28 About eight days after Jesus said these things, he took Peter, John, and James, and went up on a mountain to pray. 29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed and his clothes flashed white like lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, were talking with him. 31 They were clothed with heavenly splendor and spoke about Jesus’ departure, which he would achieve in Jerusalem. 32 Peter and those with him were almost overcome by sleep, but they managed to stay awake and saw his glory as well as the two men with him. 33 As the two men were about to leave Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it’s good that we’re here. We should construct three shrines: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—but he didn’t know what he was saying. 34 Peter was still speaking when a cloud overshadowed them. As they entered the cloud, they were overcome with awe. 35 Then a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!” 36 Even as the voice spoke, Jesus was found alone. They were speechless and at the time told no one what they had seen. (CEB)
“Sol Invictus,” Luke 9:28-36
This
rugby team’s story was so picture-perfect that it was, in fact, made into a
famous motion picture named, in fact, Invictus.
It takes place in South Africa just as apartheid is ending; the ANP hero
Nelson Mandela has been elected president, and a young white man named Francois
Pienaar is captaining the South African national rugby team. Both of them seek to bridge the ills of
racism and segregation in their own respective spheres of influence—Mandela
within the walls of government, and Pienaar on the rugby pitch. I won’t
spoil the entire movie for those of you who have not seen it, but one scene
about halfway through the movie documents the entire Springboks team bussing
into one of the many inner-city slums that dot South Africa’s land. Here,
the houses are ramshackle affairs made of tin, wood, cardboard, whatever people
could get their hands on.
And I can
honestly say after visiting the urban slums of Johannesburg on mission in 2006,
the filmmakers were very heartbreakingly accurate in depicting the sheer
poverty of the peoples who live in such conditions. As the rugby players
file out of the bus, the children rush over to excitedly mob the one black
member of the rugby team, but over the course of the day as the players teach
the little children the fundamentals of rugby, we see one of the earliest and
warmest interactions of the ethnicities in post-apartheid South Africa, as
white adults and black children are drawn together by a simple game.
It is a
moment of transformation, of transfiguration, in a film that is, at its core,
all about the transfiguration of an entire nation. But unlike the
transfiguration of Jesus that we are about to hear about from Luke the
Evangelist, these transformations of people and of nations often take time…lots
of time. Far from seeing ourselves elevated in glowing white, with Moses
upon our left and Elijah upon our right, we must muddle along in our own lives,
sometimes sure of the path we walk, and sometimes not. And far from
giving us any answers to guide our paths, today’s Scripture perhaps raises more
questions than answers. And sometimes,
that’s okay. What I’m aiming to do with
this sermon is to—very rarely for me—try a one-off type of sermon, but even
this is sort of part of a series—it has acted as a sort of post-mortem
reflection for me on change and being church that we talked about in our
Ecclesiastes sermon series in January.
Now, we
know that it was God’s love for us that brought Jesus to the earth, it was
through God’s love that Jesus’ ministry elevated the meek and lowly by saying
to them that they are as loved by God as the prettiest or wealthiest person out
there, and it was by God’s love that disciples found the tomb empty on Easter
Sunday. And it is our capacity to love one another that transforms lives
today. And not just romantic love (since V-Day is just around the
corner!), but even just good-old-fashioned affection.
The
common denominator, I think, between all of this love is that even if it might
strike in an instant, its true benefits often take eons to truly bloom.
Out of love and excitement, God crafted the world out of only light and dark,
but it took God six proverbial days to do so, and the process was so exhausting
that God was forced to rest on the seventh day. Out of love for us, God
sent Jesus to us to remake society and preach truth to power, but it took about
thirty years for Jesus to begin His ministry. We may fall in love with
the person who is to become our spouse, but it takes years of dating and
engagement before we are sealed as a couple before God in marriage…unless
you’re in Las Vegas, then it takes minutes, and you are sealed as a couple in
front of Elvis instead. And out of love, we may strive to transform the
world into better place, but…well, this is something Christians have been
trying to do for some two thousand years, and we still have such a long, long
way to go. How enviable, then, is the instantaneous transfiguration of
Jesus that Luke depicts.
