February 10, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
Transfiguration of the Lord

Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 99
Luke 9:28–43

Living up high in the rarefied air isn’t the point of transfiguration. It was never intended as breathing space for a precious few, never meant as a private experience of spirituality removed from the public square. . . . It was and is a costly investment on the ground level, worth every tear, every prayer, every cent. It is an investment to honor all that has been invested in us.

Heidi Neumark

Every preacher has texts they don’t look forward to talking about. This is one of mine. I think this is one of the most difficult passages to understand in the entire New Testament. I had to remind myself to maintain a sense of humor as I struggled to get started with a sermon this week. Jesus and three disciples—Peter, James, and John—go up a mountain and Jesus is “transfigured.” I’ve never heard that term used anywhere else but in this Bible story, and they don’t teach you what it means in seminary. Is this story about a miracle? A dream? Is it a metaphor? The text tells us only two things, first, and I quote: “His face changed.” Where am I supposed to come up with a sermon illustration for “his face changed”? I asked a dermatologist friend if he had any ideas; he laughed at my writer’s block and suggested I call the sermon “Jesus Saves Thanks to Microdermabrasion.” The text also says, “His clothes became dazzling white?” A more entertaining preacher would come up with a good joke about Oxy-Clean here—the disciples heading up a hillside with their grass-stained cloaks, Presbyterians taking along their Geneva tabs . . . Somehow I don’t think either of these is what St. Luke had in mind.

Preachers struggle with this story. The Reverend Bruce Rigdon, who is currently teaching a class upstairs on Eastern Orthodox Christianity, noted the difficulty of this passage a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned—and this is true—that when a preacher opens a biblical commentary on the transfiguration, we typically find academic ruminations on the placement of the story relative to Jesus’ resurrection appearances or a comparative look at other passages in the Bible where we meet characters whose faces shone brightly. If you came in wondering about either of those literary matters this morning, I must admit you are much more interested in theology than I am.

We can be thankful that much of the time it isn’t the theologians but the artists who nail the interpretation. I think Raphael was pretty close to getting it right in his “Transfiguration” altarpiece; he worked on it for a long time, right up to his death in 1520. The painting stands almost fourteen feet high, but only the top half is the transfiguration scene. Jesus, in the full glory of Renaissance chiaroscuro, floats above the world, radiating light and beauty. On either side of him, Moses and Elijah, giants of the faith, pay homage to him. Below him, but still in the center of the painting, three dumbfounded disciples—James, Peter and John—shield their eyes from his glory. They are clothed in robes of blue, yellow, and green, symbolically representing faith, hope, and love.

The lower half of Raphael’s painting is not of the transfiguration but of the story that immediately follows it, the story of an epileptic child and his helpless father. A crowd surrounds them as they wait for Jesus to come down from the mountain. The father, from the midst of the crowd, shouts to gain Jesus’ attention: “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once, he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not” (Luke 9:38–40). Can you see the helpless look on that father’s face? Epilepsy was so widely misunderstood in the ancient world; it’s still able to frighten those who aren’t familiar with it. Raphael depicts the father holding onto his seizing son. The boy is convulsing so wildly he almost strikes his father in the face; his robe falls from his shoulders as dad tries to keep him from injuring himself. Close by, but not close enough to be in contact, the disciples look on in terror; one points a finger as they embarrassingly surmise that there is nothing they can do.

Raphael got it right, combining the two scenes in one work of art, placing the disciples—the helpless students of faith, hope, and love—at the intersection of the tragedy below and the glory above. The transfiguration is about the relationship between the human brokenness in which we are trapped and the wholeness of God, for which we so desperately long. Goethe, when he saw the painting, made the connection: “The two are one:” he wrote, “below suffering [and] need, above, effective power [and help in times of distress]. Each bear[s] on the other, both interact with one another” (Goethe, Italienische Reise, December 1787).

