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Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99, 2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2, Luke 9:28-43a
Do you believe this story? Do you believe that his clothes lit up? Not just glowing, not phosphorescent, but dazzling, like lightning. Did his body become electric? Is it possible? Of course it was impossible, which is the point! It’s an anomaly, a singularity. St. Luke reports it as a mystery.
The transfiguration is reported by two other gospels, and though they agree on the core of the story, their reports have subtle differences. In order to make sense of St. Luke’s details we look in literary terms at his Gospel as a whole, with his distinctive themes. His Gospel is the most humane, with the most human interest, and one of his themes is the new humanity that Jesus is the founder of, a new generation of human beings of which Jesus is the firstborn, the people of the resurrection.
In terms of the literary structure of St. Luke, the transfiguration looks both forward and backward—it anticipates Jesus’ resurrection and is the confirmation of his baptism. When Our Lord was baptized, down there in the Jordan valley, below sea level, the lowest point in the land-mass of Asia, he heard God’s voice directly, for the first time, “You are my son, my beloved, in you I am well-pleased.” And now up here, for only the second time, on the highest point in Palestine he hears that voice again, “This is my son, my elected, listen to him.” The only two times that he hears God’s voice in the Gospel of St. Luke. So this is the confirmation of his baptism.
And it’s the anticipation of his resurrection. Fifteen chapters later, on Easter morning, there are two men standing at the empty tomb. St. Luke describes their robes as “dazzling” white, with the same word for Jesus’ dazzling clothing up on the mountain. St. Luke specifically calls them “men,” not angels as in the other gospels. They are people like us, but on the other side of death, like the white-robed martyrs in the Book of Revelations. They wear baptismal robes, the ordinary garments of the resurrected citizens of the Kingdom of God. They dazzle because they live already in the future, full of light, the future visible in Jesus on the mountain, the firstborn of the new humanity. St. Luke does not call this a transfiguration, as the other gospels do, but a change, a transformation.
St. Luke is the only one to tell us what Moses and Elijah were talking about. They were speaking of his departure. The Greek word is “exodus.” Of which Moses was the expert! Our translators missed the obvious, which even Peter did not, for all his confusion, as the booths he suggested were from the Feast of Booths, when Jews remember the Exodus and their years of wandering in the desert. Peter would have made them from the branches and foliage around them. But then the cloud overshadowed them like the cloud of Glory on Mount Sinai, and the disciples were terrified.
Moses was the prophet of the beginning, and Elijah was the prophet of the end. I’m guessing that Moses spoke of how to get there, and Elijah spoke of what would be there when he got there. I’m guessing that Elijah spoke from experience of how Jesus would feel alone, even while among his people, and Moses spoke from experience of how Jesus must end alone, just him and God.
Which the second half of our lesson confirms. He comes down the mountain and he walks into this tableau of a suffering son and a suffering father, and his disciples all standing around with their mouth full of teeth, looking silly and feeling worse. “We couldn’t do anything.” Our Lord can see in this tableau an image of his own impending experience. Himself the son, the son of God, seized and abused by the demonic hands of death, and his Father watching on and suffering with him, just him and God, just him alone. The dark side of the glory that he had just experienced.
Of course he was upset. It was a burden for the Son of Man to be the Son of God. That’s another of St. Luke’s themes—the interplay of the two titles of Jesus: Son of God and Son of Man. Both of these titles are lit up in the Transfiguration. But in Luke’s account the emphasis is more on the Son of Man. What Jesus is for us, as he is one of us, the firstborn of our new humanity.
My message for you today is that this vision on the mountain is an image of your own illumination and your own transformation. You too will be changed. Not a different face, but a different look on your face. Not to become divine, not an angel, but a human being who can fully bear God’s image, able to reflect the light of God upon your face without diminution, and to generate the light of God without distortion. You are a member of the new humanity, a new mind, a new obedience.
