February 10. 2002
Transfiguration Sunday
Year A
Title: Turning On The Light
Theme: Transfiguration Sunday comes before the season of Lent to
remind us that even the shadows in our lives owe their existence to light
and that the Light of the world will give us the strength to get through the
shadow of Lent.
Six more weeks of winter. That’s what everybody’s favorite groundhog
Punxsutawney Phil predicted on February 2, Groundhog Day, when he
came out and saw his shadow. Now, I know that it isn’t good news for us
right now, with power outages and ice storms and snow storms, etc, but
the good news that Phil is a horrible forecaster and its been shown
scientifically that he’s no Gary England. The interesting thing, I think, is
that the tradition around Punxsutawney Phil is that shadows predict more
winter, that is, if the sun is out, then we’re doomed for more winter,
whereas I would have thought that a cloudy day, in which poor Phil
couldn’t see his shadow, I would have thought that it would predict more
bad weather…its as if the tradition seems the opposite of common
sense, but, maybe its my common sense that all wrong. Nonetheless,
shadows and paying attention to shadows is something we should be
doing at this time of the year, especially as Christians.
Today is transfiguration Sunday, the day each year that church mediates
on the transfiguration of Jesus on a mountaintop. It’s the day when he
undergoes a transformation, a metamorphosis—actually, the word
“metamorphosis” is the Greek basis of the word “transfigured.” The
Scripture in Matthew tells us that Jesus’ face shone like the sun and that
his clothes become dazzling light—someone had turned on the lights and
that light was coming through this Jesus, on some high mountain some
two thousand years ago. And he wasn’t alone on that mountain—before
these stunned men who had gone with Jesus up that mountain were
Moses and Elijah, two men whose lives met mysterious endings—Moses
died alone on some mountain, looking over into the promise land he is
forbidden to enter by God, and he is literally buried with by the hands of
God on that mountain, and Elijah, Elijah is the man who gets whisked
away in a chariot of fire. Jesus’ clothes are alive with light, as he stands
with Moses and Elijah and his disciples stare in joy at this incredible,
incredible sight—it is the confirmation that Jesus is who he says he is.
But this story, this really strange story, really, comes to us at the right
time—for some reason, the people who have put together our lectionary,
that is, the readings from the Bible that the church follows every week,
for some reason the composers of the lectionary want us to have a story
about light before we enter into a season of shadows, before we enter
into the season of Lent. Lent begins a few days from now, on Ash
Wednesday, and for 40 days, minus the Sundays, the church devotes
itself to the task of looking inward, to searching our often stubborn
hearts and thinking about what it means to be faithful and how, at times,
we have chosen hate over love, judgment over grace, pettiness over
generosity, death over life. On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of
how human, how mortal, how transient our human lives really are—“From
dust you have been created and to dust you will surely return” is said as
the ashes of last year’s burnt palm branches from Palm Sunday are
smudged on our foreheads. It is a season when we are called to reflect
on what has been done for us in the cross—that is, the power of death,
the sting and horror of death is destroyed because Christ embraced his
own death and in doing so, he gave us his life. It is a mystery—life
comes to all of us through the death of one person, some two thousand
years ago.
And Lent gives us a time to sit in that shadow of that death for a little
while, Lent gives us a moment to honor the shadows that come with
being in the presence of light—you know, to know what light is, we have
to go through an experience of shadows—and so we have a story, a
mysterious story, about light of the world, this Jesus, and how we need to
be reminded that shadows, that troubled times, are simply part of being
in the presence of light—you simply can’t have light without the
possibility of shadows. You can’t know light without the shadows; you
can’t know cold without experiencing heat, you can’t know joy if you don’t
know sorrow, you can’t figure out what life is if you haven’t thought about
death, you can’t know the light of the world without thinking what life
would have been like living in the shadows and even the darkness. We
often get lost in our shadows time, in our times of despair, in our own
moments on our crosses, and we forget that shadows can’t exist without
light, that resurrection can’t happen without a cross, without a
crucifixion. Why? Why is that the universe has been set up this way,
that light can’t exist without darkness, that joy cannot exist without
sorrow. I don’t know why. If it was up to me, I would have set up a
different kind universe, but since I am not the Creator, the Mother and
Father of us all, I don’t get what I want all the time. I would have created
a world where you and I could have known joy without sorrow, life without
death, hope without despair, light without shadows, but alas, you and I,
we are children of the Creator and we are not the Creator, so we must
settle for the way the world is at this moment.
