Sleepy
Luke 9:28-43

February 18, 2007


It happens every year, halfway between Christmas and Easter, only a few weeks looking back to the baby Jesus and almost precisely the same number of weeks ahead to the crucified and risen Christ. We go up intending for a mountain top experience and we come down scratching our heads, wondering what is so religious about watching and listening to a couple of dead people talk.

It sounds sort of weird to be listening to dead people, but we do it all the time, just not face to face. Every worship service you and I cite and recite the words of dead people, prophets and martyrs, teachers and saints, and we listen intently for what new things they might say to us from the realms of death. We joke about it a lot, but the danger is that we might fall asleep - including the preacher - and miss the subtle nods of the head and whispered syllables that transfigure every word.

Eight days later after saying some pretty hard stuff about denying oneself, taking up the cross, losing one’s life in order to gain it - the Beatles almost got it right, eight days is a week - Jesus drags Peter, James and John up the mountain once again to pray. The text mentions only Jesus actually doing the praying, and since they were nodding off, having trouble staying awake, that almost had to be the case. It’s hard to watch praying without getting down to praying some yourself. It is very hard to watch preaching without participating in the preaching.

It took a while for the three disciples to notice anything. At first, Jesus’ appearance of his face was altered. Something in prayer did something to him and he was changed. He was transfigured, but while one assumes his face became dazzling white, it was just his dusty clothes. The disciples finally looked up out of the heaviness of their eyes and saw two men talking with Jesus, Moses and Elijah obviously. How was that obvious? There were no portraits of these great men available? I doubt they had name tags. And it is said they, Jesus too, appeared in glory - nobody has yet been able to describe physically what being in glory looked like. It had to be absolutely spectacular, but absolutely indescribable. Still, glory woke Peter, James and John up.

Somebody overheard the glorious conversation and for the disciples it would have been an undecipherable one, for the three were discussing Jesus’ departure, his exodus literally, and how it was going to happen in Jerusalem. Moses symbolizes the whole law and Torah of Judaism, while Elijah is the greatest of the prophetic spirit, so the entire Old Testament world is affirming Jesus, apparently interested in strategizing about his agenda, his passion.

The disciples can barely stay awake through all of this, a foretaste of the drowsy time to be spent in Gethsemane weeks from now. But now, just as the conversation was finished and the party was breaking up, Peter rushed in to try to keep this mountain top experience going. He had missed the essence of what had been going on, so he offered to erect three booths so that all that had happened could be replayed for his benefit, that he could bask in all this glory without having to go back down the mountain to the less glorious world. Moses and Elijah were already gone, but Peter blurted it out anyway, not knowing what he was saying. No one answered him directly. Instead, there was a cloud.

And a voice, the same voice as at the River Jordan baptism of Jesus, and almost the same words, “This is my Son, the Chosen; listen to him.” As soon as those eerie words were uttered, the cloud dissipated and Jesus was left alone. And just like after the resurrection in some accounts, they all kept silence about this whole incident. For a while they were silent, that is.

They were back to the bottom of the mountain, right where you and I are. A huge crowd met them and pressed him again for healing the woes and illnesses of an oppressed people. Nothing that happened on the mountain could benefit them now in the problems of the real world, a surreal and mythical vision. What had happened was a collage of déja vus of Old Testament epiphanies and anticipations of the Passion and Resurrection to come. It doesn’t heal the afflicted and exorcize the possessed, but the Transfiguration is the mid-point in time between the old world and the new world of resurrection.

Human beings have always had tremendous difficulty describing how they have come to encounter the divine, or at the least how to articulate real insights into the way God works in the world to change us. Perhaps you have had a momentary flash in which something became clear, a moment you remember but have no way to put into words, especially since it was so instantaneous. Except that it told you something about how you should be going about living in this world.

These three sleepy, yet dazzled disciples kept silent about the mountain until after the resurrection when suddenly it all fell in place. Peter did not know what he was saying at the time, but later on he knew that the end of life was no longer death, but resurrection. He lived the rest of his life that way, as a prelude to resurrection. No one really knows how to paint a picture of what “glory” is, but after a while it becomes clear that Glory is the same essence of life that glows in the resurrection, and you and I do experience it from time to time. We just can’t bottle it and and manipulate it for our own purposes.

Peter, James and John witnessed the Transfiguration, saw the glory of Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and were not left behind as innocent bystanders. They were changed, though notice that just like you and me, they didn’t get the point, didn’t comprehend, for the longest time. The disciples were not the sharpest tacks in the world of spirituality. In time we come to understand and put into practice what we have learned. Jesus didn’t need to be transfigured or changed on the mountain - we do and we are.

The best description is not even Biblical, it’s from a hymn. That’s all right, we are sons and daughters of the Methodist tradition in this Metropolitan sanctuary and Methodists tend to learn their theology from hymns as much as from sermons and Scripture. Julia Ward Howe heard singing a group of Union soldiers around a campfire in the early days of the American Civil War. They were singing the greatest of all anti-slavery songs, “John Brown’s Body (Lies a-Mouldering in the Grave)”, and Ms. Howe took the tune and gave it new words. In the fifth verse: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free;

While God is marching on.” It’s you and I who are transfigured on the mountain today and the time to sleep is over, for it’s getting near time for a resurrection again.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan