February 10, 2013 – Luke 9:28-43a
Luke 9:28-43a
The Glory in the Grey, or, After Enlightenment, the Laundry
The Transfiguration of our Lord – February 10, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Let’s pray.
Come to us, Triune God. Transfigure our drab, prosaic, too-fully-explained world. Come to us in all your majesty, in your full unapproachable otherness, come. We may not know how to deal with you, or what to make of you, but we pray in confidence that you know full well what to make of us – and how to deal with us, for we have experienced your loving descent to us in Jesus Christ. Amen
(by William Willimon at http://www.logosproductions.com/content/february-10-2013-supernatural)
Up to this point, Jesus’ ministry has been pretty down to earth.
He’s healed a lot of people, challenged a lot of people with the sermon on the plain,
forgiven a lot of people, and taught a lot of people.
Nothing too glorious in that.
And then, in the middle of all this, he takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain to pray.
Luke is the only Gospel writer who tells us that they go up specifically to pray.
And it’s only in Luke that Jesus is transfigured while he is praying.
In the middle of a very difficult and demanding ministry,
Jesus takes them to pray – and something happens, to him, and to them.
What happens to Jesus is that he starts shining, shining with an improbably dazzling whiteness,
as if he were lit from within.
And what happens to Peter, John and James is that they see Jesus shining and they
hear a voice that is addressed to them.
And the voice says that this Jesus who’ve they’ve been tramping around in the mud with
is in fact God’s Son, or as we might say, God’s apprentice,
working God’s trade of love in the world.
And then the voice says that they are to listen to him, that they are to obey him.
And what has Jesus just told them that they are supposed to obey?
That he is going to suffer for love of the world,
and that they are to take up their crosses and follow him.
If it’s not exactly what they want to hear, perhaps that’s why God decides to become
a great booming voice in the clouds.
Let’s not forget that this is one of the very few instances in the New Testament when
God speaks.
I guess listening to Jesus, and obeying Jesus, and following Jesus, must be pretty important.
The disciples are being called to grow here.
To grow in their understanding of who Jesus really is, that is,
in understanding that this healing teaching feeding forgiving person is in fact
the incarnation of the one true God of all mercy and compassion –
And to grow in their understanding of what this entails for them.
They are being called to grow here in discipleship.
They are being called to grow spiritually, and that is why Jesus has invited them to pray:
to grow in understanding and in discipleship.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ whole life and ministry are saturated and centred in prayer.
It begins in prayer, when the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus while he’s praying at
his baptism (Luke 3:21-22).
Jesus selects his disciples after praying for an entire night (Luke 6:12-16).
In the midst of ministry, he can be found praying (11:1).
Jesus prays in the garden before he is arrested (Luke 22:39-46)
and he even prays from the cross (Luke 23:34, 46).
And in Luke’s second volume, Acts, the church – Jesus’s resurrected body on earth – also prays:
most dramatically when the gathered church prays for boldness in its witness of
healing and preaching (Luke 4:23-31).
Prayer for Jesus, and for the church in Acts,
often involved a dramatic encounter of God’s presence.
In prayer – a practice all of us called Jesus’ disciples must reclaim more and more – in prayer,
we too are called to grow in understanding and discipleship.
As we invite God to reveal God’s presence to us in our lives and in our congregation.
As we invite God to stir up in us the Holy Spirit given us in our baptisms.
As we thank God for all that is good in our lives,
and as we ask help for all that is hard.
As we lift up to God in prayer the plight of all who suffer.
And as we seek to listen more clearly and discern more nearly what it is God is calling us to.
As we do all this in prayer, we seek to be transformed, like those disciples our brothers
that day long ago.
As we do all this in prayer, we seek to grow in our faith.
As we do all this in prayer, we seek to grow in spiritual maturity, that is,
in figuring out how all of our lives can be lived in relation to God and our Christian faith.
Wednesdays in Lent will give us all this opportunity,
and I encourage all of you to make this a priority for yourselves this year.
Prayer is a wondrous gift, and it can sustain us in our journey:
it can help us see the divine in the ordinary, and how the divine can be at work in
the ordinariness of ourselves.
It can help you close the gap between your faith life and your everyday life,
so that your everyday life is suffused with the divine.
Prayer itself, though, is not the end.
Someone should have told poor old Peter that before he opened his mouth,
wanting to preserve the moment and build houses for everybody so they could
stay up there forever!
That is a very religious impulse: erect a shrine, put up a monument, raise a church.
But God doesn’t seem to think much of the idea – it is pretty funny how he
cuts Peter off in mid-sentence and tells Peter to stop talking and start listening and
following and obeying Jesus in his cross-bearing love-bearing ways.
The Zen Buddhists have a saying: After enlightenment, the laundry.
Sometimes you think all the important stuff you’ve achieved and
all the glory that is you somehow exempts you from doing the laundry:
you know what I’m talking about!
But apparently even the Zen masters had to do their laundry.
It’s no different with Jesus, it’s no different with his disciples, and it’s no different for us.
Jesus does give the disciples a glimpse of his glory, and that is a grace-filled and
compassionate thing to do.
The good news is that we do get glimpses of glory.
But that grace is a costly one: the glimpse is given to sustain us while we do the laundry.
The glory wants to be taken into the world.
I mean, how does the story end?
Sure, on the mountain three disciples saw Jesus’ glory and were astounded.
But down in the valley, at the healing of a man’s only son,
all were astounded at the greatness of God.
The thing is, Jesus was shining all the time, even before the event on the mountain.
He was shining in the healings and in the feedings, in the forgiving and in the teaching.
And apparently – judging by his impatient response to the disciples when they are not able to
heal the boy – apparently he wants us to shine down in the valley in just the same way.
The vision doesn’t carry us up, it carries us down.
Worship is a high point of the week for many of us, and rightly so.
In worship we are given a vision of God’s restored creation
Peace is shared. The dignity and worth of all present is recognized.
The elements of the earth are handled with extreme care.
Words are used to build up rather than tear down.
The Manna of bread and wine is shared equitably by all.
It’s no wonder we often leave worship feeling better.
But there’s more to Christian life than our worship services.
The Assisting Minister sends us out to the valleys and the streets at the end of the service.
Sustained by the vision, she calls us to bear the light we have received.
To let the light shine through us.
And, as George McLeod the founder of the Iona Community once said,
to see the glory in the grey.
To see the glory in the doing of the laundry and in the stewarding of gifts.
To see the glory in the sick, in the hurting, in the hungry, in the stranger.
To see the glory in the work, in the world, and in the witnessing.
To grow and understand that the glory is given for the sake of the world.
Let’s pray.
You, majestic sovereign . . . move now off the page! Move off the page to the world, move off the page to the trouble, move out of your paged leisure to the turmoil of your creatures. Move to the peace negotiations, and cancer diagnoses, and food banks, and homes, and hospital wards, and care homes. Listen to the moans and groans, and see and hear and know and remember, and come down! And then come down through us, for we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen
(adapted from a prayer by Walter Brueggemann in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann)
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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