St. Paul encourages us in our epistle, in verse 18: And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of our Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is working your transformation. We do not finish it ourselves. God finishes it in our death and resurrection. But already in this life it begins for us. The Lordship of Jesus provides the algorithm, and the Spirit is the catalyst. And you have seen examples of it happening, including persons in this congregation.
Do you consider this transformation desirable? Or that it’s even possible? Do you believe that people can change? Or do they basically stay the same? Are we compelled to go through life being driven by our histories? We know that cultures change. We know that nations can be transformed. Indeed, the Bible considers it the will of God that the ethics of the Torah and the Gospel should gradually transform the nations. But what about individuals? What about you?
I believe that I am being transformed. Slowly and with fits and starts. I look back with some embarrassment at my life and I shake my head at my history, and though my remorse is not a proof of real transformation it is a sign of it. There’s always repentance in transformation, and often a plea for help. Transformation requires something from the outside, a catalyst, an algorithm, a power and an influence that is external to yourself. Neither internal evolution nor spontaneous generation make for transformation. You cannot do it on your own. That’s a judgment, but it is also liberating.
You must first pass through your own exodus. The God of Moses did not bring the children of Israel straight into the Promised Land. They had first to be transformed from a rabble of resistant slaves into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, which took the desert, the diet of manna, and the fiery serpents. First they had to go through suffering, the suffering of pain, humility, and repentance.
God does not send the suffering, it’s just part of creaturely life. Nor does God get you out of your suffering—God gets you through your suffering. God goes with you through your suffering, just as God went along with Israel during those forty years in the desert. And God was transformed too, not by any change in God, but by the transformation of their capacity to know God and experience God, and to learn God’s love. You transform your image of God in order to transform yourself.
You have some healing, but not complete. You have more joy, but also deeper grief. You fear people less because you fear God more, and you learn the fear of God that comes with love. You are more loving, more ethical, and therefore more humble and more vulnerable, but also spiritually more powerful. The algorithm is the Lordship of Jesus and the catalyst is the Holy Spirit.
You cannot undo your history, you cannot remake your body and you cannot avoid your grief. You will contend with your history and your body and your grief until you are released in death, and transformation takes maintenance. You need the prayers and the hymns and the sacraments.
Your transformation will always be something of a mystery to yourself. Yes, it is a fact, as certain as your baptism, but you will never fully comprehend it. You give up some part of it to others, to those who love you and confirm you, to God and the community. They had to tell Moses his face was shining, he didn’t know it. You get your inner light from sources outside you. But at the same time, you are already transformed in the way that you handle your history and your body and your grief, your weekly converting your tragedy into comedy. The laughter is the laughter of humility and love.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
Genesis 45:3-11, 15, Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50, Luke 6:27-38
When I was a child, my mother would put my brother and me to bed, and she would talk with us and pray with us, and I learned my faith from her. I was very young when she told us about eternal life, and I was terrified. I didn’t tell her so, I kept it a secret, but I hated the whole idea of immortality.
I was an overly-sensitive little boy, and the thought of my mind going on forever and ever, endlessly, kept me awake at night. I would lie there sleepless, sweating, with stomach cramps, and I remember praying, Please God, you can give eternal life to Hank, but please just let me die at the end.
Years later I was happy to learn that the Old Testament does not teach the immortality of the soul. It is nowhere in the Torah and the Prophets, despite the Israelites having lived in Egypt for 400 years, a nation obsessed with immortality. The Torah assumes that our souls are just as mortal as our bodies.
Neither does the Old Testament teach that we go to heaven when we die. Heaven was no place for people! What the Israelites hoped for was to inherit the land, as it says three times in our Psalm. They were a people often exiled, wandering, and their hope was the Promised Land and life in Shalom, in peace and quiet prosperity, and to pass that along to their children’s children, who would remember them and bear their names. Being remembered was all the immortality they asked for. In their stories God remembered them, and they prayed, “Remember us, O Lord!”
