Last Sunday after Epiphany B 1 Kings 19:9-18, Psalm 27:5-11, 2 Peter 1:16-21, Mark 9:2-9 The Rev. J. Brian Ponder Church of the Resurrection Starkville, Mississippi February 26, 2006 In the Name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Ah … The Transfiguration. The Transfiguration … the one event in the New Testament Scriptures I convinced myself and my first semester NT professor that I needed to exegete … to simply learn more about it … what it meant … what it means … what it was and is … what it was “getting at” … turning it inside out … looking at it from every different angle … going back to the original texts … cross-referencing … finding continuity and disjuncture amongst other scriptural texts … fully engaging with it. … I’ll never forget her face when I told her, “This is the one for me! This is the one I’ll tackle for my project. … I just want to know more about it. It’s a story that’s always intrigued me.” … “Go ahead,” she said with a little smile on her face and a gleam in her eye. An instance when prudence gave way to naïveté, the Transfiguration became that biblical story that consumed me and the better part of my semester in seminary. While many of my classmates chose three to four line passages, pericopes as they’re called, I chose one of the mother-load passages that had folks asking me “What were you thinking!?” And after I submitted Phase I of the project, I’ll never forget my professor’s response to the work I had done … not one of my proudest moment by any means. … No reflection … no feedback on my progress … only this scratched at the end of my work … “Brian [period]. I don’t need to tell you just how much more work you have to do on this project [period].” … No signature. No “Good luck.” No “Hang in there, you’re on the right track.” … Definitely a reality check moment. Several of my closest classmates and I to this day get a laugh at that one. … I learned my lesson, but I also learned a great deal. In fact, the night before my first finals, I was still typing away, putting the finishing touches on the exegesis. … Mark’s account of the Transfiguration may only be eight verses long, but it and those in Matthew and Luke are rich with imagery, connection to historical scripture, peoples, entities, encounters, you name it. It snowballed, and snowballed, and snowballed. And today, it’s mine… ours. So here goes. The thing about the Transfiguration that always interested me was the act of the Transfiguration itself. It was the trek to the mountaintop. It was the encounter while there. It was the mystery of the appearance of the lawgiver and the great prophet together with Jesus, the voice of God from the cloud. It was all of it, and the “change” itself that is mentioned … the transformative nature of it all … but not. In fact, it’s not a transformation at all for Jesus, not so much as it is for his followers. For Jesus it is a transfiguration … a change, or maybe better understood by us today as an exchange … of images, realities, possibilities, especially by those who witnessed it. And, I think this may give us, some 2000 years later, something about which to think … here in the midst of this hyped-up, media-driven day when we are bombarded with images flashing before us … not just with the “moving pictures” of the 20th century, but through text messaging, image downloads, picture exchanging software, internet access, videos and DVDs, the instantaneous capturing of pictures … images … and no longer having to wait days … not even an hour for processing. … But are we really able to process it at all? … We’ve very much reached a kind of sensory overload in our world, and we see, if even nowhere else in our scriptures, an ultimate instance of sensory overload here in the Transfiguration. Jesus takes with him three of his closest companions to the mountaintop. Peter and James and John ascend the mountain with Jesus. Mark clearly states that this opportunity posed not just a “close encounter,” but it was also a “closed encounter”—an encapsulated event for a tiny audience, a niche market, if you will. Jesus took the three up a high mountain “alone, by themselves.” It was to be an important time away from it all … especially the crowds who had mobbed Jesus as we’ve heard over the last few weeks, what must have been somewhat overwhelming even for Jesus. They went to the mountain, a place where throughout Jewish history God’s people have encountered God … whether it be Moses, or Elijah, or in this case, Jesus and his closest followers. On mountaintops and in clouds (sometimes of fire), these were the places of meeting with God, places to find God, to be found by God, to commune in the presence of the Other, where God tabernacled, “pitched tent” as it was known, where God dwelt. And it’s on the mountain that the three disciples become the ones overwhelmed … overwhelmed at the sight of what was before their very eyes. Talking with Jesus are Elijah with Moses; Jesus’ garments arrayed in the brightest of whiteness; Jesus is fully transfigured before them; nothing is held back from them, only the details of the conversation amongst the three Greats, and already they don’t know what to do with themselves. … Peter with James and John are astounded. Any one of these components would have been enough … only Jesus’ transfiguration, only seeing Moses or Elijah, let alone both communing with Jesus, only seeing Jesus’ unnaturally brilliant raiment. … But then it happens … the voice from the cloud! … This is sensory overload, my friends, and at the very outset of it all, Peter tries to quickly fill in the gaps, because he’s not quite sure what to do with it all. Peter makes an offer to create a situation that would keep those present in that moment, present there for good. In the unknowing of his processing of it all, Peter tries to capture the moment … to own it … perhaps … in a way that was not his to own, for if he and the others had stayed there … well there wouldn’t have been “a rest of the story.” … Peter scrambles to find comfort in the midst of discomfort and wants to call it a day, to hang it up and stay there in the midst of this mountaintop high. … But then it happens … then comes the charge that would change everything … the true reality check. God speaks to them directly, saying: “This is my Son, the Beloved …”, the same words spoken to Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan. This is for the three a revelation of Jesus’ true nature … as Messiah … not “Rabbi” as Peter had exclaimed when offering to build dwellings, but as Messiah—the Chosen, the Expected One, and through this encounter, they themselves are the ones who have come into communion with God. They become the ones changed, and knowing this, there’s no way that they could have stayed on that mountaintop. … There’s no way that they could have simply called it a day, proclaimed “Our work here is done.” No way … but we oftentimes do, don’t we? … Deciding with whom we’ll share the keys to the Kingdom … or with whom we’ll share our own stories of redemption … or just who we’ll let into our little guarded worlds … or just whatever it may be that keeps us at a distance from those yearning for transformation, whether or not they might call it that. In receiving through sight and sound a fuller revelation of the nature of Christ, Peter and James and John were called into a new responsibility. Their transformation was one that took them from the mountain and deeper into the rest of their ministries and that of Jesus. By being let in “on the secret” they were empowered to tell the story, if not in that moment, surely in the days ahead of them—the days when Jesus would no longer be with them. … Likewise, we are called to share the age old story … and telling the story doesn’t mean anything on the mountaintop … because there, everyone already knows the story. It’s in the foothills and along the footpaths, in the canyons and valleys, the craters and deserts, along the boulevards and alleyways, the sharp turns of life, the places of darkness and despair that the story yearns to be told, that longing hearts await the beat of true life, that the senses await real stimulation … the sound of conviction in the voice of retelling, the taste of if all … maybe and God-willing in bread and wine shared amongst strangers and friends … the smell of the sweetness of grace … the touch of others in the journey … the hope of meeting God face to face—seeing with our own eyes. My friends, this little church building sits on a mountain. … It rests on the highest peak of this town, a mountain by Starkville’s standards. … We are called from this place, each of us charged in the way we are called to live our lives to proclaim the One who has transformed us. We are called here for renewal, but what’s more, we’re called away from this place charged with, changed with the newness of being, to carry with us the brightness of God, if not in our recounting of the story, at the very least in the ways in which we greet those who may otherwise have missed it … our friends and our neighbors, … the crotchety salesclerk at the Old FoodMax, the haphazard bag boy at WalMart, the girl down the street hiding behind a mask of serenity, the guy who goes through the trash at the edge of our driveway. And it shakes us … it should to the very core of our being, because it challenges our comfort, it moves us away from what we know … into realms of unknowing and uncertainty … of how we’ll be received, of how we will be met, of how we will be further challenged … of how we might be further transformed … outside of this place. As Peter and James and John descended the mountain, there’s no way that they could have really known what was ahead for them, or Jesus for that matter! But having communed with their God, they were empowered for the time when they would again be shaken from their comfort, when all they would know was discomfort. … When the time is right Lord, may we be open to the fullness of your revelation. May we not rest in our comfort, but be changed by your holy discomfort. And may we never be so overwhelmed in the midst of it all that we can no longer be agents of your transformation. Amen.