Jesse Zink grew up in Western Massachusetts, attended St. John's in Northampton, and spent several summers at Camp Bement.  He spent two years as a missionary in Mthatha, South Africa with the Young Adult Service Corps, and is currently studying at Yale Divinity School.  We were fortunate to have Jesse as our guest preacher on February 13 and 14.  

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36 (37-43a)

Let us pray.

Loving and gracious God, grant that we may listen and obey your call to mission in this world. Amen.

These Bible passages we've just heard are so rich and full of meaning. There's Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, his face shining from his conversation with God Almighty. Then there's Jesus transfigured into dazzling white in front of his closest friends. These stories are powerful and grab my attention.

So it's perhaps a little small-minded of me that my first reaction to hearing these readings is to be instantly jealous. Just think how lucky a person like Moses, Peter, James, and John are. They get to see God at work directly and immediately, unmediated by anything. Although none of them actually see God, they can be sure that they have had a close encounter that few other people in history will ever have.

Now I have a lot of questions for God, about how to live our lives, about what I should do with my life, about various points of doctrine and theology. So when I read these lessons I think to myself, ''How come Moses and Peter and James and John heard from God directly while I have to have my communication mediated by this book and my sporadic prayer life?'' I have this feeling generally about the prophets and the apostles in general. God spoke directly to the prophets and Jesus hung around with the apostles for a few years. What I wouldn't give for just a few minutes of one-on-one conversation with the divine to clear up a few pressing issues.

But when I think about these readings for another moment, my second reaction is to pause. After all, sometimes what God has to say can't be easy. The law that Moses delivers, for instance, is full of challenging social teachings - welcome the immigrant; remember to care for the poor, the sick, and the outcast; and so on. These teachings aren't challenging in the sense that we struggle to understand them. They're challenging in that we struggle to live up to them.

Then there's Jesus. In Luke's Gospel, immediately preceding the Transfiguration is a story of Jesus teaching his apostles. He says, ''If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it…'' That phrase ''take up your cross'' has become a bit of a cliche - ''we all have our crosses to bear,'' you might hear somewhat ironically - but when you really think about it, it's tough to hear. The cross represented an undignified death reserved for the lowest classes in society. And Jesus wants us to take that up? When you hear that teaching and then you hear God say at the Transfiguration, ''This is my Son, listen to him!'', there's no escaping the seriousness of the message. You might tug at your collar, sweat a bit at the brow, and think, ''Gee whiz, God. Couldn't you have softened the message just a bit?''

My third reaction has to do with what Jesus, Peter, James, and John do after they hear the voice of God. They come back down the mountain they've just climbed. Jesus and his apostles have been walking around the region and are constantly besieged by requests for help. Jesus is always healing someone or teaching something and always surrounded by people. In this context, Peter's idea seems eminently reasonable. They should stay on top of the mountain, build homes for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, and not go back down. But if you read on Luke's Gospel, you'll see that Jesus and his apostles head back down the mountain and are immediately confronted by a man who wants his son to be healed.

These readings and my reaction to them, remind me of a friend of mine named Noxolo. As you might be able to tell from the click sound in her name, Noxolo is not from around her. Noxolo lives in South Africa in a town called Mthatha.

Mthatha has a bad reputation in South Africa. It's said to be dirty, dangerous, and full of gangsters. There's a national highway that goes right through Mthatha and when you ask someone from say Cape Town or Johannesburg if they've ever been to Mthatha, they say, ''Oh, yes, I've been to Mthatha - I mean, I've been through Mthatha.'' They might sometimes add, ''I've driven through Mthatha with my windows rolled up, my doors locked, and a look of terror on my face.''

My friend Noxolo lives in a neighbourhood of Mthatha called Itipini. Actually, to call Itipini a neighbourhood might be going too far. The word ''Itipini'' means ''at the dump'' and the community is a shantytown or a slum that started when people began living on the dump so they could scavenge off the garbage. They built shacks out of whatever was available - old car parts, pieces of tin, tarps, plastic bags, milk cartons, beer bottles, literally whatever would work. There's no running water, no electricity, roofs and walls leak.

Living in a place like this does not always bring out the best in people. Alcoholism and drug use is rife. There's little access to medical care or quality education. People who get sick don't get better. Children often don't do much better in school than their uneducated parents. HIV and tuberculosis are widespread in Itipini. People in Itipini live very close to the margin for survival and put their effort and energy into figuring out how to make it to the next meal, the next day.

For two years, I was a missionary of the Episcopal church and worked at a community center in Itipini that has a clinic, a pre-school, an after-school program and a lot else. I worked with a woman from the Diocese of Western North Carolina, named Jenny McConnachie, who has worked in Itipini for about the last 15 years.

I met Noxolo on the day that Sizwe died. It was a day about two and a half years ago, shortly after I had arrived in Itipini. Sizwe was a young man, younger than me, who had AIDS and TB. I saw him every day in the clinic when he would come for his TB pills. Even though the the clinic was only a short walk from his shack, he would still be out of breath when he arrived, leaning on a walking stick. He would swallow his pills, sit on the bench for a rest for several minutes, and then return to his shack. With each passing week, I saw him getting weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner as the AIDS and TB ate away at him. He was working on getting the life-saving anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS but it was a long and slow process.

One morning, some men came running into the clinic. Sizwe wouldn't get out of bed, they said. He wasn't conscious. Jenny and I went down the hill to his shack and found Sizwe much as they had described him. He was lying on his thin mattress, unconscious, laboring heavily to breathe. Carefully, we loaded him into the back of our little truck. A visiting friend of mine drove while I sat in the back and cradled his head so it wouldn't hit the truck bed.

But who would come with us? These men were happy to be the heroes and dash into the clinic to come get us but no one wanted to accompany him to the hospital. They knew the hospital would be over-crowded and they would have to wait for hours to be seen. Sizwe needed someone who could accompany him and be his advocate in the hospital so he wouldn't be forgotten in the crush of patients. Surely there was someone - girlfriend, sister, mother, friend, anyone - who could come with him? No, we learned. Sizwe had just moved to Itipini and no one knew him very well. Just as we were beginning to despair, a young woman stepped out of the crowd that had gathered around the truck and she offered to come along. This was Noxolo. She got in the front seat and we were off.

We made it to the hospital and I bullied my way through the crowd and made sure Sizwe was admitted to the ward. I made sure he was being seen and Noxolo was with him and then returned to my other responsibilities in Itipini. Sizwe died not long afterwards. Noxolo was one of the last people to be with him.

So why would I think about Noxolo when I hear these readings in this service? In the first place, she is someone who quite literally did not stay on a hill. Itipini is built on a slope and her shack is near the top. Our clinic is near the bottom so on that day when Sizwe needed to go to the hospital, she came down the hill from her shack and plunged right into the chaos of everyday life that Peter would have them avoid by staying on top of the mountain.

Noxolo in her life was someone who carried heavy burdens. She was born and raised in Itipini to an alcoholic mother and an unknown father. Her mother was murdered when she was a teenager. She was married young and against her will. She dropped out of school in sixth grade. She has two young children, who are delightful - and exhausting - bundles of energy. She is HIV positive. She has several different jobs in the informal economy to make the money she needs to support herself. She's a few years younger than me but has had the life experiences of someone twice my age.

Despite these burdens, however, she is a committed Christian who exemplifies the ''listen to him'' idea we see in this Gospel passage and routinely takes up the proverbial cross to help others around her. Throughout my time in Itipini, I repeatedly saw her sacrificing of her time, energy, money, and resources to assist others around her in the community. Sizwe wasn't the only person she accompanied to the hospital. In fact, over time Noxolo and I became quite the team - I would drive and she would help look after the sick person on the way to the hospital.

The cross was a burden Jesus willingly took up and not just on Good Friday. When we look through the Gospels, we see Jesus routinely bearing burdens for others. It is the burden of compassion and mercy. It is the burden of reaching out to those on the outskirts and edges of society, the outcasts. It is the burden of following God's will for his life, of following God's will all the way to the cross, even though he prays to let that moment of suffering pass him by. It is the burden of truth-telling, of calling out the faithfulness of the sinner and the sin and hypocrisy of the religious leaders and then showing both a new way of grace. The discipleship Jesus teaches is burdensome - we are blessed when we are persecuted, we are blessed when we are meek, we are blessed when we mourn, we are blessed when we are reviled.

I didn't have worry about my daily existence. Noxolo did. But she kept laying down her burdens at Jesus' feet and taking up the cross. Many of those people we helped did die, as Sizwe did, and Noxolo and I grieved their loss. Some did not and Noxolo and I celebrated their continued life and health.

