Sermon: Of Rocks and Radiance

Transfiguration Sunday    021912

2 Corinthians 4:3-6, Mark 9:2-9

Of Rocks and Radiance

By Rich Gamble

When I was a teenager, I felt the real presence of God in my life. I didn’t pray so much as converse with the divine and in that context of regular communication, things happened that made me feel as if I was involved in an exchange of ideas and not just a monologue. It was a simplistic relationship with God, the simplicity of a child.

I remember one night I got a call from a friend who was really upset and needed someone to talk to. Unfortunately it was the night before a big test and I always waited until the night before to prepare for tests. I had a choice. Turn down my friend in need and do well on the test or help my friend and do poorly on the test. What would Jesus do? I asked myself.

“OK God, I said, I’m going to help my friend because I think that is what you are calling me to do. I’m going to leave my test scores in your hands.”

I went to see my friend and didn’t get back home until late. Frazzled, tired, I was unable to study and so I went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning the world was covered in snow. While I slept a snowstorm descended on St. Louis and paralyzed the city. Classes were cancelled at my school and I felt the hand of God. Now it takes a pretty naïve kid or a pretty large ego to think that a snowstorm effecting millions of lives was caused by God to help one kid on a test. But I knew it was the hand of God.

Since then, I have spent time with hundreds of people in crisis, some losing their homes, some losing loved ones, some dying themselves. I have talked with people who were suicidal, and led memorial services for loved ones and teenagers who have killed themselves. I have unsuccessfully struggled to stop wars, end homelessness and open the eyes and the hearts of a nation that seems to care more about reality show idols than the real people living on the streets around them. Sometimes it is hard to remember the wonder of that relationship with the divine that my child-self knew.

The transfiguration story is just that, the in-breaking of wonder into the story of Jesus. Mark’s gospel has 16 chapters. In the center of the story, Peter calls Jesus Messiah, or in the Greek: Christ. It is a title with a lot of baggage that Jesus doesn’t want to carry. As a remedy against the domination based expectations of the masses towards a messiah, Jesus talks about the coming suffering he is going to experience in Jerusalem. From that confession of Peter, Mark’s Gospel sets its eyes on Jerusalem and the inevitable deadly confrontation with the Powers that Be.

Along the way, in the midst of the three predictions of his suffering and death by Jesus, we have this story, in which Jesus asks the inner circle of three disciples to join him and climbs a hill. Mark’s Gospel has some special effects but largely it is a story of Jesus healing sick people, Jesus arguing with religious leaders, and Jesus trying to teach some very dense disciples. It is a story with blood and mucus and lepers all of which were signs of ritual impurity to Mark’s Jewish readers, to us it speaks of the modern notion of impurity: germs and dirt. In short it is a story filled with the stuff of life: conflict, spit, sickness, and suffering.

But along the way, Jesus and three disciples climb a hill and for a moment everything changes. The mundane becomes numinous. Jesus’ clothes become radiantly white, and he is surrounded by the long dead Moses and Elijah (note it is not David and Solomon who appear with Jesus, the path of Jesus is not that of domination based kings but of liberation based prophets). Jesus in whiter that white clothes and the prophetic figures in consultation with Jesus, it was all fairly amazing, so much so that Peter wanted to pile up some rocks and make a monument but Mark apologizes for this embarrassing reaction to the mystical, saying that Peter didn’t know what he was saying because he was terrified.

Then the crescendo comes with no less than the voice of God pouring down from a cloud, saying to the disciples, “this is my son, listen to him.”

And then its over, like a freak summer hail storm, the mystical moment passes and Jesus is Jesus once more and they march back down the mountain, back to the work and struggle.

The letter from Paul speaks to a community of people working and struggling. Paul places their work in the context of a mystical struggle between the “god of this world” and the god of Christ. Yes the message of Christ, the message of agape love as being the center of our notions of family, community, politics, economics and religion is a light to the world. But try to describe light to people who were born blind. The god of this world, Paul says has blinded the minds of people who are perishing.

Look at all the suffering we cause ourselves and others because our minds are not open to luminous and numinous reality all around us. Blinded by the glare of media, shrouded in the fog of fear, desperately seeking to fill the hole in our hearts with the stuff in our hands we are unable to see the light of life.

Mark’s mountain top story is a moment when the everyday work of Jesus is shown for the mystical experience that it really is. Like that moment when my child self saw beyond the accumulation of frozen precipitation to the wonder of the presence of a loving God. 

Had I stayed home and avoided my friend, the snow may still have come, but instead of coming as a benediction it would have come as an indictment. Had the three disciples begged off of climbing a hill, the transfiguration may still have happened but they would have never seen it. If we do not place ourselves outside of fearful self-interest and on the path of costly compassion, then we will miss the radiance around us. It is there, in the muck and the mucus, the blood and the suffering, the conflict and commotion, the Holy radiates love and peace.

As my child self believed, so I believe still, God waits to enlighten, inspire and trip us up. God calls us to places of pain, and conflict and laughter and grace. God awaits us in the mundane and the messy, and in the indescribable beauty of a maple’s leaf or a child’s laugh.

This place is not a monument to a past event but a place to pause in the midst of struggle, to center ourselves on the wonder that shines forth around us. Just as Peter could not lock the transcendent in place with his monuments, we cannot lock the wonder of God in a place like this. To do so would be idolatry.

The wonder is all around us, travels with us, is in us if we can but see it. This time may not be any more sacred than any other, and indeed there is no light here if the path from here does not lead to the challenging and costly work of reshaping the world in the name of compassion and justice. But if we embark on that path, if we strive with our lives to embody the love of God, then this, or any moment may be filled with the light of the Divine.

Coming down from the hilltop Jesus is greeted by people in need. The work continued. The march towards the painful and grace-filled collision with the Powers of Jerusalem continued. But I can’t help but believe that the disciples who climbed the mountain came down different people. The Gospel shows us that they didn’t act any differently at first. It took time for the wonder to set in.

That is my hope for these hours we spend in this sacred space; that by coming together and centering ourselves in the wonder of God’s dream for our lives that we may slowly be transformed by God’s dream, into God’s dream.

The disciples could not linger on the hill, could not build monuments. The monuments to God’s love are lives lived sharing that love with friends and strangers and enemies. God waits for us, waits to break through our fears and needs, waits to beckon us to a new reality hidden by the “god of this world.” God waits to fill our lives with purpose and meaning, hope and joy. God waits on mountain tops and in cardboard hovels and occasionally even in places like this. And that is good news.