The Rev. Rob Merola

Ahhh,  it is so good to be here this morning, isn’t it?  Great to see everybody, great to be together again.

Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, which means Lent begins this Wednesday.    Tuesday night is our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper, and it’s another great chance to get together, a chance to enjoy great company over one of the great all time foods: pancakes.   Then Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, with services at 6, 12, and 7:30, and the season of Lent officially begins.   I hope you are thinking seriously about the disciplines you will undertake to make this a very Holy Lent.

This morning, however, we are going to finish up our series on building strong families.  And to help us think about the point of today’s sermon, turn to the person next to you and tell them what you think the number one problem is that people face today.  What’s the number one problem facing people today?   Is it sex?  Greed?  Selfishness?  Busyness?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the number one problem people are facing today is none of these things.  It’s SNOW!  Snow, snow, and more snow!

No, I love snow.  That’s not our biggest problem.  I believe our biggest problem is simply constancy.   It’s being faithful to God’s best over the long haul.

Think about it for a moment with me.  Let’s start with marriage.  When you first dreamed about marriage, what did it look like?  What were your deepest dreams, your highest hopes for marriage?  Is that what your marriage looks like today?  What happened?

Or think about parenting.  When you first became a parent, what were your aspirations for parenthood?   How many of us lived up to those aspirations and became the parents that in our heart of hearts  we so badly wanted to be?  

In the long run, I think I was a pretty good parent.   I did a lot of things right, and I’m proud of that.  But never in a million years would I say that I loved my kids as they deserved to be loved, that I was the best dad I could’ve been and probably should’ve been.   What happened?

Or finally, think about your relationship with God.  Most of us, somewhere along the line, have been passionate in our love for God.   Maybe it was when we first became Christians, or maybe when we came back from a mission trip or a retreat, or maybe when we made it out of a tough situation.  We had this sense that God was close and wanted so much to be 100% devoted to fully and passionately following Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

Are you 100% fully and passionately devoted to God?  Does your heart burn as white hot with love for him as it once did?  What happened?

The problem is that somewhere along the line we get worn out and worn down by life.  Creating the life that we hoped for got to be too much work, and so we’ve resigned ourselves to something less. The life we dreamed of simply seemed too far out of reach, and so we decided it was no longer worth the effort, saying  “That’s just the way  it is.”  Like the disciples in today’s Gospel, we get tired, and our eyes grow "heavy with sleep".   Somewhere along the line our original vision of what our life could be—should be!—becomes blurred.  We doze off in mid-conversation, and we burn out, black out, and our resolve fades away.

So the big question is:  How do we stay true to our vision for what we once hoped our lives would become?     Let me just pause here a moment and let that question sink in:  How do we remain constant in our pursuit of the highest and best visions God has placed in our hearts?

How, in God’s name, do we keep at it? 

And maybe a secondary question for those of us who are parents is, “How do we teach our kids to keep at it?”

These questions bring us to our Gospel this morning, and to the story of the Transfiguration.   Just prior to today’s reading, Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”   The answer is perhaps not what He was expecting:  “They say you’re John the Baptist; they say you’re Elijah; they say you’re one of the ancient prophets risen from the dead.”   In other words, the feedback Jesus gets is that they see Him exactly as they have seen the prophets of old.  They think of Him as a forerunner of the Messiah who is yet to come, but don’t see anything in Him or in His ministry that suggests He might be the Messiah Himself.

Jesus follows up:  “Well, who do you say that I am?”   Peter replies, “You are the Messiah.”   Better—it is the answer Jesus is looking for.  But it immediately becomes clear Peter doesn’t really know what he is saying; he doesn’t understand who the Messiah really is, or what Jesus is really all about.   And so Jesus tells him to keep quiet.

It is in this context that Jesus climbs up on a mountain to pray.    The implication seems to be that, since people still don’t understand who He is, Jesus needs to talk to God about whether or not He is on the right track.  He needs to check in and confirm that what He heard from God at His baptism and in the wilderness is indeed what God wants from Him. 

In other words, He needs to find the strength to keep at what God has called Him to do.  How does He do this?

First, he gets away.  He leaves the crowds and the masses with all their cares and concerns behind.  In fact, He leaves most of the disciples, with all their cares and concerns, behind.    He takes some down time.

This last week, we’ve all had some opportunity for down time.  How did you do with it?  Did you fight the elements and go into work anyhow?   Did you get frustrated by all the snow and find your stress level only rising?  Via the marvels of modern technology, did you work as hard at home as you do in the office?

Or did you take at least some time simply to stop and marvel at the beauty of falling snow, the silence of a world turned wonderfully white?  Did you take at least a little time to sit in front of a fire or under the warmth of a blanket and rest?  Did you do something so radical as perhaps to take even a short nap?

