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February 18, 2007 |
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Thin Places & Light
Exodus 34:29-35 & Luke 9:28-36
February 18, 2007
Transfiguration Sunday
Rev. Jonathan E. Carroll, Th.M
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The coming of the power of God into the midst of human reality is no ordinary event.
As the drama of the church year continues to unfold before us, comes a very important moment in the life of the church; today, we experience the final epiphany of the Epiphany season. Epiphany is the season when God is shown again and again in the flesh and blood of the incarnation – the Word become fresh flesh in the breathing, healing, loving presence of the person of Jesus, so that all people of every time and every place might know God, the light of the world. This gospel story that began with that bright and telling starlight over Bethlehem’s baby draws to an end now with a dramatic event again full of light: not light in a star anymore, but light on a face, and the outward wonder of Christmas stumbles into the inward searching and hope of Lent. Today is Transfiguration Sunday. Today, through the disquieting tale of the transfiguration story, what was once a comfy, cozy familiarity of this very human Jesus is transformed into the breathtaking power of a divine Lord. Jesus—very God of very God—as the Nicene Creed has it—light where before there had been none. And the disciples—both there on the mountain and here in this sanctuary—are confused at what this moment is all about.
When this puzzling story begins, it has been more than a week since Peter confessed that Jesus is Lord, and since then Jesus has announced to his disciples that this dusty road they were traveling together would come to a dead end where he must—for the sake of the world—suffer and die; that this was the beginning of the end. This, you might imagine, was troubling and confusing for his disciples.
Not only is it confusing enough for them to understand this man whom they were following who was to bring peace and justice to the world, and that somehow his death would become a part o that, but now the confusion spreads deeper as the disciples witness this strange and mysterious event for which, it appears, there are no words.
So who can talk about the Transfiguration? Jesus certainly did not talk about it, and neither did his disciples. Matthew tells us that Jesus instructed them to tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man had been raised, and Luke is quick to say that “…in those days, they kept silent and told no one of the things they had seen.” Makes you wonder how Luke ever got wind of it himself, and, once he did, whether he questioned the wisdom of writing it down for all the world to read.
The moment he did, though, it became public property, and since then all kinds of people have been pawing through the story of the mysterious Transfiguration event trying to find some significance, some explanation, some meaning: “Why was so and so there?”, “Why did he say such and such?”, “What does this mean for the church and for me?” There are preachers all the world over who have this very day taken the Transfiguration story down off the top shelf of our faith and are blowing the dust off of it trying to get it to make some sense, to explain it away. I guess this is all we know how to do with an experience that does not fit any of our categories. What do we sometimes do when we encounter mystery, when something breathtaking breaks into our everyday living? When we experience something for which there are no estimates to make, tests to run, or numbers to figure, we immediately try to make sense of it, to label it, explain it. We have the need to make it permanent, tangible, and rational, something we can cling to to explain it all. We try to manage the mystery, wanting to become owners of it, not guests.
Which is why every time this biblical text emerges to be preached within the lives of Christian congregations some debate also emerges. Everyone hopes to control the mysteries of God. In one corner, there are those who will be asking: Did Jesus really and miraculously become incandescent there on the mountaintop? Did he really glow? How and what does that say about the uniqueness of who he was? And in the other corner, there are those who will snicker and scoff that there are some folk who actually believe that Jesus climbed a mountain and sparkled. Now, it’s fine that there are some who believe this and others that about what Scripture is saying and how. But at this point, both factions are assuming that the most relevant part of the story lies in Jesus’ illumination, in the light. One side says, “it would take a million floodlights to make Jesus glow like that if it weren’t for God,” and the other side says it would take zero, because “there was no light, it’s all a metaphor,” and either way, they’re both out their with their photometers.
One wonders if we have even caught up with the first disciples of Jesus, who show up in the gospels as the slow-witted sidekicks, who often miss the point. The gospels persistently show Peter and his friends latching on to the wrong part of Jesus’ message, focusing on the leaven in the bread instead of recognizing the saving abundance of God, or fearing the storms on the sea rather than giving thanks for the presence of Jesus in their midst. Some of our questions about the mystery of Scripture get no further than Peter’s hasty fixation on wanting to set up tents on the mountain as a way to control the event; some of us wanting to build a shrine to the Transfiguration event and charge admission, and others wanting to dismiss it altogether as evidence that the disciples had eaten too much spicy food before falling asleep up there and see what you get, a gassy stomach and Jesus all lit up and ghosts.
