Transfigured with Fear

Excuse the silly picture!  I had the choir (along with myself and the music director) wear sunglasses during the children's sermon to celebrate Transfiguration Sunday and can't resist this image.  (Source here.)

March 2, 2014 (Transfiguration of the Lord Sunday)

Matthew 17:1-9

¹Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. ²And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. ³Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. ⁴Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” ⁵While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” ⁶When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear ⁷But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” ⁸And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

⁹As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Sermon:

The sky is blue, and so is the carpet.  If someone hands you a glass of tea in North Carolina, it’ll be sweet.  If they serve you barbecue, it’ll be pork.  The sun will set tonight, and rise tomorrow.  If you’re around me for five minutes, you’re going to hear ‘y’all’ escape from my lips, (y’all).  Duke and Carolina fans will always be at odds, even if they live in the same house.  Food at Juanita’s house will always be delicious.  If I say “the Word of the Lord” after a scripture reading, you’re going to say… “Thanks be to God.” 

We like certainties.  They bring not just security, but also comfort.  In a world where everything seems to change so quickly that your phone is obsolete before you even take it out of the box, it’s nice to know that some things stay the same.  This love of certainty bleeds into our faith too, of course.  We like to tell the same stories over and over again, you see.  God created everything out of nothing, and we’re made in God’s image.  God chose a covenant people, freed them from slavery, and when they turned from God in sinfulness, God called them back with prophets. 

Jesus was born, The Word-Made-Flesh, and his too-short life was one of healing, challenge and forgiveness.  He died for our sins, and he rose again to defeat sin and death, once for all.  He’ll come again, but in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is both our comfort and discomfort, helping us figure out what it means to “be church” just as those early Christians did so very long ago.  This is the story of our faith: our certainty.

But can anyone remember what I talked about at our recent Congregational Meeting?  We heard about Peter walking on water, and then sinking with fear, and I shared Anne Lamott’s idea that the opposite of faith is not doubt.  What was its opposite?  Certainty.  We named a lot of certainties at that meeting that can sink us as individuals and as a church, keeping us from stepping out in faith. 

But if certainty is the opposite of faith, how can we still hold onto those stories that are the core of our identity as Christians?  Is certainty sinful?

Well, the snarky young adult answer is, of course, it depends.  Sometimes certainty is the life preserver that keeps your head above water when all around you is dark, swirling chaos.  And sometimes certainty is a chain on your ankle, pulling you down and keeping you from filling your lungs with the new breath of the Spirit you desperately need.

The same sinking Peter we talked about in our congregational meeting shows up in today’s reading from Matthew.  And his same fear is here as well.  Here’s how this shiny Jesus story (which we like to call the ‘transfiguration’) went down:

Jesus invites Peter, James and John for a camping trip.  Pete of course is the most excited in the bunch, ready to earn his Mountaintop with My Messiah Badge, and has his swiss army knife and canteen ready to go.  After a long journey up, up, up, they make it to the top.  While Pete practices his knots and tries to scope out the closest source of water, something happens that means he won’t be earning his Campfire Making Badge after all.  A blinding light shines in the corner of his eye, and he glances up to see Jesus shining like a disco ball.  And then, speechless (for once), he sees Moses and Elijah standing with him, also shining like Clark Griswold’s yard at Christmas. 

Pete, ever the boy scout, responds quite naturally with, “Tents!  Yes, tents!  Hey, Jesus, wanna see my tent-pitching skills (I did earn that Badge after all)??  I can pitch three, one for each of you, because, er, you’re sort of hurting my eyes a bit.  It might be better if you were inside a tent.” 

But just as he begins explaining the best locations for each tent, he gets interrupted.  By a cloud.  And a voice.  Okay, this camping trip was starting to get really weird.  The voice says, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I’m well pleased; listen to him.” 

Pete, James and John are so terrified they fall over.  (Which is what happens a lot in the Bible when people got scared, by the way.  Boo!  Then…boom. Flat on their faces.)  And then, just like that, as quickly as it came, the whole blinding business is over. 

