Luke 9: 28-36
Transfiguration of the Lord
10th February 2013
This
is one my favorite Sundays of the year.
The transfiguration – whether it’s Matthew’s or Mark’s or Luke’s version
– is one of my favorite stories in the New Testament. The fact that Matthew and Mark and Luke (the Synoptic
Gospels) include this event tells us that it was pivotal in Jesus’ life and
significant because it reveals something essential about Jesus’ identity and
God’s glory at work through him. It’s
not the only story shared by them. The
feeding of the five thousand and last supper, the crucifixion, and of course
the resurrection are included by these three witnesses. (John’s Gospel is a “horse of a different
color,” as it were, which is why I’m leaving him out.) But my point here is that while the Synoptic
Gospels refer to the Transfiguration, placing it almost at the center of their
narratives, serving in some ways as the hinge upon which their narratives hang,
for the most part, its importance has been ignored or overlooked. It’s a text that leaves us feeling puzzled
and confused. A lot of my friends and
colleagues don’t like to preach on this text.
What do we do with a text like this?
I
would probably feel the same way but for the fact that almost twenty-three
years ago this September this text and it’s meaning took on enormous
significance for me. At every ordination
in the Presbyterian Church (USA), in addition to the sermon, there’s a charge
directed to the ordinand and a charge to the calling congregation. At my ordination, I asked a Princeton
Seminary professor, mentor, and friend, James Loder, to give the charge. He walked into the pulpit of my home church,
the First Presbyterian Church of North Arlington, NJ, just a few feet from the
font at which I was baptized 26 years earlier, read this text (Matthew’s
version) and then proceeded to offer a second sermon on it.
I
can still hear Jim’s voice in my ears, saying to me, charging me to, “Listen to
him. Listen to him.” Jim said to me, a week before I left for Scotland, that the
life, the vitality, the effectiveness of my ministry wherever I go, wherever I
serve will always be contingent upon my capacity to “Listen to him.” My failures and successes in ministry will be
directly related to my ability to “Listen to him.” If that sounds heavy, it is. That’s what a calling is, it’s a burden, a
weight we’ve been asked to carry. That’s
what these stoles represent, the yoke of the calling, being yoked to Christ. When I arrived at St. Leonard’s Parish Church
in St. Andrews, Scotland, where I served, I was struck by the large
stained-glass west window in the sanctuary with a depiction of Jesus’
transfiguration. Since then,
transfiguration features prominently in my journey and has shaped my faith and
theological outlook.
Jim’s
words are never far from me. Over these twenty-three years as a minister I have
tried to listen, worked hard at listening.
Sometimes faithful, I like to think; but also, I know, at times
faithless. Jim was right. Listening matters. Listening to Christ is
what counts. Listening has changed my life for the good and hopefully for
others who listen to me.
But
it’s only now, twenty-three years later, that I’m beginning to sense something
else about this text; I’m beginning to sense how much I’ve heard “Listen to
him” primarily as a command, instead of hearing it as something else – and it’s
the something else that I’ll get to in a minute.
Until
recently, my own moralizing ear was
getting in the way of me hearing the text.
The moralizing ear so often
distorts our capacity to hear and perceive grace in scripture. Moralizing
ear is my term for a filter that often informs our hearing of
scripture. (Those in the Thursday
Morning Bible Study have heard me talk about this over the years.) What I mean
here is that somehow, some way so many have come to assume that faith is
primarily about following the rules, about laws, proper behavior, commandments,
and, of course, judgment, if we fail to obey. With such a perspective, God is
essentially seen as a lawgiver. Many
hold the view: God created human beings
to behave; we screwed up, so we’re judged, forced to pay the price – a price we
cannot afford to pay because who is “rich” enough in virtue to make up for
Adam’s fall, so Jesus comes along, pays the price instead, and, even though
we’re now forgiven, with his help we can follow the law, because God only cares
about whether or not we follow the law.
Such
a view, which I’ve intentionally made to sound simplistic and foolish (which I
think it is), is produced by the moralizing part of us, ruled by an image of
God as Lawgiver. When we do this we reduce the function of religious faith to morals, to ethics; it’s called
moralizing. This tendency is old and
deep and it’s all over the church and it shapes external views of Christianity. During the Enlightenment, when Reason tried
to reign and anything mystical or supernatural was deemed “unreasonable,”
philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said most of Christianity should
be rejected because it wasn’t rational.
