February 14, 2010
The Last Sunday after The Epiphany (Year C)
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6.8-10; Psalm 19; I Corinthians 12:12-31a;
Luke: 4:14-21
Each year for the last Sunday in Epiphany we hear the story of the transfiguration, the time when Peter, James, and John go with Jesus to the mountain top and witness Jesus being transfigured, dazzling even, and with him are two others Elijah and Moses. Peter, of course, being Peter, wanted to preserve the moment forever, capture it, and keep hold of it by making booths, similar, I imagine, to the one that held the arc of the covenant, dwellings or boxes or containers of some sort that would keep all of them together, there in that moment, forever.
But, no! A cloud, containing the voice of God, came upon them before those booths could be built. The moment was over. And God said, "This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him!" And there was Jesus, all alone
And they kept silent. They kept silent about what had happened just a few minutes before that mountain top experience of theirs was reduced to silence.
This story is familiar to all of us – I am sure of that – but I think it will never be fully explored and recounted so that what we can learn from it is all depleted.
There is the idea that we can capture precious moments or times in our lives and try to preserve them forever. I think any parent will tell you of having day after day of such moments. And when you are a grandparent, it is even more acute. Our children are so precious, and too often we get mired in the constancy of the harried state in which we live that our children or grandchildren are grown and we have missed it. But every once in a while, sometimes when we deliberately plan it, and sometimes when the sheer grace of the moment explodes in our faces, we notice how cute or smart or clever or wonderful, just plain wonderful they are.
We remember to seize the moment because we know that next week they will be older and have different interests and different quirks and different smiles. Seize each moment this reading seems to say. But is that all it says? Can we seize moments and trap them forever so that we never have to live beyond them?
Doesn’t this story also seem to forbid canonizing such mountain top moments, forbid encasing them or treasuring them beyond the moment in which we are living? Doesn’t the cloud constantly hang around us, reminding us to move on? That cloud that forces us to remember the past is gone, and then encourages us to live in the moment and to look to the future, the walk down the mountain, and then to live into, onto, the new path we are to follow? Doesn’t this lesson teach us that we cannot capture any moment forever? We can only carry it with us in our heart as we step into the future?
I recently took a seminar on Appreciate Inquiry and one of the sound bites from that class that I took away with me seems especially appropriate for this lesson this morning. The sound bite is “remember, you are living the rest of your life in the future!”
Maybe the cloud covering them was a way of making that saying come to life. You can’t capture the past; you can only keep walking into the future. And walk those disciples did, down the mountain to a far different reality than they would have imagined when up on that mountain top with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah! The past is gone; let it go. Walk out of the cloud into the future, a future you cannot know really, except by faith in Jesus, the chosen, knowing that he will be with you there, too, in that future, as much as on the mountain top.
And, I might suggest, this passage seems to also tell us that Peter, James, and John were there for a reason, maybe to have that mountain top incredible experience with Jesus and Moses and Elijah, or maybe to witness God’s voice crying out from the cloud and anointing Jesus as the Chosen – maybe. Sometimes the reasons for the mountain top experience is not clear to us when it is happening. We think it is one thing, but we need the retrospect that time provides, to know the true reasons. Things of Holy Value and Wisdom can circle back around on us if we let go of the moment and wait for their wisdom to reach us in God’s time.
But then, maybe, it was really just as simple as it was “good for them to be there” as Peter said. Good for them to be there, companions, witnesses, friends. Maybe the importance of this passage lies in its simple truth that we can make it through anything if we have friends and companions and others who will walk with us wherever we have to go, up the mountain or down!
Or maybe what needs to be mined from this passage is the very last part, that those friends and companions were silent. They kept silent! It seems to me that in our polite western culture we keep silent too often about the wrong things. We are eager to repeat gossip or knowledge that gives us power over others. We are eager to be an expert witness. But think of all the times in our lives when we are silent, and we should have spoken.
The reason we have this lesson at all is because we are heading into Lent on Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, and we know that what awaits Jesus is not a mountain top experience in any way, well, not until the resurrection, which is, of course, way beyond a transfigured experience and into something that I am certain the disciples with him on the mountain could not foresee or imagine. That is not the reason they were silent about what they had seen.
The truth of life is that we must come down off the mountain. We must live in the moment, cherish each of them, but realize constantly that the rest of our lives will be in the future because Jesus came down from the mountain top to climb on the cross.
The disciples reluctantly followed him down. It was much better on the mountain top – I am sure they thought so anyway. They came down and lived in the reality of the day to day. They lived days that they knew enough to cherish moments. There were days of fearing and then living through the worst, and finally knowing that all that happens in this life is not what defines our eternal life. What defines that life could not be trapped or encased on a mountain top because what defines our lives is the resurrection, the hope, the promise of life that Jesus lived and was resurrected to show us.
And that, my friends, is not something we should be silent about. We should tell others of the good news of hope, the good news of resurrection, the good news of eternal life with God that is God’s intention for all! If we get stuck in the mountain top experience and forget that, what is coming, even if it is after some challenges or difficulties, what is coming is new life better than we can imagine, even from the mountain top.
Do not be silent about the good news!
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd