February 20, 2022 + Transfiguration + Smithtown.
I.
Just before this story, we hear about how Peter affirms that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the One anointed by God to be the King of Israel. It is the culmination of all that has gone before in Jesus' ministry. Their movement is growing! Jesus is a popular teacher and healer, with the power to feed five-thousand hungry people from practically nothing. Things are going really well. On to Jerusalem!
But just then, Jesus starts to get very dark. A cloud seems to come over him. All of a sudden he begins to talk about how, when he gets to Jerusalem, he will die. He will undergo great suffering, and the elders, chief priests, and scribes will kill him, he says. Not only that, but the disciples too will have to participate in this defeat with him, in some sense. To follow him, Jesus says, they have to "deny themselves." Every day, they will have to "take up their cross," which was a gruesome instrument the Romans used to torture seditious troublemakers to death. In order to save their lives, they will have to lose their lives, he says. It seems like a dramatic and not very helpful change in tone.
I imagine the disciples are somewhat perplexed. What happened to nice Jesus, giving away free health care and food, fixing the weather, conjuring huge catches of fish, and walking on water? What happened to that attractive, entertaining, popular Jesus? What happened to Jesus the winner? After eight and a half chapters, you think you know somebody....
Maybe we find ourselves in a place somewhat similar to Jesus' disciples. I think the church has been in a kind of trauma for half a century and now it is getting even worse, especially over the last two years of Covid.
We don't like change. Some folks want the church to be a refuge from all the crazy stuff going on out there in the world. At least when we come in here we can depend on things being reliably more or less the same. I mean, the interior of this room probably hasn't changed in centuries; we still worship in box-pews and I'm up here in this pulpit in the sky, just like our Puritan forebears. We have a beautiful pipe organ and a bell choir, and we have old-fashioned group singing, and we read from this book from two-thousand years ago. It's all very traditional, reassuring, stable, and comforting. Most of what we do would be completely recognizable to our grandparents or even great-grandparents, as Presbyterian worship.
One of the reasons Covid has traumatized us is that it has forced us to change. We're "meeting" now on screens instead of in-person; we wear masks all the time, we can't touch each other. Ministers are resigning, churches are splitting over vaccines and mask mandates; people who got used to "going to church" in their pajamas, or streaming it whenever they like, or even surfing around to check out other churches? They are not necessarily coming back, if we are even safe, which nobody knows for sure. Receipts are way down. Churches that used to be ready for change, are suddenly retrenching into survival mode, frantic about getting new members and keeping old ones, which turns out to be mostly an impossible contradiction. Worse, a lot of Christians are finding themselves in shock over the astonishing spread of the just plain nastiness of other Christians, over everything.
We hate this! Things are getting farther and farther from the nice, comfortable, secure, successful way they used to be. Fewer and fewer of us even remember that.
II.
And if we can't have Jesus and the Church as a place of stability and comfort, if we're going to have change preached at us even here? Jesus going off with this alarming talk about death and crosses? What good is it? Who wants to be part of a movement that is going to fail?
So, perhaps sensing a need to address confusion and frustration in the ranks, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John, the inner trio of his disciples, up onto Mount Tabor for a retreat. They are to pray and meditate, probably to help them process this new approach, this change in the plan and message, that he is going to Jerusalem to die and be raised. But when they get to the top, apparently Peter, James, and John are exhausted; they fall asleep. They lose consciousness of what is going on.
Mountains are very important in the Bible. Mountains offer us the sort of all-inclusive, God's-eye-view of things that gives us some perspective. They also offer opportunities for solitude and reflection. At the same time, mountains remind us of our vulnerability. In the Hebrew tradition, the two people most closely associated with mountains are Moses, who receives the Law on Mount Sinai, and Elijah, who defeats the prophets of the god Baal on Mount Carmel.
Maybe to find our bearings in a time of confusion and conflict, we too need to spend some time on a "mountain." Now, we don't really have mountains on Long Island. The closest things we have to mountains are big landfills. I don't know if we can go up there or if we would even want to. So fortunately it doesn't have to be a literal mountain. It doesn't even have to be an actual geographical place.
Mountains in Scripture are metaphors; the spiritual meaning of "higher" is within. "Going up the mountain" means entering our deepest inner place of prayer, contemplation, vision, and union. It means getting a wider perspective and refocusing our thinking. The "mountain" is where we experience our connection with our own bodies and breath, where we go to touch the basic elements of life we share with others. It is where we get away from distraction and demands, and take time to focus on core values and identity, where we have come from and where we are going?
I mean, many of us have been locked down for the better part of two years; how have we been using that time? Have we found some solitude, or even communion with a few trusted companions, to reflect on what is going on with us and where we might be going? Have we engaged in some spiritual practices -- like meditation, journaling, lectio divina, yoga, fasting or even just taking long walks -- to reground ourselves in what is really important?
Remember that our "mountain" is not supposed to be a comfort zone. It's not a vacation resort. That's why we're generally so lax about these practices. Mountains are dangerous and exposed places. We don't know what wild animals we might encounter. They take strenuous effort to climb. We are liable to fall, or give up. We're at the mercy of the elements. And climbing a mountain has no redeeming social or economic value.
III.
Up on that mountain with Jesus, the disciples wake up and have this mysterious, mystical, supernatural, unexplainable experience where they see Jesus changed and shining with a dazzling light, and the prophets Elijah and Moses appear with him and they have a conversation with him about what is going to happen when he gets to Jerusalem, which they pointedly call his "exodus," his departure or liberation.
Peter of course rather infamously responds to this by not wanting to leave. He is infatuated with the amazing experience itself. If Jesus is turning his attention to Jerusalem, Peter is still focused on the mountain. “It is good for us to be here,” he says, as if to say, “and it is not a good idea to go anywhere else, like Jerusalem, for instance,” where Jesus has already predicted that they will face death and shame.
This is what happens when the mountain becomes merely a great experience and personal achievement. We all want to remain in our glory days, whenever they were. We don’t want to go back down to the lowlands, where there is pain and need. Wouldn’t it be better to stay on the mountain and let needy, possessed, and sick people come up to them? Wouldn’t it be better to build a shrine… no, three shrines! up here? Then they could tell people all about their experience and they could go down and spread the word. Wouldn’t that be better?
We tend to get all excited about the experience and ignore what the experience is really about. We make sure we buy the t-shirt and the coffee-mug, and take lots of pictures with our phones... we focus on remembering something, but we miss the actual thing that is happening now.
Peter is still speaking when this mysterious, terrifying cloud comes over them, “overshadowing” them like a dense fog. The last time the gospel uses this word, “overshadow,” is back when the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit would envelop her and the power of the Most High would overshadow her, and she would be filled with the very life of God; she would be pregnant with God's Son, growing within her, to emerge from her to save the world.
Here, the disciples are also overshadowed by God’s bright Presence, where they too receive God’s Word, though in a rather different way. With them it is a Voice they hear, saying "This is my Son, my Chosen: listen to him!" Just as Mary was charged with giving birth to God, they will be sent to bear God's message of reconciliation and peace to everyone.
IV.
What we see in this passage is change, more change, change upon change, change squared! The word "transfiguration" is a translation of the Greek word metamorphao. Luke uses for what happens to Jesus the same word we use for when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly: metamorphosis.
The thing about metamorphosis is that for the caterpillar to change it must almost totally disintegrate. Were we to open a chrysalis in the middle of its process we would find, not a caterpillar growing wings, but just an indistinct goo. From this goo a butterfly is made. The caterpillar deconstructs and then is reconstructed as a butterfly.
So our choice is basically either to stay on the mountain as a caterpillar with Peter, still practically asleep and unaware, barely conscious of what he is saying, building and maintaining monuments, museums, and memorials. Or we may see in Jesus Christ a foretaste and anticipation of our own bright destiny.
The mountain is important. But following Jesus means getting off the mountain and going down to the crucible of human confusion, pain, disease, and bondage. It means making our way with him to Jerusalem, where the Temple is, which after all is basically a place of sacrifice. It means disintegration and deconstruction. It means letting go of our ego-centric impulses and projects, our fears and dreams, our nostalgia and our desire. It means relinquishing what we used to be, and who we think we are, and emerging into who God calls us to be, who God made us to be, who we essentially at our deepest place already are: Christ-in-the-world.
That is the journey, the process, of the season of Lent, which begins this week. Forty days of following Jesus into the lowlands, through the valley of the shadow of death, a time of disintegration and deconstruction, failure, loss, and release. Forty days to come to grips with the darkness, where things seem to be falling apart and the center not holding. Forty days to arrive at something that looks like a tomb, but because of the insight we receive on the mountaintop, we know is really a chrysalis, an incubator, the site of resurrection, from which new life emerges.
So I hope we can reframe this whole time we are in right now, both in the world and in the Church. Instead of looking back at what we've lost and longing for the glory days of 2019, or 1955, or 1975, or whenever, let's open our eyes and our ears and see the Light of God shining in Jesus Christ, hearing the Voice that tells us to "listen to him!" By listening to and following him, we become what he is: beings of light spreading God's Presence, Wisdom, and love, God's compassion, forgiveness, and grace, into the world.
The Transfiguration means that this time of disintegration is the way God is making of us something new. The new thing we are becoming will have continuity with what God has done, that's why Moses and Elijah show up. The new thing will also be completely, wildly different. We need to do what the Voice says: "Listen to him!"
In the end we will see and hear. We will be beautiful. We will be awake. We will be wise. We will be alive. We will shine like the sun. And we will fly.
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