February 22, 2009
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany (Year B)
2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6;
Mark 9:2-9
I doubt there is a passage in scripture that I can identify with more than this one, this year especially, this story of the transfiguration. Once again it is Peter’s blundered attempt to preserve the moment, to protect it from the future impinging on it, a future that will change it, maybe even deny it or make the brightness and immediacy of it seem so distant.
Peter, who would make a booth for Jesus and Elijah and Moses to contain them, it is that Peter to whom I relate today. This past year I lost my father, and as I read this story of Peter trying to contain the moment, I recognized myself. How I wish that I could contain moments that held my father and me together, in this life, my father, dancing eyes, always friendly, always ready to catch me when I fell, always steady, always there. Would that there were a booth that could contain those moments the way Peter longed to contain that moment on the mountain top.
This is a year I don’t think it’s just for me, but for many, to relate easily to Peter. We are mourning what was. The experiences we have had on mountaintops loom larger in our minds, seem dearer, than the challenges we face each day now. As I was reading in preparation for this sermon, I came across a passage from William Blake quoted by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. That passage said the problem with all great experiences is that if kept to ourselves, they freeze rather than are liberated. “The cistern contains. The fountain overflows. Expect poison from the standing water.”
This startling saying struck me as particularly true as I reflected this week on my father’s life. I cannot freeze the moments I had with him, but by allowing them to flow into my life in generous and new ways, my father will be kept alive and ever growing, through me, through my children and grandchildren. Of course it wont be like being with him, touching him in the flesh on that mountain top, but he can still be something I hold deep inside that continues to define and refine and enliven me, to guide me. My dad can still catch me when I fall, still steady me, still alive, but in me . . . not the same, of course, not frozen in time, but as in all things of great value, ever changing and becoming alive in new ways in new times.
And so it is even more so with our experiences of God. Each of us has had moments with God that were moments of shear grace, moments we would like to capture and encase in a booth, moments when we knew in startling reality that God is our creator, and/or God is our redeemer, and/or God it is who empowers us to be more than we really are. It is in those moments of grace, such as Peter, James, and John knew on the mountain top that we want first to box up, place in a sacred cistern so to speak, capture so they can never escape us, until we realize that such experiences when they become memories only and not continued as part of our ongoing life, become stagnant, even poisonous! And we are forever trying to go back and recapture them instead of moving forward with them as a treasured framework out of which we build the next steps of our lives.
The part of this passage that I saw, as if for the first time this year, is the part of Mark’s gospel that says “as they were coming down the mountain . . .” We cannot capture and box up or even put in an urn the whole of any moment of our lives. We can’t frame it, photo it, or save it, any more than Peter, James, and John could. Nor can we with any purely grace filled moment of our lives or with God. We are to carry it with us, carry that memory, down the mountain and let it sustain us as we go the next steps of our lives. We can never recapture it. But we can honor it and keep it alive by letting it flow like a fountain out of us in the action and work of our lives. If we let it flow out of us into the relationships we have with others, then rivers will well up where nothing was before, rivers of grace and love and hope and peace.
And what if we try to capture a moment that was? What happens then? What if we hang on to a moment that was, the times the way they were? I think of the movie Gran Torino. Having now seen many of the Oscar nominated movies this year and Gran Torino, I think the Oscar nominators missed the boat. In Gran Torino a man hung on to what was. Living in a changing neighborhood he clung to his old ways and hated the Asian neighbors who overtook the neighborhood he and his wife had raised their very successful sons in, sons who had moved well away, of course!
He was bitter, poisoned would be a good description of his heart and his demeanor and his relationship with his sons and his God, poisoned, as if contained in a cistern. I won’t tell you the plot of the story – go see it – but slowly he learns to let go of what was and embrace what is, and in so doing, he was able to bring all that was good in the past with him into the present and even the future. The poison was dissipated, and love, generosity, and compassion flowed from him, perhaps for the first time in his life.
We are living in times when it is very tempting to crave “what was!”, times when the past looks better than the present, or even the future seems likely to be. We are a depressed people. This nation is facing terrible challenges, and our community is caught in the thick of the economic turndown. Our parish is working hard to overcome some recent challenges and conflicts, individuals in this parish have suffered terrible losses this past year, and there is much upheaval. Yet, if we try to recapture what was, we will find we have nothing but a cistern full of poison. If we are not willing to follow Jesus back down the mountain, but are trying desperately to hang on to the mountain top, we will find the grace we thought we had captured there, is now absent.
If we live on memories, we are not living, and eventually we warp those memories into something that is frozen and dead or death dealing, as did the Clint Eastwood character did in Gran Torino. But if we use memories to inspire us, perhaps as a walking stick to accompany us as we walk down the hill with Jesus, then we will capture them in a living way, a way that enables us to give such memories to others, a way that helps us to be God’s hands and voice and eyes to others as we go forward, and, most importantly, we can continue to be transformed by God ourselves, ever changing, ever growing, ever more the person God created us to be.
I won’t say I don’t miss my Dad, I do. And there is nothing that can make it okay with me that he is no longer here. But as I hear his voice in something I say, or see his smile in my son, or his eyes in my grandson, as I remember an act with the kindness he showed to others, and try to be as he was to others, I know what he has given cannot be contained in a cistern. It flows like a fountain.
My friends, may we all be aware of the poisonous standing water in our lives, of the times we want to capture and recreate rather than allowing the living waters of God’s grace to flow through us to take us where God is leading us now, down from the mountain to a new place. May we be a people who gladly pick up our walking sticks and carry them with us to new places, trusting God’s grace is accompanying us each step forward.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd