February 14, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Transfiguration

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 42:1–5
Exodus 34:29–35
Luke 9:28–36

In a world of exclusion— a world we ourselves keep recreating because it is a world so deeply entrenched in our very hearts we need to learn to practice embrace.

Miroslav Volf

Two weeks ago, I arrived home from the Middle East after two weeks in Egypt with a group from this congregation and an additional week exploring Israel and Jordan with an old friend. I owe a word of thanks to all of you who wished us well and held us in prayer and who greeted all of us so kindly with words of welcome upon our return. Several of you have asked if we will be organizing an opportunity to share our discoveries and show pictures, and yes, we will definitely find a time for that.

While I was away, and also upon my return, I was reminded once again of how difficult it can be to share something like a travel experience, something meaningful and out of the ordinary, with someone else who was not there to be a part of it. Friends ask a simple question, “How was your trip?” And I think many of us, because we don’t know where to start, take what might have been an important or formative experience for us and reduce it to a word or phrase that is much more vague and sterile than what we would’ve liked to say: The trip was “really good,” “meaningful,” “challenging,” “a great opportunity.”

On some level, those brief answers are necessary and maybe even desired; most people who ask “How was your trip?” while genuinely interested, are not looking for a full rundown of everything that happened from the moment I entered O’Hare. The difficulty, and the importance, of the question becomes clearer when we consider the people who are closest to us. If you come home to a spouse or significant other, a child, maybe a very close friend, how can you share the experience you’ve had? So we bring gifts and show pictures; we go to great lengths, sometimes, to stay in touch while we are faraway, emailing, Skyping, setting up international phone plans. And yet there is something lost in not having been there together. We wish that person had been by our side to be present in a particular moment, and a bit discouraged that they were not, we may be a little frustrated or feel a little alone as we try to explain. Our loved ones on the receiving end feel it, too. In our inability to convey the experiences we’ve had while we were apart, we all sense the space between us as persons; when something great happens, we want others to understand just as we do. We want to reach across that space and get them to see what we saw and feel what we felt, but making that connection can be a struggle.

There is a story about this in the Bible. It’s known as the transfiguration. This story appears in three out of the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and we devote a Sunday to it every year in the church calendar, and that day is today. Nevertheless, my hunch is that many of you may not remember much about the transfiguration, and I think that is with good reason: the transfiguration is a mysterious story, largely based in the personal experience of three of the disciples, and parts of it are difficult to put into words. Like the travel experiences I was describing above, the transfiguration is a story that is hard to share. But let me give it a try.

Jesus heads up a mountain one afternoon, taking with him three disciples: Peter, James, and John. Right from the beginning, the story shows our problem: why didn’t the other disciples get to go? What were Bartholomew and Andrew and Mary Magdalene thinking as three of their friends marched off with their teacher and left them behind? If they were jealous, it was with good reason. I can tell you from just having been in Galilee, it’s a beautiful place for a hike. Mount Tabor, where tradition tells us that this event took place, is at the north end of a long and wide valley. This part of the world is not barren or dry, as scenes from the movies or CNN footage from the Middle East might lead you to believe. This is green and arable land, and crops grow thick in dark soil, right up into the hills. Today you can see vast stretches of farmland stretching out in front of you like a green and brown patchwork quilt, and even in those days long ago, the mountainsides would have been home to grapevines for winemaking and gnarled branches of old olive trees, ready to yield their fruit for oil. As you ascend the hills, pine trees take over, smelling as fresh and clean in Palestine as they do on a summer day in Wisconsin. And Mount Tabor sits on a small continental shelf raised up, looking like a volcano with a small rounded top, as it has been since it was created thousands of years before Peter, James and John walked there with Jesus. Even if nothing had happened that day, it would have been the ideal place for a quiet hike with a beloved teacher, a spiritual moment with God’s own Son. And the close friends who stayed behind would have felt at a distance from Peter, James, and John, who that day went on a journey that not everyone would share.

This distance I’m describing, this separation from one another, is not isolated to travel; it happens in all kinds of circumstances. It can happen when someone we care about misses an important event or celebration or doesn’t get along with one of our friends. We feel it when someone doesn’t understand a frustration we have with a coworker or a parent or a sibling, because they don’t fully understand that relationship. This feeling of distance can be particularly raw when it comes to spiritual experiences, moments of personal difficulty, or growth and discovery. We so desperately want to share those things with someone we love, and then we wonder, Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they get me?

And if you think this feeling of the space between us is isolated to personal circumstances, it’s not. Have you ever been the only Republican or the only Democrat at the dinner table when the political commentary and jokes start flying? You know the feeling of distance I’m talking about. The sentiment behind it is the same: “If only I could explain myself. If these people knew my story, if they knew my history and why I’m passionate about a different set of issues, they would understand. But how do I start, how do I explain to them who I am and what I believe?” It seems easier to maintain the old argument, or just to sit quietly and nod, instead of taking it upon ourselves to try to repair our nation’s longstanding political divisions over tonight’s glass of wine. And thus our misunderstandings continue to fester.