But I don’t want us to get lost in shadows, in the shadows of Lent, though
I think the shadows are something we need to attend to, as disciples of
Jesus. Christianity, this religion built around following this Jesus of
Nazareth, Christianity is fundamentally rooted in the goodness and yet
messiness of this world, in all the resurrection and crosses we humans
are destined to experience in our lives. I always tell people that I am a
Christian first, by the incredible grace of God, but secondly, because I
think Christianity tells the truth about the world—that it doesn’t gloss over
the hard stuff, the crosses, the moments of despair—you only have to
look at Jesus’ experience on the cross to know that this is not a religion
whose ever going get to let you and I escape into some happy lala land
not rooted in the real world. Yet, the shadows don’t tell the whole story,
the full story, the full truth about light. Shadows surely exist, hard times
have surely happened in our lives, despair has surely overwhelmed us
one too many times, but the shadows exist because light, the light of
world soaks all of creation. We are people bathed, completely and
utterly bathed in light, and despite our shadows, the light of the world will
never let us live for long in shadows and darkness. We are a people of
hope, a people of resurrection, a people of joy, a people of light, but that
hope, that resurrection, that joy, that light comes with the price of
knowing what it means to be hopeless, of what it means to experience
the cross, with what it means to live for a time in the shadows. Me—I
would have done it differently, but I will never forget what one of my
religion professors in college, Dr. Green, said when my class and I
struggled with shadows—he simply said, shrugging his shoulders, “that’s
just the way it is.”
You know, we get the story of transfiguration, this story of light and life,
right before we enter into a season of shadows and even darkness. In
the preceding few verses before this story in Matthew, Jesus tells his
disciples that he will go to Jerusalem, not as the victorious Jewish
Messiah conquering the Romans, but he will go there and he will be
crucified, like some common criminal. And Jesus’ disciples are not too
hip on this idea, and they try to argue with him that surely won’t be the
case—not you, Jesus, not you, they say to him. So, after that downer of
a moment, this introduction to the horror that will happen in Jerusalem,
Jesus gives them the gift of this moment, this moment of light and wonder
with Moses and Elijah, this proof that he really is who he says he is. I
think Jesus gave them this transfiguration moment to get them through
the experience, the chaos of the coming days in Jerusalem, when they,
his disciples, would have all their hopes and dreams dashed with this
arrest of Jesus, when they would desert him in his moment of need and
they would creep into the shadows of their shame, their guilt, and their
hopelessness—this moment of light, this moment on the mountaintop is
about giving them the strength to get through the shadow times, through
those hard, painful moments that will surely meet them in the coming
days. Yes, shadows would surely come to them, but the shadows existed
because they were in the presence of light, of the light of the world.
The disciples in our story from Matthew, the disciples want to build on the
mountain, they want to stay in presence of this light as it is, and they
want to begin making a home on that mountain of light. But Jesus won’t
let them—the problem is that you can’t have light without shadows, so
there are times when we must leave the mountain so that we can
experience the valleys. Mountains like this one are great, they fill us up
with light, with Christ, so that we can see still see the truth whenever we
must leave the mountain to go down into the valley of shadows. “Listen
to him,” the voice of God says here, “this is the one whom I’ve sent, so
no building homes here—you’ve got work to do in the valley below.”
Valleys exist because mountains tower over the earth, shadows exist
because light pours its warmth into all the universe. The good news is
that we get moments like this, moments of light and wonder, so that we
can meet the challenge of Lent, the challenge of looking inward, the
moments when the shadows seem to overwhelm us. The world, the
world is bathed in light, in the light of Christ, and that light will never go
out, and that light will never leave us in darkness. We are given much,
so much, and this moment in Matthew is a reminder that life, that hope,
meets us at the end of Lent—resurrection is the end of the story, not
crucifixion, life, not death, is written into the story of the universe, and
indeed, it is written into the very story of our lives. May God bath us in
much life as we begin the season of Lent, this season of shadows.
Amen and amen.