The first hints of resurrection are in the last of the prophets. This was how God could keep that promise of the Promised Land. Too many Israelites had lived and died in exile, and not received God’s promise, so they would be raised again someday, and gathered back to Israel, there to live a second round, but this time in Shalom. This resurrection was for inheriting the land, and not for going to heaven, nor was it for humanity in general, but for the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.
So the sudden resurrection of the Lord Jesus was a great surprise for all involved. No one was expecting it—that was not the plan. Just one man, and not the whole nation? And only glimpsed and not explained, his resurrected body loosened from the laws of nature and the limits of creation, and then his departure into heaven, in his physical body? How could that be? What for?
It was hard to believe for the Corinthians. The Hellenistic inhabitants of the Roman Empire were brought up believing in the immortality of the soul. They were taught by Plato that their bodies were the prisons of their souls, and their best hope was to cast off their bodies when they died to free their souls to live forever in disembodied bliss. The resurrection made no sense, either as a fact or as a metaphor, either the resurrection of Jesus alone or a future resurrection for all of us.
St. Paul quotes their two typical questions. “How are the dead raised?” It’s impossible. And, “With what kind of body do they come?” It’s inconceivable. It’s so inconceivable that it can’t be possible.
St. Paul doesn’t answer the first question, and in fact the Bible never does. The Bible never explains how the Lord Jesus was resurrected or how we too shall be. It’s the second question that St. Paul answers, to establish its conceivability, and he says, You fools!
You dummies, you see the intimations of it all the time, every day you work in your garden. You take for granted that when you plant your seeds they will transform into the plants you want, and do you doubt that’s possible? Look at the seed, how dry and hard and inert it is. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t change, it doesn’t grow. You keep it in storage for years, like a stone that’s dead. And it bears no visible likeness to the green and growing thing it will become. You find that conceivable! And therefore possible! Resurrection is the same, you dopes.
You know that modern biologists still cannot explain the mystery of life in seeds. How a thing that shows no signs of life, even for centuries, with just a little bit of moisture can suddenly spring to life. No other substances can do this, not even substances created in the laboratory with the same proportion of elements. With all of our marvelous science we have never been able to generate life from dead matter.
But that must have happened four billion years ago, to get life started on this planet. Ever since then the molecules of certain kinds of matter have passed some code down to other molecules to make that matter come alive, but we humans have proven unable to introduce that code when it is not already there. All of life today is descended from that primeval life that was once for all generated out of dead matter, for which we may even indirectly hold God responsible, and if God can bring life to what is dead, then why not to your own dead body?
But how is that possible after many centuries of being dead, or maybe cremated? How does God find all the scattered molecules? Maybe God doesn’t, and we conceive of other possibilities. Maybe God remembers your DNA plus the bar-code of your life! DNA is mostly information, and how much information can be kept in a digital file too minute for eyes to see, and you can show a whole movie out of that. Maybe God will reconstruct you from the information that God has on you, for God remembers. All you need to be resurrected is that God remembers you!
Last week I asked you to believe that your body has the capacity for resurrection. I should have said it better. Your body does not have that capacity, because of the corrupting power of sin, until it dies first, and God resurrects it with that capacity. But even today your body is a miracle of God, a wonder. As weak and frail as we are, and hardly as agile as many animals, yet the human brain is one of the wonders of the universe, of impossible complexity and capacity, and the seat of this miracle we call the human mind, that can imagine eternity and even meditate on God. Your body is both a wonder and a sign, in which you can read that God has purposes for you, and God remembers you.
This is the last of my sermon series on epiphanies, on manifestations, on physical revelations of God, and this week’s manifestation is your body. Look at your bodies here, what do you see? Can you see past mere observance, can you see with the eyes of faith? Look at your bodies as something like seeds of what God will resurrect us into. How different will we be?
