I read this week that the wonderful old Brooklyn steakhouse, Peter Luger’s, has hatched something new in order to contend with the challenge of being a restaurant during COVID. 

Now, if you know Peter Luger’s, you’ll get how odd this is.  

It’s one of those places where the whole point is to do everything the same way they’ve always done it.  

That’s a big part of the appeal.  

Well, these are odd times, as we know.  

Restaurants are not permitted to operate at full capacity, and that’s not good. 

But there is also the reality that a lot of people get the creeps when they eat in an empty restaurant, and apparently, COVID has not changed this, so that’s not good, either.  

So this is where someone at Peter Luger’s has had an idea. 

Because while you are not permitted to operate at full capacity with live people, it seems that the regulations are silent when it comes to operating with wax people. 

(MG: slowly nods head…)

So someone at Peter Luger’s has said, what if we populate half of the restaurant with famous people? Famous wax people.  

What if you came to Peter Luger’s and Audrey Hepburn from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was sitting at the next table? 

What if you came to Peter Luger’s and Don Draper from “Mad Men” was standing at the bar?  

What if being a real person eating a steak at Peter Luger’s was like taking part in the ultimate New York story? 

This is what they’re going to do.

So…is that “adjusting” or isn’t it?  

I can’t quite tell.  

It seems clear that it is choosing to meet a new reality by cultivating a very particular kind of fantasy. 

They’re banking on the hope that one way or another, the fantasy will manage to catch on.  

II.

In this morning’s Gospel, I wonder if Peter isn’t caught up in a very particular kind of fantasy, himself. 

Certainly, he is hoping that the message of Jesus will catch on.  

He’s not focused on just trying to survive. 

From his perspective, things could not be better.  

This project of preaching and healing they’ve been working on is already starting to change the world.  

For those with eyes to see, the presence of God in the midst of all of it has been unmistakable.  

The endless troubles of a weary world are over now, or soon will be.  

He’s seen it.  

Isn’t that what the voice they all heard on the top of that mountain meant? 

Thanks be to God that he had been given eyes to see…that he got to be a part of it.  

It’s Jesus who abruptly interjects with visions of the immediate future that are dark and seem bad for business.  

It’s Jesus who is introducing fantasies about doomsday.  

From Peter’s perspective, it must have made no sense, and since it didn’t, it’s out of love and loyalty that Peter tries to stop Jesus from going too far down that road.  

Because he could see.  He could see, even if Jesus apparently couldn’t.  

He could see the people starting to look at each other nervously as they listened to Jesus talk this way.  

He watched as they began to get agitated and started to disconnect.  

It’s not that they were just abruptly turning and going.  Any of the regulars would have noticed that.  

It’s more that lately, the ones who’d been up front, hanging on Jesus’ every word, glowing after every healing they witnessed, seemed to be hanging more toward the back, with each day more of them leaving…more of them breaking camp sometime overnight and taking off without a word. 

With every new gloomy tiding, the people of God were fading away.  

Jesus wasn’t telling them about the God they wanted, anymore.  

III.

Peter doesn’t quite recognize that is the God he wants, too.  

Who knows? 

If there had been wax figures available to pump up the numbers, to give the illusion of the same kind of joyful crowds they were all used to, maybe he would have ordered a truck load.  

Maybe he would have tried to sustain the challenge of this new reality by cultivating a very particular fantasy, banking on the hope that one way or another, it would manage to catch on.  

This is what Peter still doesn’t understand after all this time.  

He’s gotten very good at watching Jesus.  But he still has a great deal to learn about actually seeking the presence of God.  

He cannot imagine a world in which Jesus will not be there for him to watch—literally to watch.  

It’s so unthinkable that even when Jesus himself speaks of it, Peter urgently seeks to hush him.  

The deeper notion of the God who is present…the call to know the God who dwells with us, abides with us, who loves and cares for us even in the darkness is something he just can’t fathom yet.  

What Jesus wants him to understand is that godforsakenness isn’t a thing, not because henceforth, there will not be darkness, but because no matter how dark it may become, God is always there with us. 

We see God’s face in the faces of those who stand beside us. 

We hold God’s hand in the hands we reach to grasp. 

We know God’s healing when, in our own distress, we may not even have the strength to believe just then, but we find ourselves sustained by the faith and love of those who come alongside us, willing to sit with us patiently in the darkness.  

That’s not the God that Peter thinks he wants.  

That’s not the God who promises to smite our every enemy and bless our every effort.  

But it’s the God we know in Jesus Christ.  

IV.

That’s the God we’ve seen with particular clarity over the last 50 weeks. 

Not all Christians would say so. 

