February 19, 2012 – Mark 9:2-9
Mark 9:2-9
Transfigured? Transformed? Metamorphosed?
Transfiguration of our Lord – February 19, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Midway through a very challenging ministry, Peter and James and John get a glimpse of
Jesus’s glory on the mountain.
They get a glimpse of who Jesus really is.
This one who has been unafraid of the demonic.
Who has shown no fear in the face of death.
Who has touched the untouchable.
For whom compassion has trumped fear and social convention at every turn.
Who has not been afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.
This one, they discover on the mountain, is divine.
Fully and completely divine, while also so fully human.
The divine light shines through and in him.
Maybe it’s some consolation to the disciples who’ve been slogging it out with Jesus so far:
Oh good! What a relief: this is the one!
Maybe they’ve figured they’ve made it.
That this is it: the end of the road! Glory on the mountain with Moses, Elijah and Jesus!
Maybe they figure they’ll be raptured up to heaven with Jesus,
for supposedly that was what happened to both Moses and Elijah:
they were taken up to heaven,
making the official population of heaven exactly two at that point.
So Peter figures maybe this is a good place to settle down, build some houses,
take a load off.
And who can’t sympathize with the poor guy?
Who among us wouldn’t rather bask in mountaintop retirement glory than live and work in
the valley of hunger and sickness and the demonic?
Peter experiences a great moment and . . . wants to stay there.
If only he could freeze that wondrous moment, stay there, and then, to top it all off,
maybe be raptured up to heaven with Jesus and Moses and Elijah and
James and John, forcing God to change the official
“Heaven population sign” from 2 to 6.
This kind of desire to freeze a good moment happens in every movement and every organization.
We might say it’s a “Kodak moment” for more than one reason.
We all know that a couple of weeks ago Kodak – the photographic behemoth of
the last century – filed for bankruptcy.
Is it too much to say that Kodak wanted to freeze its moment of glory in a Kodak moment?
It’s inability to adapt quickly to new digital technology was a failure of vision,
and a failure in its mission to move forward and take risks.
Peter is having a Kodak moment on the mountain: he wants his picture taken with the guys up
on the mountain, and freeze it forever.
But that’s not exactly Jesus’s plan.
By the end of the scene, Moses and Elijah are nowhere to be seen:
Peter and James and John are alone with Jesus and are given the only command that
God’s voice gives in the New Testament: Listen to Jesus!
And what Jesus has just told them is that he must go to Jerusalem,
and continue to do the things he’s doing, and suffer for it, and die for it,
and finally be raised.
And then what Jesus tells them is to come on back down the mountain with him.
Because they’ve still got work to do there.
And as soon as they get back down, the first thing they do is heal a sick boy.
In some ways we’re at a real good point in our congregational life.
Things are going really well in our life together.
Great lay leadership, wonderful, generous giving, good community life,
lots of mission and ministry that everyone feels they can support.
One of you told me this week that the temptation for us will be to want to stay just where we are,
rather than trying to figure out how we can continually move into the valley,
the place where Jesus is always leading us.
At the same time, we should acknowledge that Jesus brings us to the mountain for a reason:
to rest a while, to be refreshed, to hear again the voice that claimed us
in our baptisms and blessed us just as it blessed Jesus with the same words:
You are my beloved child. I am well pleased with you.
Be strengthened for your journey back down to the valley.
You have it in you to do what I am calling you to do. For I put it there.
I think, on this day, it’s important for us to recognize that the
glory on the mountain and the service in the valley are not two separate things.
They are both gifts from a good God and they are inextricably bound together.
Our Christian lives – following the pattern of Jesus’s life – are a dialectic between
resting in God’s loving grace on the one hand and
serving our neighbours in need on the other.
The one grows into the other, and the other leads back into the one.
We are transfigured not just from glory into glory, as the old hymn has it,
but from glory into service and from service into glory.
The two are not fundamentally different things.
Which leads me to Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter. Just stay with me. It’ll be fine.
I got to thinking about all this from reading Pastor Mike Baughman’s blog this week.
(at http://thehardestquestion.org/yearb/transfigurationgospel-b/)
Transfiguration is not a word we really use much anymore,
and Pastor Baughman reminded me that really the only place we really hear about it
anymore besides church is in the Harry Potter books.
