Trinity Presbyterian Church
2200 N. Bell Avenue # Denton, Texas 76209
Rev. Craig Hunter
February 22, 2009
Change We Can Believe
Scriptures: Psalm 50:1-6, Mark 9:2-9
A Zen master visiting New York City goes up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything." The hot dog vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill. The vendor puts the bill in the cash box and closes it. "Excuse me, but where’s my change?" asks the Zen master. The vendor responds, "Change must come from within."
Change is popular these days. It's where all the action is. As the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who, incidentally, was from what is now Turkey, as he said, Nothing endures but change. This has been translated into modern terminology to read, Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
There is a constant momentum pushing us forward, we want to be kept apprised of the latest changes in our world, the latest advances in technology, we want to keep up. We have to move faster and faster so as not to fall behind.
It is no accident, therefore, that change is big business. Of course, change isn't always the word that is used, but that is really what it is all about. No, change is sold to us in other forms, indeed, in a bewildering array of styles meant to appeal to a broad cross-section of society. Financial advertisements encourage us to get a new credit card or invest in a new stock or mutual fund - you don't want to miss out, after all, you want to maximize your returns and get the best deals. Then there are the magazines that tell us how we can re-vitalize our sex lives by learning all the latest psychology or techniques or whatever. You have the health magazines that promise to improve one's physical or mental health through diets or exercise programs, the beauty magazines that entice with promises of simple yet dramatic transformations, the self-help books that promise to unlock secret happiness and improve relationships, the list goes on and on. If change comes from within, one wonders, why does one need to buy a book full of someone else's ideas? Hmm.
What underlies all these different approaches, what is really being sold in one form or another, is change. After all, how many advertising campaigns are built on the concept of purchasing the same old product you've always used before. Get the 2009 Honda Accord, it is old and unimproved, as a matter of fact, it is basically the same as the car you have now -- somehow, I don't think that would go over very well. No, you want something changed, something transformed, even the age-old classic toilet paper comes now with scents and patterns and who knows how many plys per double or triple roll. New and improved -- what kind of loser still uses single-ply unscented, anyway? More than the products themselves, often what motivates shoppers to buy the products is the unspoken promise of transformation. If you just buy this, do that, or learn that, you can do better, you can be better. You can change.
Indeed, you could argue that most of the economy is built on change. If we weren't selling change, we wouldn't be selling much of anything at all. There is much to criticize in the way this system works. After all, when we are told that we can be better, that we can be more wealthy, sexy, attractive, healthy, happy, etc., we are also being told implicitly that who we are and what we have it not enough, that we are poor and ugly and sick and unhappy. But my primary point is that, regardless of whether it is good or bad, change is for sale in our society. Sometimes we need it, I certainly need more toilet paper when my stock runs out, sometimes we don't, but in any case, change is a commodity.
This is true not only in the marketplace, but in the church as well. Every week I get several emails from various church-related organizations marketing the newest form of change in the church world -- the newest revitalization seminars, the newest communications technologies, etc. Some of these are no doubt helpful and worthwhile, but cumulatively they seem to send the message that if you don't buy these products, you must not care about the gospel, you must not care about your Christian witness in society.
Finally, I am reminded of the Obama slogan, "Change we can believe in." Although the content of that change remains somewhat vague and undefined, it is interesting to note how the term "change" itself has become a commodity and is used to further a particular political agenda. Whether you think that agenda is good or bad, the use of that slogan and its ability to rally support speaks to an almost spiritual hunger for transformation.
Into this context comes our Scripture lesson this morning. It, too, is about change. You won't find that word in your English translations, but it is there in the Greek. But I am getting a bit ahead of myself. Let's begin at the beginning. In telling the story, Mark is careful to highlight parallels with events from the Old Testament. While Mark does not usually give exact time references, here he is careful to point out that six days have elapsed. This is presumably an allusion to the 24th chapter of Exodus, when Moses waited for six days on Mount Sinai before the glory of God appeared to him in the form of a cloud. Something similar happens here. Jesus' clothes becomes dazzling white, Moses and Elijah miraculously appear next to him, and God's divine voice speaks out of the clouds, declaring to the disciples that Jesus is God's Son, and commanding them to listen to him.
Peter, James, and John, don't know what to make of the whole thing. That confusion doesn't stop Peter from opening his big mouth and saying something stupid. "Let's build tents here," he says, "let's chill out," thinking their journey is over when it has just begun, thinking that Christ's ministry could end somewhere other than on the cross. He was afraid, the talk of suffering and death that both follows and precedes this passage must have disconcerted Peter, and who can blame him? Perhaps it was a good thing that Jesus tells them to tell no one about what they had seen, for one gets the feeling that they wouldn't have known what to say in any case. After all, if you have ever had a mountain top experience yourself, you know how hard it can be to talk about without sounding crazy. You know how hard it can be to find words for something that seems too full to be expressed.
But at least as much as this text is about anything else, it is about change. Like I said, the word "change" doesn't appear in the English translation, but in the Greek the key word is metamorphosis, transformation, transfiguration. Change. It is from this change-meaning word that we take the title of this passage and the title of this Sunday in the liturgical year --- Transfiguration Sunday. Jesus was transfigured, he was changed, he was somehow different from the way he was before, and so was the way the disciples saw him.
This change is not like the change we so often seek. The disciples' encounter with Christ doesn't make them more beautiful, or wealthier, or healthier. The change present in this passage is not a change that is for sale. It doesn't come from within. It isn't part of a political agenda. No, while it is difficult to give words to the kind of change this passage describes, while there is a sense of mystery to it, nevertheless the change in this passage seems to have something to do with seeing. There is an emphasis on the visual experience, on what is seen. Jesus doesn't say to his disciples, Don't tell anyone what you experienced, or what happened, he says, Don't tell anyone what you have seen.