You may have seen Christians claiming to rebuke the virus like a demon and to banish it.  

Some others have said that it represents God’s decision to withdraw Divine protection over the world because of a particular short list of sins.  

The temptation to meet some new reality by cultivating a very particular kind of fantasy is never far away from any of us. 

We would do well to remember that as we seek to speak of God.  

For me, what has abided through this whole everything has not been some shallow version of God’s decrees and our unworthiness, or some fantasy that God, properly worshipped, will take any danger away as a reward for those with brains enough to do as we’re told.

What has abided has been a sense of the presence of God, even in our challenges.  

I’ve seen it in the love of this community for one another. 

I’ve seen it in the way we have found the strength and purpose to push through each day as best we can.  

I’ve seen it, not because life is easy for those who believe…but because life can be so hard, and yet we get on with it.  

We love children who are so angry and withdrawn. 

We love spouses who are hard to live with all day, every day, which is never what we signed up for.  

We love people who still say half of what they have to say while their Zoom is still on mute.  

We find a way to manage boredom and solitude and the sense of being at loose ends.

We do our jobs.  

We do all of it.  However we can. 

And God bless us for it.  I’m certain God does.   

I’ve seen how God has been actively at work doing new things—offering new comfort, newinsight, new and unexpected gestures that help us to heal even in the midst of our distress. 

God is doing this despite and sometimes even through all of this, not because God wishes it on us, but because God is with us, no matter what happens. 

Even this long into it, we know that some days go better than others.  Some of the adjustments we make are easier or more durable than others.

We have to look for God anew each day and learn to bless the partial daily victories of a God whose providence unfolds more gradually than we might be inclined to wish, but which proves to endure far longer than we could ever dream. 

Peter could not recognize this God, even when this God literally stood before him and spoke about these very things. 

But faith would not have us be so blinded, anymore. 

God stands with and among us. 

God is ready to join us in any new reality that the world might devise.  

And God is urging us to see the Divine Presence now and in whatever comes next, because the world may change, but the love and presence of God simply never will.

Don’t be a wax figure, frozen in a vision of the past, Jesus says.  

Be a child of God, attentive to what comes, alive to what remains, and hopeful in what will be.  

Flesh and blood and Spirit – unable to be frozen, and ever alive to the God in whom we live and move, and have our Being.  

Amen.

There are some things we almost always say at the beginning of Lent.  

For example, that Lent is a time for reflection—introspection. 

That it’s a time for learning to live without things, so that we can see more clearly what it is we actually need in order to live as souls before God, our truest, deepest selves.  

Tonight, on Ash Wednesday, we are especially urged to ponder the fact of our own mortality.  

That’s what the ashes are about. 

Of course, you’ll remember that when we receive ashes, we receive them with an admonition. 

We always say: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”  

There is an urgency to that.  

It reminds us that there are some things in our world and in ourselves that we need to turn around, and we don’t have forever to make progress on those things. 

It’s also a way of remembering that some of what the world cares about—some of the things it teaches us to focus on, to spend our time doing, to spend our wherewithal building—some of these things don’t stand the test of eternity. 

Put under that sort of intense microscope, few things actually do stand up to the test.  

In that sense, I’ve always been surprised that we don’t generally read from the Book of Ecclesiastes on Ash Wednesday. 

The preacher’s old familiar words that “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” seem so deeply resonant.  

If we spent 40 days taking time on our knees to parse the vanities and the verities of our lives – to ponder the notions and the truths that guide us – we would be really keeping Lent…keeping Lent real…for sure.  

But this is a weird year.  

Given the last eleven months, how many reminders of our mortality do we need? 

How much giving up of things do we still need to do?  

I suppose it is a comment on the relative ease many of us have come to expect, but once you’ve had to get creative in sourcing your family’s toilet paper, how important could it possibly seem to give up chocolate for Lent?  

In a world where grandparents have had to give up seeing their grandchildren, when spouses can’t even be together in the hospital during a procedure, when brides have to wear masks to walk down the aisle, and so many of the little places we love for our small comforts can scarcely stay afloat—wow—what’s Lent?  

The Christian writer C.S. Lewis once described Hell, not as a place of fire and brimstone, supervised by devils with pitchforks.  

For Lewis, Hell was more like a dreary English suburb with houses that looked all alike, where the time was that depressing window before sundown on a cold midwinter afternoon just after the shops have closed – except forever.  

Who among us can’t picture that right now?  

At this point, what could “keeping Lent” possibly add? 

I think the answer is, actually, it could add a lot.  

Because of the edifice of our own expectations…the structure of our assumptions has crumbled, then the question is what we will seek to rebuild – what is it that will come back differently? 

