Transformed and Transforming

A Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday and Family Dedication
Luke 9:28-43

Until we arrive in the gospels at the stories of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, no gospel passage lifts Christ up for praise more powerfully than the one in front of us this morning, the story of the transfiguration. And yet, it is a puzzling and mysterious passage. Jesus and Peter and John and James go up on a mountain to pray. And while the four of them are praying, the three disciples begin to fall asleep, that common, narcoleptic tendency among Jesus’ disciples. (These days it tends to happen during the sermons instead of the prayers, but maybe it’s because we pray shorter prayers these days). Peter and John and James are aroused from their stupor to see a glow-in-the-dark Jesus speaking with two men that have been dead for centuries, the great law-giver Moses and the great prophet Elijah.

It is a puzzling and mysterious scene. Since the early centuries of the church, commentators have tried to make sense of it in various ways. Some have said it is so puzzling and mysterious that it must have been a dream; they were falling asleep after all. Others have said it is a vision like the vision of Isaiah the prophet in Isaiah 6. Some have said it is a story of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples after his resurrection that has been moved back earlier in the gospel to prepare the readers for that glorious occasion of resurrection and ascension. Some commentators have gone so far as to say that it is a creation of the imagination of the early church in order to glorify Christ or to make the point that the teachings of Christ belong side-by-side with the law and with the prophets of the Jewish Bible.

To this day, we don’t know quite what to make of this puzzling and mysterious scene, and for me, here’s why. You would think that this mountaintop experience of Peter and John and James who saw Christ as no one had seen Christ before would somehow have changed or transformed them. You would expect, wouldn’t you, that an experience with Jesus like this would change everything for the three disciples who saw it and heard it, who were there when it happened. It was a glorious moment, no? Jesus’ appearance changed, and his clothing became dazzling white, and the three disciples saw their mentor and friend “transfigured” and chatting it up with the two greatest heroes of their faith. They saw Jesus as no one had seen Jesus before. But it didn’t change a thing. It didn’t change a thing.

This story of the transfiguration is reported in Mark and Matthew and Luke, but it is never mentioned again. It is never even alluded to, hinted at, anywhere else in those gospels. It is exactly as it is said in verse 36: they told no one anything of what they had seen. How could they not? How could you not leak at least a little bit of it? How could you see Christ on a mountaintop as no one else had seen Christ before and walk away from it in silence as though it had never happened? This silence of the gospels is puzzling. We are told that John was one of the three disciples who was there, who experienced it firsthand, but the gospel of John does not tell the story at all. How could John the Beloved have been there for something so amazing and astonishing and not even mention it? How could the Johannine tradition be silent when the synoptics put John on the mountaintop for the transfiguration? The silence of the gospel of John is puzzling. Nowhere in the apostolic preaching in the book of Acts is the transfiguration mentioned. According to Acts, when the early preachers went out, they told the story of the history of Israel and the story of God’s love and redemption in the story of Jesus, but they never mentioned the transfiguration. The apostolic silence is puzzling. And the disciples: they’re no different after the transfiguration than they were before it. The very next passage in this morning’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary shows us that the disciples were no more faithful, no more effective, no more understanding of Jesus than they were before their mountaintop experience. Even the disciples who had been to the mountaintop with Jesus still didn’t get it. The silence of the disciples’ lives is puzzling, don’t you think?

Decades ago, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel taught us in a song to pay attention to the sound of silence, “of people talking without speaking, of people hearing without listening.” It was a song of darkness and light, a song the words of which are every bit as puzzling and mysterious as the story of the transfiguration. Some of you are old enough but young enough to remember how Simon and Garfunkel called us in their song to listen, to listen to what is “whispered in the sound of silence”: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls and whispered in the sound of silence.” How do we make sense of the silence of the gospels and the apostolic preaching and the evidence of the disciples’ lives? I’d like to suggest this morning, as we think especially on this day about nurturing our children, children of our families and children of this congregation in the gospel and the faith and practice of the Christian life, it is the silence to which we should listen and from which we should learn.

