This message - my most recent! - actually being posted in a somewhat timely fashion! - grew out of an ear worm. A very long-lived, very insistent ear worm. I was back at Springmoor this past Sunday, February 14, Valentine's Day, Transfiguration Sunday. Rainy and 34. But also bright and warm and happy. The message came together quickly as that ear worm and the notability of the day and my physics past all converged. Some days are just like that I guess.
Here's the link to the video, thanks to the awesome folks at Springmoor Retirement Village.
The texts are:
Do you know what an ear worm is? When a song (or more often a little piece of a song) worms its way into your brain and you can’t stop yourself from humming it over – and over and over and over and over and OVER?
I had one of those. For two weeks before I even started thinking about this message I would be thinking that song when I woke up, hum it while I was getting dressed, bop my head to it as I ate. At work I would realize I was humming it as I prepared for distribution of food, and yep, it was the last thing I “heard” when I went to sleep at night.
FOR TWO WEEKS. Ugh.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a good song! It’s a song I love, a song that has been known to leave me in tears. But when my friends and coworkers started noticing, well…
It was a bit much.
It’s a song that was released by Cyndi Lauper and it was a big hit in 1986. In fact for two weeks in 1986 it was the number one song on the Billboard Top 100. It was also Cyndi Lauper’s last big hit. And what a way to go out, y’know?
It’s called True Colors. (you can listen to the official version here)
One line especially captured me: When this world makes you crazy and you’ve taken all you can bear, just call me up, because you know I’ll be there.
That’s the line that made me cry, because something in my spirit longs to know that when the world has become more than I can bear, all I have to do is call and they will be there.
And that made me think of Jesus.
Then came the time when I was starting to prepare to be here today. Transfiguration Sunday. The day we hear the story of Jesus being transfigured from ordinary Middle Eastern Jewish man to someone else. Someone described as dazzling.
Dazzling bright light.
That dazzling bright light came up against the True Colors ear worm in my former-physics-teacher brain and I immediately thought of prisms.
Do you know about prisms? Pieces of glass. When light shines through a prism a rainbow comes out the other side! They are so much fun to play with. In fact, if you look on the internet for prisms one of the first thing that comes up is a toy.
But prisms are also serious physics. In a previous part of my life I was a high school physics teacher and I spent 10 years doing research into how people learn physics. I have spent some time thinking about how pure light goes into a prism and gets broken up into lots of different colors.
The colors are beautiful on their own, but they are only a part of the whole light. The unbroken thing is the pure bright dazzling light.
Like Jesus.
In the Transfiguration.
Like Jesus when he showed his closest friends who he really was. When Jesus revealed that he was the whole package, the ideal human being, the only one ever to live like God created all people to live.
Peter, James, and John (and all the other disciples, and you, and I) could never be that pure kind of light. Each of them had their own beautiful true color, but none of them had all the colors – all the parts – of perfectly pure dazzling light.
But Jesus! Jesus has all the True Colors. And of course we were meant to have them too. But when sin came in it acted like a prism, breaking our pure good humanity into who we are.
It was super critically important that Jesus revealed who he really was, but in broken human terms it was also really dangerous. That’s why Jesus told Peter, James, and John not to tell anybody. But whether they told or not, that Transfiguration started a path for Jesus and all his disciples that would unfold so that Jesus would die.
But of course he did not stay dead! I can’t leave out the end of the story – Easter came!
But before Easter came there was a lot of brokenness. A lot of sin acting like a prism.
* Judas betraying Jesus – possibly because he was so sure Jesus could not harmed
o Peter denying Jesus three times – possibly because he feared for himself more than for Jesus
* The disciples all huddling together in fear – possibly because they thought death would be
final this time, too, and the politicans would be coming after them.
It was like Lent, a display of some of the worst of humanity, except that the disciples did not know that Easter was coming. All they could see was that terrible things were happening to Jesus and they couldn’t help. They couldn’t be anything but broken and hurtful to the one that loved them so well.
What a contrast!
The pure dazzling light of Jesus coming right before all that bad stuff. All those reminders that the disciples were not the whole package.
It was a rough time as the disciples saw their own broken parts in contrast to Jesus dazzling consistently good presence.
But Jesus kept loving them.
Today is Valentine’s Day. The day of love! And everywhere you look you encounter red. Red, red, red. Red hearts. Red bows. Red teddy bears. We sometimes think of red as the color of love.
But I think maybe that’s not enough. Red is only one of the many colors that pure light gets broken into.
Jesus, who IS love, was (and is) that pure dazzling light. Jesus was (and is) all the colors. Red and blue and green and purple (my personal favorite) are just pieces. Beautiful, but in different ways for each of us. They are good, because those colors are all part of the pure dazzling light of Jesus.
But none of us can dazzle by ourselves. We need each other if we are to even begin to think about getting close to who Jesus was.
We cannot love on our own. Only Jesus could do that. We need the give and take of loving each other, to love one another when things are tough, to invite us back into relationship when those relationships become broken. The back and forth of helping each other carry burdens and pick ourselves up and move on when things have gone dreadfully wrong.
Pastors from liturgical traditions (like Lutheran and Episcopalian and Catholic and Methodist) traditionally wear white stoles on Transfiguration, to remind us of the purity and dazzle of Jesus. But today I’m wearing this stole to remind myself – and maybe you – that we cannot dazzle on our own but we can be beautiful together.
Sin may break pure light into colors but they are True Colors – the parts of us that long for wholeness that only God can offer. The parts of us that are drawn to each other in an attempt to be better than we are alone. The complete, pure, shining light that we see in Jesus, who lived the perfect life that we cannot.
Lent starts this coming Wednesday and some people will get ashes on their foreheads as a reminder that we are limited, that we will not live forever, that sin has fractured the pure dazzle of the original creation into so many separate colors. And remembering that fact is good when it makes Easter all the more joyous and beautiful and celebratory.
But this year I urge you to remember this also:
You have a True Color and that part of you is holy and good and beautiful. It is the part that will bring you back to the savior who sees those True Colors. So…
When this world makes you crazy and you’ve taken all you can bear you can call him up – he’s already there.
Amen.
