The Transfiguration of our Lord, February 18, 2007

St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque

Pastor Harold Nilsson

Luke 9:28-36 (Revised Common Lectionary, Series C)

I saw Jesus a while back.  He was at a discount store.  Actually, he was a she.  Jesus came on the scene something like this.  An elderly man came up to the checkout counter ahead of me with his cart full of items.  (I am elderly, but you know that the word really means someone ten years older than you.)  By the time he reached the checkout the line behind me was long.  The man put his purchases on the conveyor, among them a pair of shoes.  Now in that store, shoes had to be paid for separately back in the shoe department.  There were signs posted to that effect, but either he had not seen them or they had not registered with him.  I wondered how the clerk would deal with him.  Would she glower and brusquely tell him, you have to take the shoes back to the shoe department?  Would she be thinking, “What’s the matter, you dummy?  Can’t you read?”  What she actually did was this: She came out from behind her register and conveyor, smiled at the man, gently put  one arm on his shoulder, and with her other hand pointed out to him where he first needed to take the shoes; then he could come back and pay for the rest of his items. 

That was Jesus, you say?  Wasn’t that just someone being pleasant?  I saw grace happen there.  And when grace happens – anywhere! – isn’t Jesus there?  I have heard it said in this church (and in every other church I’ve ever attended) that God is present in our world in the living Jesus.  Do we really believe that?  Do we see him?  Do we hear him? 

Barbara Brown Taylor has remarked that church isn’t “a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in the world.”  By listening to divine words and celebrating divine sacraments over and over again, she said, “church can help people gain a feel for how God shows up – not only in Holy Bibles and Holy Communion but also in near neighbors, mysterious strangers, sliced bread and grocery store wine.”¹  If the truth be told, however, we haven’t been all that good, have we, in helping each other name and claim the presence of God beyond these doors.  Especially if those experiences have any aura of mystery about them.

I learned that from a man in a parish I once served.  I had known him as a regular church-goer for at least ten years when he told me about a time when he was in the hospital for major surgery.  While he was under anesthesia he had one of those tunnel and bright light episodes that others have called “near death” experiences.  “I have told very few people about this,” he said, “because they would likely say that my brain chemistry was altered or that I was crazy.  But I know that God was near me and I was near God, and since then I’ve not been afraid of dying or much else.”

For at least as long as Harvard has been around – more than 300 years (and did you hear that last week it chose a woman for the first time to be president) – for at least that long, mystical experience has been suspect in the western world.  Modernity, or the Age of Reason, has carried on by the conviction that by applying human reason, the world can be described and understood and harnessed to the benefit of all.  We can discern reality, or truth, by diligently using the scientific method.  Sandia Lab could not operate without this premise. 

Which is why “God sightings” as Pr. Holman named them recently, and especially a God sighting like the transfiguration of Jesus challenge us.  They strain the limits of credulity of us who have been educated and shaped and made our living by being skeptical of that which is not understandable and explainable.  But then the pre-modern disciples Peter, John and James also were taken beyond the limits of their understanding on that eighth day.

They went up a mountain so that Jesus could pray, which he did often according to Luke.  Why couldn’t he just pray where he was?  Well, he had been besieged by requests and crowds and probably needed a break to prepare for what he knew was coming next.  On the mountain, perhaps Mt. Tabor, through eyes half shut from weariness and Jesus’ dark prediction of his death, Peter and his friends see something confusing and exhilarating: Jesus’ face is altered, his dusty, sweaty clothes are dazzling white, and Moses and Elijah, gone for hundreds of years, are talking to him.  This was a multi-media event, with sound as well as sight:  “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” said the voice from the cloud. 

There is much to be learned from this story.  Apparently it was so beyond Peter, John and James, so improbable even by ancient standards, so impossible to describe what they saw and heard and knew in the interior of their beings that, like my parishioner friend, they didn’t tell anyone about it – at least until long after when it made its way into the gospel accounts.  In that regard the story reveals a poverty of the Age of Reason.  It’s a poverty that has closed our hearts and minds to the ineffable, to the possibility of God breaking into our ordinary existence with acts of grace and compassion that renew us.  Joseph Sittler spoke of the idolatry of the provable fact – the notion that unless something can be rationally demonstrated, it isn’t so.  Maybe the poverty of modernity is why many say we’re moving into a post-modern age that’s willing to question that we can reason our way to all the answers.  The transfiguration of Jesus is a post-modern story.  It witnesses to the unprovable truth that the way of Jesus is a way worth following; that it’s a way that makes sense of our questions and has the power to shape lives for good.   The transfiguration can move a post-modern scientist to say upon peering into a microscope at a new discovery, it was like “seeing the face of God.”    

