all believed that huge snow

and ice storm was on its way.

I think probably many of us react differently to the threat of a storm now that

we've lived through Helene.

I know I do, and I was filling up extra containers of water,

and I was checking on our stores of propane for the gas stove,

and I was bringing all the candles and the flashlights from every room into

the living room for easy access if we lost power.

They're still there, actually.

Including some, like, beautiful glass globes that will hold pillar candles and

you can carry them by the rope handle.

They're all there. They're all piled under my TV.

And every time I've walked by them this week with this text in mind, I thought,

maybe this is what we need to do now, to gather every bit of light we can into

one place and let it illumine the falsehoods that are trying to destroy us.

Let it extinguish the lies and the greed and the licentiousness with the light

of the prophets and the gospel, with the everlasting light of God's love revealed to us in Jesus.

Let us listen to him. Even now, as he moves us on toward Calvary.

The homily was offered by the Rev. Amy Peterson. Musical contributions were

performed by Dr. Kevin Seal.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karin Marie Fredrickson.