"Having a fat God and having a skinny God are two completely different things."

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Hi Friends,

A few items:

Thank you for your continued prayers and encouragement. My most recent sermon elicited much care and concern. As I navigate my way through chemo’s (unexpectedly arduous) side-effects, I truly appreciate your support.

Our Monday night live sessions will continue next week. For Lent, we will be kicking off a discussion of Fleming Rutledge’s big book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. For your participation, we invite you to read the first “motif” chapter in her book on the Passover and the Exodus. You can find her book here. If circumstances prevent you from getting it, let me know. I’ve got about a dozen copies on hand. But do check it out! Fleming is a subscriber and lurker here, and she’ll know if you didn’t do your homework.

The video from the final session of the Mystery of Christ will be available later this week.

Finally, here is a sermon on the Transfiguration by my friend Ken Sundet Jones, preached at Grand View University’s chapel. And remember, if you’re a preacher, consider joining Ken and me for the next cohort of the Iowa Preachers Project. Applications will open at this Spring’s Mockingbird Conference.

Jesus‘s transfiguration, which we just heard about, is one of the few things, apart from the Lord‘s death and resurrection, that shows up in all four gospels. So it must be important. But it’s such a strange story: Jesus takes a few disciples with him and goes up on a mountain top. The disciples fall asleep, and when they wake up, they see Jesus standing with Moses and Elijah with what we might call a strange look on his face and shining clothes. Like I said, it’s a strange story. But let’s see if we can get at it from a different angle so that it makes more sense for us.

Today is Mardi Gras, which is a French word that we get via New Orleans, which was originally a French port before Thomas Jefferson bought it in the Louisiana purchase. And Mardi Gras is a church term. Mardi means Tuesday, and gras means fat. It’s called Fat Tuesday, because it’s the last day before the season of Lent, which in the Roman Catholic tradition is the somber church season in which believers are called on to think about their own sinfulness and need for Christ’s work on the cross.

One of the ways Christians have observed Lent is to take on some kind of discipline. In the Roman Catholic tradition and elsewhere, there are restrictions on diet that people often adhere to, including not having meat on Fridays. That’s why McDonald’s and Culver’s make a big deal about their fish sandwiches. They want fast food spending from Catholic customers. But that’s just the surface of things. The goal for the forty days of Lent is to join yourself to Jesus who went into the wilderness for forty days after he was baptized. During Lent you seek a more austere lifestyle and cut out things you don’t need, including, guess what? Fat. So, in this tradition today is the last day that you get to have two gorge on fat, including buttery pancakes, and syrup after chapel.

The odd thing about this tradition is that, in a way, it runs counter to the kind of God you have, the God, who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If you want to know more about God during the season of Lent, maybe it’s not the best thing to do to go without, to starve yourself, or to become a mealy-minded person, feeling like you have to perform some obligation in order for God to regard you kindly. People often give things up for Lent, whether it’s fat or chocolate or Spotify or speeding or doom-scrolling on Facebook. Then they discover it’s harder to do than they expected, and they don’t follow through on their commitment, and they feel like less of a Christian, and then they worry about God‘s response. Such a slippery slope, and at its bottom stands a God who looks down on such failures, one who begrudges expending any mercy on his extremely fallible human creatures.

But the story of Jesus’s transfiguration on the mountain tells us something different. The transfiguration is all about something being revealed to the disciples. A veil that was draped between them in Jesus is lifted, so in Jesus’ strange look and glowing robes they see his glory, his bigness, his awesome, true nature. All his divine glory exudes from him like the rays of the sun. Psalm 23 says “my cup overflows” when it talks about what it’s like to be related to God. In this case, Jesus is a cup, overflowing with goodness and mercy — more goodness and mercy, actually than we human sinners can really stand. That’s why a cloud descends on the mountain, and Jesus becomes obscured. Just a glimpse of it had the disciples cowering. So it’s all hidden or clouded, so that we can access it in a way that doesn’t destroy us.

In fact, in about seven weeks, Christians will gather for Good Friday and hear about Jesus on another mountain, on Golgotha, where he hangs on a cross and breathes his last breath. This is not some different God from the overflowing ultimate goodness that streams from Jesus in the transfiguration. It’s the same thing, the same glory, but hidden behind its opposite. Jesus’s divinity revealed on the mountain of the transfiguration and on Golgotha when he’s crucified, both reveal the ultimate fatness of your God. In Jesus’ very being, in his living, breathing body and finally in his death on the cross, God intends to show you that you don’t have a skinny God; you have instead a fat God.

Having a fat God and having a skinny God are two completely different things.

Having a skinny God is like being forced to eat All Bran and skim milk for breakfast, a handful of dry-roasted peanuts for lunch, and celery sticks for supper, and being told you should be grateful for it because it’s good for you. What kind of God is that? Is this the kind of God who would go to the bitter end of the cross to give himself to you?

But having a fat God is something altogether different. This is more on the order of being served a thick ribeye steak. And not just any steak, but one that’s marbled with fat. And as I’ve learned by watching episodes of America’s Test Kitchen, fat gives flavor. You want a fat God who has some oomph to him, a God you can save her, a God who’s more than merely nutritious or good for you. You want a God who, when you get a taste of him, you say to yourself “ I need another helping of that.”

Now I know all about fat. When I interviewed here at Grand View University 22 years ago, I weighed an eighth of a ton, 250 luscious pounds made all the more alluring by wearing bowties. The bowties, though, or camouflage. I hated being morbidly obese, as my doctor wrote in his chart, and dealing with things that came along with it like diabetes and for daily injections of insulin. So I went to Weight Watchers and lost 65 pounds. I gained back half, and in the last year have gotten back down to that low weight thanks to the Ozempic that, like Jesus himself, can do for me what I can’t do on my own.

So it’s good that I’m not as fat as I used to be. But you don’t want God who goes on a diet. You need a God who can fill you up so that you can say with the psalmist, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” You need a God who grows bigger with every day. You need a God who’s as fat and overflowing as his eternal love and mercy.

In spite of Lenten disciplines and this whole business of giving something up for Lent, how about instead you take on something else? How about sinking yourself down into the Scriptures with the goal of seeing how fat God really is? How about showing up for worship on a Sunday morning so that this God, Jesus Christ himself, can provide you with a full banquet in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper?

And if you are hungry for his word of mercy today, if you’re weary of the church’s demands to be more disciplined, if your mind about God is clouded, then you’ve come to the right place, because, as Jesus tells us, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. The mouth of God on the amount of transfiguration says, “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” And what Jesus wants you to listen to, to hear and hear well, to savor, is that he is for you. The menu of grace he has put together is prepared for your taste buds, your belly, and your well-being. This is his word, his promise to you, that you can come to him and encounter the fattest of gods who will not turn away from you, but always give you more. Today and always. Happy Fat Tuesday! Amen.

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