Come, Follow Me

"Come, Follow Me"

Matthew 17:1-9
February 3, 2008

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them
up a high mountain, by themselves. 2And he was transfigured before them, and his
face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. 3Suddenly there
appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord,
it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you,
one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 5While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright
cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the
Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” 6When the disciples heard this, they
fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. 7But Jesus came and touched them,
saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” 8And when they looked up, they saw no one
except Jesus himself alone. 9As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered
them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the
dead.”

Six more weeks of winter. That’s what everybody’s favorite groundhog Punxsutawney
Phil predicted on February 2, Groundhog Day, when he came out and saw his shadow.
Now, I know that it isn’t good news for us right now, with all the snow we’re experiencing,
etc, but the good news that Phil is a horrible forecaster and its been shown scientifically
that he’s no member of the weather channel . The interesting thing, I think, is that the
tradition around Punxsutawney Phil is that shadows predict more winter, that is, if the
sun is out, then we’re doomed for more winter, whereas I would have thought that a
cloudy day, in which poor Phil couldn’t see his shadow, I would have thought that it
would predict more bad weather…its as if the tradition seems the opposite of common
sense, but, maybe its my common sense that all wrong. Of course, we’re talking about
groundhog predicting the weather for the next six weeks, and perhaps that is where all
common sense really gets lost. And yet, on a grander scale, the issue of shadows and
paying attention to shadows is something we should be doing at about this time of the
year, especially as people who are about to begin the season of Lent, and a new
sermon series on the Seven Deadly Sins. I am in the midst of ordering of a few sets of
the Seven Deadly Sins Plate Set to give to those with perfect attendance—its
something to put side to side with your good china in the dining room cabinet.

Nonetheless, today is Transfiguration Sunday, the day each year that church meditates
on the transfiguration of Jesus on a mountaintop. The passage usually chosen for this
day focuses on the moment when Christ undergoes a transformation, a
metamorphosis—actually, the word “metamorphosis” is the Greek basis of the word
“transfigured.” The Scripture in Matthew tells us that Jesus’ face shone like the sun
and that his clothes become like dazzling light—someone had turned on the lights and
now, somehow, that light was coming through this Jesus, on some mountain some two
thousand years ago. And he wasn’t alone on that mountain—also before these
stunned disciples who had gone with Jesus up that mountain were two other figures,
Moses and Elijah, two men whose lives, interestingly enough, had mysterious endings:
Moses died alone on some mountain, looking over into the promise land he is forbidden
to enter by God, and he is literally buried by the hands of God on that mountain, and
Elijah, Elijah is the man who gets whisked away in a chariot of fire. And yet, as he
stands with Moses and Elijah, Jesus’ clothes are alive with light, and his disciples stare
in joy at this incredible, incredible sight—it is, for them, the confirmation that Jesus is
who he says he is—he is Messiah, he is indeed the real Savior.

But this story, this really strange story, really, comes to us at the right time—for some
reason, the people who have put together our lectionary, that is, the readings from the
Bible that the church follows every week, for some reason the composers of the
lectionary want us to have a story about light before we enter into a season of
shadows, before we enter into the season of Lent.   Lent begins a few days from now,
on Ash Wednesday, and for 40 days, minus the Sundays, the church devotes itself to
the task of looking inward, to searching our often stubborn hearts and thinking about
what it means to be faithful and how, at times, we have chosen hate over love,
judgment over grace, pettiness over generosity, death over life. On Ash Wednesday,
we are reminded of how human, how mortal, how transient our human lives really are—
“From dust you have been created and to dust you will surely return” is said as the
ashes of last year’s burnt palm branches from Palm Sunday are smudged on our
foreheads. It is a season when we are called to reflect on what has been done for us in
the cross—that is, the power of death, the sting and horror of death is destroyed
because Christ embraced his own death and in doing so, he gave us his life. It is a
mystery—life comes to all of us through the death of one person, some two thousand
years ago.

And yet, Lent gives us a time to sit in the shadow of that death for a little while, and
Lent gives us a moment to honor the shadows that come with being in the presence of
light. You know, to know what light is, we have to what it means to be in darkness,
through an experience of shadows—and so we have a story, a mysterious story, that
tell us about the light of the world, this Jesus, and how those shadows, those troubled
times, are simply part of being in the presence of light—we simply can’t have light
without the possibility of shadows. You and I, we can’t know light without the darkness,
without the shadows; we can’t know cold without experiencing heat, we can’t know joy if
we don’t know sorrow, we can’t figure out what life is if we haven’t thought about death
yet. We often get lost in our shadows time, in our times of despair, in our own moments
on our crosses, and we forget that shadows can’t exist without light, that resurrection
can’t happen without a cross, without a crucifixion And yet, the question must be asked:
why? Why is that the universe has been set up this way, that light can’t exist without
darkness, that joy cannot exist without sorrow. I don’t know why. If it was up to me, I
would have set up a different kind universe, but since I am not the Creator, the Mother
and Father of us all, I don’t get what I want all the time. I would have created a world
where you and I could have known joy without sorrow, life without death, hope without
despair, light without shadows, but alas, you and I, we are children of the Creator and
we are not the Creator, so we must settle for the way the world is at this moment, not
the way we want it to be.

But I don’t want us too get lost in shadows, in the shadows of Lent, though I think the
shadows are something we need to attend to, as disciples of Jesus. There is the story
of a dog, crossing a bridge over a stream with a piece of flesh in his mouth, who saw
his own shadow in the water and took it for that of another dog, with a piece of meat
double his own in size. He immediately let go of his own, and fiercely attacked the other
dog to get his larger piece from him. He thus lost both: that which he grasped at in the
water, because it was a shadow; and his own, because the stream swept it away. The
shadows are meant to teach us many things, but they are, ultimately, not the light itself,
and we mustn’t get too enamored of them, though it is easy to confuse the shadows in
life, the difficult times in our lives, with being the whole story of our lives .

I think Christianity is fundamentally rooted in the goodness and yet messiness of this
world, in all the resurrection and crosses we humans are destined to experience in our
lives.   And so I always tell people that I think Christianity tells the truth about the world—
that it doesn’t gloss over the hard stuff, the crosses, the moments of despair—you only
have to look at Jesus’ experience on the cross to know that this is not a religion whose
ever going get to let you and I escape into some happy blissful land not rooted in the
real world. Yet, the shadows don’t tell the whole story, because the full story, the full
truth is a story about light. Shadows surely exist, hard times have surely happened in
our lives, despair has surely overwhelmed us one too many times, but the shadows
exist because light, the light of world soaks all of creation. We are people bathed,
completely and utterly bathed in light, and despite our shadows, the light of the world
will never let us live for too long in shadows and darkness. We are a people of hope, a
people of resurrection, a people of joy, a people of light, but that hope, that
resurrection, that joy, that light comes with the price of knowing what it means to be
hopeless, of what it means to experience the cross, with what it means to live for a time
in the shadows. Me—I would have done it differently, but I will never forget what one of
my religion professors in college, Dr. Green, said when my class and I struggled with
shadows—he simply said, shrugging his shoulders, “that’s just the way it is.”

You know, we get the story of transfiguration, this story of light and life, right before we
enter into a season of shadows and even darkness. This is the opposite of the way
that Leonardo Da Vinci taught other painters, which was to begin every canvas with a
wash of black, because all things on earth are dark except where exposed by the light.
Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows later.
Though I can appreciate Leonardo’s wisdom, it’s the opposite for us as Christians, I
think—really, the world is bathed in light, and it is the dark, the shadow that reveal how
beautiful the light really is, how beautiful the creation of God really is. To know that
truth before we begin the journey into night, into the valley, it makes the burden easier,
the load more gentle to bear.

In the preceding few verses before this story in Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples that
he will go to Jerusalem, not as the victorious Jewish Messiah conquering the Romans,
but he will go there and he will be crucified, like some common criminal. And Jesus’
disciples are not too hip on this idea, and they try to argue with him that surely that won’
t be the case—“not you, Jesus, not you,” they say to him. So, after that difficult
moment, after they deny the reality of the storm clouds on the horizon, Jesus gives
them the gift of this moment, this moment of light and wonder with Moses and Elijah,
this proof that he really is who he says he is. I think Jesus gave them this
transfiguration moment to get them through the experience, the chaos of the coming
days in Jerusalem, when they, his disciples, would have all their hopes and dreams
dashed with this arrest of Jesus, when they would desert him in his moment of need
and they would creep into the shadows of their shame, their guilt, and their
hopelessness—this moment of light, this moment on the mountaintop is about giving
them the strength to get through the shadow times, through those hard, painful
moments that will surely meet them in the coming days. Yes, shadows would surely
come to them, but the shadows exist because they were and are in the presence of
light, of the light of the world.

The disciples in our story from Matthew, the disciples want to build on the mountain,
they want to stay in presence of this light as it is, and they want to begin making a
home on that mountain of light. But Jesus won’t let them—the problem is that you can’t
have light without shadows, without knowing the truths that only the shadows can teach,
so there are times when we must leave the mountain so that we go to the valley, and
learn what only the valley can teach us, the valley of the shadow of death, as the
Psalmist says. Mountains like this one are great, they fill us up with light, with Christ, so
that we can see still see the truth about the way the world really is whenever we must
leave the mountain to go down into the valley of shadows. “Listen to him,” the voice of
God says here, “this is the one whom I’ve sent—let it give you hope, let it give you
strength, but there will be no building of homes here—you’ve got work to do in the
valley below.” Valleys exist because mountains tower over the earth, shadows exist
because light pours its warmth into all the universe.   The good news is that we get
moments like this, moments of light and wonder, so that we can meet the challenge of
Lent, the challenge of looking inward, the moments in our lives when the shadows seem
to overwhelm us. The world, the world is bathed in light, and that light will never go out,
and that light will never leave us in complete darkness, even if seems as if the shadows
are to overwhelm us. We are given much, so much, and this moment in Matthew is a
reminder that life, that hope, meets us at the end of Lent—as I said last week,
resurrection is the end of the story, not crucifixion, life, not death, is written into the
story of the universe, and indeed, it is written into the very fiber of our lives. Amen