But there were other wonderful people this week, too. Lisa, Jenny, and Holly especially. I was sick with pneumonia all week and these people filled my thoughts and my computer screen. Their fingerprints are all over this message. It grew and grew and as I write this on Saturday night I am wondering how it will come out tomorrow morning. Hopefully I will get a good recording so you can compare the text below with what I actually said.
The lectionary texts for the week are:
Exodus 24:12-18
Psalm 2 (or you might prefer Psalm 99?)
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9 (the Transfiguration story, and the basis for the message below)
Come Holy Spirit. Transform us from believers to doers, from doers to believers. Tickle our ears, touch our hearts, and make us more like you. Amen.
TRANSFIGURATION.
What a word. I told someone who is not real big on church that I was working on a Transfiguration Sunday message and she sent me a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon… about transmogrification. Another word tossed into the bin of long words best used in special situations like cartoons. And church.
But this is Transfiguration Sunday, and that is a big deal because it is the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, and Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and Lent is a very big deal in the church year. So…
What on earth is Transfiguration?
Is it the same as transmogrification? Or the more familiar transformation?
Well, first of all, transmogrification is transformation IN A SURPRISING MANNER. So if we know what transformation is, then we can know what transmogrification is… same thing, just in a surprising way.
But transformation is something you probably kind of know about. Take a moment… think about it. What is transformation? Turn to somebody near you and tell them what you think it is.
And transfiguration. I will put aside the coyness and tell you that transfiguration is a change in form - in the figure - but not in the actual thing. It’s like taking off a mask. When Jesus was transfigured in today’s Gospel lesson he showed something real about himself that he had not shown routinely. Jesus did not become a different person or thing, Jesus just showed all the way who he really is – something he could not do before because people would be too weirded out.
And it freaked Peter, James, and John right out – even though they were the three that Jesus thought MIGHT be able to handle it: his best friends.
And it transformed them! Proof? Jesus said “don’t tell anybody” and even Peter, who could never stay quiet about anything – DID NOT TELL. At least not until a long time later.
Transformation. Changing. Becoming another thing – not just a revision, but a change in who we actually are in some way.
And that made me think of Creation. And The Fall. God created us in some way. You might say God DEEMED that we be a certain thing. But then The Fall came. The brokenness of the world. Regardless of the details, somehow we went from being good and in close relationship with God to being broken, and in broken relationship with God.
The same, but not.
But something else keeps happening, too. God does not leave us broken. God comes and DEEMS us again.
You might say, God REdeems us. Declares that we are another new thing.
So there is something constant in us, and for today’s purposes I’m going to say it is the image of God. If God is constant, and if we are the image of God, then that image in us must also be constant.
But everything else? Everything else is up for transformation.
The whole world – constantly being transformed.
Constantly breaking – abuse, political games, sex trafficking, homelessness
Constantly being redeemed – healed relationships, new loves, creative arts
Everything looks different from moment to moment, day to day, week to week.
But in people, the image of God is constant. We might bury it. We might decline to look for it. We might do everything we can to deny it in others. But it is there, and it is constant because God always stays the same.
*****
But what happens when churches forget that God – and the image of God in us – is the only thing that doesn’t change?
I’ll tell you what happens. People get very scared. They worry about losing the transformations they’ve already experienced – often in beautiful meaningful ways. And I can’t be certain, but I suspect that sometimes people like the way they’ve been transformed and they are afraid that God cannot love them as much if things change. That maybe somebody else will get loved better in that new system.
So they work hard to keep the shell constant and forget to notice the ways that we are all the same in the image of God. That God’s image can stay constant in us even if everything external changes.
And when that fear takes over, and a group feels things have to stay the same (in any way!) then that congregation stops living the transformation. The lose out on the gifts that a loving God shares with a much beloved people.
HERE’S AN EXAMPLE of how that can happen:
Before World War II there was a movement in Christianity called Liberal Christianity. It was very modern, very up-to-date. The leaders, like the Niebuhrs and a dude called Harnack were all about social justice, loving each other, getting to the KERNEL of God’s will in the world. Sounds great, right? But they went a little too far. They essentially opened the door to rejecting Jesus entirely.
They were convinced that humanity was evolving. That The War To End All Wars had, in fact, ended war. That people were going to just keep getting better and better.
But then… World War II. The Holocaust. Hitler’s people experimenting in horrific ways on human beings that it had deemed less than human. Rationing. Shortages and orphaned children. Horrors so terrible they were unimaginable, and in some people not imagining them, other people were exterminated in the most thoughtless and careless ways.
So much for human beings getting better and better.
