Shining Out Your Own Soul

"Shining Out Your Own Soul"

Luke 9:28-43 (Transfiguration Sunday)
February 14, 2010

28-31About eight days after saying this, he climbed the mountain to pray, taking Peter,
John, and James along. While he was in prayer, the appearance of his face changed
and his clothes became blinding white. At once two men were there talking with him.
They turned out to be Moses and Elijah—and what a glorious appearance they made!
They talked over his exodus, the one Jesus was about to complete in Jerusalem.
32-33Meanwhile, Peter and those with him were slumped over in sleep. When they
came to, rubbing their eyes, they saw Jesus in his glory and the two men standing with
him. When Moses and Elijah had left, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, this is a great
moment! Let's build three memorials: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."
He blurted this out without thinking.
34-35While he was babbling on like this, a light-radiant cloud enveloped them. As they
found themselves buried in the cloud, they became deeply aware of God. Then there
was a voice out of the cloud: "This is my Son, the Chosen! Listen to him."
36When the sound of the voice died away, they saw Jesus there alone. They were
speechless. And they continued speechless, said not one thing to anyone during those
days of what they had seen.
37-40When they came down off the mountain the next day, a big crowd was there to
meet them. A man called from out of the crowd, "Please, please, Teacher, take a look
at my son. He's my only child. Often a spirit seizes him. Suddenly he's screaming,
thrown into convulsions, his mouth foaming. And then it beats him black-and-blue
before it leaves. I asked your disciples to deliver him but they couldn't."
41Jesus said, "What a generation! No sense of God! No focus to your lives! How many
times do I have to go over these things? How much longer do I have to put up with this?
Bring your son here."
42-43While he was coming, the demon slammed him to the ground and threw him into
convulsions. Jesus stepped in, ordered the vile spirit gone, healed the boy, and handed
him back to his father. They all shook their heads in wonder, astonished at God's
greatness, God's majestic greatness

One of our spiritual guides during this upcoming Lenten season will be the writer and
educator Palmer Parker, someone who has been an important person on my own
spiritual journey over the past couple of years. Palmer is known mostly as an advocate
of connecting the art of teaching with personal spirituality, and he brings his Quaker
faith into dialogue with both of those things, both teaching and spirituality. For those of
you familiar with the Quaker tradition, you’ll remember how it emphasizes the power of
silence in hearing God’s voice, God’s presence, in worship and in life. The Quakers
believed that each of us have the light of Christ within us, and the best way to discern
the voice of that inner Christ is to be quiet before it, and to be quiet with each other in
worship. In most Quaker worship services, there is no preacher, no leader, really, and
worshippers are simply asked to be silent during the whole service, unless, UNLESS,
the Spirit so moves them to speak, during which they may rise and say the words they
think the Spirit is speaking through them. If you’ve ever been to a Quaker service, you’
ve probably both experienced the quiet beauty of it, and, yet, if you’re like me, and you’
re like a lot of people, you’ve also struggled with the true silence that swallows you up,
as you worship quietly with others. In our culture, we’re simply not used to long periods
of intentional silence, especially in a public gathering, which is probably the reason why
there aren’t a lot of Quakers in this world.

But Parker Palmer says that the reason why silence is needed is because what is
eternal in us, that is, the soul, maybe even the Christ in us, the soul is a shy thing, a
reticent and withdrawn thing, though I don’t know if using the word “thing” quite
captures the mystery of that which is the “forever,” the eternal in us. Of course, the
soul is not only shy, but powerful as well, something Parker Palmer reminds us of in this
remarkable passage from one of his books, The Hidden Wholeness

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it
knows how to find safety in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my
bouts of depression.   In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on
collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my
ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I
could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest
of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.

