“Keeping It Real”
Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-43
February 18, 2007 – Transfiguration Day

The Rev. Dr. Catherine Taylor

Today is Transfiguration Day, one of those turning points when we veer in a new direction in the church year.  You could argue that everything that has happened in the church year so far was working up to today:  all that waiting in Advent, the celebration of Jesus’ birth at Christmas, and the many small revelations of God’s majesty throughout epiphany have been working their way toward this, the day on a mountaintop when Jesus is seen at least for a moment as his most real self – still human and yet light surrounded, God with us and for us here and now and forever.  Amen.

As soon as it happens it’s over, and we begin the serious journey toward Lent.  The One who is for us is out to save us and that can only happen down the long road to the capital city where a cross stands waiting outside of town. 

The story of the transfiguration is one of the strangest in the Bible; in part because outside of the movies none of us is likely to have seen a person transfigured before.

We’ve seen changes in people.  In college I can remember watching the transformations in the people who came to Duke to take part in the special diet developed there for seriously overweight folks.  Part of their regimen was a daily walk around the wall of East Campus, and when they first started they walked slowly, often stopping to rest, often looking as though they were in pain.

A few weeks later they looked about the same, but they were moving faster, making it around the wall without needing to stop.

After a few months, they were shadows of their former selves, wearing new clothes to go with their new bodies, and some jogging or even running over the ground they once could barely walk.

They were right there in front of you every day, these folks whose names you didn’t know, doing something life-enhancing and hard.  It was dramatic; it was inspiring.  It was transformation and change, but transfiguration is something else again.

Through modern special effects, filmmakers now have the ability to portray instantaneous physical transfigurations for us.  But when they do, almost always the character’s “real” self is revealed to be a worst self, a monster hidden within.  This is the very opposite of the revelation of a glorious shining image of God which our faith says is our truest self.

We’ve seen on the screen all manner of humans revealed to be evil aliens, an angry hulk, humans turned into insect or animal.  The single cinematic example that comes to mind of a character becoming transfigured in the biblical model happens off screen in Lord of the Rings, when Gandolf the Grey is transformed through suffering and triumph into Gandolf the White.  One critic said he looked as though he’d been to a really good salon. The filmmakers did the gospels proud when they shrouded his entrance in a cloud of blinding white light. 

It always seems strange to me when our own Christian story comes back to us in movies or books and people react as if they were encountering the information for the first time.  How strange that our own story has to come back to us in a movie in order for us to see a glimpse of what it might have been like on the mountain when Jesus was transfigured.

The story of the Jesus transfiguration is found in three of the four gospels.  We read it every year and every year the three disciples who witness the moment tremble and gape.  Each year Peter volunteers to make the glory permanent, to keep it high up on the mountain as it were, by building three booths or tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, even though he is so overcome with fear he doesn’t know what he’s saying.

Several features work together in the story to identify Jesus with God’s own majesty. 

The “high mountain” leads back to the stories of Moses’ commission on Mt. Horeb, and the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai.  The sudden and unexplained brightness of Jesus’ clothes recollects God’s agent in the Book of Daniel (7:9) where the Ancient One is depicted in clothing “white as snow.”  It is the whiteness of a light that is not accessible to human beings.  The appearance of Moses and Elijah connects Jesus with Israel’s two most esteemed prophets.  The overshadowing cloud recalls the divine presence in the cloud of the Exodus and at Sinai (Exodus 24:15-18).

Peter, James, and John then are ahead of us when it comes to the history of Israel and the meaning of all this imagery.  But we are about even, I guess – the three disciples on the mountaintop and the rest of us here in the sanctuary – when it comes to comprehending this story.  We all know at least something of what is going on, and perhaps we all wonder just what this amazing revelation might mean for us.

What does it mean to you, living day to day in a world that may not be what you hoped for, what does it mean to you that one day Jesus was transfigured?  That one day Jesus hiked up a mountainside and his clothes turned white, and the prophets of God stood on either side of him while a voice from a cloud declared, “This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him?”

I said earlier we had not seen transfigurations before, but that’s not really so.  If you spend any time with children, you may have seen transfigurations on their faces.  Remember that moment when a child is learning to read, when he or she is struggling to turn the mysterious squiggles on the page into something with meaning?  And that sheer delight that comes into the eyes when      

P U P P Y means a wiggling ball of fur, a wagging tail, and R E D will be the color of valentines and sunsets for the rest of your life? 

There is no going back from moments of revelation like that.  From that point on, the letters have become words with meaning and a permanent change has taken place in the child’s life because what was once just shapes and letters are now sentences and stories and news and essays and understanding, and there’s no going back. 

The disciples on the mountaintop also knew at some level that what they had seen can never be unseen.  Maybe that’s why Peter wants to fix it there and house it.  What has happened up there on the mountaintop was real and perhaps, at some level, he is beginning to see that what we live day to day at present is not permanent.  The sorrow of the present world is what is transitory, not the shining mountaintop moment.

How about you?  Can you fathom that the scene on the mountaintop is what is real, and that what we live day to day at present is the thing that is not permanent?

That doesn’t mean we should live our lives waiting for pie in the sky, ignoring the difficulties we face as members of the human community, unconcerned about justice in the here and now.  In fact, it means the opposite.  It means that we can have the energy and the hope to face the difficulties of the present world no matter how grim, or how painful, or how hard. 

That’s why included in the lectionary for today is the story of what happens at the base of the mountain.  Jesus is confronted by the father of an epileptic child.  The father had sought healing for his son from the disciples, but they were unable to do anything for the boy.  Jesus’ harsh rebuke about the faithless and perverse generation is unsettling.  The biblical scholars who live in the books in my study all sat around with me shaking their heads.  “Who was he talking to,” one of them asked, “The disciples, the crowd, both?”  “It’s a statement about his own suffering,” said another, full of certainty, but everyone in the room looked up at him from the books with my own irritated face. 

So I’m on my own here and this is what I think.  I think Jesus was tired and less than diplomatic, but that what he might have meant was this.  “Good gracious, when are you going to figure out that there is so much you can do?  When are you going to figure out that you are clothed with power, real power, the power to give comfort, the power to listen, the power to pray, the power when things are overwhelming to rest in the promises of God who can break through the clouds at any time and remind us that suffering, while as real as can be, never has the last word, never triumphs, never wins?”

He is disgusted with us because we can’t see the beauty of our own faces, the light that shines out from our own clothes.  Then he turns from his frustration to a suffering child and makes him whole. 

What we are asked to believe is that at certain moments in time, the glory of God is visible.  And that the only real purpose in life is seeking to see that glory.

I heard an interview with an amazing man on Fresh Air a while back, a man who makes it almost easy to believe that what is most real is the power we have for love and reconciliation and healing.  His name is Father Greg Boyle and he works with gangs in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles.  He has worked there for over 20 years.  In his work he has seen things that might make anyone give up hope:  he has buried many teenagers who were victims of gang warfare; he has watched mothers bury not one, but all of their sons in turn; he has sat by beds of shooting victims and beating victims, some of whom never recover.  He says mass in 25 jails.

But he has also started a business that employs ex-gang members.  He did this because kids coming out of prison who are tattooed from head to toe with gang symbols are not exactly what employers have in mind when looking for people to man their counter or their cash register.  So he started a skill-screen t-shirt factory and he employs kids there.  In this factory kids from rival gangs work side by side.  Usually, says Father Boyle, when a kid begins and is told there will be former members of rival gangs at work beside him, the kid will say, “Well, I just won’t talk to them.”  But after a time, and a short time at that, they do begin to talk.  And they get to know each other and the old labels of enemy or rival give way to the name co-worker and sometimes friend. 

The interviewer asked Boyle if he had met kids whom he knew it would be hopeless to try and help.  He said Yes, but every time he thought he’d met a kid he could never reach, he, too, turned out to be someone who wanted a regular life and a home and family and freedom from what he had known in gangs.

She asked him if he talked about the gospel with these kids.  “Not really,” he answered.  “It’s more important to live as if the truth were true, to go where love has not yet arrived, choose to stand with the folks that God chooses to stand with.”

Then he told the story of the desert monks centuries ago who whenever they were greatly distressed or despondent would just repeat one word over and over and over.  “That mantra keeps you here,” he said.  “It keeps you facing the person who is facing you; it keeps you present to God revealed magnificently in front of you.”  The word wasn’t “Jesus;” it wasn’t “love,” Boyle said.  The word was “today.”   AMEN.