I preached again this Sunday. For the first time I created what I would call the "long-form" sermon. I guess it took 17-20 minutes, whereas my usual time would be 10-12. I think it went quite well. Short sermons and long sermons can both be good or bad; but there are different rules for doing them well, I think. The feedback from the congregation has all been good on this one.
My usual caveat: the manuscript is not the sermon. It is the visual cue that gives the sermon its structure and flow; the sermon is what is spoken and heard, not what is written. I invite your comments and feedback!
Sermon
February 18, 2007
Murray Speer
Luke 9:28-36
The Mystery of the Transfiguration
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’—not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
Today we have heard two stories that involve people going up on a mountain and encountering God. Have you ever had an experience like this? When you’ve gone somewhere, apart from other people, and found something there that you never expected? Sometimes, it can be hard to describe. Sometimes, it can change your entire life, your entire perspective. Sometimes you can be transformed.
We call today in the liturgical calendar the day of the Transfiguration. It’s always the last Sunday in the season following Epiphany. Always the Sunday before the start of Lent.
It’s kind of funny how, in the church, we have words that aren’t really used anywhere else in our culture. In many cases, it’s because when we started using them they made sense to everyone, and then the English language moved on from those words, and we kept using them anyway. The word “transfiguration” is one of those words. We don’t use it anywhere else in our culture, but we have kept it for this day, and this story. It just means, changing from one thing into another. It’s a synonym for “transformation” – which is a word that is much more familiar to most of us, I think.
The transfiguration has been, in recent decades, a bit of an embarrassment for the church – probably especially the United Church. When a person steps into our worship, a person steeped in the perspectives of the modern world, and hears us talking in a matter-of-fact way about Jesus getting all glow-y and clouds of smoke talking to people – well, we don’t always come across so well.
“You mean you really believe that Jesus started to glow?”
“You really believe that two guys who had been dead for centuries were just there?”
“You mean to tell me that you believe they heard a voice coming from a cloud, with their ears and everything?”
These aren’t easy challenges to respond to, especially if they’re coming from people who are making a sincere effort to understand and to pursue their faith.
Which is why I think it’s a good idea to start calling this day in the liturgical calendar “the Mystery of the Transfiguration” – or, if you prefer, “the Mystery of the Transformation.” Mystery means that this story, the story that Luke tells us, and Matthew and Mark each tell us also, in their own ways, is not the end-in-itself, but the beginning of something. Mystery means that this story is not the final word but the opening word.
Mystery means that we all, every one of us, has a journey to take with this story. A journey toward a deeper understanding of ourselves, a deeper relationship with God, and a deeper trust in the promises of God for us.
So let’s ask a question (I’ve been told that I tend to use perhaps too many rhetorical questions in my sermons, so I’m going to try to stick to one this time, and here it is): When we treat this story as the opening word, and try to journey deeper into the mystery of the transfiguration, what do we find?
The first thing we find is that Jesus prays. This is characteristic of the prayer life of Jesus in the gospels – he goes off by himself or with a few friends, to a quiet place away from the crowds, and he engages in prayer. And this time, when he prays, Elijah and Moses come and speak to him.
This is a different kind of prayer than we might often think of. I think we’ve been trained to think of prayer as “talking” – certainly in worship, when he have our opening prayer we all talk; when we have our pastoral prayer, one of us talks; the Lord’s prayer is something that we say; and many of us were raised to pray daily by reciting a certain little speech. All of these, without a doubt, are important ways to pray.
But talking isn’t the only way to pray. If anyone here has been given that impression, then you’ve been mistreated. Imagine if Elijah, or Moses, or Jesus were standing right behind you, ready to talk to you, and every time you prayed you were to spend the whole time talking, so that they couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Imagine if God had something important to tell you, and you never stopped talking long enough to listen.
Listening is an even more important way to pray than talking. And we see this in the story from Luke: Elijah and Moses appear, in glory, and speak of his departure. In the details of the story, Jesus isn’t necessarily saying anything back to them. He is very possibly simply sitting still, and listening.
In our Bible study groups that meet Tuesday evening and Thursday morning, we very often have prayer at the end of the meeting. Usually there is a bit of a negotiation over who will speak for us as we pray – mostly trying to get someone else to do it. Because it takes a great deal of courage to speak. And often we have conversations about how it is that one can pray, spontaneously and from the moment, which is what we mean when we say “extemporaneous”. From the moment. There are some tricks and techniques that can help, some stock phrases that can make it easier, but I’m convinced that the most important step of praying in that way, is listening. First, we listen to each other and find out what is happening for us in our lives, and what is happening among us as we gather together. And second, we listen down into our souls and wait to hear the word of God speaking back to us. If you can learn to listen, you can learn to pray.
