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Transfiguration, 02/19/2012
Sermon on Mark 9:2-9, by Paula Murray-Stuckert
Preparing for the Journey
The season of Epiphany begins under the reflected light of a single, though magnificent, star. As is the case generally with starlight, it is a light that conceals as much as it reveals. Starlight becomes sunlight, and over the course of the seven weeks of Epiphany, day after day, more and more is revealed about the child born in a star lit stable to a woman named Mary and her betrothed, Joseph. The season ends in a blinding blaze of white light, revealing the now adult Jesus standing on a pinnacle with the two greatest prophets of Israel, Elijah and Moses, his colleagues in God's saving work.
White is the color of the end and the beginning of Epiphany, white for the blaze of glorious light at the top of Mt. Tabor; white for the lesser light of the star. White precedes the dusky purples of Lent, as the shadow of our sin and the stain of death grows darker with each succeeding day of Jesus' journey to Calvary and the cross.
Journeys are easy to understand because most of us have at least the occasional yen to get out and see something besides the four walls surrounding us. This is especially so as the weather warms, and Lent begins as winter lets go of its cold grasp on the landscape. Lent feels somehow more natural to us, as we pick up and prepare to follow Jesus to Jerusalem and then to that cross laden hill beyond. Epiphany, with its heavy emphasis on revelation, feels a bit too much like school to us. But like those first disciples, we need to know and trust our teacher before we set out on a field trip, and so we have Epiphany, even as we look to the journey and most of all, the light of the empty tomb at its end.
As a young woman I would go on rafting trips in the mountain country of Idaho and Oregon. There was always a staging area where we met and prepared for the trip down river, checking out rafts for leaks, making sure supplies were plentiful and packed to stay dry. And we were trained and retrained on how to handle the oars safely and to navigate the hazards of the river.
Transfiguration Sunday is the staging point for Lent. It is here that we summarize what God has revealed to us to date of the One sent to us for our salvation. It is here, on Transfiguration Sunday, that we look to our goal, and check our readiness to proceed. And we are trained and retrained on the hazards of the road before us.
Unlike those first disciples, we who are the latest in a long line of followers of Jesus, understand where this journey ends and why. In the Gospel of Mark, the disciples are largely clueless even as they stand at the foot of the cross or at the empty tomb. But head knowledge does not always translate into something that we can see and feel, and the point of this Lenten journey is not to relearn the already well learned story of the events of the last few months of Jesus' life as much as it is to transform our lives in the light of that story.
Transfiguration means to change appearance or form. We might be more familiar with the word metamorphosis from our grade school days when, fascinated, we watched caterpillars morph into moths or butterflies. There were caterpillars that made the transition to the chrysalis or pupa stage, but never emerged as adult butterflies. They failed to mature, and died, a matter of great sadness to second and third graders. We faithfully walk the Lenten journey with Jesus knowing that his death and ours is at the end of that journey, but so is the resurrection; therefore we undertake this journey year after year that our lives may be transfigured as we mature in faith and love of the Lord.
Clearly then, Lent is not vacation, though there are aspects of it that lead to renewal and restoration. We are not, as the author Annie Dillard once said of some of her fellow churchgoers, "cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute." (Teaching a Stone to Talk) We are expected to "pull oars," to listen to the Word made flesh as we walk alongside him and the first witnesses to this penultimate act in God's working for our salvation.
"Listen to him!" booms the voice from the heavens as Peter, James, and John stand below Jesus, transfixed by the sight of their teacher conversing with Moses and Elijah, the greatest of Israel's legendary, and long dead, prophets. This is the first time they hear that voice; they were not present as we were at the start of Mark's Gospel to watch Jesus be baptized in the Jordon. Nor, had they been there, would they have heard the voice of God the Father as he concluded that baptism with these words, "This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased." That word was heard only by Jesus himself, in keeping with the secrecy motif of Mark's Gospel. But now God speaks and all present hear him, and what they hear is this, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"
There is a limit to the degree we can compare God with a human father; God is not human and is not father as human males are fathers. But he sounds pretty emphatic, as though he wants to make the point to these men that they are on that mountain for a reason, and that it is not only Jesus who is transfigured, but they themselves, and creation with them. God's point is clearly not just to reveal to the astounded disciples gathered on that rocky mound that Jesus is the Messiah. They got that already, we know that from Peter's response to the dazzling brightness of Jesus' robes and his communion with the great ones of Israel's history. Tradition taught that both Moses and Elijah would return just before the Messiah came. Both prophets died in God's service, but neither man had a grave that could be found. Elijah, taken up into heaven by a fiery wheeled chariot and horses, and Moses, buried by God himself on the wilderness side of the border with the Promised Land, both transfigured by divine light, stand there with Jesus between them and to the disciples it is clear that the end time is come. So Peter offers to build booths for each of the three Great Ones, not because he cannot bear to come off the mountain and to leave behind the vision of divine glory, but because the Messiah was to come at the Festival of Booths. Peter was simply out to build the Messiah's habitation on that now holy hill. The hard work of building up God's people is done; the Messiah has arrived.
Only, that work is not done. The Messiah is indeed come, but he has not come to call up earthly armies and destroy an earthly enemy. His enemy is greater by far than jumped up little Herod Antipas in his provincial capital or even Tiberius Caesar loafing in the gardens of his far away Roman palace. The work, the journey, has just begun, for the Messiah's enemy is no mere man, no matter how great the armies at his command. The Messiah's target is sin and death, and this enemy he will conquer with his own death on the cross, and the resurrection that vindicates him.
So the disciples, overwhelmed with what they have seen and heard, turn at Jesus' command and start down the mountain, back to the less rarified heights of the plain, where they find another frustrated father, a human one, whose little boy the disciples have been unable to heal. Jesus heals the child, and the journey to Calvary begins again.
As it does for us this Ash Wednesday. But now, we stand for a moment here on Transfiguration Sunday, our staging point, and we prepare for the coming journey. We free time in our schedules for the Word, and for the prayer that precedes it and follows it. We dig our Bibles out from under whatever pile of papers hides them, because we know we will mark our milestones on this journey in the pages of the Scriptures. We will open them up to read each day, and pray as we do that God open our ears, and our hearts, and our spirits to hear, really hear, what he has to say to us. We will let what we hear work its way into us, fasting, giving time to the needs of others, to open ourselves to that Word so it may confront our weakness and our arrogance and our disobedience with God's own steadfast kindness and loyalty. We will see the depth and breadth of God's love, the lengths to which he is willing to go to bring us home to him, and we will be transformed by his Holy Spirit, becoming more like Jesus with every passing day.
The Lenten journey of 2012 will come to an end on Easter Day, April 8. The journey of faith, though, will continue, until such time as God decrees that its end has come, and we see the glory of God ourselves, on his holy hill.