Last Epiphany, Year A
Transfiguration Sunday
March 6, 2011
This morning is all about transfiguration. I haven’t preached on this Sunday before and so I hadn’t realized that apparently the last Sunday of Epiphany is always all about transfiguration. Every year on the Sunday before Lent begins you get either this Old Testament reading about Moses meeting God on the mountaintop or a reading about Elijah ascending into heaven on his chariot of fire. And you also get some version of our Gospel reading about Jesus on the mountaintop. All of these stories involve people meeting God and being changed in appearance – being transfigured by their experience. Or at least, that was always what I thought they were about.
When I was in seminary, I got to be up on that mountain with Jesus and see the transfiguration for myself. Well, sort of. In seminary, each student is placed in a small group for weekly worship and fellowship. The groups take turns leading worship and my turn happened to fall just before Transfiguration Sunday. I had been exploring different types of prayer in one of my classes and was particularly enamored with a method developed by St. Ignatius – a sort of prayer of imagination, where you try to put yourself into the Bible scene. To smell and hear and see what is going on behind the words on the page, perhaps to become one of the characters or an onlooker, and to feel what they might have felt, to be part of the movement and the conversation. I thought our Gospel story for this morning about Jesus’ transfiguration would be a great one for this kind of imaginative prayer, and so I led my small group in meditation using this reading. After it was over, we shared our experience, and several of us talked about how it felt to be inside this story. To see the bright cloud around Jesus and his dazzling clothes. To watch the change in Jesus.
So remembering this experience as I prepared for my sermon, I naturally thought immediately about … pancakes. Pancakes have been on my mind with the countdown to Tuesday’s Pancake Supper. Two more days until I get to watch those chocolate chips melting on my hot pancakes! Two more days until I get to eat the salty-sweet perfection of sausage that has found its way into the syrup. Ummm…!
I’m a big fan of breakfast food. I love the way simple ingredients (like pancake mix and milk) can become something so glorious and satisfying when paired with syrup and whipped cream. For me, pancakes go hand-in-hand with warm and fuzzy memories of my childhood. They enliven my family gatherings, they bring us together and make us laugh. I realize pancakes may not be everyone’s path to inner peace, but surely there is something else you can substitute here – something else that becomes more than just whatever it is. Something that changes from what is seemingly ordinary into something that is extraordinary.
There’s something holy about that kind of transformation.
And so that’s what I planned to preach about this morning, because it’s all over our readings for this morning, right? Something seemingly ordinary being changed into something extraordinary.
During Moses’ mountaintop experience from our Old Testament reading, Moses is no longer the reluctant and sometimes grouchy leader of the exiled Israelites but is now very clearly God’s Chosen Prophet and Lawgiver.
And during Jesus’ mountaintop experience from our Gospel reading, Jesus is no longer just a wise and challenging human leader but the divine Son of God.
Except that, sometime about Friday afternoon as I was working on my sermon, I began to think maybe I had it all wrong. What my small group in seminary experienced wasn’t the change in Jesus, but how it felt to witness Jesus in that moment. Jesus hadn’t actually changed in this encounter at all – he was divine all along; he was the beloved Son of God all along. To him, this gathering on the mountaintop was just a chat with his dear old dad. What really changed in this story was the disciples. The way they saw Jesus and the way they now understood themselves and their mission. They got a little glimpse of what had actually been there all along.
And the same thing with Moses. He’d been talking to God for ages before this moment. He’d heard God talking in the burning bush, been getting directions from him daily, practically, as he led the people out of slavery. This wasn’t a change for Moses as much as it was for the people traveling with him who at that moment perhaps finally realized that Moses wasn’t a nagging rule-giver but an example of what it might mean to live into their covenant with their relational God. They too got a little glimpse of what had actually been there all along.
I had a sort of epiphany (very handy here on the last Sunday of Epiphany) that these stories aren’t about the transfiguration of Moses and Jesus. Not really. These stories are about the transfiguration of us and our vision of God.
We are the pancakes. We are the ones living our ordinary ingredient lives when suddenly we have a glimpse of the ultimate glory – whipped cream, syrup, chocolate chips. This is what we were made for! We are part of this! This is what changes everything. This is what it means to be truly alive!
Our readings for this morning show us moments when the eyes of the people of God were opened and they began to see in new ways, to live in new ways. It’s interesting to watch what happens to Peter, James and John in the span of just a few minutes during their mountaintop experience. So many reactions. First, surprise. They see Jesus’ shining face and glowing clothes and they are stunned. Next, an attempt to control or humanize the situation. “Lord, let us build you all houses!” Then they hear God’s voice speaking about Jesus and truly understand for the first time the relationship between God and Jesus. And the very thought of a God so close and personal fills them with fear. But then God incarnate touches them and tells them not to fear. And they rise, shaky but renewed and ready for the work ahead. It is time to take their transfigured selves back down the mountain, back into the world.
But moments of transfiguration aren’t just something that happened “back then.” They are out here for us to experience as well.
Every Sunday right here in this place we have opportunities to look beyond what we think is real into something even more Real – opportunities to get a glimpse into the reality of God. We shake hands with friends and strangers – regular people - during the Peace but we are actually all part of the movement of the Body of Christ. We eat regular bread and drink regular wine at this table but it is actually Christ among and within us.
[And on this particular Sunday we will watch as baby George gets doused with what may seem like regular water but is actually the water of creation, the water of the flood, the water that parted for the Israelites, the water of Jesus’ own baptism. George may seem like a regular baby boy but he will soon be marked indelibly as Christ’s own forever.]
But it isn’t only in the sacred that we are exposed to God’s Reality; in my experience, God is just as likely to use ordinary moments to transfigure us. These transfiguring moments are all around us if we’re paying attention. I’ve used this sermon as an excuse to ask friends and family and, as far as I can tell, we’ve all had them. (I highly recommend this as a conversation starter, by the way.) One friend shared how her relationship with her dad changed when he got very sick and they were able to forgive each other for things that had been holding them apart. My dad told me of the impact of a few instances when he got startlingly clear answers to prayer. Holden mentioned how having children (and especially so many children!) has changed the way he sees the world. My daughter Sophia talked about how her little sister Maya’s birth “made everything better.” (My son Dylan, who is very into music, talked about how great it must have been when we went from tapes to CDs, but it’s possible that he didn’t really understand the question.) God is in all these moments – inviting us to be transfigured by our glimpses of God’s Reality.
My guess is that when the disciples went back down that mountain with Jesus, their faces were shining too. They’d had a transfiguring experience – they’d discovered a whole new way of looking at Jesus, at God, at themselves. A whole new way of living in the world.
May the season of Lent help us all to be open to our own transfiguring experiences, in the seemingly holy spaces and the seemingly mundane. To be open to visions of God that will make our faces glow. In pancakes and beyond. Amen.
Transfiguration Sunday
March 6, 2011
This morning is all about transfiguration. I haven’t preached on this Sunday before and so I hadn’t realized that apparently the last Sunday of Epiphany is always all about transfiguration. Every year on the Sunday before Lent begins you get either this Old Testament reading about Moses meeting God on the mountaintop or a reading about Elijah ascending into heaven on his chariot of fire. And you also get some version of our Gospel reading about Jesus on the mountaintop. All of these stories involve people meeting God and being changed in appearance – being transfigured by their experience. Or at least, that was always what I thought they were about.
When I was in seminary, I got to be up on that mountain with Jesus and see the transfiguration for myself. Well, sort of. In seminary, each student is placed in a small group for weekly worship and fellowship. The groups take turns leading worship and my turn happened to fall just before Transfiguration Sunday. I had been exploring different types of prayer in one of my classes and was particularly enamored with a method developed by St. Ignatius – a sort of prayer of imagination, where you try to put yourself into the Bible scene. To smell and hear and see what is going on behind the words on the page, perhaps to become one of the characters or an onlooker, and to feel what they might have felt, to be part of the movement and the conversation. I thought our Gospel story for this morning about Jesus’ transfiguration would be a great one for this kind of imaginative prayer, and so I led my small group in meditation using this reading. After it was over, we shared our experience, and several of us talked about how it felt to be inside this story. To see the bright cloud around Jesus and his dazzling clothes. To watch the change in Jesus.
So remembering this experience as I prepared for my sermon, I naturally thought immediately about … pancakes. Pancakes have been on my mind with the countdown to Tuesday’s Pancake Supper. Two more days until I get to watch those chocolate chips melting on my hot pancakes! Two more days until I get to eat the salty-sweet perfection of sausage that has found its way into the syrup. Ummm…!
I’m a big fan of breakfast food. I love the way simple ingredients (like pancake mix and milk) can become something so glorious and satisfying when paired with syrup and whipped cream. For me, pancakes go hand-in-hand with warm and fuzzy memories of my childhood. They enliven my family gatherings, they bring us together and make us laugh. I realize pancakes may not be everyone’s path to inner peace, but surely there is something else you can substitute here – something else that becomes more than just whatever it is. Something that changes from what is seemingly ordinary into something that is extraordinary.
There’s something holy about that kind of transformation.
And so that’s what I planned to preach about this morning, because it’s all over our readings for this morning, right? Something seemingly ordinary being changed into something extraordinary.
During Moses’ mountaintop experience from our Old Testament reading, Moses is no longer the reluctant and sometimes grouchy leader of the exiled Israelites but is now very clearly God’s Chosen Prophet and Lawgiver.
And during Jesus’ mountaintop experience from our Gospel reading, Jesus is no longer just a wise and challenging human leader but the divine Son of God.
Except that, sometime about Friday afternoon as I was working on my sermon, I began to think maybe I had it all wrong. What my small group in seminary experienced wasn’t the change in Jesus, but how it felt to witness Jesus in that moment. Jesus hadn’t actually changed in this encounter at all – he was divine all along; he was the beloved Son of God all along. To him, this gathering on the mountaintop was just a chat with his dear old dad. What really changed in this story was the disciples. The way they saw Jesus and the way they now understood themselves and their mission. They got a little glimpse of what had actually been there all along.
And the same thing with Moses. He’d been talking to God for ages before this moment. He’d heard God talking in the burning bush, been getting directions from him daily, practically, as he led the people out of slavery. This wasn’t a change for Moses as much as it was for the people traveling with him who at that moment perhaps finally realized that Moses wasn’t a nagging rule-giver but an example of what it might mean to live into their covenant with their relational God. They too got a little glimpse of what had actually been there all along.
I had a sort of epiphany (very handy here on the last Sunday of Epiphany) that these stories aren’t about the transfiguration of Moses and Jesus. Not really. These stories are about the transfiguration of us and our vision of God.
We are the pancakes. We are the ones living our ordinary ingredient lives when suddenly we have a glimpse of the ultimate glory – whipped cream, syrup, chocolate chips. This is what we were made for! We are part of this! This is what changes everything. This is what it means to be truly alive!
Our readings for this morning show us moments when the eyes of the people of God were opened and they began to see in new ways, to live in new ways. It’s interesting to watch what happens to Peter, James and John in the span of just a few minutes during their mountaintop experience. So many reactions. First, surprise. They see Jesus’ shining face and glowing clothes and they are stunned. Next, an attempt to control or humanize the situation. “Lord, let us build you all houses!” Then they hear God’s voice speaking about Jesus and truly understand for the first time the relationship between God and Jesus. And the very thought of a God so close and personal fills them with fear. But then God incarnate touches them and tells them not to fear. And they rise, shaky but renewed and ready for the work ahead. It is time to take their transfigured selves back down the mountain, back into the world.
But moments of transfiguration aren’t just something that happened “back then.” They are out here for us to experience as well.
Every Sunday right here in this place we have opportunities to look beyond what we think is real into something even more Real – opportunities to get a glimpse into the reality of God. We shake hands with friends and strangers – regular people - during the Peace but we are actually all part of the movement of the Body of Christ. We eat regular bread and drink regular wine at this table but it is actually Christ among and within us.
[And on this particular Sunday we will watch as baby George gets doused with what may seem like regular water but is actually the water of creation, the water of the flood, the water that parted for the Israelites, the water of Jesus’ own baptism. George may seem like a regular baby boy but he will soon be marked indelibly as Christ’s own forever.]
But it isn’t only in the sacred that we are exposed to God’s Reality; in my experience, God is just as likely to use ordinary moments to transfigure us. These transfiguring moments are all around us if we’re paying attention. I’ve used this sermon as an excuse to ask friends and family and, as far as I can tell, we’ve all had them. (I highly recommend this as a conversation starter, by the way.) One friend shared how her relationship with her dad changed when he got very sick and they were able to forgive each other for things that had been holding them apart. My dad told me of the impact of a few instances when he got startlingly clear answers to prayer. Holden mentioned how having children (and especially so many children!) has changed the way he sees the world. My daughter Sophia talked about how her little sister Maya’s birth “made everything better.” (My son Dylan, who is very into music, talked about how great it must have been when we went from tapes to CDs, but it’s possible that he didn’t really understand the question.) God is in all these moments – inviting us to be transfigured by our glimpses of God’s Reality.
My guess is that when the disciples went back down that mountain with Jesus, their faces were shining too. They’d had a transfiguring experience – they’d discovered a whole new way of looking at Jesus, at God, at themselves. A whole new way of living in the world.
May the season of Lent help us all to be open to our own transfiguring experiences, in the seemingly holy spaces and the seemingly mundane. To be open to visions of God that will make our faces glow. In pancakes and beyond. Amen.
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