Seeing the Light of Christ

February 3, 2008
Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

It’s difficult to say for sure what happened on the mountain that day. But whatever it was the synoptic gospels, Matthew Mark and Luke think it’s important enough to include it in their accounts of Jesus and his ministry with and among the disciples.

It’s a familiar story tucked into the time line of the liturgical year between Epiphany and the beginning of Lent, kind of like a last heads up about who and what Jesus is all about before the journey heads straight up hill.

Most sermons on this text focus on Peter, James and John and their desire to stay on the mountain with Jesus and preserve their marvelous Christophany, (which is a $5.00 word for the appearing of Christ) for themselves.

And, truth be told, I have preached that sermon…talking about how we hang onto the mountain top experiences of our spiritual life and risk making monuments to moments of holiness.

It’s possible that by the end of the sermon I might wish I had stuck with that predictable interpretation, but there are a few other things in the text that offer a different message…I’m going to risk it and head out on a limb. If you haven’t figured out I’m a little weird around the edges, it’s time.

You probably know that Peter James and John formed the inner circle of Jesus disciples, though the reasons don’t seem obvious. Peter was a bit of a social klutz, prone to outbursts, or as Linda said a few weeks ago, a blurter, but his blurts sometimes didn’t always coincide with having his brain fully in gear.

James and John were prone to squabbling and jockeying for power hoping they could be Jesus’ favorite though it’s pretty clear they didn’t have much of a clue what went along with that. But nonetheless they were the inner circle, Jesus’ beloved disciples.

And maybe what’ we’re supposed to notice is just that…they weren’t perfect. Jesus’ invitation to the inner circle and to discipleship in general wasn’t about being the brightest and best, at least in the contemporary cultural sense of the word, and that is pretty good news. That Jesus would call Peter, James and John, and the rest of them, too when you think about it suggests that the qualities needed for discipleship are less complicated than we imagine.

They were common, ordinary folk who followed because they heard something in Jesus’ call, and were willing to take a chance and let it grow. It wasn’t because they were perfect, it was because Jesus’ message reached them and healed them and changed them. They were as much in need of what Jesus had to offer as the people they went out touch in his name.

And they didn’t get it all at once, which also seems to me like pretty good news. The chapter begins….six days after Jesus took Peter James and John up the mountain to pray. The gospels aren’t much for giving stage directions, so when phrases like that appear it begs the question, six days after what?

In the previous Chapter Peter blurts out that Jesus is the one and Jesus says he is the rock on which the church will be built. And just a few verses later he tells all the disciples that following him is about taking up their cross and saying hard things with great love.

So, the Transfiguration wasn’t their first glimpse of Jesus and his radical new ministry. It was just the next glimpse that encouraged them in their journey. Another piece of clarity about Jesus and the mission they now shared. And it came in the context of prayer, which is the next big hint about the significance of this text.

Prayer is one of those places where we can get clear about the life of discipleship. Sprinkled throughout the gospels are accounts of Jesus heading off on his own to pray, taking the disciples away from the crowds to spend some time together in solitude and prayer. And while we all know that we “should” pray daily most of us wouldn’t feel comfortable giving a detailed account of that takes shape in our lives.

We wonder if we are doing it right, if we are saying the right thing in the right way. Often times when we pray aloud we appropriate words that aren’t part of our daily vocabulary like Thee and Thine as if God’s willingness to hear were contingent on our verbal skills. And I may be all wrong here but I think those struggles translate into our private prayers as well. There’s a lot more to be said about prayer, suffice it for today to note that this text says nothing about what they were praying about or how they were praying or if they were even using words. Prayer was simply the context for the bit of clarity about Jesus and his mission.

And increasingly it was a mission that headed them for trouble. Jesus and his followers didn’t get in trouble because they sat around on mountain tops and thought deep thoughts and had mystical experiences.

They got in trouble because those insights led them back into the world to love people no body else would bother with and to challenge the religious and social structures that said that was okay. And that’s good news too but it’s just that here the gap between good news and easy news is getting bigger.

One thing we share with our forbears in faith is the difficulty of resisting culturally defined ideas about what is of value and who is of value and whose values get to decide. During Jesus time the pressure was to fulfill the law, to do it right, and when you remember there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament, doing it right got pretty burdensome.

And then Jesus and his disciples come along and point out their tendency to choose the commandments they like and ignore the others, like the Deuteronomic Hospitality Code, doing justice and loving mercy, letting the fields lie fallow in the 7^th year to care for the earth, and the principles of Jubilee, which cancelled debt and returned land to its rightful owner every 50 years, to name a just a few.

And it’s no different for us today. The challenge to people of faith, to us, is enormous because just like in Jesus’ time a small group keeps hijacking the religious moral agenda of our nation, in order to deny civil and reproductive rights to groups that are the object of their disdain and judgment. When we are silent, we concur with their assessment. And that’s just for openers.

Part of seeing Jesus for who he is, our own Chistophany is about reclaiming our voice and our values. I don’t know about you, but I want to hear a voice for the family values of inclusion and equality and tolerance. I want to hear the Christian voice that says Hatred is Not a Family Value. I want the voice of faith to proclaim that the crucial moral issues of our day are poverty and health care and housing and global climate change, the AIDS pandemic and the global economy. And it’s up to us, as we see Jesus for who he is to live out the change he makes in us and to speak from that place.

Jesus and his disciples were not the power brokers of the times but they took up the message of the good news that was aimed directly at the poor and marginalized and while they didn’t always do it perfectly they did faithfully. They got a glimpse of who Jesus was and it changed them.

And when Peter and James and John tried to build a wall around the moment, it had as much to do with being terrified at the implications of what they witnessed as anything else. They wanted to preserve the moment because it was safer on the mountain than it was down there doing the work. As my friend Joyce says, “If you want to follow Jesus you gotta look good on wood.”

Jesus told them to get back to work. That insight was for a reason and the reason was mission. And the beloved disciples go stumbling after him. Just a few verses after where our reading leaves off that’s what they’re doing. Jesus is healing and they are stumbling after him….

Now that image is one that is encouraging to me. Stumbling after Jesus, trying to live into the truth even when it makes no sense. On the heels of Peter's desire to define it, nail it down and hold onto it, they finally come to a different place, which is back where they belong doing the work of mission and ministry. And while it may not all make sense, they continued to follow the light they had seen in Jesus and as they did it ignited in their own lives.

And maybe, in the long run, as we stumble after him, sometimes seeing for sure, sometimes not knowing, the point is not to have all the answers, but to have those moments of mystery that are life changing and life giving. I think that's better than the answers.

The Transfiguration is an event that asks as many questions as it answers, poses as many problems as its solves. Historians and theologians have, for generations, speculated and written and haggled about the significance of this passage of Scripture. And I can't help but think they miss the point.

It is supposed to be mystery, it isn't supposed to make sense, it is intended to feed the part of us that is beyond words, to encourage the mystery in us by showing us the mystery beyond us. It is as simple and as awe inspiring as a light that stretches out before us and shows us the way in moments when we most need it.