Transfiguration: of US

Mark 8:27-9:8

Who are you?  Who are you REALLY?  If you describe yourself to someone else, who would you say you were?  Would it change depending on the person you were speaking to?  How do you describe yourself to yourself? 

Now a deeper question, perhaps - How would GOD describe you?

Are you always the same person?  Yes and no, right?  At our core, probably.  But on the edges, in our behavior, we have good days and bad days; days of light and days of dark; days that we could have/should have/would have done better and days when we were able to live out and act out our lives beyond our own expectations, when we rose beyond others expectations as well.

Sometimes we think we know people, we have relationships with other people and we believe we know and understand them, but then they do something that catches us off-guard.  They surprise us, for good or for bad, and we have to look at them again, and re-evaluate who we thought they were.  We have to reevaluate our relationships with them, we have to reevaluate our understanding of them, we have to reassess who they are in our minds and hearts.  We all know stories like this, right?  Some of us have lived through stories like this, where a person we thought we knew intimately shows us that they are someone else altogether, that they have parts of themselves we never knew about, or whole areas of their lives that we knew nothing about, or activities that completely blind-sided us.  Other times we hear about heroic behaviors from people we just saw as regular folk, people, just like us, just living each day as it comes.  We can be surprised by people.  

Sometimes we surprise ourselves as well.  We are put in situations that call from us more than we thought we had, more than we thought we could be, and we rise to the occasion. … or we don’t, and maybe that surprises us too.  And the thing is that it’s not usually that people suddenly become something they are not.  It’s more true that people are complex, multi-faceted, and we didn’t see parts of ourselves or parts of other people.  We didn’t and don’t, ever, I would say, know someone else, or even ourselves, completely.  Other people are always more than we believe them to be.  We, ourselves, are always more – more complex, more multifaceted, than we think we are.  We don’t always know what we would do in a specific situation until we find ourselves in that situation.  For example, will we have the courage to stand up against wrong, even if that means losing our friends?  Will we have the courage to stand up against wrong even if it means losing our jobs?  Will we have the courage to stand up against wrong even if it means losing our lives?  We don’t always know, we don’t really know, until we are in that situation.  It is easy, for example, for people to say they would not have been part of the crowd asking for Jesus’ crucifixion.  But some of those same people found themselves in Nazi Germany supporting the Nazis not because they believed them to be right, but because they did not have the courage to stand up to them.  We have the same situations again and again.  And we don’t know how we will respond until we are put in a situation in which we have the opportunity to stand up to what is wrong and we see what we will do.

In the story of the Transfiguration, Jesus was seen in a new light.  He was seen in a way that he had not been seen before.  It’s not that he changed.  Jesus was always Jesus.  But, while he was clearly a leader and a strong man of integrity, faith, power, at the same time he looked like a normal, every day person, which was ALSO who he was.  Christian theology says that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.  That doesn’t mean he was part human and part Divine.  Fully both.  The disciples for the most part tended to see, I believe, the humanity of Jesus.  But in this moment of the transfiguration, they saw the Divinity of Jesus as he stood with Moses and Elijah with face shining and a voice declaring who he is.  They saw him for a moment in this other aspect, and it terrified them.  My guess is that it would terrify us, too.  We like to see people the way we like to see them.  And no matter how much we want someone to be better, bigger, more wonderful, more able to save us than we think they are, when it comes down to it, seeing Jesus appear in such a way before us would probably terrify us.  

And yet, stories such as this one call us to see.  We are called to see the transfiguration – to see more than we saw before – to go deeper than we knew with each person.  Yes, with Jesus, but also with one another, and to see God in those around us.  We are also called to allow ourselves, too, to be transfigured and transformed, to see God within ourselves as well, and to invite God to live in and through us, to shine in us and to live in us.  

