SERMON NOTES FOR 3.6.11
If you have ever gone on vacation to get away from it all, and spent time hiking in the mountains, as Tom and I used to, you know the feeling. Climbing and climbing, up and up, into cooler and fresher air, thinking you’ll never get to the top, and wondering if it will be worth it when you get there. And slowly, as you ascend, feeling like you’re leaving your everyday, busy, worry and stress-filled life behind, peeling it all off like you would take off a jacket, and remembering who you really are when you aren’t rushing around like a crazy person, and step by step feeling more and more like yourself. And coming up the final hill and turning a corner and standing there at the very top of the mountain, no sound but the wind rushing in your face, and turning around and around and seeing all around you for miles and miles. You know eventually you will have to turn around and go back down that mountain, but for now, life is complete and you wish it would never end.
Today’s gospel is an experience a little bit like that. Not just in the fact that it is a story about a mountaintop experience. But because Matthew’s whole gospel is really structured that way. This is in a way, the high point of his gospel, the climax he’s been leading up to. From here, Matthew's gospel will lead straight down into the valley, as Jesus heads down the mountain and takes a turn toward Jerusalem where he knows he will die. But for today, we stand at the top of the mountain and look all around at the panoramic view Matthew gives us of Jesus’ ministry.
We can look back and see Jesus at his baptism, emerging from the waters and hearing the same words we hear today: You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased. We can look further behind us and see the beginning of Epiphany, when Matthew told us that a star lit up the sky, with light like the light of Transfiguration that we see today, and people came from faraway foreign lands to see a newborn child in a stable. We can look even further back than that and see the whole history of the people of Israel, embodied by Moses and Elijah on this mountaintop, the law and the prophets.
Then, if we turn and look the other way, we can look ahead of us and see a long Lenten road leading to Jerusalem, and we can see outside of Jerusalem another hill with three crosses on it. We can look beyond those crosses to the resurrection, as Jesus instructs the disciples to say nothing about what they’ve seen until he has risen from the dead. And we can look even further than that, to another mountain where the risen Christ will come to the disciples and promise to be with them always.
Today we stand at the top of this mountain and see those things with panoramic vision, but for now we are right here, in the presence of a teacher who has astounded us by being transfigured before our eyes. And we can ask ourselves the questions that are so important with all scriptures: What is happening here? And what does it mean for us?
If you ask – what is happening here, on the mount of the Transfiguration, and someone gives you a rock-solid, dependable, confident answer, you will know that he or she is lying. Because no human being can really understand what is happening here. This is something outside of normal human experience, this is something that defies the laws of physics. Jesus is an ordinary human being, dusty and dirty from the hike up the mountain, and suddenly his clothes become dazzling white and his face starts to glow, brighter than the sun.
We can ask: did Jesus change? Or did the disciples change how they saw him? The Bible doesn’t tell us: but I suspect that both are true. Jesus really did have a spiritual experience, Moses and Elijah appearing to him to strengthen him for the ordeal ahead. But the disciples experienced a miracle too: a gift from God of vision, a veil being lifted from their eyes so that suddenly they were able to see a truth that we ordinary human beings cannot see.
I think, though no Bible expert or PhD theologian can tell you this for sure, I think that the truth is that Jesus always glowed like the sun, but that normal people could not stand to see it, so Jesus wore a veil of ordinariness to spare their eyes; yet once, just once, the veil was lifted and they could see.
And they could not only see, but hear the truth: a voice from the clouds, the voice of God saying “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.” And this Transfiguration of Jesus brought about a transformation in them. Transformation is not the same as Transfiguration, but nevertheless what they witnessed transformed them. They are transformed by what they see, into witnesses of the power and glory of God revealed in Jesus, as we heard in the Epistle of Peter today.
And so what we have in today’s gospel is a miracle of vision, a gift to the disciples of a glimpse into God’s glory that gives them power to proclaim the gospel to all people. Yet our second question remains: what does it mean for us? One thing it certainly means is that we have the power of their witness to tell us who Jesus is, that Jesus was not just some ordinary teacher, Jesus was not even a spiritually powerful miracle worker, Jesus was not someone who was especially good at loving God and others who taught us how to do the same.
Jesus was all those things, but he was more. Jesus was God’s Beloved Son. We must listen to him.
And we have been listening to him, these long weeks of Epiphany. We have heard him tell us how to live, we have heard him explain how we are to love God and love our neighbors, we have heard him proclaim that we are salt of the earth and light of the world, we have heard him tell us even to love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us, we have felt his blessing and we have perhaps even been healed by him.
Yet now, here on this mountain, it’s time for us to see and hear more. On this mountain, we can see who Jesus truly is. But we can see more than that: we can see who we truly are. Because the true miracle of the Christian faith is this: who Jesus is, is who we are. Did we hear that right? Who Jesus is, is who we are. He is the baptized Son of God, the Beloved. So are we. We who are baptized have been baptized into his death and into his resurrection. We are children of God too. We are with him on this mountaintop, and with him we are shining like the sun.
You don’t believe that we are really like him? Listen to a story: On March 18, 1958, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the great writers on Christian spirituality in the 20th century, was walking down an ordinary street in the shopping district of Louisville, Kentucky, as crowds went about their business. When something happened: he looked around and saw something .
He wrote about it in his journal the next day: “Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream.”
Years later, he wrote about the experience in his book, Confessions of a Guilty Bystander: “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Walking around shining like the sun? Wait, wait! That may be true for Jesus, the Son of God – but surely it cannot be true for us. After all, we got up this morning, didn’t we? We brushed our teeth, we ate breakfast, we rushed to get into the car in time, we got ourselves and our children here to church, we settled into our chairs and tried to figure out the tune to the opening hymn, we are ordinary people who every now and then get a glimpse of what God might want for us.
And yet – Thomas Merton is not the only person to have seen this happen: I have seen it too. Sitting one day in a communion service in a church I had never attended before and never would attend again, surrounded by strangers I would never see again, suddenly as I looked at the people all around me, they changed. They began to glow, brighter than the sun. It lasted for only one second, but for that second I looked at these ordinary people around me and they glowed like the sun.
Here’s what I think this Transfiguration story is telling us, brothers and sisters: What Jesus is on this mountaintop is what we are destined to be too. And more than that, it is what we are. Think of yourself as a being shining with such glory that God has to veil all of our eyes so that we don’t all blind each other all the time, God’s Holy Spirit like tongues of fire, leaping from you to me to you, back and forth all the time, God’s glorious light shining in us every moment.
And what if it is really true? What if we are truly loved, not because we are good or kind or helpful, but because we are God’s children, because we are glorious? Then could we forgive ourselves our quirks, our helplessness, our insecurities? Could we let ourselves experience our anger and our sinfulness and our thoughtlessness? Knowing the whole time that there is nothing we could do that could ever stop God from loving us, because we are like God, not despite of the fact but because we are human?
And what would it be like if we could see past the veil that darkens our eyes, could believe that if it were lifted and we looked around at each other, we would see that same uncreated glory shining in our neighbors too? How could we not love our neighbors as we love ourselves, those who are veiled in disguises of poverty and foreignness and difference, those who are veiled in disguises of irritability and resentment, those who are far away and those who are near. How can we not love such glorious beings as they are?
How could we not give ourselves for them, as Jesus gave himself for us?
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Shakespeare, and it’s true. We are the dream of God, and God has given us a gift: the light of Christ, gloriously risen in us. Let that light shine before all.
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