RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - February 3, 2008

“One Brief Shining Moment”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 17:1-9, 14-18

Let’s be honest, right from the start. We all want to be where God is. Don’t we? Certainly that is at least part of the reason that some of us come to this church week after week, that we share the bread and the cup together every first Sunday of the month. There is that little piece of us that believes that here – in this very place - we will find God.

Not that we are unique. After all, the Hebrew people were absolutely certain that God was in the pillar of fire that went before them and the cloud that billowed about them. They believed beyond the shadow of a doubt that when God was not doing the smoke and mirrors disguising thing, the Holy One resided at the top of a high mountain, like Sinai where Moses went to speak to Yahweh face-to-face.

Not that any of the Hebrews wanted to actually go way up there with Moses, but they still wanted to be where God was. You know the story. When Moses was gone for such a long time picking up the Ten Commandments, the Hebrews figured that if God was up there with Moses, then God could not possibly be down here with them.

Why do you think they crafted that golden calf they paraded around in Cecil B DeMille’s epic film? It was a no brainer - if they would not go to God, well, then, God would need to come to them – idol or no idol.

We all want to be where God is. Perhaps that was at the back of the minds of Peter, James, and John as they followed Jesus up, up, up the narrow, rocky, winding path that summer afternoon so long ago. After all, they were good Jews. They knew that God lived on the mountain tops, among the clouds and claps of thunder. Perhaps, they hoped, through this time of lonely prayer with their rabbi, they would somehow come to know and find God too.

Now the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record this story of the transfiguration, though the writers differ on the details. However, something important, something transformative, happened on that mountain – on that, they all agree. One might call it a vision – as undeniably real as such an encounter with holiness can be - because without warning Jesus changed before their very eyes.

Bedazzled by visionary ecstasy, they saw not their plain-robed friend, but rather their teacher clothed in shimmering white, his face shining like the sun, shining like God would surely shine. Changed in form Jesus was – like a cocoon would be transformed into a butterfly or a bulb into a flower.

Changed, transformed, transfigured from Jesus of Nazareth into this divine Christ in glory. Not only that, but from the cloud above boomed a holy voice of proclamation and acclamation. “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” And to top it off, Moses and Elijah flanked the itinerant preacher: Moses and Elijah who were the two greatest prophets ever known to Peter, James, and John.

Not having 20/20 hindsight as we do, surely they missed the irony that Jesus, who would later be branded as a revolutionary and killed for his attempts to change the social order of the Roman world, would be side by side with Moses, who led his people out of oppression, and Elijah, whom King Ahab had called, "that trouble of Israel," because Elijah condemned the people's milk toast attitude and failure to stand courageously on principle when it came to worshipping true or false gods (Chittester).

And as quickly as the mountain top vision came, it was over, almost as if it had never happened. And the three disciples walked down, down, down the narrow, rocky, winding path into the village where Jesus healed an epileptic boy, a little guy possessed with demons. And the glory-filled experience faded into the dim corners of the mind where the very best of memories reside.

The Sundays of Epiphany begin and end in light. They begin with the light of the star over Bethlehem and end today, on Transfiguration Sunday, with the light of God affirming Jesus as the Holy One long awaited by the disciples – and by us as well.

Today, then, we are invited to climb the mountain with Peter, James, and John and to stand in the very midst of the sacred mystery and to experience the Holy. Today, we are invited for a foretaste of what will come at Easter.

This week, on Ash Wednesday, we will begin our divine descent. Like the disciples, we will go down, down, down that narrow, rocky, winding path that will weave through our Lenten wildernesses, only to end with the cross, with the execution of the one on whom we pin all our hopes and all our dreams for a more compassionate and just world.

And if we can sift out the truth in Matthew’s story of the transfiguration, then we will know that the first stop on our journey is not to some private place where we can relive the ecstasy of our mountain top vision, where we can delude ourselves into thinking that what is important is only our personal relationship with Jesus – but rather our first stop is in the valley, in a small town, where a family is hurting because a child is possessed with demons and because they are ignored by uncaring officials and stranded by ineffectual institutions.

As Joan Chittester writes, the message of Jesus is “about healing hurts, speaking for and being with the poor, the helpless, the voiceless and the forgotten who are at the silent bottom of every pinnacle, every hierarchy and every system.” And as we head into Lent, which has become in the church a very private and personal time of self-reflection, it is important to remember that.

We all want to be where God is. Of course, we do. We all want to have those ecstatic and visionary moments when we are certain that we are standing in the glorious presence of God, washed in the blood of the lamb. But that is only part of knowing God.

If we want to really be a follower of Jesus, we must look for God in other places too. As Matthew pointed out when he very consciously linked the story of the boy with epileptic demons to the transfiguration story and as Patricia de Jong wrote, “The mountaintop experience served the purpose of inspiration and hope, but it is the hard work of ministry which will make all the difference in the world.” Perhaps Howard Thurman is right when he says, “"God expects us to come into God's presence with the smell of life upon us."

Once upon a time, there was a rabbit born in Minnesota where the winters are very cold and very white – and warmer days always seem a long time coming. In fact, this particular rabbit had never seen anything but the white of snow.

However, when our rabbit listened to older and wiser rabbits, they always talked about spring and how magnificent spring was. And because our rabbit was a very young rabbit, he made some interesting assumptions about spring.

And so as soon as the weather got warmer and all the snow melted, our rabbit went looking for spring. First he came upon a daffodil and he said to the flower, “Are you spring?” The daffodil laughed and replied, “Of course I am not spring, but I would not be blooming if spring was not here.”

Puzzled, the rabbit hopped along and came upon a mushroom. It was a large, beautiful mushroom and the rabbit asked, “Mushroom, are you spring?” The mushroom laughed and said, “Of course I am not spring. However, I would not have come out if spring was not here.”

“Huh,” pondered the rabbit, and he continued his search and came to a big fuzzy ball lying in a den. The rabbit poked the big fuzzy ball a couple of times and then shouted, “Are you spring?” And the big fuzzy bear yawned and stretched and growled, “Of course I am not spring, but I would not have woken up if spring was not here.”

How discouraging! The rabbit could not find spring anyplace. He started to cry, big tears running down his rabbit face. It was then that a robin came by, and the robin said, “What is wrong with you?”

The rabbit replied, “I have been looking for spring, and I can not find spring anywhere. Are you spring?” The robin, being kind, said, “O no, spring is aaaaalllll around you. You are living in the middle of spring.”

And so it is with us – and God. We are living in the middle of God. God is on the mountain top, but God is also in the valleys and on the plains. God is in our visions of holy ecstasy, but God is equally in the ordinariness of our lives and in the hurting and desolate corners of the world.

Surely God is in this church and at this table, but God is also in the dreariness of our Monday mornings and in our acts of mercy toward the poor, our acts of justice for the weak and gentle, and our blessing of the peacemakers.

And today, on Transfiguration Sunday, we are able to see it all and take it all in. As Stephen Paul Bouman wrote, “For one brief, shining moment on the migration to Jerusalem and the cross, God gave the disciples what they needed to believe."

And so today, with Peter, James, and John, we are witness for just an instant to God’s whole plan – not only the bedazzling light of glory and the sacred affirmation of the one who proclaims God’s message of compassion, but also the darkness of the hurt and pain – the demons that possess us and others.

May the juxtaposition and interlocking of the two give us great courage and profound hope as we set forth on our Lenten journey, and see in the far away distance, the silhouette of a cross beneath a blood red sky.

Sermon - February 3, 2008

“One Brief Shining Moment”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Matthew 17:1-9, 14-18

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Matthew 17:1-9, 14-18