Luke’s Gospel gives us the opportunity, though, to discern something that our debates about Scripture tend to mask. Luke invites us to stand with Peter and James and John, to witness Jesus transfigured, “the appearance of his face changed and his clothes dazzling white,” but we’re not to get stuck in Peter’s misguided but well-intentioned fascination with the vision itself. Luke reminds us that what Peter says is evidence that Peter didn’t know what he was talking about. The Transfiguration moment pulls back the veil for a moment and reminds us what the routines of our daily life conceal: that no place on earth and no moment in your life is more than a hair’s breadth away from the dazzling mystery of God. Peter had found himself at a thin place, a point in time and space where the thin skin that separates what is human from what is divine is stretched like a scrim on a stage and where the light of Christ behind it illumines us to the mysteries of God alive in the world. And the name for God’s mystery that we see in the everydayness of our routine lives is glory. The glory — the beauty and goodness and hope — of God on the mountaintop.
The Bible makes clear that amazing things happen on mountaintops. In Exodus, Moses goes up on a mountain into the presence of God and is himself transfigured. When he came down from Mt Sinai, everyone could tell that he had been in God’s presence, that something more than ordinary had gone on up there. He eventually wore a veil to protect the people from seeing his face that shone like the stars. (I wonder if we should hand out veils because people can see that in our faces when we go from having been in the presence of God.)
And it didn’t end there. God’s glory traveled from Sinai, to the Mount of the Transfiguration, to Mt. Calvary, where Jesus, full of God’s glory again, opens his arms and sets it loose on a world desperately in need of its peace. And it goes on still, this glory of God, radiating in the lives of the saints and the martyrs, in spectacular architecture and exquisite music like here and like this, in the sublime beauty of the world God created, in the strength of friendship, the miracle of life, and the power of love. And we have seen it. We have been eyewitnesses of the mystery of God, maybe not at the top of a mountain, but we have seen it nonetheless when we’ve actually looked for it; maybe we have seen it instead in a classroom, a living room, or a waiting room; maybe we have felt it in the arms of a reconciled old friend, the eyes of a child, or the embrace of a spouse whose love we’ve just rediscovered.
God’s glory—God’s love, hope, and goodness—calls out to us through mystery, and if we cannot recognize it, then it were better if our tongues would fall mute rather than, like Peter, we succumb to trying to talk about it with words that are, by nature, inadequate. God’s glory is given to us in the routines and regularities of our everyday not so that we can measure it or test it or even tell of it, but so that we can grow into it with our very own lives, so that we can breathe it in only then to breathe it out into the stories that we tell and the lives that we live with others who hope to know God’s presence in the same way.
Let me try to convince you that these stories of voices and clouds and light are worth our time. They may not be explicable by the well-tested laws of physics, but they are true by the laws of mystery, and spirit, and faith. After all, the word believe means to give one’s heart to. We cannot grasp it all intellectually, but we can grasp it with our hearts and lives. The mystery of the glory of God comes into plain view when we no longer reduce it to a mechanical explanation on the one hand and a superstition on the other. If we must accept only those alternatives, we will, like Peter, miss the point. Instead, come, seek out God’s glory behind the thin veil of the here and now, for it inhabits everyday life, stealing in, interrupting, and disrupting us. God’s grace flares, and ripples, and awakens us to God’s presence in the midst of our everyday; in the lives of those who sit next to us at church, who work beside us in the office, who serve us at our favorite restaurants or at the grocery, even the one with whom we rest at the end of each long day.
Here, now, among these wooden pews and oft-repeated words, God’s glory dwells—in ordinary bread and this unpretentious juice, nourishing hungry hearts with glory’s feast, refreshing thirsty souls with living water from the cup of salvation. Christ is transfigured this morning on mountaintop and on tabletop; in the spirit of a people and in the sinews of your faith. And because of it, you and I are being transformed, atom by atom, wish by wish, prayer by prayer, into a body that is not just like yours or mine, but that is like his, and we become free at last to carry into the streets the sign of truth and the light of love so that all may see our friendship and service and may recognize in them the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord who has come down from the mountain for us and for our salvation and whose glory has changed us and has set us free.
Amen.
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