Transfiguration

 

Mark 9:2-9

Luke 9:28-45

               Today is transfiguration Sunday.  We remember the disciples having a deep glimpse into the Divinity of Jesus, the sacredness of Jesus, the God-infused person of Jesus.  But today I am asking us to look a little deeper at what it means for all of us to be made in God’s image.  Today’s sermon may leave you with more questions than answers, but that’s okay because I believe, truly, that God is found in the questions, in the journey, rather than in pat answers.  With that as an introduction, I invite you to dive in with me. 

               In our faith, in most Christian churches, in our grounding doctrines we declare that Jesus was “fully human and fully divine.”  But what I would like to invite you to do this morning is to think about what that means for you.  What does it mean that Jesus was fully human and fully divine?  What does that mean for YOU?  Do you accept that as true?  Do you question part of it and if so, what part?  Let’s break it down for a minute.  What does it mean for YOU to be fully human?  We admit that we are human.  And when we say we are human, what does it mean?  And then the second part, what does it mean to be fully Divine?  What image comes to mind for you?  What is the meaning behind that phrase for you?

               I want to suggest a couple things that I am inviting you to consider at a deeper level.  First, I think that for most of us, these two things: fully human, and fully divine, are at a base level incompatible.  When we think of being human, one of the first things that occurs to us is probably that we are flawed, that we make mistakes, that we mess up, that we don’t have the whole picture, we hurt people, we slip.  In contrast, when we think of Divinity, I think many of us, if not most or even all of us, think perfection.  We think all-knowing, perhaps, all-seeing, perhaps, all-powerful, maybe.  Or maybe we just think Divine means all-loving.  But even all-loving implies without error, without the ability to harm or hurt.  So how do we reconcile these two ideas of what it means for Jesus to be both fully human and fully Divine? 

I think that most Christians, not talking about any one of you as individuals, but for most Christians, when they hear that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, that what they actually believe is that Jesus was fully divine, all the time divine, all the time God-incarnate.  And that occasionally or in part, or at times, Jesus touched into being human.  It’s like he was a divine soul, a perfect soul, but within a human body.  Not fully human, or fully divine.  But split: a divine soul in a human body.  And while his human body had needs, such as sleeping, eating, drinking, and while his human body grew, started as a baby but grew into a man; his mind, or thoughts or soul was God: incapable of making mistakes, of being without strength or power, incapable of failing.  I invite you to think about that for a moment.  Do you divide the human part out of Jesus?  Do you discount the human part of Jesus?  Do you ignore the part where we declare that Jesus was FULLY human as well as fully divine?  When the church makes that statement, “fully human, fully divine”, it is declaring that the humanity of Jesus was every bit as important, valuable and profound as the divine part.  I want you to sit with that. 

            The humanity piece of Jesus is very important: he takes a nap in the bottom of the boat sometimes.  He has had enough of people and retreats to be himself sometimes.  He eats with his friends sometimes, rather than always being out teaching or healing.  We ask the question, “What would Jesus do in this situation?” and what we mean by it is “What would I do if I were Jesus?”  But perhaps the question we should be asking instead is “What would Jesus do if he were me?”  It is a subtle difference.  But it is an important one.  Jesus humanity, despite our fears of it, despite our suspicion or avoidance of it, is not hidden. It is right there in the stories.  And while we delight in stories like today in which the divinity is more emphasized, for those who actually knew him, who hung out with him, who spent time with him, those moments of seeing divinity were shocking, disturbing, terrifying.

To experience the truly sacred was terrifying for the disciples.  Not just in this story.  As we read about in the call stories, as well: when the fishermen’s catch of fish was overflowing, they were terrified, bewildered, overwhelmed by the sacred, by the experience.  When they saw Jesus walking on the water, it scared them.  And they had a reason to be scared: encountering the divine, the sacred, within life, within nature – wherever we are given the vision to see it, does and will call us into being different.  When the disciples first encountered it, as you know, they left everything, left their lives behind to follow Jesus.  When they encountered it again on the mountain it called them to be new again.  It’s not just about doing things differently, as we discussed a couple weeks ago: it’s about a very change in one’s identity.   And that is terrifying: being called to be different, other, new.

And yet, what is the whole point of these stories?  And of the transfiguration?  I would challenge you to see that perhaps the whole point is that everything is sacred.  That new identity that we are called to claim is an identity as a child of God, as a reflection of God, as one created in the image of God: as a spiritual being on a physical journey, as a sacred being on a human journey.  As one who, like Jesus, is both human and sacred.  And that, my friends, includes YOU. 

Again, it’s all sacred.  And that includes YOU.

It’s like we didn’t get it.  We never get it.  We are told that we are made in the very image of God.  In the very IMAGE of God.  What does that mean?  It means that we have that sacred, divine spark within us.  We are called to see the sacred within everything.  It is like the Hindu phrase “namaste.” Translated, Namaste means, “the divine in me greets the Divine in you.”  Namaste is a recognition of the divine spark within each of us.  To put it in more Christian terms, it is like when we take communion – the normal, human, mundane elements are transformed simply through our sight, through our vision of being able to recognize the sacred within them.  I have a friend who ends her communion service with these words: “We give you thanks, O God, that when we take these ordinary elements and dedicate them to your purpose - they become holy.   Help us, your ordinary people, also be dedicated to your purpose that we too might experience your holiness.”  We are made in the image of God, which means we are infused with the sacred.  But we didn’t get it.  We don’t get it.

Jesus coming?  God said, “you are made in my image” and we didn’t understand.  So then God said, “okay, fine.  If you will not see that I made you in MY image, then I will remake myself in YOUR image.”   I want you to think about that.  Jesus is God remaking Godself in OUR image.  And what does that mean for us?   Our scriptures use a phrase to refer to Jesus that is sometimes translated “son of man” and sometimes translated “the human one” depending on which translation you are reading.  But both communicate the same thing.  What it is to be fully human, what it is to be FULLY human is to be what Jesus is: infused with the sacred.  Jesus is the human one, the one that we are called to be as humans, the one that we strive to be as humans: the product of humanity, the “son of man”, the fully human one.  To be fully human, is to be infused with the sacred.  

God wants us to see the sacred within everything.  God declares that we have been made in God’s image.  But we deny this.  We insist that we are “only human” and so God comes as Jesus: remaking Godself in OUR image.  Do we then get it?  Well, as you know, we still don’t.  It scared us so much that we killed Jesus.  We couldn’t face it.  And we killed him.

We are being called to shine.  We have it in scriptures such Matthew 5:13-16: You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its saltiness, how will it become salty again? It’s good for nothing except to be thrown away and trampled under people’s feet.  You are the light of the world. A city on top of a hill can’t be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a basket. Instead, they put it on top of a lampstand, and it shines on all who are in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before people, so they can see the good things you do and praise your Father who is in heaven.”

I read you this quote recently, but it applies here again and I want you to really hear it.  Marianne Williamson said, ““Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

We too, then, are both human and sacred.  But as much as we emphasize Jesus’ divinity and forget his humanity, to the same degree, we emphasize our humanity and forget that the spirit of God is within us too.  We focus on Jesus’ divinity and we neglect the divine within us.  We create a dichotomy here: we separate these out into two things.  But they aren’t two things.  God is infused within everything.  The sacred is part of everything because God created it all and whatever God touches is made sacred by its very nature.  We talk about “thin places”.  “Thin places” are mountain top experiences like in this story.  “Thin places” are places where it is easy to experience the divine, where it feels like the Sacred is touching down in a much more concrete observable way.  Tahoe is described as a “thin place” as is Iona in Scotland, and Sedona in AZ.  These are places where people regularly experience God. 

             But this dualism we create is damaging to us all.  There isn’t anything that is only mundane or profane.  All is infused with God.

             Richard Rohr said: There is no authentic God experience that does not situate you in the world in a very different way.  After an encounter with True Presence you see things quite differently, and it gives you freedom from your usual loyalties and low-level payoffs--the system that gave you your security, your status, your economics, and your very identity. Your screen of life expands exponentially. This transformation has costly consequences. Moses had to leave Pharaoh's palace to ask new questions and become the liberator of his people.”

              We are called to embrace those encounters with the divine: to see with the eyes that witnessed the transfiguration.  To see it now, to see it in each other, to see it within ourselves.