Transfiguration, in other words, seems to be about a way of seeing, it is a change not so much in who one is, but in how and what one sees. It is a way of seeing differently. When we talk about seeing things in a different light, we are talking about transfiguration experiences. Transfiguration is when we see God's future in the midst of our present.
Frederick Buechner writes of the Transfiguration, "Even with us something like that happens once in a while. The face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in . . . Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing. (Buechner, in a commentary on "Transfiguration.")
I think of Elizabeth, a young woman who goes on a mission trip to Mexico or somewhere else and encounters poverty. Yet in the midst of material poverty, she experiences hospitality of heart, she partakes of a spiritual abundance. She learns to see riches where others would see poverty, she learns to see poverty where others would see riches, her way of seeing changes, she comes back different somehow, transfigured, you need an artist's eye to see it.
Jeff is in a class with another man, a gay man or a Muslim man or an immigrant. They are forced to work together, and without ever noticing exactly when or how, somehow something within Jeff changes, he is transfigured, his fellow student is no longer a depraved or violent or lazy other, he becomes Jason or Ali or Jose, a man who is both similar to and different from himself, perhaps even a friend.
Or I am reminded of Michael J. Fox and his encounter with Parkinson's disease. In an interview with People magazine a few months ago, he talked about his condition and his life. Over the years, his condition has steadily become worse. At some point nearly every day, his limbs go entirely slack, his speech slurs, and he suffers from spastic tremors. His symptoms can be made more acute by any number of things. "It can be affected by whether or not I've eaten enough protein, or if there's a low-pressure system in the weather," he says. "If I want to take my daughter Esme to school, and I have 10 minutes, I don't know for sure within that 10 minutes if I'll be able to put my shoes on to go out the door." Yet he remains active and upbeat, still driving, ice-skating, and playing guitar, and credits his illness with bringing him closer to his wife and four children. "I really love my life," he says. "For everything that's worse, there's something better. Yes, it's a horrible condition. But it's part of an amazing life. And not an 'otherwise amazing life.' It's part of what makes my life amazing." Although he himself didn't use the term, I would say he has been transfigured, Parkinson's has changed his way of seeing. I am humbled by his story, and there is a part of me that cries out, I want to be transfigured like that too. Don't you?
Of course, as Christians, to be transfigured is not just to see things in another light, it is more than that, it is to see things in the particular light of Christ. It is to see things in the light of our crucified and risen Lord. Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone what they saw until after he has been raised, because it is not until then that they will really understand. It is as if they have to read
backwards, as if the meaning of what they have seen isn't yet clear, it only becomes clear in the future. For us, too, the meaning of our lives is not yet clear, it only becomes clear in an unfolding encounter with the crucified and risen Lord, it is through that encounter that we learn to see things differently. We learn to see the presence of God in the suffering faces of our neighbors. By the light of Christ who resisted evil without violence, we learn to see the Christian way as the way of suffering love, not of violence. By the light of Christ, we learn forgiveness, not revenge. We learn hospitality in place of suspicion, we learn generosity and stewardship in place of accumulation.
You may think that this all sounds like something out of a fairy tale, Jesus walking around with a long-dead Moses and Elijah, shooting the breeze, and shining like the sun all the while. Encounters with the crucified and resurrected Lord, and the whole bit. You may think it stretches the imagination. And I wouldn't disagree with you. I would say you are right. More than that, I would say, maybe that is part of the point. These stories push us from our safe terrain where we think we know what is true into God's world, where there are stranger things on heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. They push us into the realm of mystery and art, encounters with which can transform ourselves. As the famous writer Madeleine L'Engle writes, "As a child it did not seem strange to me that Jesus was able to talk face to face with Moses and Elijah, the centuries between them making no difference. We are not meant to be as separated as we have become from those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. I learned to know and understand my father far more after his death than during his life. Here we are on the border of the tremendous Christian mystery: time is no longer a barrier. As I read and reread the Gospels, the startling event of the Transfiguration is one of the highlights. You'd think that in the church eyar we would celebrate it with as much excitement and joy as we do Christmas and Easter. We give it lip service when we talk about "mountain-top" experiences, but mostly we ignore it, and my guess it that this is because we are afraid. . . . We are afraid of the Transfiguration for much the same reason that people are afraid that theatre is a "lie," that a story isn't "true," that art is somehow immoral, carnal and not spiritual."(Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, New York: North Point Press, 1996, p. 80)
These stories point to a deeper truth, and if the story sounds a little like a fairy tale, maybe that's because God's story, and ours, is a little like a fairy tale, or even a lot. Buechner talks about the gospel as a fairy tale, by which he means that it has a once upon a time quality to it, that it is true beyond time, time in the way that we usually count. And as a fairy tale, the gospel always involves some kind of transformation, some kind of transfiguration. Things are not always what they seem, the ugly duckling becomes a swan, the frog is in reality a prince, the Tin Man finds his heart. Similarly for us, Saul of Tarsus becomes St Paul, Simon the unreliable denier becomes Peter the rock, the meek inherit the earth, and a crucified rabble rouser is in reality the risen Lord, people living ordinary lives in Denton Texas have a role to play in the biggest drama of them all, the story of God's redemption.
So I invite you. I invite you to step gingerly through the magical wardrobe, to encounter the crucified and risen Lord, to allow your hearts to be touched by wonder. And, by the grace of God, may you too be transfigured, may you never be the same.