This interaction is the essence of what it means to be faithful. Faith is living between the two scenes. Oddly enough, many of us do not embrace that interaction; instead we devote our energy to one level of life’s painting while seeking to avoid the other. We either cloak ourselves in visions of greatness and deny the messiness of the world, or we bury ourselves in our brokenness and forget that Christ is calling us to something better.

The theological giant Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about this quandary as much as anyone. He noted that all of us make our way through life either fooling ourselves into thinking that we are immortal or stumbling along as if we were mere animals. The assumption that we are gods leads to all kinds of fallacies: We believe that we are invincible. We will never be the one to get cancer, be hurt in a football game, suffer a spinal cord injury, show the signs of dementia, kill someone while getting behind the wheel after a few too many. We know that these things happen to other people all the time, but we are still shocked when it happens to us. We are shocked because on some level we want to believe that we are invincible, that we are like God. But it is a lie (see Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man).

The opposite side of the same coin is the temptation to except the lowest of our humanity and do nothing but act on our selfish desires. What’s your poison? What do you do to forget about it all? Drinking and drugs are obvious go-to examples, but there are plenty of others: the escapism offered by guilty-pleasure TV, the fleeting satisfaction of throwing your money around on clothes or overpriced restaurants. We do these things only to find out that you have to have them again and again to feed the beast. The microdermabrasion and super-white laundry I joked about in my introduction—all of these are ways that we fool ourselves into thinking that if only we master these material realities, we can be at peace. But there is no peace there, because we are not merely creatures; we are children of God, and when relying on these distractions, we will always wake up in the morning unsatisfied, wondering why we still feel incomplete, wondering if God has made us for something more important than shopping and drinking and getting the house a little cleaner, the laundry a little whiter. We know there’s more to life than that.

The point is not that any of these things are bad. It is a fact that we are human beings, living in a material world. And the call to godliness is also a part of life. It is absolutely true that we are children of a divine creator God; each one of us has a seed of holiness inside of us, a drive toward goodness and generosity. Neither of these ideas is altogether wrong. The challenge and essence of life is to learn how to exist in between the two, to figure out how to live where we find the disciples in Raphael’s painting, living in faith, hope, and love, unable to ignore either the desperate calamities of the world below or the glorious shining example of Christ above. Faith is about seeing the whole picture.

This seemingly philosophical principle has frighteningly concrete applications. There are plenty of examples of things that we keep separated because of the threat of holding them together. Today in our city, as much as anyplace else in the world, a culture of poverty and gun violence lives quite apart from a culture of affluence and political expediency that likes to ignore it. Today is February 10, and in our city year-to-date, forty-six people have been killed by guns. I know you share my concern about it, but to walk up and down the block in front of our church, who would have any idea? Given the choice, who wants to? I openly admit that I’d much rather comfortably enjoy a glass of wine at Gibson’s than wonder about the dangerous commute of the busboy who will wash the glass. God knows there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the good and pleasant things of this world. But it’s far too infrequent that people like me and that busboy switch places. It’s difficult in the world we’ve constructed for me to really know what his neighborhood is like, and it’s hard to imagine that he’ll ever pay me twelve dollars for a drink. There are so many dividing lines, so many insulating factors that allow us to ignore those whose lives are different from ours. The problem is that just like everything else in life—cancer and dementia, prescription drug abuse and shopping—living in one world and ignoring the other will soon catch up with us. I live in what I consider to be a pretty good neighborhood. The first Chicago murder victim of 2013 was found just after New Year’s, three blocks from my front door. This is not someone else’s problem. It is ours.

What are we to do? It may surprise you to know that there is quite a lot you can do. You can read about Illinois House Bill 5831, an action 95 percent of surveyed citizens support, requiring the registration of handguns. You can sign a petition to support the passage of the bill at coffee hour today. April 10, a citywide coalition is hoping to take 5,000 people to Springfield to lobby for commonsense gun laws. You can go along. You can visit the Mission Committee table today and find out about CeaseFire and Crosswalk, programs that support young people in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods so that they can worry more about their algebra test and less about how to get home from school without getting shot. You can participate in our Chicago Lights Tutoring program or volunteer at our Social Service Center and get to know a person by name, face, and story so that these problems become familiar realities in your life and not just statistics on the evening news.

But there are so many ways we can insulate ourselves from the problems of our city. And possibly the most dangerous one is time. The story of Hadiya Pendleton, gunned down last week in a playground, or the horror of Newtown, Connecticut—these stories catch our attention and arouse our sympathy, but we quickly forget. As Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in The New York Times this week, “[The scourge of gun violence is at the center of our news right now. But,] if history is any judge the moment will pass, and most of us will find ourselves again lost in our daily and particular business. When that time comes, there will be others of us who [still] live in places where senseless shootings remain a corrosive constant” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times, 6 February 2013).

This is where the philosophical argument about the human and divine meets the reality of your life. This is what Raphael’s painting is about. This is what the story of the transfiguration is about. St. Luke did not put these stories one beside the other by some kind of accident. Faith is not about going up to the mountaintop and staying there. Nor is it about surrendering to the idea that some problems just cannot be solved. Faith is about knowing something of the suffering and the mountaintop and living in the middle.

Heidi Neumark served Transfiguration Lutheran Church during the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic in New York City. Note that her church was named “Transfiguration”; she’s obviously thought about this story. And she writes, “Living high up in the rarefied air isn’t the point of transfiguration. . . . [It was] never meant as a private experience of spirituality removed from the public square. It was a vision to carry us down, a glimpse of unimagined possibility at ground level” (Heidi Neumark, Breathing Space, p. 268).

I love that turn of phrase: “unimagined possibility at ground level.” I love it because living faithfully isn’t just about coming down from the mountain; it’s about remembering to look up. “It is often tempting to imagine that our world is beyond saving,” writes one biblical commentator. “Disaster persists. Brokenness, sin, and injustice threaten human life. Hope wanes even among faithful people” (van Driel, Feasting on the Word, C1, Transfiguration Sunday). But we have to look up.

Nick Kristof, who writes most of his editorials about desperate poverty and human sex trafficking, recently reflected, “I promise, I’m not the Eeyore of journalists. The truth is that covering inequality, injustice, and poverty can actually be inspiring and uplifting.” He then told the story of Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn. Seventy percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches—it is not exactly a bastion of privilege. But School 318 just became the home of the first middle school chess team to win the national high school chess championship. The chess team at this inner-city school has ninety-five members. One student, Rochelle Balantyne, just got a full-ride to Stanford. Carlos Tapia, whose parents are a maid and a house painter, has eighteen chess trophies at home. “Based on estimated chess ratings, Albert Einstein would rank third on the team” at School 318, Kristof writes. And it’s not an accident or a miracle; it’s not an inexplicable exception. The team thrives thanks to the tireless work ethic of the students and the voluntary enthusiasm of a teacher named Elizabeth Spiegel. (Kristof, “Meet the Champs,” New York Times, January 30, 2013) There are a million things you can do to change the world.

It seems like such a hard story to preach, the transfiguration. “His face changed; his clothes became dazzling white.” What in the world does that have to do with us? It turns out it has everything to do with us. In this story, the most important transfiguration happens not to Jesus but to his disciples. This story is about human people finally seeing Jesus as he was and is and will be. It’s about us, the students of Jesus, the modern-day disciples, finally understanding a simple truth: We, his followers, are the ones who must be transformed by faith. We are the ones who are called to come down from the mountain and look around. We are called to continue living here in the world and to be people of vision. We are called to look into the eyes of our human family; you are called to look in to the eyes of the person sitting to your right and your left, the person sitting on the sidewalk and the person from the other side of town, and when you look into those human eyes, you are called to see the citizens of heaven. We are all called to live in hope, to act in love, and to struggle with faith at the meeting point between suffering and glory. We are called to be transfigured, to see “a glimpse of unimagined possibility, and to see it at ground level.” Amen.