I am sure that you can think of people in your own lives like Noxolo, the self-sacrificing people who embody the message of the Gospel. In the church I grew up in, it was the long-time Sunday School director that I still look forward to seeing on each of my return visits. Jenny McConnachie, the missionary I worked with in South Africa is one as well. Twenty years ago last Thursday Nelson Mandela walked free from prison. As if 27 years in prison wasn't enough burden-bearing and life-sacrificing, he then worked extraordinarily hard to overcome some serious obstacles to achieve a peaceful democratic revolution in South Africa. All of these people teach us the basic Gospel message: give, forgive, accept, befriend and do it to all equally.

When we think about people in our lives who refuse to stay on top of the mountain, who listen to Jesus' command in their lives, each seems pretty different. But there is something common among them and I think we can tease out that commonality by returning to a word I used earlier, missionary. I described myself as a missionary of the Episcopal Church. That word, missionary, is so contested and difficult to hear, because of its connections with a history of colonialism and subjugation. So why retain the word?

A missionary, to state the obvious, has a mission. And who does that mission belong to? Does it belong to the missionary? To the missionary's church? It is none of these, I think. Mission belongs to God. And that mission can be summarized quite simply and clearly. God's mission, throughout the course of history, has been the same: the restoration of right relationship between people and God and between people and each other. The message of the Bible is that God longs for people to live in unity with one another and with God. This is what Jesus preached and did and told his followers: reach out to the poorest and outcast among you and be reconciled to them; love God entirely and trust in God. This is a universal message as true as when Jesus shared it with the poor Samaritan woman at the well as when Paul preached it to the high and mighty in Rome or in Athens.

The questions missionary needs to ask, then, are these: Where is God's mission around me and what role am I privileged to play in that mission? To ask it another way: Where is reconciliation needed and how can I help make it happen? And if we ask the question in this way, it becomes clear that missionaries are not only the people who move to Africa for a time. Not everyone or even most people are called to work overseas. We become missionaries by virtue of our belief in Christ, not by our decision to move across the world. The need for reconciliation is as strong and urgent in Longmeadow, Springfield, and western Massachusetts as it is in a shantytown in Africa. The need takes a different shape but the question remains the same: what role are we privileged to play in God's mission here and now? When we come down from the mountain of a Sunday morning church service, where do we go? What is the particular cross Christ is asking us to take up?

There's a problem here, though. The idea of obedience, even if it is obedience to God's command, borders on repulsive. You know how it works - you say, ''listen to me!'' like God does this morning and no one listens. In fact, in my experience, if you have to say ''listen to me,'' it's a good sign that no one is. In our time, the idea of obedience is certainly counter-cultural. We'll live our lives, perhaps every now and again deigning to help someone else out but for the most part we'll ''do our own thing'' or ''go our own way.'' Forgot about someone else's commands or cross. Obedience is not for us.

But you know what? God knows this. God has some experience with the Israelites, after all. Almost as soon as Moses came down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments the first time, the Israelites started disobeying. Then they turned ignoring the law into a national pastime. So God sent Jesus. Jesus freely gave himself in obedience to God's command on his life and died on a cross, even though he prayed that it would not happen. Whereas before Moses had to put a a veil on his face to talk with God, Jesus' time with us on earth shows us that there is no longer a mediator between God and humans. As Paul writes in the portion of the second letter to the Corinthians that we just heard, ''when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.'' We stand in direct relationship to God. That doesn't mean we always obey God's command in our lives but it does mean that God forgives us when we fail to obey those commands and gives us another chance. As Paul writes, ''Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.'' The command of the Lord is freedom in our lives. In any other part of human existence this would be a contradiction. But by God's grace, it is what motivates people like Noxolo to continue to take up their cross and follow God. God commands and then gives us the grace to obey that command, the command to take our role in God's mission and continue the Gospel work of reconciliation in our broken world.

Paul concludes the epistle lesson by writing, ''All of us… are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.'' God's command calls us to mission in this world, to come down off the mountain, and take up our crosses. Let us move forward in this call, transforming the world and being transformed, actively seeking and discerning what role we are called to play in God's mission of reconciliation. For some of us, that takes us to South Africa. For many of us, however, I bet we'll find the work of reconciliation right here in western Massachusetts.

Amen.