Transfiguration of Our Lord

February 3, 2008

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to Matthew. (Matthew 17:1-9)

Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

What is your outlook on life? What is your vision concerning life in this world? How are you at seeing? Seeing is tricky business.

I’m not an expert on how vision works, but I have been told the way it works, basically, is that light penetrates the lens at the front of the eyeball, projects images into it; and then, because of the curve of the eyeball, the image is somehow flipped upside down and turned backwards, where it’s projected onto the back of the eyeball. Then something called the optic nerve translates that image into an electrical impulse that is sent to a certain part of the brain, which decodes it and makes some kind of sense of it.

Different ones of us know by experience what it’s like to have parts of this process break down and not work. Some of us have had that strange experience of having our vision corrected for the first time, and we say, “Oh, that’s what the world is supposed to look like!”

Seeing is tricky. The way we see things is quite subjective. A good magician can trick us every time, even though we look as carefully as we can at what they’re doing. And isn’t it interesting how much we like it, how much we like to be tricked? We love a good magic show!

One of my favorite places in the Science Museum to go to is the Illusion Theatre. How many of you have been to the Illusion Theater? It’s wonderful. I have seen the same show many times and I don’t get tired of it. The crowd in attendance is treated to illusion after illusion and inevitably starts to laugh at the ways in which their eyes deceive them.

Seeing is tricky and subjective, but it also can be penetrating and deep. We use the word “sight” to mean a kind of understanding or knowing that’s far more than the physical process of seeing. When we feel we understand something, we say, “I see.” We call a special or keen knowledge “insight.”

Have you ever had the experience of getting to know identical twins? You know how it is. When you first meet identical twins, you can’t tell them apart, they look the same to you. But as you get to know them, suddenly they don’t look the same at all. Knowing someone well changes how we see them, even physically.

Sometimes people are given special sight, beyond rational explanation. We just honored Dr. Martin Luther King this last month. I find that final speech he gave in Memphis to union workers so very haunting. He spoke of what he saw happening. He shared his vision. He encouraged his hearers to demonstrate “dangerous unselfishness.” Finally, in the words we know so well, he spoke about the mountaintop. It’s as though he knows what’s going to happen to him. And he says, “It doesn’t matter to me any more whether I live or die.” “Oh, I’d love to live a long life, but it doesn’t matter to me any more because I have been to the mountaintop, and I my eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord!”

I noticed recently, as I was walking my daughter Charlie into her preschool, the pictures of all the little classes in the preschool. I noticed hers. It struck me suddenly that they are three African American children and three Caucasian children. But to them they are not three and three; they are six!... friends.

Dr. King’s vision was more than his natural eyes could see at the time. But because of his vision, my eyes can see what he saw coming but knew he wouldn’t live to see in the flesh. Special sight, insight, some people have it in special measure. But all of us have it in some measure. There are moments when we see deeply, and it can be painful, can’t it?

Rik Reppe is a performer and a playwright who, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, left his home in Los Angeles and began to travel the country, beginning in New York, to talk to people, to try to connect with Americans, ordinary Americans, who had been touched and changed and impacted by what had occurred on 9/11. And then he wrote a play that depicts those he encountered. At one point, he observed a little girl—this is three months after 9/11—in St. Paul’s Chapel, near Ground Zero, he observed a little girl, waving goodbye to a picture of her daddy, a firefighter, who had died in one of the towers. In the play he cries out, “Give me my detachment back!” But it was too late; he saw. Sometimes what we see is just too much; it’s more than we can handle.

An elder gentleman once told me that he could no longer read the newspaper or watch television news because he would begin to weep uncontrollably. You see, he had lost his ability to stay detached. He had lost that ability to look without seeing.

One member of our congregation has a bumper sticker on their car that says, “START SEEING IRAQI CHILDREN.” I’m disturbed and reminded every time I see it, and I think to myself: “Yes, not only Iraqi children, but Kenyan children; children in Darfur; in New Orleans; in Washington, D.C.; in St. Paul. Start seeing children.” What if we started seeing not only the children but the lonely, the displaced, the homeless, the suffering, the sick, the dying? What if we really, really saw them?

How easy it is to look and not to see. How is it that I glance through the morning paper and don’t weep? We can’t really handle seeing the horrors of life in this world; it’s very hard to take it in. But the converse is also true. We can’t really handle the incredible, heartbreaking beauty of life either: the experience of love, of genuine compassion, the amazing gift of this fragile life, the miracle of birth, and of every living being. We couldn’t function if we saw fully and completely the true splendor and the depravity of human existence all at once. We couldn’t.

The disciples, James, Peter, and John, had a vision of Christ transfigured before their eyes, together with Moses and Elijah. And the radiance and the splendor of that vision and the voice of God saying, “My dearly loved Son, listen to him,” were just too much. Peter begins to babble: “Let’s, let’s build booths, three of them, yes, three booths. Well, let’s, and let’s stay here and let’s worship you three. Then suddenly the voice of God strikes the disciples to the ground in terror. Jesus comes and touches them, and they arise and they look around, and Jesus is to them as he was before, and he’s alone. Moses and Elijah have disappeared.

We trace this story every year, this transfiguration up on the mountaintop and then their descent down into Jerusalem, where Jesus will die a terrible death. Why do we do this? Because in it, I believe, is a glimpse—from the mountaintop to the cross—of the beauty and the horror of the story of Christ and of life in this world, the way it is.

Today, it is the splendor, a vision of how beautiful the experience of God’s love can be, how miraculous it is to be alive, how beautiful life is, and what a blessing to be a child of God. Christ is not the only child of God. You are, too, as is every living being.

The Christian vision is a “both/and” vision. The vision of Christ in glory and Christ in humiliation is a full picture of human life, from the sublime to the tragic.

How do you see things today, this moment? How do you see the world? How do you see yourself? How do you see people in general? How do you see the future? How do you see the past? It’s like that famous image at the Illusion Theater of the vase, which has also two faces, and you can’t see them both at the same time. It’s one or the other. Life appears differently to us at different times, according to our experience.

The transfiguration is an insight, beyond normal, natural sight. Jesus didn’t take James, Peter, and John up the mountain to be worshiped by them, but to show them something crucial about life—that life in this world is beautiful, and wondrous, and miraculous, as well as tragic and laced with evil; that God sanctifies life with constant blessing and presence; that every created being is a living miracle loved by God. And that if we could see not only Christ but every child of God according to that divine love and the spirit of God that enlivens us, we would be dazzled.

Would that we could all say with James and Peter and John and Dr. King that “We have been to the mountaintop; we have seen the glory of God’s great love for the world and every living being,” and to know that love in ourselves and for others. It’s not the whole truth, but it is the truth. It’s the truth we’re looking at today, and may we see it.

Amen.