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Union University Church | |
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| By Reverend Laurie DeMott |
February
22, 2009 |
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In preparation for preaching today, I read through several commentaries
written by Biblical scholars addressing this text, and one of those scholars
felt the need to warn the preacher to resist the temptation to wax eloquent
in describing the scene of the transfiguration of Jesus. "Do not ask your listeners to try to imagine themselves there on the mountain with the disciples," the scholar said, "because the average person in the pew has never had anything remotely like this happen to them. It would be a waste of time to ask them to imagine a scene that is so far beyond the capacity of their imaginations." Now, I question this commentator's assumptions. First of all, though most of us may never have had the sort of mystical experience described here in Luke 9, that doesn't mean that we have never heard of such experiences. In fact, I know that there are people in this very congregation who have had spiritual visions or felt a sudden overwhelming and unexplainable presence of the divine, and I know it because they have shared their memories of those experiences in discussion groups with others. Furthermore, I question the scholar's poor opinion about the capacity of your imaginations. Human beings are, in fact, quite adept at imagining all sorts of things -- everything from alien abductions to the face of the Virgin Mary on a potato chip; so surely we are capable of seeing in our mind's eye the more mundane vision of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus talking together on a mountaintop. And finally, even if such an experience is not part of our experience, I think it is still helpful to attempt to open our minds to what it might be like to step into the shoes of the disciples that day. Let's face it, much of what happened in Jesus' life is not part of our experience -- I don't think, for example, that any of you has ever seen a crucifixion -- yet preachers have played out that scene in hundreds of thousands of sermons for the last two millennia because the gospel is not only something that happened in the past. The Christ of the past is still the Christ of our present and will be the Christ of tomorrow and so the disciples' experiences can still and should still shape our own. Of course, the reality is that regardless of how I decide to start my sermon -- whether I decide to begin with a description of the disciples' weary trek up the mountain as they follow the winding trail through the brush, climbing over boulders, the hot sun beating down on their faces until, upon reaching the summit they throw themselves to the ground in utter exhaustion while Jesus draws a little away from them to kneel in prayer, and how suddenly the disciples are drenched in a brilliant light that shocks them awake, and they see Jesus, his face glowing, his dusty robes renewed and cleansed, in deep conversation with the towering figures of their faith, Moses and Elijah, and how the fatigue of the disciples flees before their new-born terror and Peter, wanting desperately to grab ahold of something that makes sense to his confused mind, looks around for some brush and stammers out, "Let us build some shelters for you and your guests, Jesus," - whether I start my sermon by waxing eloquent on that scene or whether I play Jack Webb and give you "just the facts, Ma'am", is not going to encourage you or discourage you from imagining this scene in your mind because actually, we do it all the time without any help from our preachers. This scene on the mountaintop captivates us. We write books about it and we flock to movies about it and we are fascinated by its possibilities. Oh, maybe the characters in our version of this scene are a little different -- maybe instead of Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, the characters are Marty Fly and Doc Brown in "Back to the Future" or instead of disciples witnessing the events, they are seen and reported by the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells Time Machine. We love stories that mix up the past and the present and the future and plop some hapless fellow right down in the middle of the mess. Just think of all of the movies and stories you know that are devoted to exploring the idea of playing with time: "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "Somewhere in Time", "Peggy Sue Got Married", "Planet of the Apes", Michael Crichton's "Timeline", "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure": we love the idea of having an opportunity to re-live our past or catch a glimpse of our future. We love to hear stories in which people are no longer trapped by the inevitable linear forward movement of time but are free to move backward and forward, to even meet themselves coming. Now, you may be thinking, "Whoa, did I miss something in the Bible reading today?Because I didn't see any time machines there on that mountain." Well, maybe there are no souped up DeLoreans in the ninth chapter of Luke but when the disciples see Elijah and Moses standing next to Jesus, they have the same reaction that Marty Fly has when he sees his mother twenty years younger in "Back to the Future". Moses was, to the Jew of the first century, the figure who most represented their past. He was the father of their faith, the one who gave them the law, the one who led them to liberation. Everything that had formed who those disciples were as men of faith was embodied for them in the person of Moses. Elijah, on the other hand, even though he too had belonged to their past history, was thought of by first century Jews as the one God would send to them some day to prepare the way for the Messiah and usher in the end of the age. When Elijah stepped through his or her door, a Jew would know that everything old was about to be swept away and the new age was upon them. The future was unfolding. Even today, Jews at Passover set an extra place at the Seder table for Elijah so that they will be ready if he knocks at their door that night to announce the fulfulment of the events that began long ago in the Exodus. So when the disciples see Jesus standing there between Moses and Elijah, they aren't seeing just two famous men with their teacher; they are seeing the beginning of the age and the end of the age, their past and their future, with Christ smack dab in the midst of the two. In a television series from a few years ago called "Quantum Leap", that played with the idea of time travel, the main character in one scene explains how he is able to time travel throughout his own lifetime. He takes a piece of string and holds it up saying, "This is how we usually think of our lives, traveling along in a straight line from a beginning to an end. But what if