In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Over
the past week, as memorials have been made to the crew of the Space Shuttle
Challenger that exploded thirty years ago, I was reminded of then-President
Reagan’s remark that the crew “touched the face of God.” That beautifully
poetic line reminded me of another, from the great hymn writer, Charles Wesley,
that we are “changed from glory into glory.” The glory of humanity climbing
into a rocket to visit outer space was changed into a strangely beautiful cloud
of smoke that brought a group of explorers to see the face of God. And so, by
reflecting on the Challenger tragedy and our Scripture readings today, I’ve
been pondering what it means to “see the face of God.”
This
passage from Luke is known as “The Transfiguration.” It’s a particularly tough
for us to read in a post-Enlightenment, modern world. Things like this don’t
happen. Dead people don’t show up and talk to our religious leaders who have
glowing faces. We’re generally glad that our lives are built on solid
scientific understandings and not magical theories. It’s a good thing that our
airline pilots, doctors, and financial advisors all have a solid grasp of the
way the modern world works and don’t rely on practices that are thousands of
years old. But when it comes to our faith, we are told to embrace those stories
and philosophies that we would utterly reject if they came to us in any other
field. When Jesus teaches, we can get on board with his timeless teachings.
When Jesus heals, we can understand that Jesus shows us the power of God to
work through brokenness. But a story such as the Transfiguration is a bigger
challenge for us, as it’s harder to apply to our lives and requires us to adopt
a worldview that might be incompatible with ours. There is still an important
message in this narrative: that God can be seen face to face.
Every
year, this reading about Jesus being transfigured is read on the final Sunday
after Epiphany prior to Ash Wednesday. Epiphany began with the magi visiting a
child, and it concludes with Jesus appearing shining radiantly, with glory for all
the world to see. As we prepare to enter Lent, it provides us with a sense of
what we hope that the Messiah is: someone who is revered, as Elijah and Moses
were; someone whose glory will fill the skies; someone who will be clearly
manifest as the Messiah and accordingly worshiped and obeyed; someone whose
power will be unquestionable. But the end of Lent though, we’ll have a very
different image of Jesus on a different mountaintop. There, Jesus will be seen
not shining radiantly, but hanging in agony from a cross. He will be not
honored, but despised. He will changed from glory into glory – from the glory
of the Transfiguration to the ironic glory found in the Cross.
Mountaintop
experiences are wonderful, and we give God thanks for them. But life is not
lived in those moments. That is the tension of our faith – that the peace of
God which we long for is not fully on display here. Sure, we catch glimpses of
it now and then, but we can’t live there. That’s what well-meaning Peter tries
to do when he says “Let’s build three tents here, one for Moses, one for
Elijah, and one for you, Jesus.” When we have those mountaintop experiences, we
long to hang onto them. When both of my daughters were born and I held them for
the first time, I was on a mountaintop, and part of me would love to be frozen
in that moment in time. Whoever wins the
Super Bowl tonight will be on a mountaintop that they’ll never want to leave.
Maybe you’ve been on a spiritual retreat or have a memory from summer camp
where you felt God’s presence as palpably as someone giving you a hug and you’d
like nothing more than to feel that again. The mountaintop is a wonderful thing
to experience, but we don’t live there. If we did, we’d miss out on all of the
opportunities to see the face of God. As we see in this encounter, our task is
not to capture holy moments, but to respond to them.
On
Wednesday nights during Lent, we’ll gather for fellowship and study using a
wonderful book called The Dream of God,
by Verna Dozier. The thesis of that book is that we’ve “distorted our faith,
narrowed it from a call to transform the world to a call to save souls of
individuals who hear and heed a specific message, narrowed it from a present
possibility to a future fulfillment.” Jesus didn’t come here to help us to
write a Creed, implement Sacraments, or found an institution. No, Jesus’
Incarnation is about helping us to move glory to glory. From the glory of being
created in the divine image of God, through the pain and sin of life, into the
glory of God’s dream for peace and justice to be known on earth as it is in
heaven.
This
is what the Psalm today is about – “The Lord is King; let the people tremble;
he is enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth shake. The Lord is great in
Zion; he is high above all peoples. Let them confess his Name, which is great
and awesome; he is the Holy One.” Those words are just as ridiculous today as
they were in ancient Israel. Israel had a failed monarchy and had been overrun
by foreign nations. Human dignity and peace were not hallmarks of their society
any more than they are in ours. Psalm 99 is not just counter-cultural, it is
counter-reality. If we really acted as if the Lord is King and we all confessed
that holy name above all other names then I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t need to
say “Black Lives Matter,” because that would be obvious; we wouldn’t need to
fight for equal pay for women, because that would have happened a long time
ago; we wouldn’t have homeless veterans sleeping on the streets while Wall
Street executives who caused the Great Recession never had charges filed
against them and sleep in their warm homes with billions in the bank. It is
precisely because we are not living in the glory of God that we need Psalms
such as the ninety-ninth to remind us of what a transfigured faith might look
like.
St.
Paul, in writing to the church at Corinth puts it this way: “Since, then, we
have such a hope, we act with great boldness… And all of us are being
transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Perhaps
then, the Transfiguration isn’t just an event to capture in a stained glass
window, or to sing about in hymn, but rather is something that we might respond
to in faith. As St. Paul puts it, the salvation of Jesus isn’t just something
that we are to believe in, or be blessed by, but it is something that are
participate in. Through faith, we come to see the face of God all around us,
even in the mirror. The life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus isn’t something
to venerate, but something to enter into.
Today
we’re celebrating a Baptism, which is a great reminder of this. It’s not just
that we worship God as a deity in the sky by offering prayers and sacrifices,
instead, we enter into God’s very being through the mystery and grace of
Baptism. The Resurrected life awaits us, not just after our deaths, but in the
midst of our lives. The Transfiguration shows us that all around us, the glory
of God is waiting to be seen. One of my favorite lines from poetry is “Earth’s
crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who
sees, takes off his shoes, the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” What
would it look like if we acted with boldness in looking for and showing others
the face of God?
Where
do you see the face of God in our world? I think we’ve all had those moments
where we see something so touching, so beautiful, so alive that it transfigures
humanity into something greater than we can bear. It might not be a mountaintop
experience, sometimes something rather mundane captures us – a blooming flower
or a couple holding hands – and we see it transfigured, full of meaning beyond
what we see with our eyes. We move so quickly and our eyes are often fixed on a
screen of one form or another that we might be sitting around, eating
blackberries, while the face of God is waiting to be seen. As you consider what
disciplines you might take up this coming Lent, perhaps it could be to focus
more on seeing the face of God in the world around us.
And
as others are looking for those transfigured moments of grace, how might they
see the face of God in you? How are you being transformed more fully into the
image of God? You may very well be the peace of God that someone needs to see
at work. You may speak the words of comfort that some soul needs to hear. Your
generosity may be the inspiration that begins a movement. Your smile may be
what saves someone today. We are told in Scripture that we are created in the
image of God. In Baptism, we affirm this image and are made part of Christ’s
body, being transfigured and changed from glory into glory so that the world
might see God through you.
May
God grant you the eyes to see the transfigured glory of this world. May God
transform you to be God’s face to others. And may God always be with us as we
are changed from glory into glory. Amen.
