transfiguration 14 February 2010
Exodus 34. 29-35
2 Corinthians 3. 1-6; 17-4.2
Luke 9. 28-36
I recall hearing a minister preaching on the account of the transfiguration once . He began by saying that Peter and James and John did what religious people always do whenever there is a profound experience of the divine. They suggest that a building be erected – a concrete memorial to the event. In another of the gospels Peter says to Jesus: it is good that we are here Lord; let us erect three booths. They want to do what so many of us always want to do; fix the experience: put up a building; screw down seats; take a photo; lay a plaque. God was here. And we stand back and view it with pride. What a relief; We are not alone.
But Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem; to humiliation and then glory. The face that now glows will be bloodied, disfigured and barely recognisable – and he knows it. This one who stands with Moses and Elijah, who speak with Jesus of the passover that he is about to achieve, will be humiliated and crucified; he will rise to new life and ascend to God too, as they have.
I don’t know whether this pattern of getting a fix on things is just a general human trait or something which is particular to people in the church. We get fixed on our churches; our other buildings; our favourite seat; our favourite hymns; attached to the way we reckon things have always been done or should be done. We stop in our tracks but, as the Sydney Carter song encourages us, we need to keep on travelling on:
In the three readings for the day we seem to see a transition in understanding over time of the transforming vision of God – from Moses who must cover his face almost permanently after his being with God for forty days and forty nights on the mountain; to Jesus in whom the law and the prophets of God are now embodied, to Paul reminding members of the church at Corinth that
where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
I spoke last week of the strange paradox of grace: that even while we recognise we are sometimes very broken individuals, and sometimes less than perfect communities of faith, that the grace of God calls us beyond our usual human response of condemnation of self or other or our highly developed ability at avoidance and enables us to be transformed by this spirit of freedom.
I suppose I have read the piece we have heard from 2 Corinthians before but it has never impressed itself upon like it has today. The Corinthians are clearly worried about reputation as we all get worried about reputation: Am I good enough? Surely we are better than they are? But Paul reminds them You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
It is an echo of the prophet Jeremiah – in those days I will write my laws upon their hearts.
This is a challenge to us in the reformed churches because we place such heavy emphasis on scripture. We are inclined to look to the letter of scripture rather than spirit in it. And don’t we know what terrible atrocities have been and are still committed in the name of the letter f the scripture.
But as we look to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith we may be transformed in appearance. In life’s journey we can be so tempted to look back, especially as we get older, and set in stone our memory of better times. God and life are always to be had in the future; if God is only in the past or the belief that the experience of God was always more powerful in the past then probably God for us is dead.
It is the challenge I spoke of last week: the challenge to be. To be fully present to each moment; each joy, each invitation to live, each curly, frustrating, distressing moment we might find our selves in. The challenge that Jesus faced in conflict with the religious leaders of his own time was that they had fixed in stone the revelation of God in the past and so were not free to embrace God in the present – they certainly couldn’t see God in Jesus.
In the church we inherit and remember our tradition and the stories of our ancestors in the faith - but we must keep on travelling on. As the Basis of Union says: we are a pilgrim people, always on the way to the promised goal. The church historian Jaroslav Pelikan distinguishes the true embrace of tradition from the strangling of tradition in this way: tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. It’s always a good way of sniffing our what’s going on sometimes. tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
As part of our preparation for this year a few of us from Pilgrim and Doncaster East and Templestowe met with Phil McCredden and Dave Zovak this week and we looked at the early stages of the consultation we will conduct together with them this year. There will be good opportunities over the year for us to hear and be heard as we explore what the future together might look like. We will need to grasp these opportunities for exploring the future in conversation, not sit back and pre-judge the outcome from a distance or sit on our hands; we are in this together. It will be a very exciting time. We agreed that we would report to you the progress of the conversation and the events and steps we have planned on a monthly basis. It will be essential that you keep yourself abreast of that progress. We don’t want people to feel that they are in any way left out of proceedings.
As we push out into the river and engage with the future in dynamic and sometimes challenging ways all of us will be tempted to cling to bits of flotsam from the past that might make us feel a bit more secure. One of the things we will all need to reflect on personally is the question: what is it that I am so attached to about this thing? Is it the memory of the event, the time, the object; or is it the spirit of that thing which actually still lives in me, and if I allow, will draw me into the future and some new expression of the life of God. It will be an opportunity for us to discern the spirit in us allowing us to brig to birth the spirit of the living God and have the law of life written on our hearts.
Andrew Boyle