              I come back to my starting questions: what does it mean that Jesus is fully human and fully divine?  And what does it mean that you are created in the image of God?  Stay with those questions.  And look for that image within yourselves.  Amen.

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.

Coming into our True Natures

Exodus 34:29-35,

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28-36

I’d like to invite you to take a moment to think of a situation in which you weren’t seen for who you really are: a situation in which someone completely mis-understood you, didn’t get what you were saying or refused to see you as you really are and made assumptions about your motivation, or your personhood that were just plain wrong.  I think for most of us these situations have been painful or unpleasant, though it can also happen that someone thinks of you as better than you are, misunderstanding you in a way that puts you higher in someone’s esteem than you might deserve.  Can you think of a situation where you were judged or misunderstood?

When the kids were young, we read together a series by Noel Streatfield that begins with a book called Dancing Shoes.  And in the book, the little girl, Rachel, whose mother has just died, is seen as a sulky, cold, jealous little girl because she is adamant that her adopted sister, Hillary, not be part of the Wintle’s Little Wonders dance troupe.  The reader in the story is let in on to the fact that Rachel does not wish this for Hillary because she loves Hillary deeply, feels responsible for Hillary’s well being after the death of their mother, and believes that Hillary is capable of being a real ballet dancer with a professional ballet company.  But the adult characters in the book universally mis-understand Rachel and believe that she is an awful, unfeeling, jealous child.  This creates the tension or drama in the story which is only resolved at the end when she is finally seen and heard for who she is and finally treated as the loving child she is.  I found this story very difficult to read because of the pain central to this mis-understanding, and the pain of Rachel at being mis-treated because she was so terribly mis-understood.

But this theme, of mis-seeing someone, mis- understanding someone’s true character is a very, very common theme in our literature, in our television, in our movies.  In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s misunderstanding of Darcy (and visa versa), Jane’s misunderstanding of Bingley’s sisters, and everyone’s misunderstanding of Wickham make up the drama of the story line: all of which, again, are only resolved at the end.  In the movie Run Away Bride, the Julia Robert’s character is misunderstood by everyone, herself included.  Many of our stories involve someone being lifted up as a hero who really isn’t. Others involve judgement and condemnation on someone who doesn’t deserve it.  It is everywhere.  I’m sure you can think of many stories in which people are simply misunderstood, their motives and their actions read wrongly.  Their personhood or identity is read as something other than what it is.  And I believe that this is so central in our books because it is a very common experience that all of us have.  I am certain that everyone here could tell of at least one time in your life when your actions were completely misunderstood or misinterpreted, and undoubtedly this had results for you, many of which were probably unpleasant.

We experience the damage of these misunderstandings in our own lives, and yet I think we still tend to act on our own mis-interpretations of others at a smaller level on a daily basis.  We determine that the person next to us who made a mistake driving in the car is a jerk or an idiot.  We decide the sales person on the phone who can’t give us a lower price is greedy.  We see a person with their shirt half untucked and we decide they are a slob.  We assume a pregnant teenager is loose.  On a daily basis we all make snap judgments of others that do not allow us to really see who people are. 

I think this is common for two reasons.  First, we try to understand people by putting people into categories, setting up images of each person in our minds about who they are and what they are like in an effort to understand our world and to relate to it in a way that makes sense.  We all do this.  From a scientific perspective, we can’t make sense of the many images and bits of information that come at us all the time unless we somehow categorize and sort through the information, and we do this with the characters of the people we meet as well.  That person is a care-taker or that person is a cynic or that person is a little off their rocker.  These are ways in which we make sense of our world, try to gain a handle on who the people around us are, and determine how we want to interact with them, respond to them, engage them.

Second, despite our efforts to understand and box people, the reality is that people are very complex.  So, it is easy to get our judgments about people’s motivations for certain behaviors wrong because people rarely do anything for only one reason, or for a simple reason that can be easily understood and summed up.

Putting together that we are quick to make judgments about why people do what they do alongside with the fact that there are usually multiple reasons why a person does what they do, and we end up, in many instances with a false understanding of the people around us.

We’ve all been a victim of this at one time or another.  And chances are, we’ve all been mistaken in our understanding of others at one time or another.

This is about identity.  And so now I’d like to ask you to think about your own identity again for a moment.  Who are you at your basic core?  Who is it that God has called you to be?  When are you most fully yourself? 

Can you think of a moment or a time when you were most fully yourself: when you were the most whole, most God-following person, most you at your deepest core?  What did that feel like?  As you journey through your life do those moments come more or less often for you?  Are there certain situations that bring this out of you? 

One of my favorite movies is the Edward Norton film, Keeping the faith.  I shared with you last month a scene from this movie between the young priest and his mentor in which he was struggling with his call and whether or not he should stay a priest.  But there is another part that precedes that scene that takes place between the young priest and the woman friend he fell in love with.  She does not return his affections, but he still struggles with what it means for who he is at his core to love her.  He said to her, “I don’t know which feels worse: having my heart-broken, or starting to doubt myself because of what that means for me.”

She responded, “Don’t you dare doubt yourself because of me.  You have a gift and you know it.  If you start to doubt that because of me, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”

And then Brian answered, “I don’t doubt myself because of you.  I feel like the best version of myself around you and that makes me doubt everything else.”

Where are we the best versions of ourselves?  When are we the best versions of ourselves? What does it mean to be the best version of your?  Who is it you, at your core, feel called to be?  This is different from the question of what you are called to DO.  This is about identity.  This is about who God has made you to be in your core, in your private moments, in your thoughts and your feelings as well as your actions.  Where do you feel most centered, most whole, most true to yourself and to God?  Do you pay attention to where and when and with whom you feel most yourself?  Most whole?  Most real?

Of course, part of our identity does involve what we do.  Our choices in thoughts, words and actions, who we choose as friends, how we treat those who have less power and resources: all of that says a great deal about who we are.  And what we do for a living, as well as in our daily life are an important part of that.  If our jobs are a real vocation for us then that is a prime part of our identity.  If our relationships are central to who we are, then that is central to our identity.  If our words and what we produce come from a place of call, then that is central to our identity.  For many of us we are defined by our roles as workers of whatever kind, also as parents, as a spouse, as a Christian - whatever it is that tugs at your heart and calls from you all of your being.  But then, what happens when something changes?  What happens to someone whose primary identity is as a parent when a child dies, or someone who is first and foremost a husband or wife when a divorce happens, or to someone whose identity is so connected to their work when they have to change a career or even when they retire?  These things can be devastating not only because they are stressful, but because they challenge our very identity.

All of today’s scriptural passages talk about identity, though it may be hard to see.  In the story of Moses talking to God, Moses’ face is changed by the conversation he has with God.  It becomes shiny, we are told, in a way that scares the people around him enough that he finds it necessary to hide his face behind a veil.  To me, this is a story that emphasizes that when we are closest to God (and I believe that the closer we are to God, the closer we are to our true selves, to our true identity) people around us see that.  It changes how we look, changes how others see us, changes how we present ourselves and how others perceive us.  I think about how many women glow during pregnancy: the joy of carrying another life can change how we move in the world.  Also when someone is passionate about something, it is not uncommon to see them glowing with that excitement, or radiating enthusiasm while they talk about it or while they live it. 

The passage from Corinthians talks about the veils we put on our own hearts, the ways in which we hide.  And to me, this is a hiding not only from others, but from ourselves as well.  We are called to work on removing those veils so that we can be most genuinely ourselves.  Those veils are sometimes easier to see in other people.  The ways people put on speech patterns for particular jobs, for example, is often a way of “veiling” who they are.  Without any real words at all, I am certain if I were to mock the speech patters of newscasters for example, or flight attendants giving the safety speech, you would know what profession I was acting out.  My daughter wrote a scene for her school musical theater performance in which she substituted colors for real words and gave an entire dialogue in which there was no question what she was saying because of the way she said it, the way she used her words, the tone of her speech.  In that case it was just a conversation.  But we have affected speech patterns in many of our professions.  Many pastors, for example, have very specific preaching or speech patterns.  Some have particular phrasings or words that put a person in a specific category.  You can tell where a pastor stands theologically, for example, when their prayer beings, “Father, we just want to thank you, Lord…”  You can assume a whole mess of stuff about the person when they begin that way.  But is any of it true to the base identity of who someone is?  These recognized speech patterns or phrases: these are veils: They are things we put them on.  They are not who we are.

And finally we have the scriptural story of Jesus’ transfiguration: a moment, a time, when Jesus was completely seen as he was, like Moses, with the glory of God shining from him and on him.  For just a moment, he is seen in his greatness by his closest friends.  They are given the gift of seeing who and how Jesus truly is.  And their reaction is to be afraid.  Why?  Partly because when a person is seen as they really are, they can’t be completely boxed, which means they can’t be completely understood.  The disciples don’t understand what they are seeing, and that is scary for them, and would be scary for any of us.  Of course, the other part of this is that Jesus’ identity was so far beyond what they expected, that it was scary in this way as well. 

But real identity is scary.  The core of who we are, I would say, not just for Jesus, but for us too, is something difficult to present, something difficult to claim, difficult to comprehend, something we are constantly working towards, journeying into.  More than that, our true identities, below all the social niceties and roles, are powerful.  They are close to God, they lack fear, they can speak truth, and do what is necessary to make changes in the world.  God calls us to make that journey into being our genuine selves.  God wants us to be the most “us” that we can be; the most true to ourselves, the most real.  God wants us to be the us that God intends us to be.

But for today, as we think about Jesus and as we think about who we are called to be, my challenge for you is not just to intentionally walk that journey, but also to remember that when you talk to someone, when you drive next to someone, when you interact with anyone, strive to remember that you are not seeing all of who they are, you are not getting the full picture, and that helping someone else to walk towards wholeness involves looking deeper, for who they really are, while knowing you won’t see it all, looking for the best in them.

I think coming into our true natures is something like recognizing that our real natures can move mountains.  Our real beings, through love, kindness, grace and compassion can make a difference.  We don’t have to fight to change the world when we are whole.  Just being the people we are intended to be can and will change the world.  Amen.

Listen to HIm

2 Kings 2:1-14

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-10

Transfiguration Sunday

            The Disciples have had a hard time listening to Jesus throughout the time they have been together.  Jesus has spoken about his death.  They deny it.  He has spoken about inclusion.  They still try to send the children away.  He has spoken about love and giving and servant-hood, and they still don’t let him wash their feet, and they still want Jesus to be honored, revered in a way that he doesn’t seek or think is appropriate to who he really is.  He has called them to join him as healers, and they are unable to do it.  He has spoken about faith and they still stumble on the water.  He has spoken about many things and the disciples remain confused, unclear, clue-less even at times.  This is proven once again by their speech on the mountain.  They don’t get it.  They want to stay on the mountain.  They want to build shrines and bask in the glory.  They want to continue the mountain top experience, rather than carrying it down with them to the people, as a source of strength to do their ministry, to do their service, to live the lives Christ calls them to lead.  They don’t get it. 

            In light of that we have God’s words “This is my Son, whom I dearly love.  Listen to him!”  God has three things to say.  This is my son.  I love him.  And listen to him. 

            When you listen to Jesus, what do you hear?  I would like to invite you to take a moment and really think about that.  When you listen to the Jesus you read about in scripture, in our conversations, in bible studies, in life, what do you hear?

            Do you always like what you hear?  Or are there times when the words are hard to hear, not what we want, but still are what we hear? 

When I was in Ohio, I was part of a weekly lectionary group in which we read the lectionary assigned scripture passages for the following week together.  We often read from different translations of the Bible.  And because of that, we have found at times that the different translations are translated differently  For example, Mark 1:40-41.  In the NRSV, this passage is translated, “A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!”  However, the passage that in the NRSV is translated, “moved with pity” is translated in the NIV (which you have in front of you) as “Jesus was indignant” and in the CEB (the one that I usually use) as “incensed”.  The word they are translating is actually “anger” so “Moved with anger” might be a better translation in both.  Either way, there is a huge difference between “compassion” and “anger”.  And the reason for these different translations is that when we look at the old manuscripts of these texts, they don’t always agree with one another.  There are many old manuscripts and scrolls of these Biblical passages, not one.  And they don’t agree with each other.  It is not always clear which one was written earlier, which one was the “original” or which one is closest to what Jesus actually said.  So the NIV and CEB chose a different original manuscript for this phrase than the translators of the NRSV.  Different translators have to pick which text they believe to make the most sense, to be the most accurate, to be the most original.  And different translators often pick different original texts from which to translate specific passages.  As we sat, in my lectionary group, with the difference between Jesus being incensed and Jesus having compassion, one of our pastor friends made the comment that because translators are also interpreters at some level, they want the passage to make sense and to match with their own theology.  Therefore, the translation that is least comfortable is actually often the one that is the most accurate.  The ones that are more comfortable are often made that way by the translators, by the interpreters.  The words that they find which are uncomfortable, they try to ease, to smooth down, to make more palatable.  So they pick the texts that make most sense to them and translate them according to those texts.  They don’t always pick the ones that really appear to be the oldest, or the most original, or the closest to what Jesus probably really did or said.