And, yet, Palmer continues, reminding us that this same tenacious soul is also as
complex as we humans are, writing:

Yet, despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety
in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a
wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods,
yelling for it come out.   But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the
base of a tree, breath with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature
we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the
corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as end in itself.
(Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness 58-59)

Palmer says that one of the reasons that the soul is so shy is because it is rarely
honored, and the truth that it speaks is so rarely taken at face value. We humans tend
to want to correct each other, mend each other, manage each other, and so when we
have moments where share a personal truth with each other, maybe a difficult truth that
comes out of our experience, we immediately go into medical mode, trying to either
correct that other’s person’s truth, either by arguing against what has been said, in that
vulnerable moment, or by trying to mend each other, trying to bandage up the wound
we’ve just seen revealed in our friend and loved one. At that moment, our soul
retreats, back into the thicket, because it instinctively knows when others are dismissing
its difficult truth (its truth, not necessarily our own truth) and crashing through its
woods. In our culture and in our church communities, we’ve been told that our job was
to be each other’s healers, each other’s menders, or in a more sinister vein, we have
been told that we are each other’s correctors, that someone’s else soul truth must line
up with our truth, or what we believe to be God’s truth, or the church’s truth, or Koran’s
truth, or whatever. And, so, it is rare that we share our souls with each other, even in
places like religious communities, places where you would think the invitation would
always be issued, because our souls know that it is a rare thing to be in the presence
of others who are willing to accept what we have experienced to be true, as tentative as
that truth may be at that moment, without being corrected or being mended by a well-
meaning other.

I think some of what Palmer speaks of in his book forms the spiritual background of our
text this morning. You need to know that a bit earlier in this chapter from the Gospel of
Luke, Jesus had first warned the disciples that his destiny on this earth was to be
rejected by the people he loved, that he would be killed, and that he would be raised on
the third day. Jesus predicts his own demise, knowing that it was the destiny of his
body and his soul, both of which were intertwined in ways that still fascinates us
thousands of years later. In this version of his prediction, in Luke’s version, not much is
said in reaction by the disciples, but what he was saying was clearly not heard,
because it didn’t fit into the disciple’s plans for him, what they wanted Jesus to do,
rather than what Jesus himself knew was his destiny. In other Gospels, you have
people like Peter actually trying to correct Jesus, tell him that he is wrong on the matter,
that his destiny isn’t to be rejected and to die and live again, a soul truth that Jesus had
the courage to share with his disciples.

That incident forms the backdrop of this moment, this moment of transfiguration, where
something magical seems to happen. Jesus’ begins to shine up on that mountains,
almost as if his soul was bursting at the seams, as if what was in him, the eternal in him
was about explode in and through him. The light within him came through, and in some
odd way, it almost seems like a response to his disciples, to their desire to shut down
his truth, his light, what he knew to be true. Unlike so many of us, whose souls run to
the thicket, his soul could not be “corrected” by Peter and his truth could not be healed
by those who didn’t and couldn’t recognize how incredibly NOT in need of their spiritual
salves he was. He didn’t need to be corrected and he didn’t need to be made
physically and spiritually whole—he just needed people to listen to him, to listen to his
words, to listen to his truths, something that the disciples were not able to do at that
moment, and really, throughout the Gospels, they didn’t quite listen, like so many of us,
when we fail to listen to the truth that others share with us, truths that don’t necessarily
have to be our truths—remember, most of us are not going to be rejected and crucified
and raised on the third day: it is only Jesus who has this particular mission. And yet, if
we won’t listen to each other, we won’t see each other, not really, we won’t be present
with each other, and we will make the same mistake as the disciples did, which was
crashing through the woods of another person’s soul, thinking we are doing making
things better, and not realizing the damage we are doing to each other. The soul will
retreat, our souls, the souls of our friends, and we will rarely be blessed with another
appearance, because the soul instinctively knows when it is not safe to reveal itself.