we take that string and bring the ends together to make a loop -- now time can go in both directions. And then," he continues, "what if we take that circle of string and scrunch it up in our hands so that lots of different points on the string are touching one another. At those points," he explains, "the past, the present, and the future all meet, and I can move easily between them." I don't know about the physics of his explanation, but the analogy is appropriate for the scene of the Transfiguration. It is not coincidental that all of the gospel writers place this scene midway through their narratives of Jesus. Immediately before Jesus climbs the mountain, in the gospel of Luke, Peter declares for the first time that Jesus is the Messiah, and upon descending the mountain, Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem. Nor is it coincidental that the church designates this Sunday -- the last Sunday of Epiphany before the first Sunday of Lent -- as Transfiguration Sunday. Today the church turns finally - and reluctantly -- away from the birth of Christ to face now toward the cross and the death of Christ. We stand here midway in Christ's story and in the Transfiguration, the past, the present, and the future all meet. And, if we are like the disciples, the prospects of such a meeting may terrify us. Why are the disciples afraid when they see Moses, Jesus, and Elijah together? If the disciples were anything like the rest of us, the experience of living fully in their past, fully in their present, and fully in their future was entirely new for them. Even if human beings cannot in real life physically time travel, we have become very adept at emotional time travel. We are very good at choosing a time that feels most comfortable to us and then squatting down there in that time mentally refusing to budge. For the young, the preferred choice of time is the future. They are always looking forward to the next new thing, the next grand experience, and refuse to give much credence to yesterday. Now those who have been trying to get their kids to study so that they can get into college may find it strange to hear me say that the young live in the future because too often our children seem unable to project their lives beyond the next few days. But I think that our children's tendency to stride blithely into the future unprepared actually rests in their rejection of the past because you have to do a lot of revisionist history in your mind to make you believe that you can pass today's exam without studying in spite of the fact that the last twenty exams you took proved the opposite. But those last 20 exams are part of yesterday and for the young, yesterday is ancient history, to be rejected as irrelevant, outdated, and an object only for bemusement. I will never forget a comment from a 16 year old member of my youth group back in 1998 who scorned a piece of music as sounding "so early 90s"! The music had been written when he was in middle school and was for him, therefore, already a relic. When we were young, our parents were fools, their musical tastes absurd, and the elderly of society had nothing to teach us because we already knew it all. We were already setting up house in the future when we would get our chance to make the rules, and the past had nothing to do with us. But then we grew older, and the more we age, the more we find the future such a frightening prospect that we scuttle backwards, back into an idealized vision of our past. Does anyone know how many church members it takes to change a light bulb? "Change the light bulb?! What do you mean change the lightbulb? Why that light bulb was given to the church by my grandfather. It's been good enough for this congregation for 50 years so I don't see why we should talk about changing it now!" Whether it is light bulbs or policies or cultural assumptions, the new ideas that so inspired us as young people can begin to terrify us as we grow older. Whereas once we were excited to entertain new experiences, the debris of past hurts, frustrations, failures, and mistakes clogs up our hearts until we are much more wary to step out on a new path. Our minds become like steel traps -- ones that have been left out in the rain and rusted shut. We hear ourselves starting every sentence with, "Back in my day...." and we fill conversations with stories about our past having no desire to ponder the future. Biologists studying gorillas have noted that young gorillas love to explore their environment and are always testing the limits of the rules of the band but the old silverback gorillas, the researchers say, become increasingly rigid in their behavior. They are less able to tolerate the young and become agitated by any change to their routine or environment. Their neural networks actually become inflexible. We are not so far removed from those gorillas; too often as we grow older, the future begins to terrify us and so we decide instead to build booths in our past and take up residence there forever. During the time of Jesus' ministry, people were no different than we are. There were the Pharisees who rigidly clung to the old laws and customs with such inflexibility that they were probably more true to Moses' ways than Moses himself. And there were the Zealots and others like them ready to cast off the shackles of their past and rush headlong into a new future where they got to make all of the rules and ignore the lessons of history. A few decades later, the apostle Paul was still struggling with the human desire to time travel as he tried to mediate arguments between Christians wanting to keep every jot and tittle of the past laws and those so ready to live out their future salvation right now that they believed salvation had freed them to follow the impulses of their own desires. Paul called those mired in the past simpletons and dogs and those rushing into the future fools pumped up on their own egos. The apostle understood that the gospel calls us to live in the "already but not yet" of time, to respect and embrace the wisdom of those who have gone before us while remaining open to the new possibilities of the Holy Spirit who is alive and always on the move. And so, as Christians, we are called to try to understand the ideas, practices, and experiences of those who have gone before us; to approach the accumulated wisdom of our past with humility and respect. We are to listen to the stories of those who have gone before us and learn from their warning and their wisdom. But so too are we called to embrace the exuberance of the young and remain open to new possibilities and new ways of thinking, no matter how frightening or uncomfortable those ideas may be. We stand here midway in God's story, bearers of a glorious past and awaiting an equally glorious future. Our Christ is the alpha and the omega in whom all times come together. |
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