First, look at Peter’s enthusiastic mistake in verse 33. On rousing from his stupor, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here in this place. Let’s build three booths, one for Moses and one for Elijah and one for you. Let’s build a shrine on the mountaintop in this place where it is good to be!” Alan Culpepper, Dean of the McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta and a wonderful New Testament interpreter and theologian says that the mistake Peter made was that he wanted to “freeze the moment and commemorate the place.” In his enthusiasm for what he experienced, he wanted to “freeze the moment and commemorate the place.” Alan says that’s always a mistake when it comes to understanding the gospel of Jesus Christ because the gospel of Jesus Christ does not call us to a shrine on a mountaintop or a sanctuary in Greenville, South Carolina, for that matter. The gospel of Jesus Christ brings us to places of experience of the presence of God like that mountaintop and like this sanctuary, and then it turns us to the task of answering the call that God has for us at the foot of the mountain, on the plain and in the valley.

The gospel is not about freezing the moment and commemorating the place, and neither is rearing our children. How often we try to do it! In pictures and moving pictures, in memories, in hopes and aspirations, we try to freeze the moment and commemorate the place when the task is not on the mountaintop at all. The task in rearing our children is preparing them for the way, preparing them for the foot of the mountain, for the plains and for the valleys. A mountaintop experience is wonderful, you see, but it doesn’t change a thing. What transforms lives is the everyday and the ordinary, the mundane: every act of relationship at the foot of the mountain, on the plains and in the valley. We should learn that from the silence. Christ’s disciples are not called to freeze the moment or commemorate the place of the transfiguration because Christ calls them and us to live the gospel in the everyday, the ordinary, the every act of relationship with children and spouse and parents and family and strangers and enemies, with brothers and sisters in Christ and those who are all around us. Of course, it’s good to be here. It’s good to praise and worship and adore; but it’s even better, having done so, to come down the mountain and head for the plain and go through the valleys faithfully.

That's where we are called to live out the story of Christ’s life with the announcement to every person we meet, “You are a beloved child of God!” (v 35), “God loves you!”—even those who are foaming at the mouth (v 39), even those whom we might see or portray and speak of as though they possessed by a demon (v 42). The silence of the gospels tells us that authentic transformation is not a mountaintop experience that changes everything. Authentic transformation is about your every day, about your every interaction, your ordinary and your mundane.

[Piano vamp on “I Want to Go” begins.] It’s about the way we bring our children up, bring them up in church even when they don’t want to be here. It’s the way we bring our children up as youth. It’s the way our children go off to college. It’s the way they marry and become parents or the way they don’t marry and still become parents to children all around them. It’s the way we age, not on the mountaintop but at the foot of the mountain and in the valley. It’s our faithfulness from the cradle to the columbarium that again and again we say not, “Lord, take me to the mountaintop so I can see Jesus as no one has seen Jesus before!” but as we say, “I want to go, Lord. I want to go, Lord. I saw just enough of Christ among the people here that I want to go where you are going, Lord.” That’s authentic transformation. [Kyle Matthews sings “I Want to Go.”] Amen.


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Engage 2010: The Holy Spirit and Fire

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Of the three persons of the Trinity—the Christian understanding of God as Three in One and One in Three, Father, Son and Holy Ghost; Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit; Lover, Beloved and Love—the Holy Spirit routinely suffers the indignity of being underrated and overlooked outside the enthusiastic confines of Pentecostal and charismatic congregations. But the Holy Spirit is the constant and continuing presence of God in the world and in the church and in the life of every baptized believer; and it is the Holy Spirit, according to this morning’s Gospel Lesson, that distinguishes John the Baptizer from Jesus the Christ. “I baptize you with water,” John says, “but the One who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

Most Protestant churches, Baptists included, have pretty much left the “Holy Spirit and fire” talk to Pentecostals and charismatics. That “Holy Spirit and fire” talk has been largely marginalized by mainstream Christianity as the sort of thing associated with people who speak in tongues and handle snakes. Many of you will remember that some years ago, before Helen Ellis retired from teaching science in our Kindergarten program, our stewardship notebooks went out to the congregation with a wonderful picture in them of a preschool youngster holding a sizeable snake. “Great!” I thought when I saw it. “I can see the billboard on 291 now: Come to First Baptist Greenville where even the children handle snakes.” Handling snakes, speaking in tongues, and the “Holy Spirit and fire” are not characteristic of our congregational identity. But as we Engage 2010, we need to reclaim the biblical image of the “Holy Spirit and fire” because that image represents the empowering and purifying presence of God among us, around us and in us.

