February 19, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | Transfiguration of the Lord

God’s Time

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 50:1–6
2 Corinthians 4:3–6
Mark 9:2–9

We come into thy house, our home,
once more to give thanks:
for earth and sea and sky in harmony of color,
the air of the eternal seeping through the physical,
the everlasting glory dipping into time.
We praise thee.

George MacLeod

A couple of Sundays ago I used an illustration in my sermon about a World War II poster that had on it the crown of King George and the words, in white, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” I didn’t realize that people actually listened to sermons, but I got this incredible response from people about this. It seems there is a kind of cottage industry in products with this phrase, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” so I’m now the proud owner of a little packet of tissue that says “Keep Calm and Carry On” sent to me by one of our members. I had a number of email links sent to me where you can purchase all sorts of cups and notebooks that have the phrase on them. I also received two cards on this theme. One of which, from a colleague, read, “Freak Out and Throw Stuff.” And the other, which was my favorite, was “Save Water and Drink Champagne.” All this great advice I’ve been getting!

We were reflecting the last couple of Sundays on Jesus carrying on in his ministry of preaching and healing. This morning we jump forward in Mark’s Gospel, because this is a particularly special Sunday in the church year. It is a “threshold” Sunday: we are on the threshold of something new today, and that is, as Hardy mentioned, that this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent. We, as a people of faith, begin to undertake that journey again, the journey of Jesus’ passion, his suffering; the journey to the cross of Good Friday and to the joy and glory of Easter Sunday.

Tradition has it that on the Sunday before the journey of Lent we explore this story, this mystery of Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountaintop. We go with Jesus this morning up onto the mountain. Now that’s something that warms a Scotsman’s heart, because Scotland is a land of mountains and hills, and the Midwest is not. It is one of the realities of living in the midst of the plains and the prairies of the Midwest. My favorite line about this—and I use this when people ask what’s different about living in the Midwest as opposed to living in Scotland—is someone once opined that there are places in Illinois where you can sit on your porch and watch your dog run away for a week! That cannot happen in Scotland, I can assure you.

In scripture, mountains have symbolic meaning. Mountains connote holy space, threshold space, what scholars would call liminal or on the edge. This is a place where amazing things can happen. Of course it is on the mountain that Moses receives the law from God. It is on a mountain that the prophet Elijah encounters God, not in the power of earthquake, wind, or fire, but in silence, in the “still, small voice” of God. And here on this Mount of Transfiguration we encounter what Frederick Buechner says “is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels.”

We are going together today to a strange place. Jesus brings the inner circle of the inner circle— Peter, James, and John—up onto the mountain, where they have this mysterious experience, or vision, of Jesus being transfigured, changed in some sense; it is the same root word in Greek for the word metamorphosis. And then this vision expands as the figures of Elijah and Moses, representing the prophets and the law, are seen to be present with Jesus, as if those representatives of the Old Covenant are bringing continuity to the One who embodies the New Covenant, the new relationship with God.

As if that’s not enough, we encounter a cloud. Be careful in scriptures when you encounter a cloud on a mountain, because, as happens, the cloud represents God’s presence, and we hear the very words of the Holy One of Israel. God speaks from the cloud, and with a reprise of the words that Jesus hears at his own baptism earlier in Mark, says, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” And then there is this commandment, seemingly to the disciples: “Listen to him.”

For preachers there are texts in scripture that invite us, in conversation with the congregation, to explore our Christian tradition and look for faithful practitioners of what we might call an earthly Christianity. Exemplars are looked for of practical expressions as to how they have been inspired by, perhaps Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes or the prophet in the Old Testament and his call for justice. We share their stories and are inspired by them: Martin Luther King Jr.; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Mother Theresa; one of my own heroes in the faith, George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona community in Scotland. Of course when we are mining the tradition, it’s not just the big, famous names. We all know of examples in our own context, in our own time, of ordinary folks who are moved by the gospel to do extraordinary things, to serve in the name of Jesus: feeding the hungry, mentoring young people, caring for others, advocating for peace.

So there are texts like that and then there are texts that implore the preacher to reflect on other aspects of the Christian tradition. Perhaps the aspect that focuses on mystery, on God’s transcendence rather than God’s immanence in the earthly ministry of Jesus. The story of the transfiguration is one such text, I believe, that asks us together to search the wisdom of the poet, the musician, the mystic, the hymn writer, the philosopher—people who, we might say, come at faith in an “oblique” way.

One such is the Scottish poet, Edwin Muir, born on the island of Orkney. In my opinion, he is one of the major Christian poets of the twentieth century. He wrote a poetic meditation called “The Transfiguration,” in which he assumes the voice of the disciples. He asks this question,

Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
one glory of the everlasting world?

Hear that word everlasting? For Muir, somehow the transfiguration is the very breaking of God’s time into human time, our time. T. S. Eliot writes about this: he calls it “the point of intersection of the timeless with time.”

Let me try to frame it in this way and see if I can bring you along. If I were to offer you the word heaven this morning, what image would spring up in your mind, I wonder? Perhaps a house with many rooms, like Jesus talked about. Perhaps the great banquet in which we are in the presence of God. For some of you, the image will probably be a New Yorker cartoon with St. Peter at the gates. But what if we were reframe our understanding of heaven, of God’s reign, of God’s kingdom, not as a place, but as time. Not our time, but God’s time.

German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg talks about it in this way. He writes, “The future of our union with God is the entry of eternity into time.” Eternity is not like our time, the minutes and seconds just keeping on going on forever. It is of a different nature. Eternity is God’s time. There is our time and God’s time, and ours is counting down the years and the weeks and the days and the hours and the seconds. God’s time does not count that way. God’s time is the fullness of relationship in God’s presence marked by love. The Welsh poet—some believe him to be a mystic—R. S. Thomas offers this reflection in poetry:

life is not hurrying on to a receding future,
nor hankering after an imagined past.
It is the turning aside, like Moses,
to the miracle of a lit bush,
to a brightness that seems as transitory as your youth once,
but is the eternity that awaits you.

The eternity that awaits you. One of the influences in my own journey of faith has very much been my encounter with a traditional approach to Christianity from the west coast of Scotland and parts of Ireland known as Celtic Christianity, or Celtic spirituality. It finds its roots in the story of the spreading of Christianity in Scotland in the fifth century by St. Columba, who founded the famous monastery on the holy island of Iona in Scotland and from there spread this form of Christianity with roots in the Celtic tradition.

Aspects of this are to do with the sense that if we can only see with the eye of faith that we encounter God’s presence, God’s time in our own time; that through the incarnation of Jesus, God taking on human flesh, everything that exists is touched by the presence of God. It is for us to “turn aside like Moses,” as Thomas puts it. See with the eye of faith. See what the poet Douglas Dunn calls a “transfigured commonplace.”

You know, as I think about it, I may have offered a false delineation between practical livers of Christ’s vision and the people we call the mystics. Really anyone, I believe, who has fully engaged in living the life that Christ has called them to is someone who has experienced something of this transfiguration in their life, this change, this newness, this way of seeing the world differently and with the eyes of faith.

Think of Martin Luther King Jr. You all know the famous words of the speech that he gave on the night before he was killed in Memphis. God allowed Moses to see the Promised Land from the top of the mountain, Mount Nebo, even though Moses would never enter that land. It’s as if that night in Memphis Martin Luther King Jr. entered the cloud with Moses.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” he says in that famous speech. “But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” He closes with familiar words, words which could have been spoken by Peter or James or John on that Mount of the Transfiguration, “Mine eyes have the seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Thanks be to God.

Amen.