Sermon for Transfiguration Year C 2013 Shine, Jesus, Shine!

Transcription

1 Sermon for Transfiguration Year C 2013 Shine, Jesus, Shine! On November 10, 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander was admitted to the Lynchburg General Hospital emergency room with excruciating back pain. Within four hours he slipped into a deep coma that lasted seven days. At the end of those seven days, he opened his eyes and thrashed around in bed. After the doctor removed his ventilator, Alexander took his first unassisted breath in a week, calmed down, and then said, "thank you." Looking around the room at his family and doctors, he smiled and said, "All is well. Don't worry, all is well." Alexander's book about his near death experience, Proof of Heaven (2012), rocketed to #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Oprah did an hour-long special about it. The publisher has printed a million copies. Before his near death experience, Alexander was a friendly skeptic. He wasn't religious, and only went to church on Christmas and Easter (well, you know, just in case...) He had spent twenty-five years as a neurosurgeon, including fifteen years at Harvard Medical School. He had published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Faith in empirical science was his only creed. His eventual diagnosis was so rare that he made medical history. Somehow he had contracted spontaneous E. coli bacterial meningitis. The doctors never determined how or why. No one could find even one other case like his. "Officially, Dr. Alexander writes, my status was 'N of 1,' a term that refers to medical studies in which a single patient stands for the entire trial." 1

2 Alexander's prognosis was catastrophic. His type of meningitis was almost always fatal, and so his doctors gave him little chance for recovery. His brain's neo-cortex had shut down; he describes it as "inoperative." It wasn't that his brain was working improperly or poorly, he says, but that "it wasn't working at all." Such was Alexander's medical condition. But his book is mainly about the "profound spiritual experience" he had when he was "completely free of the limitations of my physical brain." Whereas Alexander has no memory of any events during the week of his coma, he retains absolute clarity about what happened "outside my brain." He now believes something that's antithetical to the materialist model of all brain science that consciousness exists entirely independent of the brain. I won't spoil the story, nor address the firestorm of controversy his book has ignited. Suffice it to say that Dr. Alexander gives a vividly detailed description of his near death experience. "We will show you many things," an angelic being told him, "but you will be going back." One message in particular was more important than all the rest (but I won t tell you that you have to read the book). Alexander compares his experience to lifting a veil. A veil can function like a filter, and so can the brain. Although the spiritual realm beyond the brain is available to us, "during the brain-based, physical portion of our existence, our brain blocks out, or veils, that larger cosmic background, just as the sun's light blocks the stars from view each morning." This brain filtering is good and necessary for life on earth; imagine if you always heard every sound at once. But this brain filtering also obscures the more important realm of the spirit, unless we take deliberate steps to see "beyond the veil." When Moses came down from Mount Sinai after forty days and forty nights, "his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord." He had been radically transformed by his direct encounter with the infinite God. People were scared to look at him or even come near him. It was too much, and so we read that "Moses put a veil over his face." 2

3 In this case, the veil "filtered" the unbearable glory of God. In the Transfiguration story, as Jesus was praying, "the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning" an obvious allusion to Moses on Mount Sinai. Whether this was an ecstatic vision, or whether Jesus was literally "metamorphosed" before their eyes, the natural phenomenon of blinding light was secondary to the supernatural affirmation of the voice from the cloud this Jesus is God's beloved and specially anointed Son: "Listen to him!" In the Transfiguration story, Jesus is the New Moses. In Paul's letter to the Corinthians, he's also the mediator of a new covenant. Paul says that "we are not like Moses, who veiled his face." In fact, "whenever anyone turns to the Lord, (that is listens to his voice) 'the veil is taken away'". And so we, "who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness." In this instance, there's a veil that doesn't merely filter but that obscures, and therefore needs to be removed. Today we live in a society that novelist David Foster Wallace described as one of Total Noise. The Super Bowl is only one example of hyper-stimulation and information overload just think of all 13 commercials, not to mention the half-time show and ongoing commentary about costumes functioning and malfunctioning, and on and on... A Total Noise society, says Wallace, is both euphoric and numbing. It's way too much to organize or understand. Which is to say that it obscures or veils all those things in life, like the realm of the spirit, that are necessary for being fully human. All this noise both of sight and sound obscures the one voice we most need to hear. Henri Nouwen once stated, "We live absurd lives." He went on to talk about the meaning of that word "absurd." Surd is from the Latin word for "deaf." When you look the word up in the dictionary you will find it described or defined as "not to be heard, dull, deaf, insensible, laughably inconsistent with what is judged as true or reasonable." It is our inability to hear, to listen, that creates the conditions for an absurd life. 3

4 Nouwen goes on: "A spiritual discipline is necessary in order to move slowly from an absurd to an obedient life, from a life filled with noisy worries to a life in which there is some free inner space where we can listen to our God and follow his guidance." Absurd living is simply not hearing and not listening to God. We need to avoid absurd living. I think the title of Dr. Alexander's book is unfortunate. No amount of debate can conclude whether there's a "heaven" beyond normal consciousness. To me this doesn't matter, because I already believe that. What is important is not Alexander's medical miracle but his spiritual message that despite this veil of tears which is life, and whether you feel it or not, nothing can separate you and me from the perfect love of God in Christ who exists at the heart of the universe. "This is the reality of realities," Alexander writes, "the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist." To experience this, we need not to be distracted by Total Noise caught up in the wrong shiny objects and listening to all the wrong voices. Paradoxically, in order to see the glory of God we need to listen. To be transformed from living an absurd life, for the veil to be lifted, we need above all to listen to the Son. Like the disciples long ago, so often we fail to perceive what Jesus is doing among us. We may find it easy to name places of brokenness in our lives and world where we need God s healing presence and touch and yet find it immensely challenging to name concrete instances where God is at work among us, lifting the veil and allowing us fragmentary glimpses of God s ultimate saving and reconciling purposes. 4

5 And yet this is our calling To bear witness to what God has done, is doing and will do for the world. God s revelation continues to unfold among us. It is present when a group from a retirement community visits a local school each week to tutor students who need a little extra learning support. It is present when a congregation in a Memphis, TN suburb opens its doors to a congregation from a mosque in the midst of renovations during Ramadan. It is present when a grieving father who has lost a child receives a call to serve as an interim pastor to a congregation dealing with conflict and turmoil, and both experiencing healing. As we move into the season of Lent and again experience Jesus journey to the cross, the finality of the tomb in the darkness of Good Friday, and the unexpected new life of Jesus resurrection, the light of divine revelation continues to be present with us and God s mountaintop call continues to echo in our ears and through the ages: This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him! Beloved, turn to Christ and listen to him! Then the light of Christ will shine for all to see! 5