The only rational purpose religion served was to teach and reinforce
morality. Religion was purely
functional.[1] Religion serves society
by making us moral, making sure that we all behave. Kant reduced religion to
ethics and helped to turn faith into an ethical code, a law, and in many ways
the Church is still suffering from his error. I consider this to be an
extremely serious issue because it hinders us from really hearing the
gospel. (One day, when I find the time,
I want to write a book on this.)
Yes,
ethics, morals matter. Of course they
do. Rules matter. How we behave matters. But to suggest that this is the good news of the Christian gospel, that Jesus died on
the cross to appease an angry Judge-Father and now expects you to behave
because any moment he’s going to lash out at you in anger, to suggest that
you’re only loved if you behave in a certain way, is a gross misrepresentation
and misunderstanding of the height and depth and reach of God’s grace! It cheapens the gospel.
This
brings us back to the text. Words such as “Listen to him” can easily be heard
as one more command, one more rule, one more thing to do, one more standard to
try to live up to. Heard through the
filter of the moralizing ear that’s what we think it means, and so we get to
work and soon we’re judging ourselves for our behavior, whether we’re listening
or not listening.
But,
no one listens all the time – right? Right?
No one listens all the time. You might
hear someone talking, but that doesn’t mean you’re really listening.
Now,
of course, “Listen to him” is a command. There’s no way around this. It’s an imperative. But who
is offering the command? Whose voice
is speaking from the cloud that engulfs Peter, James, and John? Luke says, “Then from the cloud came a voice
that said, ‘This is my son, my Chosen; listen to him!’” Other early versions of
Luke’s Gospel read, “This is my son, my Beloved; listen to him!” It’s this latter reading that echoes the
divine voice that we heard coming from the heavens as Jesus came up out of the
waters of his baptism, “This is my son, my Beloved, in whom I am well pleased”
(Luke 3:22). The Voice speaking to the
disciples refers to the object of his
love, the Beloved. If Jesus hears these words as the Beloved, if
love is being directed toward him, then the source of the Voice must know
something about love; for the Voice is love itself. So, yes, we hear a command, but it’s voiced
in love, by the one who is love. Yes, it’s a command. But when we remember that the Voice is love,
then the command is something else – and this is the something else that I
didn’t hear in Loder’s charge to me 23 years ago – the command heard in love
becomes something more, it’s really an invitation,
an invitation to enter into the mystery and glory and love of God!
To
listen to him is to listen in, to
listen in on God’s deep conversation with humanity since the beginning of time;
to listen to him is to listen in on
God’s deep desire for the world and our lives within it. When we listen to him we are included in that
conversation. When we listen to him we
are brought into a knowledge of God’s deep desire for mercy and justice, for
wholeness and healing, for love.[2] The command becomes an invitation: you and me are now welcomed to share – share!
share! – in the very life of God, brought into the presence of God
to receive a glimpse of God’s glory and radiance shining through Jesus. We are drawn, like Moses and Elijah, into a
deep relationship with the Source of all being and goodness and light and given
insights and wisdom and knowledge that we could never obtain on our own, things
reason cannot handle or fathom, experiences that are new and therefore disorienting
and thereby reorienting. Peter, James,
and John are terrified by this revelation; they talk nonsense because their
frame of reference and meaning could not comprehend what they were
experiencing. Instead, their reality was
being reframed by a larger reality, as they came to see the story of their
lives as participating in a much larger story of divine salvation that reached
back to Moses and forward toward what was about to happen on a cross in
Jerusalem and beyond, even to a future held by the light of glory. They are commanded to listen to him and thus
invited into the very life shared between Jesus and God. This is relational
language. When we listen to someone we are pulled into that person’s life; when
we’re listening to Christ we’re pulled into that relationship, the divine-human
relationship, and that is what matters above all else. When that happens reality is reframed and reality reframed is what it
means to be transfigured.[3] That’s what Love
does, it transfigures our lives. This is
what the gospel is all about. This is a good news with power that shakes the
foundations of the world and reorients our lives.
