I love Transfiguration Sunday – but it’s so early this year! Two great texts, or three if you dig the Epistle more than I do!
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Kings 2:1-12. I love Elisha’s dogged loyalty: not “I will not leave you,”
but “As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you.” The
stuff of oaths, not just determination. The “company of prophets who were in
Bethel” know Elijah is almost gone. Elisha knows too – but urges them to “keep
silent,” as if by not talking about it, it just might be delayed, or not happen
at all.
A 2nd oath from Elisha in verse 4.
These 2 are travelling fair distances – and we get the feel Elijah is trying to
shed himself of Elisha. A 3rd oath, and more pleading for silence.
Elijah parts the water with his mantle. What’s
in that fabric?!? The exodus and the entry into the land reiterated; the
magical miracle revived – just for such a small number this time! Is that how
Bible power works? A grand miracle, then it manifests itself where two or three
are gathered?
Elisha, feeling meager, and understandably
so, boldly asks for a “double share of your spirit.” And then the chariot of
fire, horses of fire, too. And Elijah is swooped up into heaven on a mighty
whirlwind. And then Elisha mourned.
Hard for me not to think of Sam with Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. Frodo, at the end of the 1st movie, says, “Go back, Sam. I’m going to Mordor alone!” “Of course you are,” responds Sam, “and I’m coming with you!” He plunges into the river, gets in over his head and almost drowns before Frodo pulls him into the boat. Once Sam catches his breath, he explains: “I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee, and I don’t mean to.”
The mantle is intriguing; Gandalf rather unwisely left the course of affairs in Middle-earth to the diminutive, fun-loving, timid Hobbits. “Despair, or folly?” said Gandalf. “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!”
I think of Roland Murphy, the Carmelite Old Testament scholar who was my dissertation adviser and lifelong mentor. He shared a lot of wisdom with me; I never made an important decision without exploring things with him. But he did not, as he could not, vouchsafe to me what his dying moments were like, or what he saw when the door of this life closed and he took the first step of his journey into . . . we do not know. He died on the feast day of Elijah—fitting for a Carmelite, and a Hebrew Bible guy! Were there chariots or some dimly lit, beautiful silence? We trust, perhaps because we harbor in our souls some mysterious confidence that all must be well with someone who lived so well and loved us so well.
Like the bush in Exodus 3, the fire of the horses and chariot here are not consumed – and do not consume Elijah! The film, Chariots of Fire, ruminates on the lives of Eric Liddell, a Christian who runs for God’s glory, and Harold Abrahams, a Jew running to defeat prejudice. With Liddell in particular, the clash of his simple, holy commitments to God with the world might seem old-fashioned, but sometimes it’s the old-timey story that awakens us to the craziness of our own world.
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Corinthians 4:3-6. Important for the anxious preacher, or the popular
preacher: “We do not proclaim ourselves.” Church people don’t exist to render a
positive verdict on my self worth. I won’t preach on this Epistle, but I will
take it in my pocket on Sunday to recall it’s not about me.
Mark 9:2-9. When I try to wave my magic wand over the world of homiletics, the Transfiguration is the first text I point to – as it is the prime example of the understandable but deeply flawed way even well-meaning preachers take a text that is most clearly about God, and try to turn it into something about us. In my preaching book, The Beauty of the Word (my book, not about how to preach, but how to continue preaching!), I explain how so many texts are about how amazing God is – and it’s sufficient just to ponder the amazingness of God in the sermon! But we have to make it about us, our faith, our to-dos, our doubts, our serving… and then we struggle and wind up botching things.
With the Transfiguration, I’ve read and heard so many sermons like a few I tried when I was young – with some ridiculous attempt at “Okay, you have a mountaintop experience, and then you go back down into the real world…” All 3 Synoptic versions of this moment have as their “point” the simple fact that Jesus is amazing, someone to be worshipped, gawked at, and the only takeaway is to be lost in wonder, love and praise. Mark shows us the way the plodding disciples tried what preachers try: Lord, let us do something. Let us build three booths! Mark’s comment reveals a kind of mercy on them, and on us: “For they did not know what to say.” Indeed. Like the preacher coping with this text, too marvelous for mere words.
What the preacher knows to say is that Jesus quite shockingly started glowing, shining; the Greek means literally metamorphosized. He shimmered. No ordinary guy, this Jesus; we get a preliminary peek into his eternal glory. The only conceivable responses are recorded in Scripture. In Mark, Peter does offer the greatest understatement in religious history: “It is good that we are here.” Matthew 17:10 is even better: “And they fell on their faces in awe.” Praise. Awe. Studies show a mood of awe alleviates much anxiety. Maybe instead of fixating on me and my troubles, I train my soul to fixate upon the wonder that is God – and I’ll get better. And the Church might really be the Church.
Jesus
was on a mountain - where amazing Bible things happen. Mountains, especially
huge, craggy, ice-capped ones, like in Switzerland, are what philosophers point
to as distinguishing "beautiful" from "sublime." The
"sublime" has a rougher, if impossible accessibility. It's beautiful,
but scary, a bit - and you can't just clamber up to the top. There's some
peril, risk - maybe like God...
There's an echo in Jesus' transfiguration in Mark 9 of his even greater
metamorphosis. The cloud "overshadowed" them (v. 7) - the same verb (episkiazousa) used of what happened to
Mary when Jesus was conceived (Luke 1:35). This overshadowed one gave birth to
God's "beloved Son," so announced at the opening of his ministry (at
the Baptism), and now as we move into the final act of Mark's plot. All 3
moments embody what Paul wrote in Philippians 2: "Though in the form of
God, he emptied himself." That is the metamorphosis - seen sort of in reverse
in the Transfiguration! And then his risen body too, of course...
I
want to preach the sermon that simply causes me and my people to say “Surely
the presence of the Lord is in this place – and it is good that we are here,”
or that would make me and them simply blush in awe. This sermon won’t
attempt to resolve any personal or societal dilemmas, it won’t allow notes to
be taken to put into practice on Tuesday morning, it doesn’t even try to get me
to do anything but observe a bit of a sabbath from doing things like building
booths or even being religious, and simply let my jaw drop over how cool, how
very different and glorious this Jesus is.
I
have attempted this myself a few times in sermons. Mind you, the material
extolling the beauty and glory of Jesus is plentiful. The birth, the
incarnation – God becoming small to show us God’s heart. Wow. Jesus’
words, his holiness, the people he touched, the marvel of his healing. The
temptation narrative (another one we botch by making it about how we overcome
temptation): we see Jesus achieving what you and I wouldn’t have a prayer of
doing – resisting the devil’s seductive allure. His suffering in silence,
his compassion on the soldiers who just nailed him up, his tenderness toward a
thief, his love for his mother. “What wondrous love is this?”
Am I
veering from Mark 9? I don’t mind if I do – but the timing of Mark 9
invites this very speculation: Jesus has just asked the disciples about his
identity, and he has just explained his vocation to go to Jerusalem, suffer and
die, despite the strenuous objections of those who knew him
best. Jesus. His resurrection, and ascension. Gee,
I’m going to need a heckuva lot of time to explore “Fairest Lord Jesus,
Beautiful Savior.”
The
only remote takeaways might be two: first, to try to do the awe thing every
day… and then second, as the voice from heaven (which echoes the voice at
Jesus’ baptism) quite sensible suggests, “Listen to him.” Yeah, the guy who
glowed, the one who is God and who healed and touched the untouchables and gave
his life? Listen to this guy and not all the other pretenders who’ve frankly
never glowed for a nanosecond.
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