Transfiguration
19/02/12 05:14
I sometimes think that I should be better at remembering sermons that I have given in past years. In some cases, I can remember how I felt or the circumstances better than the actual sermons. I can tell the story of my first sermon in a congregation I served as a student, but I don’t know the text or the content of the sermon. I have kept some of my old sermons and they often surprise me. From my current perspective, I think that some of my early sermons were pretty awful. I guess that congregations can be pretty tolerant. People used to tell me they enjoyed my sermons, but when I read some of them, I now wonder why.
The holidays that repeat every year are sometimes very challenging. Christmas and Easter are generally the largest congregations we face each year, but there is little expectation of dramatic new ideas or prophetic preaching on those occasions. People come to church in observance of family traditions and in celebration of holidays. The folks who don’t come to church regularly throughout the rest of the year generally aren’t drawn to the church by the power of preaching.
Holidays that are turning points in the Christian calendar and not observed by the wider community are challenging in different ways. Reign of Christ Sunday and the 1st Sunday of Advent are the last and first days of the Christian calendar. They are important days in the cycle of life inside of the church, but they aren’t recognized as holidays outside of the church. There are no marketing campaigns in retail stores geared around those days. The rest of the world is focused on Christmas shopping instead of the mood and tone of the church holidays.
Transfiguration Sunday is a similar holiday. In the secular world, the stores have just taken down their Valentine’s Day displays. Some stores have some mildly patriotic displays geared around the President’s Day holiday, but most are taking out the pastel colors and pictures of baby chicks in anticipation of Easter. Jelly beans are replacing boxes of chocolates on the shelves in the grocery store.
Transfiguration isn’t one of the really big holidays in part because it is not well understood. It is the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. When observances of fasts were more severe, the holidays that preceded fasts gained significance simply through the cycles of feast and scarcity. The story of the transfiguration is easy to remember, but difficult to understand. Jesus and some of the disciples go up on a mountain and while they are there everything changes. The witnesses described a change in Jesus’ appearance. His clothing was so bright that they fumbled with words to describe the event. More importantly, the conventional rules of time and life and death seemed to be suspended. Jesus has a conversation with two great heroes of our faith – Moses and Elijah. But they are not long-dead corpses. Rather they appear to be fully alive and fully present. It is as if the distinction between the past and the present has fallen away and both are occurring at the same time.
The moment doesn’t last. The experience is fleeting. There is a brief proposal that they build some shelters and stay on the mountain, but in their hearts all of those who witnessed the events know that it is not an experience that can be held or recreated at will. They descend from the mountain with the instructions to wait before telling the story.
Some years I have described experiences that I have had in the mountains in my transfiguration experiences. I talk about church camp, or a couple of memorable family vacations, or the experience of mountain flying with my father when I was a boy. Each of those experiences involves the sense of experiences that are fleeting. Each of those experiences came to an end and the end came sooner than I wanted. I desired to hang on to the experience and to stretch it out, but I have learned that such cannot be done. But these experiences are probably farther from what the disciples experienced with Jesus than other experiences of my life.
There have been moments, when journeying with families through grief, when we have felt the definite presence of one who has died. The experience is as real as anything else in life. Those who have the experience can’t deny the sense of reality despite the fact that the experience cannot be recreated. Some who are strict adherents to scientific methods of observance question any experiences that cannot be duplicated. There may be different ways to explain the experience, but there is no denying that something unique has occurred.
Like the disciples, sometimes we need to wait and process our experiences before talking about them.
This particular transfiguration Sunday falls in the midst of grief in our congregation. Three funerals surround the day: one on Thursday, one yesterday and one tomorrow. None of the people who died were every-Sunday worshipers. None were part of the leadership structure of the congregation. None were what might be described as well known. One had been a snowbird for years, leaving our community in the winter. He had been struggling with illness and hadn’t been able to attend worship for three months or so. Another had been in various health care institutions for nearly a decade and away from our city for at least five years. Another drifted from the church in which he grew up as his life took him through a variety of experiences including changes in career, major family transformations and a couple of decisions that raised the eyebrows of some people who didn’t understand.
All three have now taken their place among the saints of our congregation. “In my house are many rooms,” Jesus said. I have no doubt that their role in the family of Christ is no less significant than that of people whose names are more easily recognized and whose fame in this life was more significant.
We know that our understanding of time is incomplete and our present perspective skews our ability to grasp the fullness of the concept. Transfiguration opens a glimpse at a different way of perceiving time. It is equally true that our perception of life and death and loss is incomplete. Perhaps this day is an invitation to open our spirits to glimpse a wider reality than we have before imagined.