“(Trans)Figuring
It Out”
Mark
9:2-9
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February
22, 2009
The Transfiguration of the Lord
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I
want to amend just a little bit a question once posed by poet Robert Browning
when he asked
Ah, a man’s reach should
exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
I want us to figure out this morning what a religion is for. Why are
we religious? Why
do we come to worship week after week? An
article in Time Magazine this week claimed that it has been shown
scientifically that people who attend church regularly live on average at least
two or three years longer than those who do not.
But that rationale for religion seems a tad selfish.
The first
sermon Jesus ever preached was also his briefest. But it offers an
inspired answer to the question of the purpose of religion. Jesus, coming
back from his Spirit-driven retreat into the wilderness prior to the beginning
of his public ministry, distilled what he had learned over forty days and forty
nights into a single sentence: “The time is here and the reign of God has come
near; repent and believe in the gospel.”
The word repent is not in
itself a religious word. To repent
means to change your mind about something, your outlook, your perspective.
For instance:
With each succeeding loss last
fall, Bills’ fans repented of their early-season hysteria.
Sometimes
we think the word repent means to be
sorry for something. It does not.
Bills fans might have been sorry for investing grandiose hopes in what
turned out to be a mediocre team, but they repented
when they changed their minds and their outlook about the team’s ability.
Jesus
claimed that the truth about God and life and how to live as a human being in
the world is to be found in the gospel that he was bringing to life.
So people, he said, needed to repent
of other ultimate allegiances and anything that would keep them from believing
and trusting the gospel of God that he was unveiling.
A
word about the word believe:
the Greek word, Greek being the original language of the New Testament, the
Greek word that in English is translated as believe
or believing is not something we
do primarily with our intellect. It
is what we do in the acts and actions
of our lives because of what or whom
we most trust.
So Jesus, right at the outset of his ministry, gives us insight into the
purpose and role of religion. Religion
is for changing our minds about living in any way other than that which is
consonant with the gospel. (Let
me add as an important aside that other great world religions may well use
different terminologies, but, the more I learn about other religions, the more I
envision a great underground river into which a variety of wells are dug, but
they all draw from the same living water, the same divine wisdom, the same
universal and eternal gospel. So,
whereas, for instance, the Tao Te Ching that
we read in our Aging and Saging Group does not speak of the gospel per se, I
find all through it the same mind and spirit that was in Christ.)
According
to scripture, one of the most important of all religious rituals is that of
keeping a Sabbath. Why?
Well, for one reason, when we do not take a weekly sabbatical from what
we normally do in our lives, fatigue and weariness set in.
When that happens, it is not only us ourselves who suffer but everyone
around us. It is when we are tired
– physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually – that G. K. Chesterton
says we kick the cat. But, God also
painted Sabbath into the creation to presage the equality between rich and poor
that will be a sign of the reign of God fully realized.
Sabbath allows those who serve the beck and call of the privileged to
stand on equal footing at least one day a week as typical power delineations of
economic or social strata are suspended. God
built Sabbath into life’s design so that we could and would, at least weekly,
reflect on the meaning of our lives and assess how our lives line up in relation
to God’s intentions for us to live justly, kindly, and humbly.
Finally, Sabbath keeping encourages us, weekly, to ask ourselves, “What
changes are being asked of me at this time?” Or, for larger groups like
the church, “What changes are being
asked of us?”
I
think something like that is what happened at the transfiguration of Jesus.
Jesus had taken his most intimate disciples – Peter, James, and John
– away on a short sabbatical to help them to see the role and purpose of
religion. Joan
Chittister calls it the struggle between religion for show and religion for
real. In the religious
literature of many of the world’s cultures of that time, including Hebrew
culture, mountains were thought to be places where humanity commingled with
divinity. Sure enough, the disciples
got to see Jesus in a new way. They
literally were “enlightened” by Jesus who was resplendent with the illuminating
glory of God and seen in the mystical presence of Moses and Elijah, major
prophets who had called on
Peter
got so caught up in the spiritual ecstasy of the moment that he wanted to settle
in and hunker down with these three luminaries.
He wanted to bask in the light of their celebrity and his insider status.
He wanted his spiritual experience to
last. But in the middle of his
reverie, he and James and John heard the divine voice seeming to speak out of an
overshadowing cloud, “This is my Son,
the Beloved; listen to him.” And
what Jesus said to them was, “We are
going back down the mountain. We are
going back down the mountain not to engage in religion for show but in religion
for real. We are going down the
mountain to the people who need us, who need God, who need the gospel to be
championed and lived on their behalf.”
There have been so many Sundays in this room when I have felt as if I was
on the mountain of transfiguration, when the presence of God or Christ or Spirit
bedazzled me like Jesus bedazzled Peter, James, and John.
It doesn’t always happen. Sometimes
I leave here and the morning has seemed as flat as a pancake to me.
But there have been many more times when God’s presence has been as
palpable to me as my beating heart and I have been, like
Go
down. Bend down.
Step down. That is one of the
reasons why I want our young people to go down to the third world as it is found
on the Arizona/Mexico border on our mission trip this year.
I want to balance out the unrelenting call in their lives to reach ever
higher, to score higher, to achieve higher, to climb always higher
and higher and higher whatever ladders they encounter in their lives.
I want them to remember that Jesus bent down to wash the feet of
his disciples. I want them to
remember that “Jesus did not count
equality with God a thing to be grasped, but stepped down, taking the form of a servant, and humbled himself,
and became obedient to the gospel, even to the point of death.”
I want them to have the experience of (trans)figuring out that while
religion for show is often found at the top of the mountain, religion for real
is found at the bottom of it. I want
them to have the chance of (trans)figuring it out that the bliss of the
mountaintop may soothe their souls but
it is as they stoop to live the gospel of God in the tumble and tumult at the
bottom of the mountain, in the valley of real life, that they will save their souls and soften
their hearts and, in the power of God’s Spirit, make themselves more fit for
living as children of God.
I wonder if you know how high the cost of preaching can be to the
preacher.
For much of the past year, I have been irritated and agitated by the fact
that Kim and Emily brought a young man into our family life that they have known
from the school where Kim teaches and where Emily had been a student.
This young man had been abandoned by his mother when he was a little
child and deposited on the steps of a man, perhaps his father, who really did
not want him either. They shared a
hovel of a trailer but not much else. The
father gave this young man little emotional support, provided only minimal
means, and when he came to his eighteenth birthday, the young man was expelled
from the house and told to fend for himself, that he no longer had a home.
While the boy was immensely intelligent, he had few social graces and in
many ways was lost in the world. One
thing led to another and before I really realized it, this young man had become
a part of our family, living in our house whenever college is not in session.
I
protested. I groused.
I grumbled. And though these
words indicate past tense, my hardened heart has remained.
I should have had more say in such a big decision.
I have raised my children and I have other things in mind for my life
now. I crave the solitude and
sanctuary of my home. I do not want
the added expense of another person because I want to save my money (perhaps for
a home on a mountaintop somewhere, or maybe a beach)!
I like this time in my life when I can without many family
responsibilities gravitate to my study and think my theological thoughts and
maybe do some writing about them and…
and
then I come to a Sunday morning like this one and I have to preach and I am told
in the scripture of the day to “listen
to Jesus” and what I hear is a voice saying to me, “Go down, Tom. Go down
from your high mountain (and your high horse).
Go down from your high mountain where you bask in your lofty theology
into the valley of real life and live it.”
I wonder if you know how high the cost of preaching can be to the
preacher.
Are
there any places in your life that you
need to see in the transfigured light of Jesus and his gospel?
Any places where you need for the sake of your own soul and for the well-being of the
community around you, to hear the voice of the Lord saying, “Go
down. Go down from the mountain of
hubris into the valley of humanity and take the gospel with you.
Go down from the mountain of privilege into the valley of the
Beatitudes”?
“In
the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me…”
That’s
what a religion is for. Glory,
glory, hallelujah!
Amen.
©
Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church