In the story of Don Quixote (in the musical, Man of La Mancha), we hear about his love for the barmaid Aldonza.  She is not a lady, she is poor, she is unrefined.  But Don Quixote sees in her the lovely lady Dulcinea.  At first she argues with him about that designation, saying that she is not who Don Quixote sees.  She declares herself to be a simple barmaid and says to him, “take the cloud from your eyes and see me as I really am!” But when Don Quixote is on his deathbed, Aldonza realizes that because of Don Quixote’s love and vision into who she is, she has, indeed, become the Lady Dulcinea.  Her vision and understanding of herself was altered because of what Don Quixote saw.  And then who she was itself changed because one man’s insight into who she was in her heart, in the depth of her being.  

There is a Hans Christian Andersen story about a teapot that I would like to share with you:  https://fairytalez.com/the-teapot/

Again, the vision and understanding of those around the teapot greatly influenced not only what the teapot saw of itself, but the very essence of who the teapot really was.  

Kintsukuroi is a Japanese practice in which broken pots are glued and mended together with gold to form new amazing works of art.  It is said they are much more beautiful for having been broken.  But I think it is also the case that the artist sees in their brokenness possibility: the artist sees what has not yet been made manifest and creates something even more beautiful.

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole which she carried across her neck.  One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.  For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water.  Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the woman one day by the stream. 'I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house.' 

The old woman smiled, 'Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?  That's because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house.”

What helps us to be the best we can be?  Often times it is as simple as other people’s love and care.  Other people’s reflection back to us that they see something beautiful in us.  Sometimes that love and care includes gentle correction.  Not comfortable, right?  And sometimes that can help us to be the best we can be.  But I think that just as positive reinforcement is much better with our pets and our children than any kind of punishment in terms of changing behavior, the love we receive and the reflection of good that others show us help us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

There is a scene in the movie Two Weeks Notice in which Sandra Bullocks character is being asked to fight for and stand up for people who have no voice.  She says she isn’t going to the planned event where this is supposed to take place.  Her father says to her, “Hey, we didn’t raise you to sit on the side lines! Ever since you were a little girl, you fought for what you believed in!” 

She responds, “What’s the point?  They aren’t going to listen to me!” 

 “Then you change your tactic, you change your argument.  You don’t give up.  We didn’t give up on civil rights, or equality for women, or fair housing.  As long as people can change, the world can change.”

“Well what if people can’t change?”

Her father, who is struggling with high cholesterol and who has been told not to eat whole milk or cream sweets anymore, takes a bite of his Tofutti- cheesecake and says, “Well, let me put it this way.  I’m sitting here eating a piece of cheesecake made entirely of soy.  And I hate it.  But I’m eating it.”

One of the greatest gifts of God in our lives is that God sees us for all of who we are, and that includes who we can be at our very best, our most whole selves, our full-potential.  God can and does envision the God-spark in you oxygenated to become the bright flame that you are meant to be.  We all have moments when that God spark hides, and we all have moments when it shines brighter.  It is not easy to live into the vision of who we can be, but we are called to try.  As many of you know, I strive to meet evil with goodness, cruelty with kindness, rage with patience and compassion.  But I can’t always do this.  Just this week I had to deal with a service center about my Fast Trak and the person on the phone was rude, snippy, crabby.  And rather than responding with compassion and kindness, I became snippy in return.  That is not who or what I choose to be.  But I know that this is a growing edge: one worth every ounce of energy I can summon.

So then, In all of this I think we are called to two things – first, to strive to see the best in the other.  This does two things – it helps others reach their potential and be the best they can be, simply by seeing in one another the person that they could be: the best that they could be.  The other thing it is is a gift to us.  We get to see God in those around us and that is an amazing gift to us: to see God working, moving, loving in and through others.  Peter, James and John were given that gift – a moment of sight in which they were able to see Jesus more fully, see more deeply into who Jesus was.  That vision, beyond their understanding and beyond their experience, scared them, but it was a gift, too.  We can have those gifts as well, of really being able to see other people, and ourselves.  We just have to keep our eyes open.  

The other thing we are called to do is to try to see that God-spark in ourselves and to strive to live into God’s vision of the best of ourselves that we can be.  I know this is not always easy.  

We are given the vision of the transfiguration: an image of Jesus seen for the best and most whole version of himself.  That image calls us to see those possibilities in ourselves and in others: of being the best and most whole we can be and are.  It’s all that easy, and all that hard.  Amen.