Sometimes, in worship, we stop in the middle of a prayer and we’re silent for a little bit. I don’t know how all of you feel in those times, but I know that in general a lot of people are pretty uncomfortable with silences like that. They think they’re supposed to be doing something. Saying something. Looking at something. I invite you next time that happens in our worship, to not worry about saying anything or finding words, or to think about what other people are doing, or about how long we’re going to stay silent before the minister starts talking again, and to find a peaceful place inside of you, and just listen.
And sometimes prayer is not about words at all. Neither about saying words, nor about hearing them. Prayers with words and thoughts are important, without a doubt, but they aren’t all there is. Sometimes, prayer is about feeling.
Many of us tend to value our intellect above all else – this is something that the western culture has taught us. We must use our minds to exercise control over our feelings and our behaviours – mind over matter, we say. In my own experience, this can be a disastrous way of seeing the world. When our prayers are only about thinking and talking, we are cutting ourselves off from the feeling, moving, dancing parts of us.
Feeling is an even more important way of praying than listening and talking. Someone once said (Theophan the Recluse, Russian mystic): “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.”
God doesn’t expect our prayers to be perfectly worded, or even worded at all. Before we listen, before we speak, we should feel our prayers. And often that’s enough.
I believe that this is what Jesus was doing, up on that mountain, while his companions were fighting against sleep. This is the first step into the mystery of the transfiguration.
The second thing we see is that Jesus is transformed. His face changes and his clothes become dazzling white. Note that his face doesn’t become dazzling white – he still has his dark Middle Eastern complexion. This isn’t a story about Jesus becoming a white guy. But his face changes, and his clothes become dazzling white.
Now, there are a number of ways we can explain this naturalistically, if that’s what you like to do. Chances are this trip into the wilderness to pray was accompanied by a fast – they didn’t bring a picnic onto the mountain. So, three men take a long walk with no food or water, uphill and to a higher altitude than they’re used to living at, and just at the verge of sleep, they see something remarkable.
Deprived of sleep, food, water, and oxygen, the brain does strange things. It interprets information differently. We see and hear things that we wouldn’t otherwise see and hear, because our brain gets mixed up. So, when they look at Jesus, they see something they haven’t seen before.
I don’t want to spend too much time on this, because frankly trying to explain stories like this isn’t something that I like to do – because it doesn’t take us any deeper into the mystery of the transfiguration. Maybe they saw something that had been there all along but they had no access to. Maybe they saw something that was happening to Jesus before their very eyes. Maybe their perspectives on him were changed as they saw him praying, for real. Maybe he achieved a serenity and inner peace through prayer that was so impressive to them that the only way their brains could process the information was to turn it into a bright light.
But none of that takes us any deeper into the mystery of the transfiguration. What does take us deeper is this: Jesus, through prayer, is changed into something new. However you describe it, however you try to explain it away, this is the mystery.
There is a strong movement in the churches of North America right now, represented by people like the writers Marcus Borg and Thomas Harpur, who have begun to think about what people are actually saying and doing in their lives of faith. And they have found that many folks have a rich and rewarding faith, that is consistent with the ancient witness of Christianity, but does not have a lot in common with the primary understandings of the church that were current fifty or eighty years ago.
One element of this “emerging Christianity,” as it is called, is a diminished focus on “belief” and an increased focus on “transformation” – we are a people who are in a process of “becoming.” We are on a journey toward a certain destination. Christianity, in this model, is not a set of statements that we acknowledge as true, but a path along which we walk – a path laid down by Jesus and that God calls us to follow.
We are a people who are being changed into something new. Just as prayer changed Jesus into something that his friends had never seen before, a life of prayer – prayer that includes feeling, listening, and talking – and following Jesus can change us into something that we can barely imagine.
This, the call of God to change ourselves, is the second step into the mystery of the Transfiguration.
The third step is that Jesus and his friends do not stay on the mountaintop. Peter puts it quite succinctly: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.”
I think most of us have an experience in our past of being in a place or a situation that is so good… so good… that we don’t want to leave. We want to put up our tents and camp right there on that spot. Stop the world! I want this feeling and this condition to stay forever.
In spirituality talk, it’s often called a “peak experience.” There’s a bit of word play there: when it happens to us, we consider it to be the best thing ever, so therefore it’s the summit, the climax, the apex, the tip top of our good times. The peak. But also, we acknowledge that in so much of our literature, people have their peak experiences on an actual mountain. Like in today’s story from Luke.
Peter wants to stay there. Peter wants to be able to bottle this feeling and sell it, actually. He wants to stay there and let the world come to them and make this a center of worship and pilgrimage, with himself as a sort of chief steward and manager. That’s my understanding of the Peter character.
I think many of us in the church feel that way a little bit about our own congregations and our own worship. We have had some wonderful times in our Sunday worship, we say to ourselves. Some great feelings. We have experienced the presence of God in our lives, we have prayed by feeling and listening and speaking and singing. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could stay there forever. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could share it with the world! By staying just where we are and getting the world to come to us!
But that is not the mystery of the transfiguration. The mystery of the transfiguration is that we cannot stay in that peak experience. We cannot stay in worship around the clock, or throughout the week. We cannot stay on top of the mountain.
About a week ago I received an e-mail advertising an event at the United Church retreat center at Naramata, BC. It’s a three-day retreat in silence and solitude, with one hour each day of meeting with a spiritual director. Three days alone and silent – not an empty silence, but a silence full of prayer, feeling, and the presence of God. It’s happening next weekend, and if I was in BC right now I would be signing up to go.
I went last year, and it was without a doubt a peak experience for me. I would have loved nothing more than to stay there forever. I have to admit, I sometimes still imagine that I will end up there somehow, in my career, living there and possibly even retiring there. That’s how powerful my experiences in that place have been – experiences of transformation through prayer.
But when I was there last year, I had a vision – of the world as a pattern laid out on the grass. It’s called a labyrinth – a prayer tool that is being used more and more in our churches and spiritual communities. A labyrinth is different from a maze: there is only one path in to the center, with no wrong turns and no dead ends. The same path leads you back out. And it is flat on the ground, so that you can always see the entire pattern. You can always see the center, the destination. And you can always see the edge of the circle. The circle itself represents, at one and the same time, the universe, the life path of the person walking, and the heart and personality of the person.
On the second day of my retreat, I walked into the labyrinth, asking God for guidance in understanding my call to ministry and all of the things that I had been learning about in seminary, and then opening myself up to listen. On the way in, I looked at the center of the pattern and saw it as “the peak” – the place where God’s love can be found most easily. The place where we are changed into what God would have us become. The place where we are most happy, most fulfilled. The place where we would love to pitch our tents and stake our claim.
When I got to the center, though, and looked out, I saw something very different. Someone had been along with a leaf blower, and cleaned out all of the paths of the labyrinth. But just outside the circular shape, a winter’s worth of leaves sat decaying in the grass. Just outside, in the rest of the world, everything was crudded up and touched by death.
As much as I would have loved to stay in the middle of that labyrinth, clear of leaves and decay, in the presence of God’s love, deep in prayer, I had to return to the rest of the world. And as much as I would have loved to stay in that retreat center, I had to return to the rest of my life. Not because there was anything forcing me, but because that is where God was calling me.
And this is the third step into the mystery of the transfiguration. We go up the mountain, we retreat from the world, we journey to the center – and we find that God is calling us back to the places where we came from. To do God’s work among the decay and the pain and the confusion of the world.
But just like the center of the labyrinth, that is visible no matter where in the pattern you stand; just like a high mountain that is visible from miles away in any direction; just like a church on the main street of a busy town; we can always see the peak. We can always reach back and remember that feeling, remember that call, remember that prayer. And, though it may take some work, we can always journey back when we need to, to be refreshed and empowered, to do God’s work.
Jesus took his friends up on the mountain to pray. But his overall task was not prayer and worship. His encounter on the peak, with Moses and Elijah, sent him on to the next stage of his ministry – “they were speaking of his departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” He went on to the mountain to pray and replenish his power, but his work was always in the plains and the valleys, in the pain and decay and confusion of the world.
We, likewise,
are called not to be
a people
of the mountain,
but a people
with a mission.
Knowing that the mountain
is there when we need it.
Praying to God,
with our feelings and our words.
And working to transform ourselves,
and walk in the direction that God is calling us to go.