So the fashions of theology shifted. A different group of European men, the most famous of whom was Karl Barth, called people to a deep sense of repentance. A move away from the agency of human beings to the complete sovereign nature of God. A move to God being the one who was important, and human beings always being in need of God’s love and grace.
As time passed, though… the wounds and horrors of WWII because less raw, less painful. But that idea of “it’s all God!” turned out to be kind of handy. “It’s all God, so I’m off the hook!” “It’s all God, so there really isn’t anything I can do.” Or my most un-favorite… “It’s all God, so go read the Bible and leave me alone.”
Younger people would come along with questions but the questions went unanswered. One of my friends, I’ll call her Holly, tells a story that she went to a church and was INTO it. But she became a teenager and had questions. Nobody seemed interested in engaging with her but they said “Go read the Bible!” So she did. But it didn’t help. For lot of reasons, reading the Bible on her own just wasn’t enough.
In fact, she realized at some point that Google had more answers to her questions than the people at her church. So she decided that what the people at her church called God was actually just people being kind, and that the God of the church was not interesting to her. She would go straight to people and skip all the inconveniences that God brought.
She also told me that she wondered what might have happened if somebody HAD answered her questions and engaged with her. But it seemed, at least when we talked, that the time for those conversations was over.
For Holly, the church was a place that had forgotten that it was being transformed. It got stuck. In not allowing the church to transform with the people, some people like Holly were left out.
The thing is, Holly HAD actually read the Bible. She had been faithful to her congregation until they stopped being faithful to her. So all the things that church offered – the history and community, the opportunity for repentance and forgiveness – was lost to Holly and to many others of Holly’s generation.
Holly and many others in her generation decided they were atheists. That the God of those churches was not really relevant. That the God they were supposed to “believe” wasn’t doing the things Jesus modeled (they read the Bible, remember? Knew all about Jesus.) That was being done by people. And if people are the ones doing it, why put up with church?
But I wonder… are the folks who agree with Holly God atheists? Or church atheists? Did the church have such a tightly sealed grip on God that the people could not see God’s transforming work? What Holly and her friends will tell you is that they were suspicious of a church that would not be in relationship with them, that did not act like Jesus acted, that did not wander around in the community loving whomever they bumped into. They didn't understand how a church could only be for themselves when Jesus was so generously attendant to the people around him.
The people whose faith had started in a deep belief and repentance that God can always REdeem us had forgotten that Jesus also did a lot of things. That Jesus didn’t only believe - although he did, in fact, believe. He prayed. He spent time alone with God. He knew God intimately.
Jesus lived a faith by raising people from the dead, feeding hungry people, crying, being available to poor people, and meeting every need – physical, psychological, emotional, mental – EVERY NEED that people had.
Similar to the way years before when people had thought so much of what Jesus did that they forgot that Jesus was the only human being who was not broken apart by the Fall.
*****
Here's the thing: this dichotomy between BELIEVE and DO is going to continue to be with us. And no matter how edgy and exhilarating it is to be in our cool new ministries (Be Church… South Durham Connections… Emmaus Walk… Farm Church… I could go on!) we live in the same danger of forgetting that we too will be transformed and REdeemed.
We will always be broken and in need of God’s love, love that was brought, demonstrated, and slathered all over everyone by Jesus.
Our broken selves can never completely and rightly hold the image of God.
We will never be who Jesus revealed during his Transfiguration.
So the question is not… IS IT BELIEVE OR DO?
What it is, is GOD. It’s both. It’s neither. IT’S GOD.
God is not limited to BELIEVE or DO. To say God prefers one or the other is like saying that a single piece of paper can accurately represent this huge beautiful three (or more) dimensional universe.
And it was all made possible when Jesus went down from that mountain and walked to his death on the cross.
It was made possible because the Transfigured Jesus who needed no more transformation could not be held by death… because death is only for people who are broken, who need transformation (or even transmogrification), who cannot live up to the high standards of who and how we were originally deemed to be at the Creation.
And because Jesus COULD live up to that standard, the Resurrection happened. Jesus did not stay dead, and now invites us into that life.
As we follow Jesus, BELIEVING that Jesus is the one, and DOING the things to show love in the way that Jesus showed us to be – we will get it wrong. We will make all the mistakes. But because of the Resurrection we are REdeemed. Deemed anew in every moment of faith.
In every moment of every day, in the wake of the Resurrection, we are called to be believers instead of doers, doers instead of believers, being transformed and shaped, REdeemed and renewed…
Until one day when Jesus brings us home to where no more transformation is needed. Where we can live bathed in the eternity of God’s infinite love, finally and fully who we were created to be.
AMEN.
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