The
Voice that spoke from the cloud continues to speak to us; it continues to
summon us to listen. In the church we
often use listening language when we’re trying to discern God’s call in our
lives. Many have difficulty discerning God’s
call or vocation in their lives. But
maybe turning the phrase around might help us here; what if first we are simply called to listen? Listen to the Voice of Love speak and then
discern your vocation. Listen to the
Voice and then figure out how to act, what to do. Augustine (354-430) once said, “Love and do
what you want.” Vocation, then, doesn’t
come by trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do with our lives; vocation
comes from listening to the One who has given us life. One of the wisest voices of our time, Parker
J. Palmer, writes, “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening.” The word vocation
itself is rooted in the Latin for voice. “Vocation,” Palmer writes, “does not mean a
goal that I pursue. It means a calling
that I hear. Before I can tell my life
what I want to do with it, I must listen….”[4]
If
our first calling is to listen, then how do we do that? It’s been said that listening is a skill,
something we cultivate. Listening is a
skill, like all skills the more we practice them the better we are at using them. We can train ourselves to have better
listening skills. Listening is an art, particularly the art of listening for
what’s being said and what isn’t being said, listening for what’s behind the
words of a conversation. It’s not
surprising that truly listening is in short supply these days. It requires time. Listening is hard work. It can be exhausting. It also requires considerable energy and love
and even courage.
Why
courage? Because at least two other
things are required: silence and surrender. Luke says, “When
the voice had spoke, Jesus was found alone.
And they kept silent…” (Luke 9:36).
In order to really listen it’s important for us to be silent.
How can you listen if you’re talking?
The talking can be the audible kind done with our mouths or the ongoing
internal chatter that fills our inner brains most of the time that never seems
to quit. It’s tough to listen to someone
when there are competing conversations going on in our heads. Cultivating silence has always been a
spiritual discipline, essential to the life of faith. This requires courage
because we might not be happy with what we discover in the silence. What’s true for human relationships is true
for divine-human relationships. Interior
silence is required; how else are you going to hear the still small voice of
Love?
To
listen requires a kind of surrendering. Listening means you’re open to what the other
is saying, you have relinquished your control of what is said, you give up your
privileged position and yield to what the other has to say. Instead of hearing
what you want to hear or what you think someone is saying, you really
listen. This, too, requires a form of
courage. We might not like what we’re
hearing or we might disagree with it.
But, more than anything else, especially when we’re hearing the voice of
Love, when we open ourselves and surrender to the other, we just might be
changed and our reality transfigured.
This is why men and women, each for their own reasons, have problems
with surrendering because we hear this from the viewpoint of the ego which
equates surrender as weakness or defeat (particularly in men) or as submission
to power, leaving one exposed to exploitation or abuse (particularly in
women). We have to be careful here with
surrender language, but if we don’t use it we miss out on the gospel and what
Christians for centuries have told us, that, “surrender is an indispensable
gateway to life, genuine freedom, and deep humanity.”[5] Without surrendering to the one who is Love,
how can words such as these be heard as good news? “If any want to become my followers, let them
deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life – surrender their life – for my sake
they will save it” (Luke 8:23-24). These
words come in Luke just prior to his account of the Transfiguration.
When
we listen to him, it means we are not listening to our egos or what others
expect from us or the cacophony of voices in our heads or on television or the
crowd; we are yielding, surrendering to him, surrendering to Love.
Silence and surrender. Two good disciplines for disciples to follow through
Lent and beyond. In these forty days of Lent may we have the courage to welcome
more silence, both within and without, and listen to him more profoundly,
surrendering our lives into his arms, arms that will carry us where we need to
go. We are invited by Love to listen, to
listen to him who is love, and in our love for him, we listen.
[1]For example, see Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
(1793), among other works.
[2]Here I hold to C. G.
Jung’s (1875-1961) idea that our goal is not goodness, but wholeness. See also
James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad
Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves
(New York: Gotham Books, 2008), 234-235. The biblical scholar Marcus J. Borg makes a
similar point, "Christian life is
ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, it is about a
relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation." Meeting
Jesus Again for the First Time: The
Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (HarperOne, 1995),
2-3.
[3]For a discussion on
Loder and transfiguration, see Kenneth E. Kovacs, The Relational Theology of James E. Loder: Encounter and Conviction
(New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 192,
194-196.
[4]Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
(Jossey-Bass, 2000), 4-5.
[5]David G. Benner, Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human
(Brazos, 2011), 157. I’m grateful for Dr. Benner’s entire discussion of the
centrality of surrender in the Christian life (156-168).
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