A Fourth Church Sermon by John W. Vest

February 14, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

This Changes Everything

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 9:28–36

If you haven’t yet seen the epic film Avatar, you’ve probably at least heard of it. It is the blockbuster to top all blockbusters, the highest grossing film of all time around the world, already grossing more than $2 billion in the two months it has been in theaters. It has been nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for James Cameron, who is breaking all the records he set with his earlier film Titanic.

While the plot of the film is intriguing and, at times, quite poignant as a parable about the excesses of corporate imperialism, the real attraction of this movie is the spectacle of its cinematic magic. Without exaggeration and without a doubt, I can say that this is the most extraordinary work of visual art that I have ever seen. In this film, Cameron has created an alien world called Pandora that is startlingly realistic. Not only that, the 3D technology he employs immerses the viewer into this world in a way that is truly captivating and never gimmicky. I saw it on the IMAX screen at Navy Pier, where my entire field of vision was saturated with this incredible new world. In fact, “incredible” is not the right word at all, because the images moving in front of me were entirely believable. More than any other cinematic experience I’ve ever had, watching Avatar transported me to a different time and place, and for two and a half hours, I was there.

Now before I actually saw this film, I had read a news article about a phenomenon that seemed to me to be completely absurd. It turns out that there are many fans of this film that have sunk into a deep depression because of it. They are so captivated by the world of Pandora that they long more than anything to live in it rather than our own world. For these viewers, Pandora is an awe-inspiring utopia that far exceeds the banality of the world they experience on earth. For them, Avatar provides a vision of a world better than our own, a world full of hope and promise and wonder. And when they realize that they can never actually live there, they experience a deep and profound despair (Jo Piazza, “Audiences Experience ‘Avatar’ Blues,” CNN.Com, 11 January 2010).

When I first read this, I couldn’t really understand it. But after watching the film for myself, I could at least get my mind around what was happening. When you watch this film, you truly feel as if you are in the midst of it. I can see how someone who is dissatisfied with their life might be inspired to dream of something different, something better, by the fantastic images on the screen.

Author and student of religion Joseph Laycock has connected this experience with what we call “transcendent religion.” He points to the theory of twentieth-century philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, who described what he called the “Axial Age,” the time period between 800 and 200 BCE, when civilizations as far flung as Greece and China developed the notion of transcendency, the idea that there is something beyond or something greater or something better than the world we live in. Ancient Judaism and our Christian faith that developed from it are a prime example of such religions. As Laycock sees it, Avatar has inspired within some people this kind of transcendent awareness. “Cameron created the world of Pandora through technology never before seen by mankind,” he writes. “For some, this seems to have had the effect of the transcendent vision described by Jaspers” (Joseph Laycock, “The Pandora’s Box of James Cameron,” Sightings, 28 January 2009).

Have you ever had that kind of experience? Have you ever experienced something that makes you feel like there is more to life than what you know? Have you ever experienced something that makes you stop and think, “Wow, that changes everything”?

I think that’s what Peter, John, and James experienced when they saw Jesus transfigured before them on the top of a mountain. This is a strange story, I know, one that may not be very familiar for many of us. It takes place while Jesus is traveling down to Jerusalem with his disciples. It happens after they have begun to realize who he is and what he is doing in their midst.

But eight days earlier, Jesus had dropped a bombshell. He told them that he would soon be betrayed and killed and then resurrected after three days. As you can imagine, this was probably a difficult thing for them to hear. They had been following this teacher throughout the countryside. They had come to believe that he was the Messiah. They had begun to find in him their hope for a new world, a world free from the bondage of the Roman Empire and the shallowness of organized religion. And now, after placing their trust in him, he tells them that he’s going to die and be raised again.

So it is, with their minds still spinning from this surprising revelation, that Jesus’ inner circle of disciples—Peter, James, and John—went up on a mountain with him to pray. And there they saw something that they were even less prepared for, something that sent their minds spinning all the more. Jesus’ body was changed. No longer did he look like the itinerant teacher they had come to know, the poor Jew born under the thumb of a brutal empire, the marginal rabbi that inspired ridicule more than respect. Instead, he literally looked radiant. His face took on a countenance unlike anything they had ever seen. His clothes became dazzling white. He looked . . . heavenly. He looked . . . transcendent.