And so it
is important for us to remember that even Jesus Himself did not transfigure the
entire world immediately, and neither did His Church. It was not until
Constantine became Emperor of Rome in around the early 4th century CE—the 300’s or so, many hundreds
of years after Jesus’ life and ministry—that Christianity really began to take
shape as the trendy, hot, new, popular religion. What giant,
coaster-sized sunglasses and iPads and Instagram are today, Christianity was
then, in the 300s. But before Christianity, the Romans had worshiped, for
many, many years, not the God we know, but a large pantheon of other deities,
which were at this point in time led by the sun—the Sol Invictus, in English,
the Invincible Sun, and these deities were very, very popular. It’s why
we worship on Sunday—the Sun’s Day—instead of the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday…this
story, the story of Jesus, was not an easy sell for hundreds of years, even
though we may find it so amazingly compelling today. Indeed, it may still be a tough sell!
What the
transfiguration does offer us, though, is the promise that all the work and
labor we may put into creating goodness in our lives, that God will be present
in every way God knows how. It cannot be an accident that God appeared to
Peter and James and John not only as Jesus but in guise of Moses and Elijah as
well. It is hard to find a more diverse trio of such famed servants in
the Bible. Moses was the leader of the Hebrews out of slavery, he who was
raised as royalty in Egypt and renounced it all to bring God’s children
home. Elijah was the nomadic, charismatic prophet of old, who led the
effort against the worship of the Ba’als and other non-Israelite deities.
And then there is Jesus. And just as God so loved all these teachers and
prophets, and loved all of their deeds and teachings, so too may God love us,
in all we do, in all in which we stumble but also all in which we triumph, and
transform, and work to make this world we live in transfigure into something
better. God was made manifest by each of these three very different
teachers—so perhaps God can also be made present by this diverse group of all
peoples who call themselves Christians…who call themselves the “little
Christs.”
The
Reverend Peter Storey, a South African Methodist minister who toiled for
decades fighting against apartheid before coming to the United States to teach,
preached in Johannesburg that if we were to sing a particular South African
children’s hymn whose chorus goes, “Into my heart, into my heart, come into my
heart, Lord Jesus,” then Jesus’s reply would most likely be, “Okay, here I come,
but I’m bringing all these other people with me!” To transfigure a nation
with as much hurt and pain in its past as South Africa does, where non-whites
were treated almost universally as second- and third-class citizens, well,
despite the production of heartwarming movies like Invictus, we are still not
all of the way there. In Johannesburg, the houses owned by wealthy whites
are still not only far more lavish than the urban slums of the city, but they
are still often surrounded by tall iron fences. The term “gated
community” takes on a whole different level there. The bounds of
transforming South Africa into a land of peace, and of equality, are being
realized with each passing day, but so too are they being pushed, bit by bit,
every day as well. What a wonderful model for us—once we know that we
become the best versions of ourselves not instantaneously, but over time, lots
of time, we can push ourselves just a little bit, every day, to become that
best version of ourselves, the version in which God speaks and acts and loves
through each of us. And Lord, we want
that best version of ourselves to be the strongest, the most invincible, that
cannot be contained. But of course it
is. We slide back into our negative
selves with such great ease, it is sometimes instantaneous.
I cannot
tell you with absolute certainty that this passage proves anything at all about
Jesus, invincible or otherwise, other than He was God’s Divine Son and that God
loved Him. But what I can tell you is that even if Jesus Himself wasn’t
invincible as a man, the love that He preached absolutely is. Or, put a
different way by the writer and chaplain Rev. Kate Braestrup, it is not merely
the beloved that is resurrected, it is love itself, resurrected again and again
and again.
The Transfiguration
welcomes us into God’s presence and into God’s love. And that love which
we are welcomed into is a love that, we pray, over time, may guide us and
transfigure us into the most wonderful images of ourselves. Tellingly, unlike
the other Gospels, in Luke’s version, Peter, James, and John do not avert their
eyes from the image of Jesus with Moses and Elijah, but instead we left to
assume that they saw their Messiah in all of His glory and splendor.
And so,
wherever God appears, be it in dazzling white or in the cry of a humble,
newborn child, in the guise of a starving carpenter in the wilderness or in the
mortality of a man executed upon the Cross, may we see that God transfigured
and majestic before our eyes, for with God, love reigns, our fears fade, and
all manner of things become possible once again.
By the
grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
10, 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment