Luke 9:28-36

Transfiguration Sunday, February 18, 2007

 

Yes, there are those rear occasions when the voice of God seems so unmistakably clear that it cuts through and transforms ordinary experience, if only for a moment. But, let’s face it, ambiguity is the order of the day. Most of the time you and I lives with a variety of experiences and voices that we must through, asking for God’s help, to discern the right path. Though once in a while clarity – like the light of God – transforms our experience.

During the first shocking days of WWI, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth was searching for something to say to the good people of his congregation who were devastated by the horrors of war, along with their theology of human progress. As the story goes, one morning Barth was walking up the long spiral staircase to the pulpit when he slipped and grabbed a rope to the bell tower to catch his fall. The bell rang loud and clear across the city and straight across Barth’s mind. He didn’t just hear a church bell, he heard a call to speak the Gospel afresh to a people whose positive liberalism had been shattered by human atrocity.

So it is in ordinary life that occasionally we get an unexpected wake up call from God. When it happens it best to listen.

Luke’s gospel tells of two events in Jesus life where the voice of God emerged with utter clarity. Both times Jesus was praying. Once at this baptism when the skies were ripped open and the Spirit of God fell upon him, declaring that he was God’s beloved One. The other is the transfiguration when Jesus went to the mountain, with his disciples, to pray. It was an extraordinary moment; if there was every a mountaintop experience this was it. What happened on that mountain is a mystery – and it’s probably best for us to bow before the mystery beyond the limits of our knowledge.

Mountaintop experiences happen, but we don’t live there for very long, soon we return, as the disciples did, to ordinary life on the plain. On the plain – ordinary life – is where people live with suffering: a lingering sickness threatens ones life resources, relationships are shattered by betrayal, dreams die, children grow old before their time. The plain is also where ordinary people, like Zac Bao today, become deacons, to serve their church in the world; where ordinary folks go on mission to Haiti to support the body of Christ and provide clean water. What claims do my neighbors in the world have on me? In the mountaintop experience these concerns might fade for a moment but in ordinary life they face us every day.

Which is why the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration is not an escape from ordinary life. It is a revelation of God given that the church may be strengthened in faithful discipleship on the plain, in ordinary life. On that mountain, not unlike the other mountain in the history of Israel, as Moses and Elijah fade, the light illuminates Jesus and the voices pierces the sky, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!” Listen to him. Enough is enough, said Annie Dillard. Listen to him. Let the mystery be.

We live on both sides of the mountain. On one side is the call to take up our cross and lose our life for Jesus’ sake. On the other is our utter inability to bring a halt to human suffering or heal the array of Illnesses that wreak havoc.

So how do you and I – the church – get our bearing in the world? To whom do we listen?

Baptism and Transfiguration are bookends for the season of Epiphany; in both Jesus is revealed as the Beloved One and in both the message is emphatically clear: Listen to him when you are faced with the risks of discipleship. Transfigured on the mountain, Jesus is revealed as the One sufficient to uphold our lives as we seek to bear his cross in this broken world. Here is our life. Here is our hope that life itself will be transfigured by God’s light as we walk in this light.

Amen.