Jesus is all by his lonesome again, looking as scruffy and ordinary as usual.  Jesus helps them up from that rocky ground, dusts them off and says, “Don’t be afraid.  Let’s go.” 

He starts down the mountain.  In their stunned state, they follow after him.  Pete is so shaken up he doesn’t even look for the trail signals he’d left on the way up (to earn his Trail Marking Badge).  “Don’t tell anyone, they won’t understand yet.” Jesus says as they walk.  And that was all he ever said about that transfiguration moment.  No explanation, no Transfiguration Badges (much to Pete’s chagrin), just a bunch of hurting people to tend to and good news to share.  In other words, a whole lotta light and glory, and very little certainty.

Perhaps that’s what the moments that shape our faith are, actually.  A whole lot of light and glory, clouded in very little certainty.  Barbara Brown Taylor explains this well:

“What if the point is not to decode the cloud but to enter into it?  What if the whole Bible is less a book of certainties than it is a book of encounters, in which a staggeringly long parade of people run into God, each other, life--and are never the same again?  I mean, what don't people run into in the Bible?  Not just terrifying clouds and hair-raising voices but also crazy relatives, persistent infertility, armed enemies, and deep depression, along with life-saving strangers, miraculous children, food in the wilderness, and knee-wobbling love…

Certainties can become casualties in these encounters, or at least those certainties that involve clinging to static notions of who's who and what's what, where you are going in your life and why.  Those things can shift pretty dramatically inside the cloud of unknowing, where faith has more to do with staying fully present to what is happening right in front of you than with being certain of what it all means.  The meeting--that's the thing.”

The meeting.  Not the badge or approval earned.  Not the three-point-theologically sound explanation for the encounter.  Just the meeting.  Just that moment when in a way you’ll probably never understand, God’s glory is as real as the person standing in front of you, or the friend wiping away the tears you didn’t mean to cry, or the kindness you would never expect in the eyes of a stranger.  Transfiguring moments.

Transfiguration in this story of Matthew is metamorphothe in the Greek: metamorphosis.  And that means change.  And change means (deep point here): things won’t stay the same.  Perhaps that is a certainty we can cling to as people of faith that won’t sink us. 

Change will happen: jobs will be lost and gained, retirements will be embarked upon and somehow navigated into the unknown of open-ended time.  People we thought would live forever don’t, and babies will be born and change every single day as they grow up. 

The church will be called to understand love of God and neighbor in ways that are scary and challenging as it seeks to be relevant in a world that already labels it as irrelevant.  Pulpits that used to only be filled by older men will find themselves filled with younger women like me.  Change will happen. 

Perhaps this is why Jesus so immediately led Peter, John and James down that mountain.  He knew that if he waited, if he hesitated for even a second, they would plant their feet in that moment of basking in glory and never want to leave.  For change is rarely something we desire.  But it is what we need: transfiguring change.  And it is God’s gift to us.

We can choose to fear it, and instead sit down on that mountaintop experience, clinging to past glory, refusing to budge and refusing to go down to where the people who need us are, allowing certainty to incubate us from the real world. 

Or we can remember that we follow a Savior who dragged half-dazed disciples down that mountain immediately, because there was work to do.  There were people to meet with – and who knows?  Maybe some of those meetings would transfigure their prejudices and fears with a brilliant love that could never be dimmed. 

Because the glory isn’t really in the going up the mountain, it’s in the coming down again, entering into the cloud of unknowing as we enter into the lives of others, lives that are every bit as fearful as ours and every bit as desperate for God’s Light, even (and perhaps especially) if it changes us. 

Fear is easy.  It comes as naturally as breathing.  But, for a change, let’s not.  Let’s go down the mountain into a world in need where our Savior is already at work, shining with love, and constantly, constantly saying those words we can cling to with faithful certainty: “Do not be afraid.  Let’s go.”  Amen.