George A. Mason Transfiguration Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 2 March 2014 Dallas, Texas Ups and Downs Matt. 17:1-9 The late Ed Crow was a Baptist minister who ghostwrote sermons for busy pastors. Ninety percent of his subscribers were Catholic priests who relied on his homiletical help. Once in a while Ed would go dry and ask me to fill in for him. The one week on the liturgical calendar that he had the most trouble with was this one: Transfiguration Sunday. I just can t figure out what it means, he would say to me. As it turns out, the Sunday Ed liked the least I liked the best. And for the exact reason that Ed disliked it. I like it precisely because I can t figure out what it means. When you read the story closely, you see that Ed and I are in good company. Jesus most eager disciple, St. Peter, was in the same fix. He couldn t figure out what it meant, either. And trying to figure it out might have just been the problem. The story of Jesus being transfigured on the mountain is a moment of worship and beauty that defies any one interpretation of it. Like any great work of art, it invites us into the mystery and resists our attempts to pin it down so that we can then just move on. This can be disconcerting to a preacher. Somehow we ve got it in our heads that we re always supposed to know, don t you know?! One of our most celebrated preachers these days, Barbara Brown Taylor, puts it this way about the preacher s dilemma with the Transfiguration: Give us a passage of scripture and we will put on our thinking caps, doing our best to decipher the symbols, read between the lines and come up with the encoded message that Jesus or Luke or God has hidden in the passage for us to find. The idea seems to be that the story itself is chiefly a suitcase for conveying the meaning inside of it. Discern the content of the story and you do not have to go rummaging around inside of it every time it comes up. Instead, you can pull the meaning out of it and place it neatly folded in a drawer, where you can find it the next time you need it. In the present case, the most common decoded message is that
Moses stands for the Law, Elijah stands for the prophets, and Jesus, of course, is the Messiah. By singling Jesus out as "my Son, the Beloved," God sets the gospel over the law and the prophets. Listen to him, says the voice from the cloud. There are two auxiliary meanings as well one about how it is better to keep your mouth shut in the presence of the holy than to blurt things out like Peter does, and another about how the purpose of such mountaintop experiences is to strengthen us for the climb back down into the valley of the shadow of death, where our real work remains to be done. 1 You see the problem? We always need to have a point to point out to you. It usually will have something to do with believing or behaving. I may want you to believe this or that about Jesus or God or yourself or the world. Or I may want you to do something or stop doing something in the name of Jesus or God or yourself or the world. But there s something else at work in the world besides believing and behaving. There s also beholding. 1 http://day1.org/5560- the_bright_cloud_of_unknowing There are those moments that take your breath away. There are times when you look into the eyes of someone who is looking back at you with love, and you are transfixed if not transfigured. There s a kind of shining that happens, a burst of sunlight that blinds you into a new way of seeing. It s not the kind of seeing gives you power over what you see. It s the kind of seeing that has power over you, because power as certainty and control is not what love or beauty or true religion is about. A thing like this an inspired moment of transfiguration defies logic. You don t know what to make of it. You don t have explanations that settle anything. And trying to come up with them is futile. But that doesn t make the experience wrong or meaningless or futile. In fact, it invites patience and probing and pondering. This is what I think Peter is doing here. Lord, it is good for us to be here. Perfect. Maybe you should just stop there, Peter. Just let it be. Take it in. You are seeing something you haven t made up. It has presented itself to you. An epiphany. A moment in which the seam between heaven and earth seems to have 2
come undone. Eternity emerges from time or merges into it, who knows? The invisible becomes visible. Jesus is shining like the radiance of the sun, and there are Moses and Elijah with him. You aren t sure whether you are peering through a door that has opened from this side of reality or from the other side. But either way, it s extraordinary. It s a moment that leaves you giddy with excitement on the one hand and fearful with fret on the other. It s something you can t get your head around because it s something you are supposed to get only your heart around. Fear and awe go hand in hand with any real encounter with God or beauty or love. We are fearful and fascinated at the same time. And it makes us want to do something. Peter suggests that he build three booths or tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. We don t know for sure why he wanted to do that. (Remember what I said about knowing things like this for sure.) It may be that the incident took place during Sukkoth the time of the Jewish Feast of Booths or Tabernacles. That festival celebrates the presence of the God who was pleased to dwell with Israel in the small tabernacle that the children of Israel carried with them through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. So, it could be that Peter was simply trying to honor his sense that God was present and that he should do something about that to acknowledge the divinity in their midst. Of course, it could be too that he wanted to pin God down a bit. His instinct may have been to preserve the experience up on the mountain. And who among us doesn t want that? I mean, remember when you were at youth camp as a kid, and on the last night at the campfire it was testimony time. Somebody had a guitar. The girl or guy you had a hankering for was there, and you knew God was, too. Sparks were flying, and you weren t sure if it was the spirit or the flesh, but you knew it was love. Or maybe it was the time someone forgave you when you didn t deserve it, and you got the sense that God was telling you that that s the way it s going to be for all eternity, since the only people who live forever are forgiven sinners who agree to accept their forgiveness once and for all and stop wallowing in self-pity or protesting that they 3
don t need forgiving. Or maybe you had one of those moments when the hair stood up on the back of your head, the goosebumps rose on your skin, and the air got cold all at once. You felt the eerie sense that the world was not just what it seemed. But just when your fear almost overtook you, you felt the warmth of acceptance fill you and assure you that a godly goodness would protect you and watch over you. Somehow in that moment you didn t care about whether reason could justify religion; you just knew there was something more to life than the mind could conceive. You d like to keep those moments, wouldn t you? But mountaintops need valleys to give them meaning. And this brings me to a confession. Earlier in the week, when I had to come up with a title for this sermon, I was still working on the idea that I needed to make a point to you about what this transfiguration means. So I came up with this one, and it isn t a bad one. Ups and downs. We all have them. Even Jesus had them. His ministry in Galilee headed him straight up to this point on the mountaintop with God, an event that left him shining like the sun. But right after that he would be coming down and going to Jerusalem, where he would die on another mount Mt. Calvary. Last Sunday night some of us attended the musical Godspell at the Windspear. I wasn t really eager to go. I figured it would be a hippie redux of the 1971 flower-child version. Wrong. It was a smart, clever remake. But the story was gospel. It takes you through Jesus teaching: the Sermon on the Mount, his healings and miracles. But by the end of Act I, you know where it s going. Down. I would like to be able to tell you that if you are a faithful follower of Jesus, your life will always be lived on the up and up. That is, listening to Jesus and following his way in the world will lead you to one spiritual high after another and give you security and success in the world at the same time. I would like to tell you that being faithful to the way of Jesus will protect you from financial disaster, marital failure, criticism from friends, and selfdoubt. But if I told you those things, I would be turning the good news 4
of Jesus into wishful thinking instead of good news. through all the ups and downs of your life. The truth is that following Jesus faithfully will track more closely to the tracks of Jesus himself. It will be a series of ups and downs, highs and lows, victories and defeats. But in the end, God will raise you up for good. Now that s not a bad to point make of the transfiguration of Jesus story. And it would have made a decent sermon overall. The bigger thing to learn today, I think, is that you don t have to have all the answers in your Christian experience to make your way faithfully. You can put your trust in Christ and know in your heart that he is the Beloved Son whom you can listen to all your life long. It s probably important to point out that all twelve of the disciples of Jesus didn t have this experience of the transfigured Jesus only Peter, James and John. And even they had it only once. Sometimes our experience with God is direct and immediate. Other times we rely on the witness of others we trust. But behind every spiritual experience with Christ is the God who is with you on the mountaintop and in the valley, 5