The “Holy Spirit and fire” is the empowering and purifying presence of God in Jesus Christ from his baptism on, when Luke says the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus (3:22). Jesus is empowered by the Holy Spirit. In Luke 4:1, we’re told that Jesus, “full of the Holy Spirit,” returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness. In Luke 4:14, we read, “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, returned to Galilee,” where he took up his ministry of preaching and teaching in the synagogues and confronting the demons that were destroying people’s lives. The Scripture that Jesus read in the synagogue in Nazareth where he grew up was from Isaiah 61. Jesus read to the congregation gathered that day, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” That’s the empowering presence of God in the life and ministry of Jesus, and it’s the very same empowering presence of God that activates and energizes all of those who respond to the call of Christ to minister in Jesus’ name, every one.

After his resurrection, Jesus said to the disciples in the Upper Room, “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high,” which is the opening scene in the book of Acts on the day of Pentecost when “they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came the sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues as a fire appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:2-3). And from then on in the book of Acts, individuals who minister in Jesus’ name are said again and again and again to be “full of the spirit,” “full of faith and the Holy Spirit,” “filled with the Holy Spirit,” “full of the Holy Spirit and faith.” They were empowered by the presence of God among them and around them and in them. As we Engage 2010 for worship and for mission and for spiritual growth, there is nothing that we need more as individuals and as a congregation gathered together than the empowering presence of God among us, around us and in us.

It has always been that way for the people of God. In Exodus 33, after the debacle of the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai, God says to Moses, “Take them on to the land I promised them, but I’m not going.” To which Moses replies, “Lord, if you will not go with us, do not send us up from this place.” If you are not with us, we are no people. We have no call. We have no mission. We have no reason for being together without your presence among us and around us and in us. The Holy Spirit: the continuing and constant presence of God in the world and in the church and in the life of every baptized believer. The empowering presence of God and the purifying presence of God, the Holy Spirit and fire.

In this morning’s Gospel Lesson, fire is an image of judgment. It is the fire that burns the chaff, the husk, the waste material of the wheat. It is like the refiner’s fire in the book of Malachi in the Old Testament. The refiner’s fire burns the dross, the impurities out of the silver in Malachi 3:3. The refiner’s fire leaves only the pure metal. Most of us who gave up on the Holy Ghost on account of our discomfort with Pentecostals and charismatics also gave up on the refiner’s fire on account of our discomfort with fire-and-brimstone, hellfire-and-damnation preaching. We ran from the fire, but if we are to Engage 2010 in worship, in mission, and in spiritual growth, then we are going to need the refiner’s fire in our lives. The refiner’s fire burns away the useless stuff, the wasteful stuff, the unnecessary and the impure stuff so that what remains is only the necessary and the needful and the pure.

The image of the fire of judgment in this morning’s gospel lesson is a reminder that your “stop-doing list” is every bit as important as your “to-do list.” If you don’t have a “stop-doing list,” you need to start one. I learned the importance of stop-doing lists several years ago from reading Harvard Business Review. Effective companies and organizations—and effective individuals—plan for and implement “abandonment strategies” for their products and services and processes every bit as carefully and thoroughly as they plan for and implement their launch strategies. It’s so obvious we shouldn’t even have to say it but we do. There is a time to abandon the womb and be born. There is a time to abandon high school and your parent’s home and move on to college. And don’t come back! (Just kidding! Come back anytime. Stay as long as you need to. Once a parent, always a parent.) There is a time to abandon the house and move into assisted living. There is a time to abandon the earthly tent we live in to move on to a building from God, a house not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens (2 Corinthians 5:1). Our abandonment strategies are every bit as important as our launch strategy. Start a “stop-doing list” today. The refiner’s fire of the stop-doing list is a reminder of the purifying presence of God among us and around us and in us that burns away the untimely, the unworthy, the useless, the wasteful, unnecessary, and impure stuff that holds us back as individuals and as a congregation from loving and serving God and from loving and serving our neighbor as we ought. Engage 2010 with a stop-doing list so that you can get to the worthy things and the pure things and the needful things on your to-do list for worship and mission and spiritual growth.

May this be the year of your baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire, the empowering and purifying presence of God with you and around you and in you. Amen.


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.