But there was at least one person whose soul seemed willing to come out into the world
over and over again, this Christ, who kept taking chances with his disciples and with
us. But I think this moment, this transfiguration, had something to do with it. In this
story, God tells the disciples to “listen to him,” almost as if they needed to be told to
take Jesus seriously, and not try to correct him or mend him, or to mold him into our
image of what messiah should look like, as we humans are apt to do with our saviors
and with each other. And maybe this moment was a gift to Jesus as well, this moment
where he could see the power of his own soul, his own truth, a truth he shares with
Moses and Elijah, the great prophets who commune with him on that mountain, those
soul giants who came before him. Sure, a few of the disciples get to see this spectacle
of light, inner light, and maybe it’s meant to be further proof for them and for us that
Jesus really is who he says he is, but I can’t help but wonder that this moment wasn’t as
much for Jesus as it was for his disciples. It’s almost as if God had to show Jesus the
power and goodness of his own soul, that he could trust his own soul truth, and that his
mission was to let his light, his soul shine before people who did not get it, before
people who wanted to heal or correct him. So many of us get manhandled by others
when we share with others what our souls are telling us, that we retreat back into the
woods, and rarely coming out. And yet, Jesus, even after all these people trying to tell
him what his soul truth should be, he just kept sharing with others what he believed
God was telling him, making apparent that his soul was tenacious and wild and resilient,
so much more than many of our own souls.

When we show forth our light, when we become transfigured, changed by our soul
truth, when we share the light of our experience, as different as it may be from
someone’s else truth, when we allow ourselves to shine through, incredible things can
happen, and incredible things can happen to the people around us. I think that’s why
Raphael’s painting on the Transfiguration on the cover of your bulletin is important—he
seems to know that you can’t separate that moment on top of the mountain from what is
going on at the bottom of the mountain, the latter of which we heard about in the
Gospel reading, the story of the boy and his demons. If the disciples had had the
courage to listen to their master, to the truth he was telling them, and to listen to the
truth that their own souls were telling them, then the evil being wrecked upon this young
boy might have been taken care of by them rather than Jesus. Christ is so frustrated,
because even with that display of light, of goodness, of truth, coming right through him,
through his very pores, they still didn’t get it, though, of course, so many of us spend
our lifetimes not getting it as well. So much could be changed, so many could be
healed, including ourselves, if we listened to each other’s souls, without trying to make
each other into our own image, without trying mend each other, or correct each other.
Our light, our truth, our goodness, our souls, that which is eternal in us, would light up
this world, and change it completely.

There is an old story, unknown in its origins that goes like this:

There was once a dark cave, deep down in the ground, underneath the earth and
hidden away from view. Because it was so deep in the earth, the light had never been
there. The cave had never seen light. The word ‘light’ meant nothing to the cave, who
couldn’t imagine what ‘light’ might be.   Then one day, the sun sent an invitation to the
cave, inviting it to come up and visit. When the cave came up to visit the sun it was
amazed and delighted, because the cave had never seen light before, and It was
dazzled by the wonder of the experience. Feeling so grateful to the sun for inviting it to
visit, the cave wanted to return the kindness, and so it invited the sun to come down to
visit it sometime, because the sun had never seen the darkness. So the day came, and
the sun came down and was courteously shown into the cave. As the sun entered the
cave, it looked around with great interest, wondering what ‘darkness’ would be like.
Then it became puzzled, and asked the cave, ‘Where is the darkness?’ (Silf, One
Hundred Wisdom Stories From Around The World 54)

Like the sun, if we carry our light, our soul truth, into the caves of this world, like Jesus
did, there can never be a darkness in our lives and in this world that our light, a light
given to us by God in the Spirit, and in the eternal soul we are given as our birthright,
there will never be a darkness that cannot be overwhelmed by the light we carry within
us. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells his listeners on another mountain,
where he taught a great sermon, “a city on a hill,” (Matthew 5:14) he told them they
were. Truer words were never more spoken—and so the question before us, always, is
whether or not we will have the courage to shine, to let our light, a light given to us by
God, shine out into the world, to listen to the soul truth of others, and let it be, and to
speak our own soul truth, even when others won’t let it be. It can be done, it should be
done, and it will be done, if only we will have the courage to tell each other the truths of
our own souls. Amen.