If the isolation and boredom of Corona hit, and all we had to lean on was the pop of a cork at 5 o’clock, what have we learned?  

If our relationships have not proven a comfort to us, or if they’ve demanded more from our emotional wells than we have to offer, with little return, what have we learned? 

When the institutions we have taken for granted turn out to be far more precarious than we realized, what have we learned?

I think a whole lot of people have found that with everything they’ve been through, they miss God.

They miss a sense of connection to the guiding sense of purpose that we find in God.  

They miss a sense that someone sees their struggles and their unsung goodness and still finds them loveable – that while we are sinners, we are much more than only sinners, and the center of the Universe knows it, and sees that in us.  

They miss a sense that when they’re lost, someone is on their way to come find them. That there’s a Good Shepherd trying to bring them home. 

They miss what it is to hope in God’s declaration of the future – a sustained and sustainable Creation, shaped by trust among peoples and firm in the way of peace, where tears and death and darkness are no more.  

A whole lot of people are finding they miss God. 

The great Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”

Without clubbing Sartre for his honesty, the Church teaches us to wonder if God was somewhere in that longing—that sense of missing the Divine. 

And that’s why Lent is so important, even for us, even for this year.  

It’s a year when we have not had to work ourselves up to 40 days of pondering our longing. 

This time, a lot of us have reached Longing 2.0 – the longing that comes on the other side of months and months of seeing the shoddy crutches we lean on snap in pieces before our very eyes.  

Lent asks us to ponder how we might live, now that we see so clearly how we can’t afford to keep living a moment longer.  

The promise of Lent is the promise that God will teach us how to build back better from here, as God gives us the strength to take up the cross and to join the work of redemption that is already under way, as all things are enfolded under the banner of Christ. 

So it is a weird year.  

The particular disciplines of Lent may seem redundant in a year with so many of those same lessons already baked in. 

But our longing for a new heaven and a new earth could serve us well, particularly it guides us to offer our lives in service to the One in whom all true hopes must finally dwell.  

Amen.  

There’s a wonderful irony to putting this particular moment in Jesus’ ministry at the heart of our worship today. 

On Annual Meeting Sunday, our congregation gathers in a way we rarely do, and we speak and listen according to procedures that in most years, we only impose upon ourselves for this single gathering. 

There is a formality to how we do things that we tend to shy away from in most of our church life.  

In a way I really love, it’s profoundly Congregationalist that here and in most churches ours, even a four year old will call the pastors “Max” and “Shawn”…but God help us if we tried to run the Annual Meeting without formally establishing a quorum or without having Brenda read the “Certification of Congregational Usage.” 

If that happened, we’d have forty hands shoot up at once to put a stop to the anarchy.  

In many other denominations, that’s just not how it works. 

You’ve got to love that.

For a long time, well before I was ever here, I worried about it a little bit. 

I worried that it meant that churches like ours were ok with being loosey-goosey when it came to talking about Jesus, but by the book when it came to talking about money. 

I worried that it said what actually mattered, and that the answer was not “Jesus.” 

That’s not how I experience it now.      

It is of course true that, in so many ways, a church is most fundamentally a people of God, and its ongoing life is expressed in relationships with one another and with God.   

Yet in other ways, a church is also an institution, with an ongoing life that is expressed in resources that can and should be measured.  

With that dual identity in mind, it would be incorrect to reduce the complexity of ministry, witness, or even our understanding of stewardship to a series of entries for income and expenses on a balance sheet.  

But let’s not denigrate balance sheets or hold that money and assets are somehow beneath us as Christians to talk about.  

There is no question that budgets are moral documents. 

Read thoughtfully, budgets point to our commitments and to our diligence in keeping the promises this people of God has made over the course of its history. 

II.

And so we come to this morning’s Scripture, in which Jesus more or less refuses to take the path of institution-building when it seems so clearly to be beckoning.  

He’s seized people’s attention with his preaching and his healings. 

Mark tells us that “the whole city” is gathered at the door of the house in which Jesus is staying.  

When Billy Graham used to lead a crusade in a particular place, he worked out very carefully ahead of time how the momentum of his visit would then carry people into a long-term relationship not just with Jesus, but also with particular churches in that place.  

Jesus could have done that, too. 

Or better yet, he might have stayed right there. 

For example, he could have become the Great Healer of Capernaum.

Something like that had to occur to somebody.  

All throughout the Greek world, there were temples to Asclepius, the God of Medicine – these were places of healing, often with lovely groves, and placed near springs thought to have healing properties. 

