From Transfiguration to Eternity

2-23-20

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

It is good to be able to experience something just a little bit out of the ordinary, isn’t it? For example, a few weeks ago I took some time out of my regular schedule to spend an entire week reading all the books that has I had wanted to catch up on for the last few months but haven’t had a chance to. But one thing I did not expect to receive alongside knowledge and insight – a sore back from all that sitting. I have no idea how I did this college and seminary!

That week I got to “spend time” in a Religion 101 classroom with Barbara Brown Taylor. I dove into the life and wisdom of Rozella Haydee White, a speaker I had heard for the first time during the 2015 national youth gathering in Detroit. I read a memoir of a Latina Lutheran woven with the stories of immigrants and refugees in the Bible. I dug into how to cultivate a culture of generosity in congregations. I even traveled the world with mortician and death researcher Caitlyn Doughty as she explored death rituals in other countries. 

In one chapter of this particular book, called “From Here to Eternity” Doughty she wrote about her visit to a Buddhist columbarium in Japan called Ruriden, which is very surprising by our standards. The columbarium (a place where cremains are laid to rest) is a room full of thousands of niches containing tiny buddha statues all the way around. When a family comes to visit, using a swipe card coded to the location of their loved one’s remains, the tiny Buddha figurines begin to glow violet, and the Buddha figure that contains your loved one’s ashes shimmers with a bright white light. It may seem strange to us, but to the people of Japan, this is a deeply meaningful part of how they honor the people they love who have died.

The transfiguration story and Transfiguration Sunday is a strange little holiday in the church year…it sneaks up on us out of nowhere and puzzles preachers and church goers alike. But this story – and this Sunday - serves a very specific purpose. It is the space that separates the season after Epiphany and the season of Lent. It is the hinge that connects Jesus’ baptism and Jesus’ death. It is the liminal space – the “thin place” - the changes the course of Jesus’s journey and prepares him for what is to come. It is the mountaintop experience that catches the disciples, and us, off guard, and makes us wonder what we signed up for. It stops us in our tracks and interrupts our “regularly scheduled daily lives.”

As a friend of mine recently reflected, “How many of us go through our lives just going through our lives?” And yet, every so often, we all experience something like the joy and fear of a mountain top/ life changing moment. Sometimes they are sudden and come upon us unexpectedly – a surprise diagnosis, a shocking job opportunity, nearly missing a fender bender, or an accidental meeting that changed your life. For example, the morning I opened the email on Ash Wednesday 2017 to find out that I was in the top 10 in an international preaching contest that I had forgotten that I entered was one such moment.

Other transformational moments mark the hinge moments between important life stages, between two different states of life that we have been preparing for in one way or another, for months or even years:

Engagement - Wedding day – marriage

 School – graduation – “real life”/job

Pregnancy – birth – life

Pre-baptism – baptism – following Jesus as a disciple. (You get the picture)

The transfiguration of Jesus is the hinge moment in his ministry – setting him on the path toward Jerusalem, and his death on the cross. Similarly, Transfiguration Sunday is the hinge between the season after Epiphany, and the season of Lent.

Peter’s problem is that he wanted to live in this “hinge moment” up there with Jesus, Elijah and Moses on the mountain. The longer they stay up there, the longer they put off facing the whole “death of the son of man” thing. But we can’t live on the mountain top or in those transitional moments for ever. As wonderful as your wedding day might have been, can you imagine how stressful that would be to live every day in that kind of intensity? You would never go around your daily business wearing your graduation cap and gown. After your diploma is in your hand, you get to work putting what you’ve learned into practice.

After God had affirmed Jesus, using the same words as God did during Jesus’s baptism (though adding “listen to him” as an addendum), and the disciples had seen Jesus in his glory, consulting with two of the most revered prophets of all time, Jesus and his disciples had to come down the mountain.  They had to return to real life. Though the life they then returned to would never be the same again. This surprising experience is something they carried with them, and eventually made its way to us, to keep surprising us as well. They had seen Jesus through the eyes of God, and they would never be the same.

But that tends to be the case, when we look at others through the eyes of God – if the light of Christ has been given to each of us as we have been baptized, what would happen if we acted like we could see this shining flame ALL the time? What if we intentionally looked at one another, using God Vision? And what if you also saw YOURSELF that way?

One of my favorite books is Lila by Marilynn Robinson. Lila grew up poor and orphaned in the 1930s, and only saw herself through the eyes of those who looked down on her because of things she did to survive. Seemingly and surprisingly by chance, she ends up in a small town in Iowa, and marries the local minister.

On the day that preacher proposed to AND baptized Lila, he remembered the day they met: “I expected to continue with [loneliness] the rest of my life. Then I saw you that morning. I saw your face.” Lila replied, “Don’t’ talk like that. I know about my face.”

But he persisted. “I suspect you don’t. You don’t know how I see it.”

One night during a snowstorm after they were married, the two of them were talking, and Lila’s husband said, “Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.”

Lila, remembering her own baptism, adds, “Baptism is a prayer.”

To that, her husband replied, “No, baptism is what I call a fact.”

Your baptism is a fact. God’s love for you is a fact. God chose you – that’s a fact. As strange as it may sound, the light of Christ shines out in you too – as that light shown in the face of Jesus.

The season of Epiphany may be over, but the light will never be extinguished.  And as we face our own mortality and mark Jesus’ journey to the cross this coming Ash Wednesday, I would dare to say that it is not darkness that we are really afraid of. It’s shining that we fear. We would rather wait in the wings and hide in the cloud – or in three little huts – on the mountain top rather than go down the mountain to shine. But as Marianne Williamson wrote in her poem “Our Deepest Fear:”

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, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.....

We are all meant to shine… 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 other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

And that means, we gotta shine.

This world is a pretty scary place, And it can be even scarier when we go out on a limb and “let our light shine,” especially when what we do or say will be perceived as something that is surprising or shakes up “normal life.”  In those times, we can remember that the light that is within us is not our own - it comes from a source of light that is greater than us. Our light comes from God. God illuminates our way and defeats the powers of evil in this world. In Jesus, God revealed to all people God’s love in the flesh. And that love is given to each of us to shine in the world.

Together, we are able to shine, to rival even the sun in the sky…. Just as Jesus did, both up on that mountain, and in his words and actions, in his life and in his death… and beyond. So, as God says, Listen up! Listen to Jesus - Get up, and do not be afraid. Thanks be to God. Amen.