If the Lord Jesus is our image, then less different than a plant is from its seed, a chicken from its egg, or a butterfly from its caterpillar. Maybe we will differ only as an elf differs from a human in The Lord of the Rings, but as in the book, not the movie, without that bad hippy hair and those ridiculous ears. Maybe our difference will be more moral than physical. Certainly at least that, which is the take-home for today: The promise of the future resurrection directs your moral lives today.
Why else would you do what the Lord Jesus says to do in the gospel? “Love your enemies, do good, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return.” That’s nuts, if for this life only, but if you are planting seeds of good for God to harvest in God’s time, then you can do it. In our dying bodies what happens in the present determines the future, but you live in terms of your future resurrection, so that your future determines what you do in the present.
I invite you to see your moral life today as planting seeds within the world. And already now, in God’s pleasure, a good measure of moral harvest, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be given to you. And, in God’s time, even more.
My own body is dying, and I am closer to my death than to my youth. I still courteously dislike immortality, and I hope that eternal life will differ from the immortality I fear. Recently I have learned to answer the immortality that I fear with the resurrection I believe in. How that makes eternal life any different and thus more bearable I do not know, because the resurrection is offered to us as mystery as much as fact. I have to suspend my judgment, for my judgments must die too, and for its nature and its goodness I have to trust in God and in God’s purposes for us. The thing I know for sure about eternal life is that its atmosphere is love, a love so perfect that it casts out fear, and that what God has for us when God remembers us is whatever would agree with love.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
What do we see? We see Jesus in the middle of a crowd, a seething crowd, pressing in on him. We see individuals moving in on him and cycling out again; we look closer and we see persons limping and even crawling in on him, touching him, then rising up and walking out as others take their turns. Then we see them all turn toward him, and get quiet as he lifts up his voice to address them.
First he points with one hand, and then he points with the other. He could be speaking of two roads. We guess from other Bible passages that he’s speaking of the Two Ways, the Way of Blessing and the Way of Woe. “Blessed are you” if you do this, and “Woe is you” if you do that. Like in the Psalm: if you walk in the way of the righteous you will prosper. We come in close and listen, and we are surprised that Jesus is speaking of the Two Ways in contradiction, in reverse, upside down!
Because, if you were poor, you might say Woe is me, but he says Blessed are you. If you were hungry, or if you were weeping, you’d say Woe is me, but he says Blessed are you. If people hate you, exclude you, revile you or defame you, then Woe is me, but he says Blessed are you. And if we prosper and are rich, we say that we are blessed, but Jesus says Woe is you. If we are satisfied and full we say that we are blessed. If we are happy and laughing, and if all speak well of us, we say, with proper Christian modesty, Well, we are blessed. Why does Jesus say the opposite, Woe is you?
I do not think he’s saying that it’s better to be hungry than to be filled. He’s not saying that the poor are better than the rich. He’s not classifying people. He’s talking about the condition of being in the way of what God is doing in the world, when God reverses the ordinary way of the world and turns things upside down, which is what salvation does.
So if we have carefully solidified our arrangements to keep ourselves comfortable in this corrupted world the way it is, and if our commitments require the world to stay the way it is, then we’re not going to like what God is doing. But on the other hand, if you have made a royal mess of things, and totally blown it with your life, then what Jesus offers is very good news.
The Lord Jesus is not dividing us into two kinds of people. We are all both kinds. It’s a revolving door. You go through times of blessing that turn into times of woe and you get through the woe to blessing again. You go from days of weeping to days of laughing and then to weeping again. You go from hunger to being filled to hunger, from being praised to being reviled to being praised. In the words of our Heidelberg Catechism, “Rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty,” cycling in and out, like the people in the crowd around the Lord Jesus.
Isn’t this cycle just the law of karma, the wheel of life, inexorably turning, you get what you paid for, what goes around comes around, cause and effect, growth and disintegration, flourish and die, build our golden cities and they fall again to dust. The suffering of existence, the inevitable suffering of reality. To ease the suffering we have our religions, and Buddhism offers an escape from it.
