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Sunday
spoken eucharist - 8 am
bible study - 9 am
sung eucharist - 10 am

Wednesday

services begin at 7 pm

healing service (1st, 3rd)

evening prayer (2nd,4th)

eucharist (5th)

Today we depart from our every Sunday Lectionary reading of the beginning chapter of the Gospel According to Mark and jump to the 9^th chapter and the Story of the Transfiguration of Our Lord.  It is the Feast Day which brings to an end the Season of Epiphany and looks forward to the beginning of the Season of Lent, which will start this coming Ash Wednesday.

The Gospel Portion which we read this morning begins this way … “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.  And he was transfigured before them.”

Have you ever wondered six days after what…? 

[You see, one of the problems that we face in the Church when we print the readings in the Bulletin is that we all learn the Bible not as a collection of Books … but as something existing somewhere out there, maybe on the coffee table of our homes, perhaps in a bookshelf in the family room … but the little snippets we have each Sunday are only mere approximations of the whole story we might know and learn if we had the book in our hands.  So, beginning on Wednesday and through the Season of Lent … at least … we are going to remove the readings from the Bulletin and put the Bibles Back in the Pews for you to read … and that might mean that you will have to share a book with others, and so that will also be a good thing, it will teach us community?!]

So, if you had a Bible in your hands and it was open to the 9^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel you would see the phrase … Six days after … and you would of course then start reading backwards to see what it was that happened six days before.  And you would find yourself in the 8^th chapter of Mark, and there (at the conclusion of a lot of things, not the least of which has been the disciples being sent out and then coming back with various successes and failures as they try to promote the reign of God in the lives of people) … there you would find what is called “Peter’s Confession” … when Jesus asks his followers who they believe him to be, Peter pipes up: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”

So it is six days after that where our story of the Transfiguration takes place.

The story has ties to the Hebrew Scriptures, of course, and we read that as our first lesson this morning.  The story also has parallel versions … in the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke (and in fact in Luke’s account, it isn’t 6 days later, it’s 8 days later) … but the story is so important to the early Christians that it is found in the three synoptic Gospel we call them, the Gospels that seem to see Jesus more or less in the same way .. the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.  You are correct, the Story does not appear in the end of the 1^st Century Gospel we know as John.

So what happens is this:  Jesus takes the three, the Inner Circle of his Followers, up to … well where?  Tradition has it that it is on the top of Mount Tabor which is near the town of Nazareth.  It’s not all that high, it’s not like climbing Santa Fe Baldy or one of the Fourteeners in Southern Colorado, it’s more of a high place.  And it was Cyril of Jerusalem in the 4^th Century who decided that it was on Tabor that the Transfiguration took place and because of that there is a church on the top of it.

So up they go, Jesus and the three, and while they are there something remarkable takes place … Mark uses the Greek phrase:

μετεμορφθη εμπροσθεν αυτων (metamorphe emprosthen auton)

He was metamorphosed, he was changed, he began to glisten with whiteness, an aura of light.

That is enough to astound the three who become scared, and then two others appear, Moses and Elijah … the Law and the Prophets, the substance of God’s Story with God’s people.

Now it is here that usually, most preachers, myself included find themselves in a quandary.  Because there is a question, actually two questions:

1.           Is this an eyewitness account?

2.           Is it a beautiful fable?

 

And of course there is a third question lurking in the background … and that is, what does it matter anyway, it’s part of the story and let’s go into the story to see what it means.

And here most preaching begins to stumble, and begin to dismiss the account that we find in the Gospels, to purge it of the spectacular and the miraculous, and talk only about myth or metaphor.

Harvey Cox, the great American Theologian at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned against encountering a magnificent vision of the future hope of the Christian Story, only to “whittle it down to something manageable and lackluster.”

I want to suggest that we don’t do that … but rather we enter into the story itself and let it be for us what it was for Peter who remembered this terrifying event and talked about it precisely to counter the early ridicule of People of the Way (as Christian people were first called), the ridicule that they were inventors of clever stories rather than eyewitness accounts.

So, let’s suspend the science and the physics for this moment, and just listen again to the story; almost as if we were doing Lectio Divina … the method of reading a story in the Bible three times with period of silence in between.  But for now, just listen again … maybe close your eyes and listen with your imagination, and see if you can in your mind, picture the scene … Here we go:

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them,  and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.  And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.  Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."  He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.  Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved listen to him!"  Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

      As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

OK, eyes open.  What did you see?  Could you picture the ground, the rocks, the few trees atop the mountain?  Could you see the change in Jesus, a sign of something?  Could you see coming from the mist the appearances of Moses and Elijah, and could you hear them speaking to each other … in Hebrew of course. 

Could you hear Peter stammering and being the Type A Person who wants to build some traditional Sukkot … hastily made shelters with branches for the top in which the people of God would spend a week (at least fathers and sons) sleeping there … to remind them of the time in the Wilderness that God’s people went through?

Could you feel the dampness of the cloud that came over the whole top of the mountain and covered everything, so much that in the fog you could only see maybe the shadows?

And could you hear the voice of the Holy One?  What did it sound like?  Was it loud?  Was it a whisper?  Did it echo?  Did it surround you?

And then could you see everything vanish at once and only Jesus and the three and could you feel the shaking of your head, did this really happen?

 

You see, I think there are times when we just need to hear the story again, and enter into it.  Maybe you go home this afternoon and do the same thing.  Take out the Bible, dust it off, open it to Mark, chapter 9 and read it again, or have someone read it to you, and enter into it.

There is power in that story.  It is the power of the Almighty One who brings to the Beloved One the authenticity of the vision of the hope of nothing less than the reign of God.

When we read the Story this way, the blinding light and the voices from the cloud challenge faith, our faith, that has perhaps turned lukewarm and lackluster, and that it as it should be.

In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard (the Book we are going to read from during the Wednesday Soup Suppers this Lent) thus asks:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets! Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews! For the sleeping God may awake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us to where we can never return.

 

As we leave the Season of Epiphany and enter into the Season of Lent, let us enter into the Story deeply and allow ourselves to feel the holiness of faith, and live the holiness of faith.

+ Deo Gratia