This is a very human thing to do and we do it as well.  We try to block out things that make us uneasy, things that don’t make sense to us. We see this with our news, and our reaction to news, actually. I recently read about several psychological studies which show, consistently, that in light of evidence that disproves people’s biases, people are more likely to entrench in their own viewpoints rather than change their opinions.  Even when hard, cold facts that cannot be argued are presented, if what is offered is different from what the receiver believes, most people will discount the new information rather than be willing to change their minds or be confronted by a truth other than what they already know to be true. This applies to scripture as well. 

The truth is, if nothing in the Bible has ever disturbed us, then we haven’t read it closely enough.  Or rather, we haven’t listened well enough.  If nothing in Jesus’ words has ever disturbed us, then we haven’t been paying attention.  Because Jesus said disturbing things.  Jesus challenged us.  He challenged us with passages such as Matthew 25: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Get away from me, you who will receive terrible things. Go into the unending fire that has been prepared for the devil and his angels. (for) I was hungry and you didn’t give me food to eat. I was thirsty and you didn’t give me anything to drink.  I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me. I was naked and you didn’t give me clothes to wear. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’”

We are challenged with words such as, “This is so that they can look and see but have no insight, and they can hear but not understand. Otherwise, they might turn their lives around and be forgiven,” which seems to imply that he doesn’t want specific people to turn their lives around and be forgiven.  We are challenged with words such as “I came not to bring peace but a sword,” and “Anyone who does not hate their mother and father, brother and sister, wife and children- yes, and even his own life - cannot be my disciple.” We are challenged by the many parables which are hard to understand such as the story of the wheat and tares.  We might be challenged by Jesus’ own breaking of the biblical rules such as the Sabbath laws, by curing and picking grain on the Sabbath.  We might be challenged by Jesus telling us we are to do what he did and to follow in his footsteps. These should make us uncomfortable. And when they don’t, it could be because we disagree and are okay with that.  It could be because we have taken the time to really study the passages and have come to an understanding we can live with.  But I think often it is, if we are honest, because we are not really listening.

            There was a wonderful article in Sojourner’s Magazine a few years ago entitled, “Five Ways I’m the Worst at Following Jesus” by Christian Piatt.  He said, “My biggest concern at the moment is that though a lot of us claim to “be Christians,” or even to follow Jesus, a lot of us don’t spend much intentional time trying to figure out what that means and what it looks like in daily life. We try not to be too (mean) to other people, try not to kill, steal, adulterate… or worship graven images. We try to love, and to accept love — though we still hurt each other. A lot. The world is messed up and so far from realizing the fully kingdom-inspired image of wholeness and reconciliation to which God invites us. And at least in my theological world, that’s on us, not God. I believe, with all of my being, that the audacious vision of God’s kingdom, here and now, isn’t something we sit around and pray for God to make real for us. Like Jesus said, we can (and should) collectively do greater things than even he did. …So here I am, not so much trying to be Jesus, but trying to at least follow his life, teaching, and example better. And in taking my own personal inventory, I can see that I (am pretty bad at it). That doesn’t mean I’m giving up, but it’s clear I have plenty of work to do.” 

Are we aware of the things we do that are failing to follow Jesus?  And again, if we aren’t aware, it means we have not been listening. 

            But the good news in all of this is that despite our failure to listen, Jesus stays in relationship with us.  God stays with us no matter how we fail to hear.  Jesus brought Peter, James and John up to the mountain top and even though they didn’t get it, he let them see the transformation, hearing God’s voice directly and God’s instructions in a clear voice.  Jesus explains his parables to them, even through his frustration with their lack of understanding.  He repeats his message, repeats his descriptions of what is to come, repeats what they need to hear, despite their lack of deep listening.  He loves them and models for them what that love looks like, despite their reluctance to embrace it, to follow him completely, to walk the path he walked in the way he walked it.  And he does the same for us. 

            Still, God calls down, “This is my son whom I love.  Listen to him.”  Bonhoeffer said, "The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them." —(Life Together).

            Peter, James and John wanted to stay on the mountain. They had been given a new glimpse of who Jesus was, one that filled them with joy, with hope, with life. They had seen the transfiguration, they had a real and deep glimpse of who Jesus really was. And it filled them with a joy that they did not want to give up. That is understandable. That is absolutely understandable.  To be given that mountain top experience of seeing God and seeing Jesus as God’s son – what an incredible gift. To see Moses and Elijah next to him. To experience these people of God in this way.  It was an amazing gift.  It was a gift that was not withheld even though they failed to listen and understand.  It was still given.  And the opportunity to listen to Jesus was also given again, with the instructions, direct from God, to listen.  We, too, make mistakes. But we, too, are not deprived of the good gifts of God.  And we, too, no matter what we do or fail to do, are invited every time we hear Jesus’ words to “Listen to him.”    Amen.

Sunday's Sermon - Being Transfigured.

Exodus 24:12-18

Matthew 17:1-9

While at first the story of transfiguration may seem like something we don’t really experience, I think when we put it into different words, all of us have experienced or witnessed some kinds of transfiguration, probably not to the degree described here, but a transfiguration, none the less.  Let me give you an example: pregnant women often have a glow about them, and when people talk about the things that are deepest and dearest to their hearts, we can see in them a light, an animation, a transformation that resembles the glow we read about in the transfiguration stories. 

Additionally, most to all of us have had mountain top experiences - those times when we go on retreat or as a young person to church camp or to trienium or a family adventure or other adventure, have fallen in love, had heard a piece of music or experienced someone’s words that moved deeply within you in which we have encountered the God of goodness and love in an entirely different way.  Can you think of times and experiences like that in your lives?  We come away from these experiences on a high.  We come away feeling God’s call raging through our very beings.  We come away with a strong sense of God’s presence and a feeling that we can, truly, do anything with God behind us or in front of us, leading the way.  We come back on a mission, with a sense of purpose and God’s presence. 

That isn’t to say that the encounter with the holy is ever easy.  Most of the time I think it can really be terrifying to encounter the holy.  The disciples response, as we read it in verse 6 was, “When the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground, terrified.”  Have there been times for you in which you’ve encountered the holy and it was terrifying?

I remember as a child one night laying in my bed and praying to God that an angel would visit me.  “Please God, just let an angel come to see me this one time!  Please God, I want to see an angel and know that your love is here with me!”  I prayed and prayed and when I finished I opened my eyes.  At that moment in the corner of my bedroom I saw a bluish, cloudy haze.  Whether or not that was an overactive imagination, the strong effects of hope, simply the result of having squeezed my eyes shut for so long while praying, or in fact a genuine answer to my prayer, my reaction was exactly like that of the disciples.  After seeing the blue haze, I immediately squeezed my eyes back shut and fervently began to pray again, “God, I made a mistake!  Take the angel away!  Take it away!”

But even our less dramatic encounters with God can be disturbing.  Because a consistent result of an interaction with God is a difference in the way you perceive the world around you.  An encounter with God causes you to see things in a way you hadn’t the moment before.  And that can shake us at a very core level.  It can change the way we relate to everything and everyone , the way we understand ourselves and the world, the way we see and experience God.  It’s like the first time that you put a prism into a white light, the first time that you see the spectrum of the rainbow come from the prism and you realize that what you thought was the absence of color is in fact all the colors.  Or the first time you learn in science that while everything that we see looks solid and like it is hard matter, that in fact atoms are mostly space, and therefore all that we see is mostly space as well. 

The truth is we don’t see the many layers of any reality very often.  We tend to see only one or two layers of the way things really are but we don’t see the whole.  That’s not to say that the layers we do see aren’t real.  They are, but it is only a part of the truth.  We see the white light, but we don’t see that it is made of all the colors.  We see the people in front of us, and we don’t see the atoms that make them up or the space that makes up the atoms. In terms of the world, all our histories and news stories - all of them - are written from a perspective. No one has the whole truth on anything.For people who don’t have faith, they see the world, but they cannot see the loving hand behind creation and behind every breath we take. 

And when we then are given deeper glimpses, or rather, glimpses at some of the different layers of reality, it can be amazing and awesome in the deepest sense of the word.  But it can also be disturbing to learn that our vision does not encompass the whole picture, that our reality is only a piece of the what is “reality”, and that this extends into everything, including our understanding of and our relationship to God.  Paul says in 1^st Corinthians 13: 9-12, “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”  We get only glimpses into the deeper reality, and even these can be disturbing.

The transfiguration is such a glimpse into the deeper, a glimpse into the whole, an encounter with the big picture, with the many layers of reality, with God.  And that is not easy.  But it is transforming and changing.  It opens us up to a deeper relationship with God and with each other. 

The real question then becomes, what happens when the amazing, awesome interaction with the holy has passed?  What happens when we descend the mountain and return to normal life?  What happens when the prism is removed and we no longer have it out to help us see all the colors in the white light?  How do we continue to carry with us those mountain top experiences which feel so transformational even we descend once again into day to day living?

We have Moses and Jesus as examples of what that might mean.  When Moses returned from the mountain, he found that his people had made idols and were worshiping them and had turned from God.  Moses descended with the ten commandments to a people gone wrong.  But the faith that he gained from his transformative time with God strengthened him to confront their behavior and to bring them back into faith and faithful relationship with God.  Jesus returned from the mountain to a people in need of his healing, in demand of his being and presence.  Neither of them was allowed to bask in the glory of their experience on the mountain, neither of them came down from the mountain into a place where they could teach and preach about their wonderful experience of the Divine.  They both came back to this world: a world that is hard and demanding, confusing and disappointing much of the time.

And that is our experience as well.  We may have the gifts of these mountain top experiences, but we are called then to go back into the world and to use our time with God to strengthen us to face whatever life hands us.  We are not called to be monks, isolated and away from the world.  We are called to come back to the world, to be in it and to be part of transforming it.  Henry Drummond, a Scottish theologian said this, “God does not make the mountains in order to be inhabited. God does not make the mountaintops for us to live on the mountaintops. It is not God’s desire that we live on the mountaintops. We only ascend to the heights to catch a broader vision of the earthly surroundings below. But we don’t live there. We don’t tarry there. The streams begin in the uplands, but these streams descend quickly to gladden the valleys below.” The streams start in the mountaintops, but they come down to gladden the valleys below.

That isn’t to say that the mountain top experiences are pointless or meaningless or unimportant.  For Jesus and Moses, their mountain top experiences were not then just for nothing.   They remained a gift that empowered them, that guided them, that strengthened them to face day to day life.  And so for us as well.  It is from the place of our own transformation that we will be better able to transform the world and bring it more into God’s realm.

I want to read you a poem written by Christian Wiman about an experience with the larger vision.

From a Window

Incurable and unbelieving
In any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
Rise kaleidoscopically

As if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

To the pane as I could get
To watch that fitful, fluent spirit

That seemed a single being undefined
Or countless beings of one mind

Haul its strange cohesion
Beyond the limits of my vision

Over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
Exactly as it had and would

(But why should it seem fuller now?)
And though a man’s mind might endow

Even a tree with some excess
Of life to which a man seems witness,

That life is not the life of men. [sic]
And that is where the joy came in

Christian Wiman

Those moments of transformation, those times of transformation can carry us forward on the wings of joy, to face whatever life has to offer us that day.

The final good news in this is that even though we do have to descend from the mountain into the valley, even when we struggle to hold on to our transforming experiences so that we may be strengthened for our times off of the mountain, the good news remains that God is not just on the mountain top.  While we may experience God and the holy in a new, different and awesome way on the mountain, God still remains with us in the valleys and God remains with us in the plains as well.  Take strength from the mountain tops.  But live in the valleys and plains.  Take joy from the mountaintops, so that you might be able to see God in the valleys and plains as well.  Be transfigured, so that you might transform the world.  Amen.