A couple of weeks ago, we heard about Jesus’ visit to the synagogue, and how challenging it may have been to hear his preaching for all of them, not just the man with a demon who is the one who actually cries out.  

They’d all been muttering as they listened to Jesus preaching.    

But later that very same day, once the healings started – once the crowds came – I wonder if the fathers in the synagogue were prepared to forgive and forget whatever it was that had raised their eyebrows that morning.  

It’s hard to argue with results. 

And Jesus certainly has those.  

Roll the tape back for a moment.  

Right after Jesus gets back from the synagogue, where it’s everybody muttering and one guy screaming, Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. 

We don’t know a lot about her. 

Most of us think of the disciples as all male and all single, which a closer reading of Scripture complicates. 

We also don’t think of them as crashing at someone’s house, much less someone’s mother-in-law’s house, much less Peter’s…but whatever.   

There she is.  

As I said, we don’t know a lot about her, but she must have been one of those people who gets up from being sick and gets right on the phone because—boom!—by sundown, every sick person and every possessed person in town is outside the door.

That alone gets people’s attention.  

Look what happens when Jesus heals two people in the morning.  

So what’s going to happen when now all these new people and their families and their friends start posting to Facebook?   

If you look on the edge of the crowd, you’ll notice plenty of folks standing there, wondering that very thing. 

The disciples are.  The town fathers are. 

You can’t argue with results.  

People have been waiting a long time for something to change.  

People have been trying to hold on to hope for ages now.  

People are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

But now this has happened.  

Jesus has appeared.  

If you’re watching it, you have to be thinking “this guy is going to put Capernaum on the map.”  

And if what came out of it was a nice little grove or a colonnaded spring where people could gather, well, you know, that’s o.k., too.   

Baking stuff for Coffee Hour is going to be taking everybody all week.  

III.

You know, though, I don’t blame them for dreaming. 

Those moments when God touches down are like that. 

Those moments when a new breeze starts to blow are like that.  

The Gospels tell us about many of those.  

Next week is Transfiguration Sunday, when Jesus goes up a mountain and uncloaks in all his glory before three of the disciples, and Peter says, “Lord, it is good that we are here.  Let us build three dwellings: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

Peter doesn’t want to stop at building one church – all of the sudden he wants to build three. 

But Jesus resists that then, just as he resists in this earlier moment at Capernaum, when he might have launched Jesus, International, LLC, and somehow refuses.  

It’s not that he doesn’t love churches or see the need for institutions.  

It seems as if John the Baptist had no time for those.  

However, for his part, Jesus goes into synagogues all the time, and eventually he goes into the Jerusalem Temple, of course. 

If he thought nothing of value was happening in such places, it’s hard to see him bothering.  

Even more than John the Baptist, Jesus didn’t need institutions to do his particular thing.  

To review: he could stand in the doorway of his friend’s mother-in-law’s house, and the entire city would show up.  

But where else is it, exactly, that people come together to talk about the wonderful things that God has done? 

Where else is it that a person can sit in a pew on the day of her granddaughter’s wedding, and remember standing where her granddaughter is now standing, while her own grandmother, now long departed, looked on with a face full of love? 

Where else is it that a family brings a newborn, and a roomful of strangers makes promises to live better lives so that they might serve as a better example and a more reliable friend to that child? 

Where else is it that when we find ourselves broken by life, suffering loss, feeling the weight of everything, that an old hymn can spring from the organ, and two measures into it, we remember…oh right: God isn’t finished yet? 

Somehow, even though (whew)…somehow, in God, there is a way forward.  

Where else is it that we learn to stand for the dignity and worth of all people, to bless the goodness of all loving, and come to live with the discomfort and sacrifice this may ask of us? 

Those things don’t just happen on their own. 

They happen when and where Jesus appears and tells people – reminds people – that we are God’s people, and that a new breeze is set to blow. 

It’s one thing to try to hold on to God.  

But there’s no such thing as holding God down.  

That’s why Jesus did not tarry in Capernaum.  

That’s why, even though the people there were on fire for him literally overnight, he was on his way just after dawn.  

Because God will not be held down. 

The life of faith demands that we seek after God with open hearts all over again each morning. 

If the house of God is ever to be more than a shrine to where God appeared once, long ago, we must watch in faith for the flame to be lit anew.   

And we must go where it leads.  

IV.

So in a little while, we will regather this morning to discuss God’s business here at the Second Congregational Church of Greenwich. 

We go about it in ways that are different than our usual ways.

We try to describe the work of our church community at some of its most granular.  

Our leaders will talk about when and where they see the Spirit moving, and the charge they believe this lays upon us now. 

May we always prove open in our seeking and fearless in our following where God would have us go.  

Amen.