Other than our salvation, do you know what the single greatest gift we have all been given is?    It is not our spouse or our kids or our job or our mind or our hardworking character.  It is you.  It is you, because you are the means by which we experience and appreciate everything else.

If we get tired and worn out, for instance, then we don’t appreciate our family as the gift they are.  We get irritable and impatient, seeing them as one more demand on our time and energy.  But when we take care of ourselves, so that we are renewed and refreshed, then we can appreciate our families, our friends, our lives, for the blessing they are.

Jesus knew this.  He knew that the only way to keep at it, to keep on keepin’ on in what really matters, is to have the energy to do so.  And that means adequate rest, relaxation, and time away from it all.  He took some down time.  Do you?

Before we move on from this one, I want to say a word to parents.  Parents of children in Northern Virginia, we live in area where the culture wants us to push our kids hard.   We live in an area where you feel like something is wrong with you, that you are failing your job as a parent and dooming your kids to a bleak future, if you don’t have them  doing something every minute of every day and often well into the night.   

The statistics on this are sobering.   Half of all adolescents get less than 7 hours of sleep on week nights.  By the time they are seniors in high school, that average has dropped to almost 6.5 hours a night, with only 5% getting the full 8 hours of sleep they need.  And every study ever done on the matter shows a direct correlation between mental ability and sleep. 

Because people’s brains continue to grow and develop at least until we are 21, and because so much of that growth actually occurs while we are sleeping,  sleep deprivation can impair a child’s mental ability as much as exposure to lead.  With the benefit of modern brain imaging, we have confirmed what anyone who is paying attention already knows:  tired children can’t remember what they just learned.  Their brains lose the ability to make the synaptic connection necessary to encode the memories on which learning is based. [i]

Dr. Matthew Walker of Berkley puts it this way, “We have an incendiary situation today where the intensity of learning that kids are going through is so much greater, yet the amount of sleep they get to process that learning is so much less.  If these linear trends continue, the rubber band will soon snap.”[ii]   

So what is important for us is important for our children as we all.  We all need down time.  We all need rest because adequate rest is an absolute biological necessity for every species on earth.  Only we humans try to resist its pull. 

Isn’t it time we followed Jesus’ example and stopped seeing or need for rest as a sign of weakness? It has been said that “Rest is for Wussies.”    But that is not what Jesus said.  He taught that adequate rest is for the wise.

Well, there were two more points to this sermon, but I’m already pretty much out of time, aren’t I?  The second was that Jesus found strength to keep on keeping on in His friendships.    He took only three people with Him on the mountain—presumably, His three closest friends. 

I was going to talk at this point about how social these snowstorms have been.   In talking with many of you over the past few days, I’ve heard you say—and this was my experience as well—it’s been like a giant block party.   What starts as neighbors shoveling their driveways ends up with everyone, kids and pets included, just hanging out.

And I’ve heard the joy in your voice when you’ve talked about this.  I’ve felt it in my own heart.  It lifts our spirits, and so gives us our hearts and souls the strength they need to keep on keeping on.

The third point was going to be built on the fact that Jesus prayed, and I think it is impossible to overemphasize just how important this is.   In the Transfiguration, we see that in our time of need, God hears our prayers and so strengthens us to be true to what he has called us to be and to do.  Prayer is essential to our ability to keep on keeping on and be constant in the things that really matter.

You know, I’m a reasonably strong person.  When it comes right down to it, I actually have a lot of willpower.  Though we don’t often talk this way, I’m really pretty smart.  But there have been times when all those things have failed.  In those times—and they are not infrequent—I have to lean hard into God.  In those times, it is only the power of prayer that keeps me keeping on.

In conclusion, let me remind you of the familiar tale of the two lumberjacks.

There was once a man who started out determined to be a great lumberjack. 

On his very first day, he was encouraged when he managed to fell ten trees. But on the second day, he chopped down ten again. No progress at all. Then on the third day, he managed only seven!  This did not discourage him, but only made him more determined than ever.   He doubled his efforts the next day. He worked harder, longer, and without any breaks.  But at the end of the day, he had only managed to fell five trees.

After two weeks of this, he was worn out, tired, discouraged.  He was tempted to give up, when a grizzled old veteran approached him.

"Young fella," he said kindly, "I can see them callouses on your hands and bigger muscles in your arms, to prove you been swingin’ your ax. But let me ask you somethin.’ When was the last time you sharpened your ax?"

Friends, the secret to keeping on keeping on is not to be the biggest or the strongest or the fastest or the hardest worker.  It is to keep our axes sharp, by following Jesus’ example, getting adequate rest, finding joy in our relationships, and trusting in the power of God through prayer.  Amen.