And in addition to Jesus’ strange appearance, there standing next to him were two of their great and ancient heroes of faith: Moses and Elijah. As they stood with Jesus, they seemed to be talking about the very thing he had shared with them earlier, that he would soon be taken from them in Jerusalem.

Can you imagine what they were thinking? Can you fathom what they were feeling? All of a sudden, in a brilliant flash of clarity, they realized that this was not just a man. He was something more. And they knew that what they were experiencing would change their lives forever.

I’ll ask you again, have you ever experienced something like that? Have you experienced something beyond everything else that you’ve experienced before?

I’m a huge college football fan and love to spend my Saturdays in the fall watching games on television. Even after watching games for my entire life, when I first saw one in High Definition, I knew that I was seeing something different. I knew that my experience of watching football would be changed forever.

When I was a freshman in high school, I read a book called Jurassic Park. As I read that fascinating novel about resurrecting dinosaurs in today’s world, I thought that this was an example of a book that could never be made into a movie. But when they did just that a few years later, I knew that movie making had been changed. And now, once again, Avatar has changed the realm of possibility for making movies.

These are trivial examples, I know, but as you think about this for yourself, it helps to start small and then dig deeper.

When I was in high school, after planning and working to be a space physicist, something inside me began whispering that I should become a pastor. There was a moment, on a youth retreat, when that whisper became something more. I felt a rush of blood to my head. I felt nearer to God than I ever had before. I knew that my life was being changed.

When I went off to college, I was a fundamentalist Christian who, for the most part, read the Bible in a quite literal way. I was absolutely certain about the way I understood the world around me. But classes in religious studies began to open my eyes to different ways of thinking about things, different ways of approaching religion and the world. When I was a senior, I studied a book by Julius Wellhausen about the composition of the first five books of the Bible, outlining a historical-critical approach to the scriptures (Prolegomena to the History of Israel). One day, while sitting in a cubicle in the library, I finished the book and experienced a moment of sublime clarity. I saw things in a totally different way, and it made sense. I felt an almost tangible presence of God. The way that I approached religion was changed. I was changed.

Years later, while I was in seminary training to be a pastor, I spent a summer as a hospital chaplain. One of my goals was to cultivate a sense of empathy, that art of connecting with another human being at a level so deep that you feel what they feel. One day, it finally happened with a cancer patient named Emmy. I felt her pain—not the pain of her cancer, but the pain of her deep, deep loneliness. Though it scared me to make that kind of connection, I knew that something had changed. I had changed. I was aware of a world beyond myself in a way that I had never been before.

Just over a year ago, when I held my newborn son for the first time, I felt a sense of hope for the world that I could never have imagined before. There in my hands was a new life. There in my hands was the promise of a new world. There in my hands, in this tiny baby, was something way bigger than me.

Friends, that is the best way I know how to describe transcendence. And that, I think, is what Peter, James, and John experienced on the mountain when Jesus was transfigured before their eyes. All of a sudden, they knew that he was more than just a man. He was a reflection of God’s will for humanity. He was the hope of something better. He was the way to something better.

Jesus was transformed into a vision of what John of Patmos would later call a “new heaven” and a “new earth.” Moses and Elijah represented the prophetic vision of peace and justice that Jesus embodied and expanded. Together the three of them were a transcendent vision of a new world, a better world, a world reborn in the image of God.

I think that vision is what we are all seeking in one way or another. That vision of transcendence is what we long for. And more than anything else I feel called to do as a religious leader, it is pointing to that vision, helping people to imagine what that vision looks like, that is my deepest passion.

You see, once we catch hold of that vision, the story becomes about us. This story isn’t just about Jesus changing. It is about us changing. It is about what we do with that vision once we see it.

The disciples got it all wrong. At first they tried to capture the moment and memorialize it. But that missed the point. Then they kept it a secret, hidden from the very people that needed it the most. That too was a mistake. And so too would it be a mistake to let the vision of God’s new world mire us with depression and despair like those viewers of Avatar who can’t see the potential of our own world to be reborn.

The world as it is, a world of pain and suffering and injustice and oppression, is not the only way it can be. In so many ways, God is providing us with a vision of a new world, a better world, a world reborn in the image of God. And God is not only showing us that vision, but God is calling us to be a part of that vision.

Amen.