Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024

 Sermon for SMHP, Year B, Transfiguration, Feb. 11, 2024

Mark 9:2-10

               ²Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, ³and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. ⁴And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.

⁵Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” ⁶He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

⁷Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice,

“This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” ⁸Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

               ⁹As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. ¹⁰So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.

 

          My undergraduate degree and my first graduate work were in English Literature.  I have a certificate in teaching college composition.  I really thought that was what I was going to do:  teach English to college students. 

          God derailed those plans, as God is wont to do.

          I’m grateful for the skills I learned, though, and I use them every week in pouring over a set of texts so that I can talk about one or more of them with you.  The preacher skill set is a little different from the English teacher skill set, and I try hard not to turn sermons into literature lessons.  Sacred texts are more than artistic endeavors; they’re meant to show us God and connect us to Jesus and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

          But this text.  This Transfiguration Text.  Is as literary and dramatic as they come.

          It reads like a play, or maybe a screenplay.

Time:  “Six days later.”

Enter, from below stage:  Jesus, Peter, James, and John.

“Action!”  The four enter a clearing on the peak of the mountain.  Jesus is transformed and begins to glow.

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And…Peter speaks.

 

          There’s so much here we could talk about.  So many literary lenses we could read this story through.

The plotlines.  The parallels to the baptism of Jesus.  The mountaintop as a symbol of the thin places between the spirit world and the human world—Moses on Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus praying to God before his arrest at the Mount of Olives just outside Jerusalem, and his ascension—all happen on mountains.

          But I want to talk about character.  Characters “are the key element that drives any story.” In order to understand this transfiguration of Jesus story, we have to think carefully about who is there, and why.

          Okay, so who.  How many characters are there? 

          Seven:  Jesus, Peter, James and John (the Sons of Thunder), Elijah, Moses, and “voice from cloud.”  Biblical criticism says don’t read into the text what isn’t there, but literary criticism is more forgiving, so the voice from the cloud is God, even if it doesn’t say “God.”

          Seven characters.  Three human—and this being Mark, they are very human.  Peter has a very human response to the transfiguration, and we can laugh at him if we want, but we might respond similarly.

          Three human characters, one Jesus—there’s only one Jesus—Elijah and Moses who are…spirits?  Immortal?  The story is pretty light on detail, once you get past Mark’s fascination with how white Jesus’ clothes were.

          Elijah and Moses are there for a little literary device called “exposition.”

          Exposition is how a writer gets across important matters pertaining to the story.  It comes in a lot of ways.  When a show opens with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge—that’s exposition.  It tells us we’re in San Francisco.  Flashbacks are exposition. Moses and Elijah provide some rather unusual exposition.  Moses is there to call to mind that earlier mountaintop story about how God appeared to Moses and gave him the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments.

          He represents The Law, in other words.

          Elijah is there to represent The Prophets, as the greatest of them all.  Together they are symbols of The Law and the Prophets, a holistic phrase that is meant to call to mind what was, for Jews like Jesus and his disciples, all of scripture.  The Hebrew Bible.

          The voice from the cloud is also there for exposition, but if you tell God I said that, I will deny it, since exposition is not a very lofty role.  The voice of God is also there to call to mind the earlier story of Jesus’ baptism, in which the voice makes the same statement.  Both times, God reveals Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and that is why the season of Epiphany—or Season after Epiphany—begins with the first story and ends with the last.

          There is one important difference between the holy voice’s words of revelation in the two stories, though, and now we return to talking about characters.

          Anybody catch the difference?

          To whom is the voice of God speaking at Jesus’ baptism? [Jesus]

          And to whom is the voice of God speaking in this story?  [The disciples]

          At his baptism—adult baptism, full immersion—God spoke to Jesus.  It was sort of a commencement speech, reminding Jesus that he is God’s beloved child, and he will do pleasing work on God’s behalf in the world.

          Up on the mountain, God doesn’t need to tell Jesus he’s special.  He’s figured it out.  We’ve just read through Mark, Chapter One over the last month and a half—Jesus seems pretty clear about his mission, right?

          Now, the disciples…

          Right before this story, Mark tells the story of Peter’s confession, in which Jesus is asking the disciples who they think he is, and Peter replies, “You are the Messiah.”  Yay!  Brownie points for Peter.

          But you might remember that Peter’s Confession is always followed by a “passion prediction,” in which Jesus describes how this whole thing is going to end on earth.  What does Peter do then?  He rebukes Jesus, which is the Wrong Answer.

          And then we have the Transfiguration story, in which Jesus lights up like a very classy Christmas tree—only white lights—and Peter says, “Cool, let’s set up some tents.”

          It may seem like the disciples are just there for comic relief, but I assure you, they have a very important role in this divine drama.  In fact, the most important verse in this lesson might be the first one.

²Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.

          This is an obvious parallel, as we’ve already noted, to the time Moses went up Mount Sinai to get the ten commandments.

          Anybody remember what the people did, when Moses was up on the mountain longer than they expected him to be?  [they made a golden idol and worshipped it]

          The people, left to themselves with their leader gone, went super fickle and decided a cow was now their God.  And that kind of pattern repeats itself for generations.  The people love God when they feel connected to God, and when they can’t quite figure out what God’s up to, they drift, and start pretending other things are God, or that God is not our gracious and merciful Creator, but rather a judgmental tyrant who only likes, well, us. Maybe you can imagine this happening.

          Jesus went up on the mountain to have an audience with the divine fully knowing what happened at the bottom of Mount Sinai, so he took with him Peter and James and John.  Because in Jesus, God was doing a new thing—shifting the point of view to collapse the distance between the Creator and the Created. 

          Jesus brought them up the mountain, and God spoke directly to them and I can’t overemphasize what a radical shift this is.  No longer would God be mediated to the people by givers-of-laws and prophets.  We would have access to God through the person of Jesus Christ. 

          This is the point of incarnation.  Of Emmanuel.  God with us.  God for us.  God walking with us talking with us leading us into a way of love and mercy that is rooted in direct experience of God’s presence.  Jesus taking us with him as he proclaims the gospel and heals in the name of God, and then going to the last mountain—the Mount of Olive—for us. 

He was arrested on that mountain and he returned to that mountain to ascend to the Father and both times he was surrounded by his disciples, because we—“disciples” includes us—are no longer spectators in the divine drama. 

We are characters.

That is what incarnation does.  It makes God’s story, the Gospel story, our story.  Jesus didn’t come to do magic tricks to make disconnected people worship God.  Jesus came to show us that a life of love and mercy and healing of broken places was the life that God made…for us.

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John.  So that God could speak directly to them.  And when they came down that mountain, they were carrying the presence of God in their bodies.  And ever since then, disciples of Jesus do the same—bear incarnation for a world in need of good news. 

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John.  When you leave here today, you will enact that same drama in reverse: you will carry with you the body of Jesus and the presence of God, wherever you go.  Because you are a character in this story.