August 6, 2006
(The Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ)

Looking Up

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Exodus 34:29-35  •  Psalm 99 or 99:5-9  •  2 Peter 1:13-21  •  Luke 9:28-36
(From The Lectionary Page)

It would be sometime in the early hours of the morning, and I would feel his presence before I could see him. He would bring with him the chill of late night, plus the aroma of wood and cigarette smoke. It would be my husband, Rick, back from his band gig. He would gently touch my shoulder and say, “Susan, you gotta come outside and see this.” More asleep than awake, I would wrap myself in a comforter and follow him outside. And the sky would be ablaze with the Northern Lights. Flashes of blue, green, yellow, coral, and colors I don’t even know the names of would undulate across the sky. It was incredible. The same sky spread over the familiar landscape was totally transformed. No matter how many times I saw it, there was a holiness about the Aurora Borealis that raised goose flesh on my arms.

When I think of the Transfiguration, I think about those years of living well north of the 45th parallel, and of those pre-dawn moments when time was of no import and the nighttime spectacle could as easily have been a product of my dreaming mind. Today is Transfiguration Sunday. In our gospel account from Luke, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain with him. And they are treated to a miraculous theophany. Jesus’ appearance is changed -- his face and clothing become radiant. God’s voice is heard in the midst of a cloud instructing the terrified disciples to listen to Jesus, the Beloved Chosen one. The familiar landscape and their familiar teacher were changed. The eternal and divine broke into the temporal and earthly. It is a moment of profound holiness, so much so that the disciples can barely take it all in, so much so that they nearly miss the sequence of events in the middle of the adventure, where Jesus is talking with Moses and Elijah.

We don’t know the details of the conversation, but we are told that they were speaking of Jesus’s departure, which he would about to accomplish at Jerusalem. “Departure,” of course is the English translation. The Greek word is “exodus.”

Exodus. That’s a word that should get our attention, particularly in combination with the appearance of Moses. Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt into the Land of Promise. That Great Escape was the Exodus. And yet Jesus’s exodus, which he will accomplish in Jerusalem, will look very different from the one that Moses undertook centuries earlier. In the first exodus, we hear of the angel of death killing the firstborn of Egypt but passing over the households of the Israelites, of the majestic pillars of fire and of cloud, of the parting of the Reed Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers who were in hot pursuit.

The second exodus, the one which Jesus will accomplish in Jerusalem, involves his own suffering and death.

Now let’s think about this. Smack dab in the middle of the story, framed by a transfigured countenance and the voice of God coming from a cloud, Jesus discusses his departure, his exodus, the suffering and death which await him in Jerusalem. Where the sacred story of God’s people celebrated the divinely-wrought destruction of their enemies – first by Angel of Death and later at the Reed Sea – salvation history now appears to be taking a sharp turn. There will be death and destruction with this Second Exodus, but it will be God in Christ who will bear it. The God of glory, revealed in majesty on the mountaintop, will suffer and die. The message is clear. The messiahship of Christ is not to be about political hegemony. It is not to be about gathering divinely ordained firepower and overthrowing whatever empire seems to be causing the problems. The messiah of God, the Beloved Son of God, came with a very different purpose and we disciples fail to listen to him at our peril.

After all, the bloody history of the human race shows that violence is humankind’s first sin. Deacon Linda spoke movingly last Sunday about fear being the emotion in opposition to love. Fear, incarnated and enfleshed, is violence. We see this globally, and we see it locally. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as a people, we appear to be almost hard-wired toward violence. And here’s the thing: when we project that human tendency on to God, when we glorify a God who inflicts violence upon others, whose grandeur is synonymous with power and whose power is exercised with impunity, we put divine imprimatur on violence itself. We deify it. We claim righteousness and justify the death and destruction of our enemies because we believe we are acting as God would have us act.

But on the mountaintop, the beloved Son of God spoke of his Exodus which he would accomplish in Jerusalem. Are we listening? There on the cross he would embrace his unjustified suffering and death, capable though he was of unleashing terrible recompense on his enemies. He will choose death in order to take away the need for violence. He will choose death in order to obliterate our primal sin. After all, the stakes can’t get any higher than God himself dying.

We celebrate the sacrament of Baptism at our 10:15 service today. Lily, Jaden, and Sophie begin their lives in Christ today. God is well pleased with these beloved daughters! It will be their lifelong task and joy to encounter Christ and to pattern their lives on his teaching. It will be their parents’ responsibility – and ours as well – to reveal the compassion of God to these beautiful girls. And it will be our joy to see Christ revealed to us through them. It remains to be seen whether they, as Christ’s newest disciples, will come to listen to the Savior’s voice, bidding them to lead lives of compassion and love of neighbor.

It remains to be seen whether we, as Christ’s disciples, will choose to listen as well.

Which brings me back to the northern lights. If you’ve ever seen them, you know that they transform both earth and sky. In those moments, we see a glimpse of the grandeur of the universe that is usually not available to us. It’s the closest that most of us will ever come to a theophany. In much the same way, on the Mount of Transfiguration, God revealed a glimpse of his plan for salvation history to three of Jesus’s closest disciples. Salvation would be accomplished through the Second Exodus of the Beloved Son, and would show the way of radical love for all who would listen and who can bear to embrace this costly gift.

For God’s sake, pray that we may listen to the Beloved Son with whom God is well pleased.