When Winds Blow

 

Scriptures:     Deuteronomy 11:18, 26-28, Matthew 7:1-9

OK, it’s confession time. I really cringe when on the church calendar Transfiguration or Transformation Sunday shows up. Here we are just four days away from starting our Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday – a time of meaning and renewed purpose and meditation…andjoy, as I said in my Clarion column… and yet on this last Sunday of Epiphany we have to deal with perhaps the most incomprehensible spiritual mystery of the Gospels. The healing miracles, the raising of Lazarus, even the resurrection itself – none are as difficult to explain to the rational 21^st century sensibility as this story of what happens to Jesus and his three disciples there on that “high mountain”. Do any of you want to take this description literally? I thought not. So how do we make sense of it in a way that will help prepare us for the Lenten journey we are about to undertake?

First of all, we should note that liturgically the Transfiguration is a kind of end-note – a parenthesis – here at the end of Epiphany that connects with Jesus’ baptism at the beginning. In both instances God is heard affirming that this is God’s Son, the Beloved, who has all the authority of God. Both the baptism and the Transfiguration are intended to establish for the disciples – and for us – that, as Paul says in Philippians, as we heard last week, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend.” These book-ended stories, then, connect with our other reading from Deuteronomy, wherein God strives to make sure that God’s children understand what it means to “obey the commandments of the Lord your God” – what it means to choose blessings rather than curses.

What is being established through this dazzling appearance and through the presence of Moses and Elijah is the authority of Jesus for our lives – the indisputable fact that here is God’s Son ready to comfort and challenge us. Jesus speaks to the disciples, “Get up and do not be afraid”. His touch is a sign of comfort and healing, and his words reassure that whatever happens next will be in God’s hands, no matter how frightening the circumstances.

Second, we can say along with Peter, “Lord, it is good for us to be here!” This is an important thing to be doing; this is where we ought to be; this is an experience thoroughly to be enjoyed. However, as Audrey West, Associate professor of New Testament at Lutheran School of Theology, says about Peter’s statement: “On top of the mountain, Peter recognizes that Jesus’ dazzling appearance in the presence of Moses and Elijah is significant,… but he does not fully understand what he is seeing. His suggestion to build three booths sounds like an attempt to capture the moment, to preserve it for safekeeping, to domesticate this wild, frightening experience into an everyday, household encounter. One might imagine Peter, jumping up and down with his hand in the air, like an elementary student who is desperate to give the right answer, but who cannot quite get it right because he does not fully understand the question.” West goes on to gently admonish Peter – to gently admonish us: “There are times when it is best to be quiet.”

And that is perhaps the third initial thing to be said about this story: it is an awe-inspiring vision, and in such an instance often the only appropriate response is silence. Out of the silence, then, perhaps – just perhaps – we can hear something that sounds like the voice of God: “This is my Son, the Beloved… listen to him.”

What is happening to Peter and the other two disciples is what we have come to call a kairos moment. You’ve heard me speak about this before. The Greeks had two words for time: chronos, from which we get words like “chronological” – one moment following inexorably after another; but kairos time is something that has a heightened meaning – it is formative in our lives for what happens before and after. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is the kairos moment in world history. Kairos is qualitative time, the appointed time, the crucial time. It is what Mark refers to at the beginning of his gospel when he says, “The time is fulfilled…..”

I hope that each of you can recall something like a kairos moment in your own lives – one that became formative for all of your later years. Perhaps it was at a church camp, like we hope will happen to our young people when they go to Pilgrim Pines. This week’s The Christian Century has an article on “Formative moments” – interviews with seminary professors and presidents about what happened when they were young that set them on their life’s course. Here’s one such example from Amos Yong, now at Regent University School of Divinity in Virginia Beach: “Six hours at a summer church camp altar in 1977 set the trajectory for my life. It was then, at the age of 12, that over the course of three nights I experienced what Pentecostals call the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Responding to the invitation at the end of the evening to receive more of God, my friends and I encountered God in such a palpable way that I think we caught a glimpse of what the Gospel writer said would happen when the Spirit is given and received: ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’…..” (Jn. 7:37) Yong goes on to talk about how this early experience was re-shaped in seminary so “that it was possible to be something that was once considered an oxymoron – a Pentecostal scholar!…..” A kairos moment for Yong – for most of us, hopefully — doesn’t stay static but mutates and changes as we gain more life experiences.

And that was precisely the problem with Peter’s desire to stay on the mountaintop and build tents there: what was happening there was change, and that change needed to move forward into their everyday world. A kairos moment is very much like an epiphany that changes us – which is why it’s appropriate for us to be talking about this on this last day of the Epiphany season. The Greek word which the NRSV translates as “transfigured” comes from a Greek word that gives us the word “metamorphosis.” It means to completely change or transform such as a cocoon transforms into a butterfly or a tulip bulb transforms into a glorious tulip blossom. Jesus is an agent of change. And because this is so we cannot stay on the mountaintop but must follow him into a world of change in order to see where he is leading us.

Sometimes when the wind blows in the valley here it gets really strong, like ready to take your breath away. It was like that a week ago Friday, if you remember. When we were leaving the office you had to hold onto your things. When wind like that blows it seems to auger a sense of change – of something about to happen that either hasn’t happened before…or reminds us of what has happened before. In Mary Poppins, just before Mary arrives on the wind at the Banks’ home, Bert, the chimney-sweep, sings:

“Wind’s in the east, mist comin’ in.
Like something is brewin’ about to begin.
Can’t put me finger on what lies in store,
But I feel what’s to happen, all happened before.”

Winds blow in change. When Mary Poppins leaves the wind turns around again. While our text doesn’t specifically say so, I’ll bet there were some pretty strong winds up on the mountain with Jesus and the disciples. No wonder Peter wanted to erect tents; keep them sheltered while they relished the wonder of Jesus’ dazzling white clothes and the amazement of being together with Moses and Elijah. And we 21^st century followers likewise often want to stay in the transfigured moment, the kairos time. Such a scene is something like how as a child we were mesmerized by the snow swirling around in a snow globe or fireworks on a July 4^th or New Year’s Eve. But as Presbyterian minister Susan Kendall reminds us, “the flakes floating inside the magic globe finally settle on the ground; the fireworks are impossible to capture and keep. So it is with transformation and transfiguration. The elevated moments on the mountain are bound up in the ordinary and the sacred.”

Are words like transfiguration, transformation, metamorphosis too big, too much to describe what we want to have happen in our own lives? Perhaps – which is possibly why I, for one, have such trouble with this story from Matthew. Perhaps a better word, because it speaks to us about the process of change when we accept the risen Christ into our lives, is formation. We used it a moment ago in talking about “formative experiences”. Here’s Lutheran minister Paul Lundborg’s take on how formation can take us down from the mountaintop and into ultimately transformed lives:

“Whenever we gather, we listen repetitively to stories from the Bible, prayers prayed in worship, and hymns we sing or listen to, and the impact of those words chips away at the hard places in our hearts, rounds off the rough edges of our lives, and leads us in a particular direction. Slowly, ever so slowly, sometimes too slowly according to our impatience, we are being shaped in the likeness of Christ, drawn toward the love of God, molded by the Spirit. We slip and fall away and are picked up and returned to the path by loving friends moved by the grace of God, and the process goes on.

“If you are honest with yourself, you may have realized that you don’t always want to be here in church. You probably don’t always appreciate the music, the readings from the Bible, the sermon, the prayers. Maybe you’re hard pressed to recall specific teachings that really excite you. But that’s probably also true of all the meals you’ve eaten in your life. They all blur together with time, but they all work together to keep you nourished, strengthened, and alive.

“You and I are being changed. God is working with us, within us, through us. Certainly, God isn’t done with us yet. We are far from finished products. But let us pray that we will be open to God’s work, desire God’s presence, and need God’s guidance. Today’s story of a mountaintop experience reminds us there are the high moments in our life of faith, but those moments are balanced out by long, dry spells on the plains and prairies of faith. In the midst of our journey we are being changed by the One who knows our name and has called us to follow.”

The story of the transfiguration doesn’t have to be mystical and mysterious and supernatural. It can become a story about us — not that we are to shine like Jesus, but that we are to be transformed in our thinking about Jesus, about his mission and our mission to the world. As Brian Stoffregen of Faith Lutheran Church says, “those who have been transformed…by Jesus know the need to come down from the hill, to be the human presence of Jesus to fearful people — offering the touch of new life to help the cowering to stand tall.” On Wednesday as we begin our Lenten journeys may we find ourselves at the bottom of the mountain, not afraid, as Jesus told his disciples “Get up and do not be afraid”, among those who need our healing touch and our testimony to the wonder of our Lord.

Amen

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 6, 2011