During my week in the Holy Land, it was my impression that, for Israelis and Palestinians, the space between people works itself out in similar ways. But the space is worked out in ways that are literally much more concrete, for the space is so well defined that they live on different sides of a wall. Many of you know of the wall of which I speak, and let me assure you, it is grey and dark and remarkably tall and it stretches for miles. It is fair, I think, to say that people on both sides of that wall want peace. The terms under which they want it are different, but no one wants to live in a state of fear and anger. I spoke with some people who are sharply polarized and others who still patiently look for ways to build relationships and create dialogue. But in the midst of all that divides them, there is a unifying message in every conversation: “If only those people knew my story, if only they understood what it’s been like for me and for my people, for my family and my friends. If only they could understand the hurt of what we have lost and the fear in which we live over losing more.” But in the midst of everyday struggles, over time the stories have been overcome by immediate fears, and it has become easier for some to build a wall or launch a rocket than to enter that conversation. And it has become easier for others, even those who are much more moderate, to allow the building and launching to go on than to encourage the conversation. And we should not be too quick to judge them, because just like in our personal lives, there are particular realities of our present and our past that we believe no one will understand. And it’s often easier to stay in the silence than to do the work of telling our stories out loud.

Peter, James, and John could have described this distanced feeling, for they had an incredible experience that day, but they did not know how to share it, they did not know how to make the others understand. As the story goes, when they arrive at the top of Mount Tabor, they all kneel down to pray, and as Jesus prays, Peter and James and John notice that Jesus is somehow transfigured before them; he begins to shine. And there next to him appear, as clear as day, Moses and Elijah, great prophets, the two who had come the closest to knowing God, and they too begin to shine.

Peter turns to Jesus and says, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter does what most of us would do. He says to those who are with him, “Let’s find a way to preserve this. Let’s take this great thing that has happened once and see if we can make it last. Let’s build a monument so that others can see it just as we have.” This is what we’ve always tried to do with pictures and souvenirs, phone calls and postcards.

And those things help, but there’s always something missing. It’s just so hard to get someone else to experience things just the way we do. Which is why the most revealing part of the story is what comes next: “A cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’”

Pay close attention to the story here. It is no coincidence that when God says, “Listen to him,” Jesus hasn’t just said something, nor does he follow it up by saying something. The message is that Jesus has been saying things all along, and it’s time to listen. The transfiguration is not about something that happened one day up on the mountaintop but about what is going on every day down below. We may not be able to share the mountaintop experience. But we can share ourselves every day. And we can listen to each other every day.

It is a strange fact of being human that many of us come to church on Sunday hoping for something of what Peter, James, and John experienced on that mountaintop, even though we have no idea what it was that they saw. We want that extraordinary, out-of-body, mountaintop experience they had, and in longing for it, we may miss the important fact that if we listen to what Jesus has to say in the ordinary times, our perspective about what happens down here on the ground could change very much.

God doesn’t require all of us to have the same mountaintop experience. What God wants is for us to listen to what Jesus has to say, to listen to it in our own way, wherever it finds us, and to try to share that unique voice with each other.

And it turns out that what Jesus says everyday is all about those “spaces” between us that I was talking about before. Read the stories. Jesus sees a space between the conservative Jews and his Gentile followers, and he finds a way to talk to both of them. Jesus finds poor people and sick people whom no one else will help, and he meets them as friends. Jesus encounters degraded prostitutes and the profligate rich alike, and in both cases he never lets a singular experience or characteristic define them. He wants to get to know them and learn their story.

“Listen to him,” says the voice on the mountain. The Christian message is not isolated to mountaintop experiences or one set of stories. It is a message about a man who came to earth to meet us in the midst of all our variety. That’s why Christians should hope to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians and between Republicans and Democrats; we’re told to see a person and a story and a history, not just a position. That’s why Christians should find authentic and meaningful ways to relate, even to those who are not just like us. We are not called to be reactionary to a single event or characteristic; we are called to find out who our brothers and sisters really are and have been and why they feel the way they do. Christ calls us to bridge gaps with our spouses and coworkers, our closest loved ones and those who may be our fiercest enemies, because Christ sees what we too often forget: that every one of us, in all of our variety, is a child of God. And whether we are the one who travels to the mountaintop or the one who stays at home and waits, we have opportunities every day to share ourselves and our stories with others. We have the chance to reach across the spaces that divide us.

In case you think I’m being dismissive of the mountaintop experience, I’m going to tell you why. I want to conclude today by telling you that on my recent trip to the Holy Land, I did not go to the top of the Mount of Transfiguration. It was the end of our time in Israel. I’d been away from home for almost three weeks, and frankly, when you’ve visited multiple holy sites every day for almost a month, there’s a point at which, even for a pastor, the next site begins to sound like just another pile of rocks. So we skipped Mount Tabor, and on that sunny afternoon in the Galilee, my friend Tave and I enjoyed a quiet lunch of St. Peter’s Fish and a cold beer and then went on a short boat ride with a group of pilgrims from Poland. As we struck out from the coastline, something happened that I did not expect. There is an old Spanish hymn that I only know because it has been translated into English and is occasionally sung in American services. The pilgrims had begun singing, and though the words were a mystery, suddenly I recognized the tune. There we were, a couple of Americans and a boatload of Poles, singing an old Spanish hymn while crossing a lake in Palestine. The people on this boat, with whom I held nothing in common but a search for something more than a pile of rocks—we all knew the same song, a song about things Jesus had said, and we sung it together at the bottom of the mountain:

You [Lord] need my hands, full of caring,
through my labors, to give others rest,
and constant love that keeps on loving

O Lord, with your eyes you have searched me,
and smiling, have called out my name.

Across the spaces that divide us, the Lord calls out our names and loves the places where every unique one of us is found. God finds us on mountaintops and on small seashores, on street corners and in office buildings and classrooms. God finds us in the body of the church and in places that may seem far, far away from the life of faith. God finds us in distant lands and in our very own homes.

Go in peace today, find a space that separates you from another, and do not grow weary as you look for a way to cross it. Amen.