Transfiguration Sunday, February 26, 2006

Mark 9:2-9

And after six days 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 garments  became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.  And there  appeared to them Elijah with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus.  And Peter said to  Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one  for Moses and one for Elijah.”  For he did not know what to say, for they were  exceedingly afraid.  And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud,  “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”  And suddenly looking around they no longer  saw any one with them but Jesus only. 

What is real?  Is it an intense encounter, a “mountain-top experience?”  Or is it the daily grind?  What is real?

What is real?  When two newly engaged persons come for pre-marriage counseling and are convinced that this other person is the best human being on earth and, that each could never be happy again in life unless they married each other; or are we dealing with two people with temporary psychotic behavior?  What is real?

What is real?  Is it the promise and hope of salvation, where every tear is wiped away?  Or is the fears and tears that come our way?

What is real?  Is it the dreams and plans we pursue, the high-held goals of life and hope?  Or is it our repeated failures, the realization that we haven’t quite managed to put it all together?

What is real?  Is it our vows to love and nurture, the fully-intended promises to care?  Or is it our moments of anger and disappointment?

What is real?  Our visions of harmony and laughter, or our too-frequent quarrels and sullen silences?

What is real?  Are we right when we respond to disappointment by sighing, “Well, that’s life.”  Or is that giving life a bad rap?          

What is real?  Are we right when we say, in those precious moments of delighted contentment, “Now this is really living!” or is that too polly-anish?

What is real?  That our partner/lover/friend is the center of our life Or that we sometimes betray the trust that they place in us and hurt them grievously?  What is real?

Today is the Transfiguration of Jesus.  It is one of those rare mountaintop events of life, just beyond explanation, linking us somehow with the mystery of creation and eternity.     It offered to Jesus a confirmation by God on Jesus’ path of ministry; it gave Peter and James and John a glimpse of the transcendent, a peek at the reality beyond their everyday lives.

But then, was that real?  Is the real Jesus the one of glory, whose garments shine like the blazing sun?  Or is it the Jesus hanging in shame, (forget bleached-white garments, he has no clothes, and is naked, on the cross)?  Which Jesus is the real one?

Jesus leads the disciples back down off the mountain, back into the daily routines of teaching, preaching, and caring for the hurting.  So, what then is real: the mountaintop of glory, or the messiness of daily ministry?

What is real in the church?  Is it our prayers and worship, our confession of faith, our hope of heaven one day?  Or is it our acts of kindness, words of encouragement, and other concrete expressions of faith in ordinary days?

What is real?  Is it the hope that the words of the liturgy that we say repeatedly on Sundays throughout the year will shape and form our Mondays through Saturdays?  Or is reality what we bump into at every turn at home, school, work and neighborhood?

What is real?  That the church meet our needs and we are helped?  Or is it that we focus on others, intentionally going out of our way to make them welcome here, that we are here for them, and not the other way around?

By now perhaps you realize that again and again, the answer to “what is real?” has to be, in some sense, “well, both are real.”  Life is much more than a collection of moments of misery, but life cannot be detached from its burdens and cares.  Life surely dwells in the daily grind, yet we may never be so fully alive as when we experience a rare, intense mountaintop moment of life.

“Reality is where Jesus and human beings come into contact.”  I stole that sentence from a seminary professor.  “Reality is where Jesus and human beings come into contact.” 

What does that mean?

It means: that when we turn to our Savior, allowing Jesus to guide, we begin to see life with some clarity.  Our vision of what is real and what is not comes into sharper focus.  It means that if we are to get a clear idea of the shape and scope of life, of what is real, we do well to look to Jesus.

When we look to Jesus, what do we see?  On the one hand, we find a Jesus who takes us up to giddy heights of the mountain: those intense moments in the hospital room or on a retreat, we are on a pristine beach in Aruba,  when we fall in love, or when we are fully forgiven of something terrible.  That’s real. 

But we also find a Jesus who leads us deeper into the hearts of children, into the homes of the helpless, to the pain of the wounded, to the routines of tending to one another.  Jesus leads us to clean that dirty sheet of the incontinent parent or child; Jesus is there in the fear of a teen who is uncertain of the future; Jesus is there in the joy of a wedding dance; Jesus is there in the aching heart of a bereaved parent; Jesus is there in the repeated failures of his followers, and Jesus is there in our successes.  Wherever the haunts of human living leads us, we soon discover that Jesus is there too.

“Reality is where Jesus and human beings come into contact.”  Additionally, we discover that Jesus not only encountered human beings in the extraordinary and in the routine, but Jesus also repeatedly led them where they hadn’t expected to go.  “Behold, I make all things new,” said Jesus, and suddenly the age-old prejudices against Samaritans, or children, or women, or a person of any other race or nation, or people of different sexual orientation, or of different economic position; that those prejudices cannot be sustained.

“Behold, I make all things new.”  And suddenly all our wonderful plans to earn our way into God’s heart are swept away with the promise of grace, God’s love freely and lavishly poured onto us; salvation gifted to us by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“Behold, I make all things new.”  And suddenly we are to serve those people we want to lead, pray for those who hate us.  Then, Zion’s mission statement makes even more sense, that we are a community of faith, sharing Christ’s love, serving all people.