Lectionary blog for Feb. 26
The Transfiguration of Our Lord
Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2 or Psalm 99;
2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9
I tell a lot of stories. Some are stories my family handed down that I first heard sitting on the front porch with my grandfather or around the kitchen table with my parents and their friends and relatives. Occasionally someone says to me, “Are all those stories you tell true?” I usually say, “Well they’re all true, but some of them may not be completely factual.”
What do I mean by that? Though sometimes I tell what is obviously a joke as though it involved one of my relatives, that’s not really what I’m talking about. That’s just a humor technique, like a comedian claiming something happened to his wife, or brother-in-law, or bizarre next-door neighbor when we all know it didn’t. As Mark Twain once said, “If you tell it big enough no reasonable person ought to believe it; it’s not a lie.”
What I’m talking about is profoundly different. It has to do with the fallacy of human memory, the natural human tendency to construct story out of the events of our lives, the way stories change in the telling and retelling, the way stories become the possession of the community that tells them over and over as a way of understanding who they are. Biblical scholar Marcus Borg talks about the difference between “history remembered” and “history metaphorized.” My stories are true; they are the way I remember them, the way they were told to me, but they have ceased to be history—they have become metaphor for what it means to me, to be who I am. They are as true as I can make them—though they might not be completely factual.
The same thing applies to the Exodus story of Moses and Joshua going up the mountain and encountering God in the cloud. It also applies to the early Christian stories about what we call “the transfiguration.” These stories are all true. Something happened; nobody made it up. But what really happened, the exact facts, “history remembered” is unavailable to us. There are all sorts of “reasonable” speculations but no way of knowing for sure. What we have now is “history metaphorized,” history told and retold to help us understand who we are as people loved by God.
So, rather than wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what “really” happened, the more important questions are these: “What do these stories tell us about God?” and “What do these stories tell us about us and our life of faith?” Two things come immediately to mind.
First—There are peak experiences in the spiritual life; they do happen. But we can never predict, create or repeat them. We don’t know when they might happen; we can’t do anything to make them happen, and we can’t do everything the same as we did last time and make them happen again. They happen when God wants them to happen, they happen when God’s grace descends on us as it wills. Through music, worship and preaching, we may be able to stimulate a similar experience, but our attempts to manipulate our emotions into a spiritual experience won’t work without God’s choice to be present in what we do.
Second—“spiritual” highs may come and go, but a true and authentic spiritual life is lived in the ordinary day-to-day rounds of life. Throughout all the Gospels, Jesus goes off alone to pray alone a lot. Only twice did anything happen. The first was the temptations in the wilderness, a spiritual experience, certainly, but not exactly a “peak” experience one would want to repeat. The second time was the transfiguration. The other times Jesus goes off to pray and nothing happens. Well sort of nothing. He gets interrupted a lot. “Hey, Jesus, people are looking for you.” But in none of the “go off alone and pray” episodes did Jesus change form or hear heavenly voices. He just prayed, and that’s the point—Jesus goes about his business of preaching and teaching and healing, with times of synagogue worship and private prayer. This was his life. Long periods of ordinariness with only an occasional moment of luminosity.
Dr. B.S. Brown was pastor of Lutheran Chapel Church in China Grove, N.C., from 1945 to 1960. While I was pastor there in the 1980s, I found one of his old, hand-written, sermons in the archives. It was about his first car, which he got in 1920, while serving Salem and Luther Memorial churches in Parrotsville, Tenn.,—deep in the east Tennessee mountains.
He wrote about going on a trip to Knoxville long before paved roads or interstates. Frequently, he had to drive along in creek beds because there was no road, backing up hills because his Model-T had a gravity-feed fuel system. Occasionally, he would top a mountain at night and could see the lights of Knoxville off in the distance, but most of his trip was spent in the dark valleys. Brown compared this to the life of faith. We catch occasional glimpses of the Holy, but mostly we faithfully plod ahead through dark and shadowy valleys.
The presence of God is mostly a matter of perception, of awareness that God is indeed with us, not only in the moments of high feeling and intense spirit but also through the yawning valleys of life. It is a matter of trusting God’s promise to be present with us in the ordinary things we do, so that we constantly pay attention for signs of God’s hand in the simplest of our circumstances.
For in the end, our faith is not so much about the fact of Jesus being transfigured as it is about our lives being transformed by the love of God in Christ. That change, that transformation, is not about how we look to others but rather how we learn to look at others, learn to see in other people God-given opportunities for us to love and be loved—to shine into the world the light of God’s grace through the graceful mercy of our life together. And that story is both completely true and totally factual.
Amen and amen.