In those books, Harry and the other students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
must attend Professor McGonagall’s Transfiguration class,
where you learn how to turn one thing into another.
So I started thinking, Okay: you get to Transfiguration class.
And what does Professor McGonagall do when you get there?
She turns a rat into a tea cup! Whoa!
Then she turns a hat into flowers! Friggin’ amazing!
And you get the idea that transfiguration means turning one thing into something completely,
utterly different.
But then you think: hang on a mo’! Why did I spend all that money on going to seminary –
money I’m still paying off by the way; can you believe it? –
why why why did I spend all that money going to seminary and learning Greek
if I’m not going to use it?
So then you get out your Greek New Testament: yes, you do!
And you look up Mark 9 verse 2. Really! You do!
And you read there that of course in Greek the word is not transfiguration at all:
in Greek the word is metamorphosis.
And then you think: gee, everything I know about metamorphosis I learned from Miss Hockley
in Grade Five science and suddenly you’re not on
the glorious mountain of Hogwarts anymore (or even in seminary!) but . . .
in Regina in the valley – the valley of McNab elementary school
(which was not a very glorious place I can tell you!).
And you think: Miss Hockley taught me that a tadpole metamorphizes into a frog,
and a caterpillar metamorphizes into a butterfly and this is not really the same at all
as what happens in Professor McGonagall’s class,
where the tea cup and the rat and the hat and the flowers really have
nothing to do with each other in the least.
Sorry, Professor, but, you know, it’s just not a tea cup’s destiny to become a rat.
And it’s not a hat’s destiny to become flowers.
But it really is a caterpillar’s destiny to become butterfly,
and it really is a tadpole’s destiny to become a frog.
As Pastor Mike Baughman writes “the full purpose of the tadpole [is] revealed in the frog.”
And our full purpose is revealed in Jesus.
The divine shining Jesus and the human serving Jesus are not two completely different beings,
but one and the same: the one grows into and out of the other.
Jesus’ purpose is to be shot through with divine light,
and to bear that divine light to very dark places.
Jesus in the valley and Jesus on the mountain are in complete continuity.
Just so: when we are called “beloved child” by this God,
this God is not inviting us to become something different than what we are,
but to become what God formed us to become from the beginning:
beings capable of bearing divine light to one another even in the valleys of the shadow of death.
And when we are called to follow this Jesus up the mountain,
God is not calling us to become something different from what we are,
but to become what God formed us to become from the beginning,
with all our quirks and idiocyncracies and failures and gifts,
because God can make those of use to somebody, believe me.
And when we are called to follow this Jesus back down the mountain into the valley of service,
this God is not inviting us to become something different than what we are,
but to become fully and completely who we really are,
to grow more fully into who we really are and who we’re meant to be:
To be metamorphized into the very image or likeness of Jesus,
who is the very image or likeness of the God of light and glory.
For, as we know from Jesus on the cross, this God’s glory and light is fully revealed on the cross.
This God’s glory and light is most fully revealed in the valley of service.
This God’s glory consists of and cannot be separated from compassion and mercy and love.
These are not two distinct things, but one.
Friends: what I’m telling you is that you have a destiny, and in Jesus that destiny can be fulfilled.
A hat is just not meant to be flowers, just a human being is not meant to be addicted,
Or depressed, or mentally ill.
I think a lot of the searching and confusion and despair of contemporary culture
Stems from the fact that we are trying to be something we were never meant to be.
A human being is not meant to be self-centred, or greedy, or apathetic, or in despair.
A human being is meant to rest in God, live in community, and serve others.
That is in continuity with what God created you to be.
And you don’t have to become anything different to become that:
you just need to become fully you, fully who God created you to be.
We are constantly being encouraged in our culture to transfigure ourselves into someone
we were never created to be,
Rather than being encouraged to metamorphose fully into who we already are:
Beloved people of the God of all grace and loving servants of our neighbours in need.
You can take exactly what you have – just as you are, right now – and use it for a godly purpose.
You don’t need to become someone else.
You are capable of glorious things right now.
You are beloved. You are God pleasing.
We are reminded of this every Sunday, but Jesus is inviting us to not stay on this mountain of
Glorious belovedness.
Jesus is inviting us to together take that glory down into the valley of service.
Because that’s where he is. For when he get there, he will be with us. And that will be enough.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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