REFLECT ON SCRIPTURE
LENT II :: Sunday, March 5
Readings -- Gn 12:1-4a; Ps 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22; 2Tm 1:8b-10; Mt 17:1-9
Reflection by Mary Lefevre
We never approach scripture without a vantage point. It could be scholar, feminist, parent, or sinner for example. For my reflections on today’s readings, I approach them as a Queer person.
When I graduated from high school in 1966, I did not know a single person who was out of the closet, although I gathered that our Drama teacher, for one, was gay. Is that what God wanted for us and from us?
God asks Abram to leave a comfortable but unsatisfying life. He had flocks and servants, but he and his wife Sara had no children.
Following God’s invitation, he left the comfort of life as he knew it to serve the ONLY God. This involved changing his name, his country, his forms of worship. He had to let all that go to become God’s. And with this letting go came many blessings, and Abram became Abraham, the father of many nations, our father in faith.
The Gospel reading is the familiar story of the Transfiguration, echoing the words at the Baptism that Jesus is God’s Son, the Beloved, and we should listen to him. Jesus also left his familiar home with his mother to preach his new understanding of God and God’s reign. There was a certain comfort in continuing the life he knew, but like his father Abraham, he had no child, nor wife. He did not really fit.
When Jesus showed himself to his closest disciples, they had a glimpse of his true self, in the splendor that God intended. We are all called to live in the light, to know and not be ashamed of who we really are, as God’s beloved children.
The reading from the First Letter to Timothy echoes the theme that God’s design and grace are manifest in Christ Jesus, who brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
The true life of a child of God is the life they recognize in themselves through reflection and the experience of God. Abram’s call was not to be a prosperous citizen of Ur, Jesus’s call was not to remain in the obscurity of Nazareth, and my call is not to be an incomplete copy of the people I live among. I am called to manifest God and God’s love through coming out and accepting my call to be myself, the beloved of God, and so to contribute to the freedom of others in God’s people to move beyond conformity to authenticity, to let the beauty and glory of who they are in God be seen, so that God may be given the glory.