February 22, 2009
Rev. Patricia L. Liberty
Transfiguration Sermon
At various times in my religious life I have found my way to churches that issue altar calls…at a point in the service the pastor invites those who desire to commit their life to Jesus Christ to come forward for prayer and a blessing. Though I suspect I understand that somewhat differently than the other pilgrims who shuffled down the aisle with me to have hands laid on, it is nonetheless a gift that has nurtured parts of my journey, mostly as a way to anchor my understanding of God’s claim on my life and the changing seasons of my own willingness to answer.
There are few if any rituals in historic Protestantism that mark moments of insight, grace and growth. We have lost the language, or perhaps given it away, to those who speak of being born again. It is language that makes us very nervous.
We are rightfully scared of those who claim a corner on the marker of divine truth and codify such moments in narrow beliefs and even narrower behavior…if those fundamentalists only knew who was schlepping down their aisle…but I believe we are also the poorer for having lost this edge in our worshipping life.
So, for a brief moment I considered an altar call. But then I remembered that my time in your midst is short…and I’m fairly sure that whatever Sunday I offered an altar call would be my last…so fear not, you are all safe in your own pews.
Whatever rituals we may lack, we do hold to a belief that God, God’s word, our own study and the fellowship of those who gather in God’s name has the capacity to change us, and that from time to time it does.
Moreover we believe that the experiences of our lives apart from this place are also occasions of God’s appearing. When we come together for worship, gathering at font and table we connect what happens here with what happens in the sacrament of daily life.
An altar call is moment when those connections are celebrated, the seasons of our discipleship are given liturgical expression and we acknowledge that the path remains constant even though our proximity to it changes throughout our lives.
Transfiguration is one of those moments of clarity in the lives of Peter, James and John. All the synoptic gospels record the event in pretty much the same way. It’s easy to get caught up in the details of the story, wondering what kind of heavenly hocus pocus was going on and perhaps, by extension, why it doesn’t happen in the same way for us today. After all our own faith journeys would surely be made easier by a few cameo appearances from some spiritual giants of the past.
For Peter James and John…Jesus was transfigured and THEY were changed, Jesus’ appearance was altered and so were they. It was a moment of insight about who Jesus really was and what that meant for their lives.
I don’t think it is coincidence that the major liturgical holidays we celebrate, Christmas and Easter and the minor ones, Epiphany and Pentecost are all in some way acknowledgement of God’s appearance and presence.
Christmas celebrates incarnation…God with us… Easter celebrates God’s with us forever, Pentecost celebrates God the spirit with us forever, Transfiguration celebrates Jesus revealed in a new way.
Each is an invitation to recognize God’s appearing in our own lives and, like Peter James and John, and acknowledge that we are changed. And of course we are. How many of us have our childhood image of God?
Daniel Clendenin in his outstanding book, A Generous Orthodoxy speaks of his growth in faith and writes of Jesus’ he has known. Last year as a Lenten Discipline I took up his invitation to consider the Jesus’ I have known.
There was the Jesus of my childhood, Swedish Jesus, blond hair blue eyes, long flowing white gown with sandals, looking blissfully on the children who waited in line to sit on his knee.
Then there was the magical Jesus of my adolescence, purveyor of all I hoped for, for myself and for others. That didn’t last long.
The Jesus of my young adulthood was, nor surprisingly, as angry as I was. Jesus turning over tables in the temple was my story as I went out to save the world.
Gradually I have come to the place where Jesus is the one whom I see in the faces of those around me, and from time to time, however dimly, in the face that is reflected in the mirror. It is an endless revelation of grace and an eternal invitation to discipleship. For now it works…who knows if another will appear as the years unfold.
Transfiguration is an invitation to name moments of God’s appearing in our own lives and acknowledge the changes it occasions.
Having said that it’s important to note that as a result of this experience, Peter James and John did not rocket to the head of the discipleship class. There was no sudden perfection conferred upon them. Peter remained impulsive and obstreperous, James and John continued to jockey for power and they all fell asleep at inopportune moments. But with their fears and their faith, all that they were and failed to be, they stumbled along after Jesus sometimes close enough to hold the hem of his robe and sometimes desperately searching for footprints the wind erased in the sand.
They remained works in progress…and of anything you hear today that may be the best news.
Moments of transfiguration are bread for the journey, morsels that nourish our spirits with a clearer sense of who God is, which means we can have a clearer sense of who we are.
We tend to think of this story as a prototype for the “mountain top” experiences we all long for. The feeling you get when standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, the mind-blowing joy of counting the fingers and toes of your newborn child, countless other moments of spiritual exhilaration that can keep us going for months.
But a more faithful rendering of the text is that it connects us to the truth of who Jesus is; his power and authority, wisdom and grace, his unshakeable love and goodness. And those moments of clarity don’t just happen in moments of joy.
Jesus is as apt to be transfigured in the midst of our deepest sorrow and struggle. Each moment of our lives is an occasion of his appearing.
Times when we know strength that is beyond our own strength and knowledge beyond our knowing, moments when healing lurks at the edges of our pain and joy waits on the outskirts of our brokenness; and for a moment we have a clear vision of who Jesus is and what he means in our lives in the moment.
In addition to the gift for our own journey of faith, the transfiguration story also connects us to the work and mission of Jesus for all time. Symbol and movement of the text unfolds in particular ways.
The image of the mountaintop was a complex symbol in the ancient world. On the one hand it was what connected Jesus to Moses and Elijah, to salvation history.
Both Moses and Elijah had significant experiences on the mountain top. It was where Moses received the Ten Commandments.
Elijah ended up on the mountain after he told the people all that God had given him to say and they didn’t like it one bit. He high tailed it to the wilderness, running for his life, and climbed Mount Horeb.
The mountain top is a place of power in Biblical symbolism. It is what connects Jesus with Moses and Elijah…and that subtext would be clear to first century hearers.
Beyond the obvious connection to power, Biblical Scholar Sarah Dylan Bruer notes, there was a subtle tradition that also acknowledged that mountaintops were “thin places” where the boundaries between heaven and earth were most fragile.
These two traditions come together in a vision of Jesus who takes his place in salvation history AND encourages Peter James and John in their own faithfulness.
So, it was not a “mountain top” experience in the sense of a spiritual high as much as it was a way of clarifying who Jesus was, and thereby clarifying who they were. It’s what sent them back down the mountain to do the work Jesus called them to do.
The temptation is, always, to build institutions to the moment…build our huts and stay there…But work is always done after we make the trek back down again, back to the places where they and we live out the changes wrought by moments of insight. Jesus is transfigured…but we are changed.