It would be wonderful, a rich piece of gospel lore, if the transfiguration resolved the disciples’ doubts for all time and caused them never to deviate from the straight road of faith.  But of course it didn’t.  They doubted.  They misunderstood.  They hid.  They kept their mouths shut.  They denied.  They slept another time while Jesus prayed earnestly, in Gethsemane.  That time Luke calls their sleep the “sleep of grief.” 

Because our eyes grow dim and the sleep of doubt creeps back, we return here week after week to hear transfiguration stories from scripture and each other.  We come to help each other interpret what we have seen and heard.  We help each other see Jesus among us, if you will.

Anne Lamott may be our most irreverent writer on reverent themes.   She told why she made her fourteen-year-old son Sam go to church.  (One reason is that she can make him.  She outweighs him by nearly seventy-five pounds.)  “But that is only part of it,” she says.  “The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by.   Most of the people I know who have what I want – which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, joy – are people with a deep sense of spirituality.  They are people in community… They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle… Our funky little church is filled people who are working for peace and freedom, who are out there on the streets and inside praying, and they are home writing letters, and they are at the shelters with giant platters of food.”²  Lamott wants her son to see Jesus, and she sees him in that mostly African American Presbyterian Church in Marin County.

There’s another thing we can learn from the transfiguration story.  It helps us recognize where Jesus is now.  Because, you see, this story leads inexorably to the climax of the Jesus story – when he died on the cross.  When God does something to change us and our community and the world itself, that something has the stamp of the cross on it.  There is dying and rising, death and life when God acts. 

I want to share with you a paragraph I acquired a few years ago from a former pastor of this congregation, Melinda Wagner.  It’s a packed paragraph, written by Walter Wink.  Listen to it carefully.  It captures the death and life shape of Jesus’ presence with us.

“Transfiguration is living by vision: standing foursquare in the midst of a broken, tortured, oppressed, starving, dehumanizing reality, yet seeing the invisible, calling to it to come, behaving as if it is on the way, sustained by elements of it that have come already, within and among us.  In those moments when people are healed, transformed, freed from addictions, obsessions, destructiveness, self worship or when groups or communities or even, rarely, whole nations glimpse the light of the transcendent in their midst, there the New Creation has come upon us.  The world for one brief moment is transfigured.  The beyond shines in our midst – on the way to the cross.”³

Conversations about immigration that have been taking place here recently on Sunday mornings evoked memories of stories I heard from my own immigrant parents.  Some were dying and rising stories, truly experiences of grace.  As when my mother at the age of nineteen left behind her family in Europe and came by herself to this country.  She knew no English.  She was alone and vulnerable.  She passed through Ellis Island and boarded the train for the long trip to the west coast.  She bought a sandwich on the train, and sensed from the change she received that she was being cheated.  But she lacked the words to challenge the cheat.  That’s when a bilingual man stepped forward and secured her rightful change.  Someone cared.  My mother saw it as a grace moment.  And never forgot it.

Is Jesus really present in such moments, whether ordinary or extraordinary?  Of course I cannot prove it.  To try would be to succumb to the idolatry of the provable fact.  It is only with the eyes of faith that sometimes I can catch a glimpse of the beyond in the here and now.  And when that happens I believe it is, as St. Paul maintains in the second reading, the Spirit causing the glory of God to be reflected in people around us. 

And today I’m especially aware of one of those glimpses, for it was 43 years ago today that Shirley gave birth to our first born.  The awe of the divine in that moment perhaps has been equaled, but never surpassed.  And if you’ve had the privilege being a parent, you might tell a similar story.  Our daughter was and remains a gift of God and a sign of God’s presence. 

Peter, John and James saw Jesus with clarity on the mountain so that they could understand the unfolding of his life in the valley, and mirror it in their own lives.  Consider our gathering around the word and the table our trip to the mountain.  May you catch more glimpses this week.  And may someone see Jesus in you.

¹ Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, p. 165

²  Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, New York: Anchor Books, 1999, page 100

³  Walter Wink, Interpretation (no citation given), distributed by Pr. Melinda Wagner at the Albuquerque Lutheran Clergy text study, 2001