The Christian answer is different—to enter the suffering and turn the cycle the other way round. I invite you to believe that God pours an energy into the world to turn the revolving door towards final hope and blessing. The Lord Jesus calls this energy the Kingdom of God, and St. Paul calls it the power of the resurrection, to reverse your karma, forgive your sins, and bless you if woe is you. The Kingdom of God has power, the power of the resurrection.
This power is inexorable and yet this kingdom does not force itself, it works by love and not by arms. It is subtle, unobtrusive, often hidden, and poor, and hated and opposed, but it is irreversible and very, very patient, and because it is so sure, and yet so generous, and so unconditionally welcoming, it can afford to give its enemies full room and its opponents the freedom to get what they want. Because it is a kingdom of love, it does not insist on its own way, but it also never fails, it never fails to get what it hopes for.
In our Epistle lesson St. Paul is so strong on the resurrection because he sees it as the great new energy injected by God into the world. Not immortality, the immortality of the soul that everyone believed in already, because for St. Paul that means just the same old thing forever and ever, and at the end is only dust. And resurrection not as a metaphor, but as an actual event that happened in the world, mysterious yes, inexplicable yes, but historical nonetheless, God’s sudden investment in the world, God’s new energy to push the wheel of karma back around and turn the woe to blessing.
God prefers to exercise that energy only rarely in doing miracles or intervening in human events. God does not manipulate. God wants your freedom and your own power for blessing. God puts the energy into the proclamation and the testimony, the proclamation of what God did in Jesus Christ and the testimony of what we have seen in the evidence of faith, that when people believe this proclamation they live their lives in new patterns of hope and peace and reconciliation.
You catch that energy in the antenna of your belief and the receiver of your faith and you transform that energy into your own words and your prayers and songs and you radiate that energy by your works of love and your witness to the powers and your service to the poor.
And the energy comes also from the future back to us, in God’s Holy Spirit, sent from heaven to inspire you and strengthen you. You know that in the Bible heaven is not so much up above us as forward in the future, heaven means the once and future Kingdom of God already established by God in eternity ahead of us, shining back upon us like the dawn ahead of you, the light by which you see things differently, the same things as everyone else but in a different light and going in a different direction, and in your own small way you push that revolving door around the other way.
I invite you, one more week, to welcome the news that in real time Jesus actually rose up from the dead, never to die again, and that this makes all the difference. You can welcome this Kingdom with your own life, and learn to see it and bring it out and work its implications out. You live your life in terms of it, your decisions and your bodies, you re-imagine God in terms of it, and you see the world in terms of it.
In your body you feel your blessings and your woes, your wins and your losses, your fullness and your hunger, your health and your sickness, and eventually you will feel the signs of coming death, but you can also believe that your body has the capacity for resurrection, and for eternal life. What the world regards as trouble and a burden, this Kingdom raises into blessing.
So then, God’s Word and Spirit are the energy, from the past and from the future. The Word of the resurrection stops the great wheel of karma. The Spirit blows on it to spin the other way around, that what you get is not what you have paid for, that what you get is not what you deserve, that your future is what determines your now, that dying leads to life and evil turns to goodness.
The church can practice this. The government can’t. Welfare can’t. Even secular charities can’t. But the church can. And we look for our success in the energy of God. We don’t do it for statistics. Nor that the world speaks well of us. We do it not when we are rich but when we are poor. This is why the ministry of deacons is not an extra in the church, not just charity added on, but is central to the church and why we ordain them. They are living witness of our little actions among the hungry and the poor to illustrate the Kingdom of God and the hidden power of the resurrection.
As Jesus stood there in the middle of the seething crowd, so you can stand firm in the turmoil and vicissitudes of your own life. As the Monterey Cypress tree withstands the raging forest fires of California, and even requires the fire to open its cones and release it seeds, so you can be like that tree that is planted by the streams of water, bearing your fruit in due season, precisely in trial and trouble, fruit of blessing out of woe, rising from dying, despair to hope, and misery into love.
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
