What on earth?

Sermon Prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church

Auburn WA, February 22, 2009

by Gregory S. Kaurin, Senior Pastor

Texts: Mark 9:2-9

Transfiguration Sunday

“What on earth?”

Now, I haven’t had a booming voice speak to me out of the clouds, but I have sat on mountaintops, I have had moments where things are suddenly powerful, meaningful. Like our dear Tahoma, Mt. Rainier. I’ve seen her enough now, that I know she is there even when the clouds are hiding her. She shapes us, our communities; she looms large enough to affect the weather, she gives direction.

Growing up in the middle of Montana, we have plenty of mountains, but if someone said go up to Cut Bank, or down to Helena, I knew they were talking about north or south, compass points on a map. Shortly after I moved here someone told me that I needed to drive “up” Hwy 7 to get to the town of Elbe, WA. I thought they meant I needed to drive north, and couldn’t understand their directions until I finally figured out that when you live close enough to the mountain, “up” can mean south or anytime you travel mountain-ward.

She gives us direction, shapes us. We can drive toward her, but if we intend to get anywhere in this state, we have to drive around her. Like this Kingdom of God that Jesus keeps talking about. We can be moved by the mountaintop experience, but to create any kind of Christian movement, to get anywhere with the message, we have to come down and move around it.

Each year, just before Ash Wednesday, we always end the season of Epiphany with Transfiguration Sunday by reading about this mountaintop experience. The passage says, “Jesus was transfigured before them.” The original Greek says that Jesus “metamorphosed” before them. It was an intense experience.

To put it in context, if we back up one chapter, all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us that this happens after the Confession of Peter, when he calls Jesus “the Messiah,” (from which we get our name). Jesus then tells them that there are some with them who would not taste death until they had seen the Kingdom coming with power. So, about a week later on the Mountain of Transfiguration, he gives them this taste…

Most feel that this must have been near the summit of Mt. Hermon just north of Caesarea Philippi where Peter made had his confession.

There are a few great visions in the Bible that some people would like to say are just fiction, would like to purge it of the miraculous, calling it myth or metaphor. It’s pretty clear that something powerful happened on that mountain, and there was more than one witness. Years later, in his letter, Peter wrote about it in his own words. Look here in the first chapter of his 2^nd letter:

2 Peter 1:16-18

We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.

“We were there,” Peter said. Harvey Cox speaks about these visions of heaven come to earth, eschatology, or end-time-visions. He says,

“Sweeping indeed…We can discard it if we must. There are thoughtful people who have done so. But we should not whittle it down to something manageable and luckluster” (Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard, © 2006, p. 290.

But in his book, Harvey Cox goes on to talk about how mountaintop visions, both in the Bible and in our lives, should cause us to want to bring these kingdom moments down to earth. The mountaintop experience is wasted if it doesn’t change how we live in the city. After God’s grace has transfigured you and me, we are called to use it to change life around us.

When they came down off the mountain, Jesus said to keep it to themselves, at least until after his death and resurrection. It was an experience and a gift that he gave them, to inspire and move them. Maybe Jesus even thought that seeing him in glory, seeing Moses and Elijah, hearing the voice, maybe it would help them during the trial and crucifixion… give them roots, a solid foundation, faith.

But instead, they immediately got distracted. Pastor Jon and I often read and quote from Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible, The Message. Here’s how he translates that descent off the mountain,

Mark 9:^9-10Coming down the mountain, Jesus swore them to secrecy. "Don't tell a soul what you saw. After the Son of Man rises from the dead, you're free to talk." They puzzled over that, wondering what on earth "rising from the dead" meant.

Sometimes, as I’m studying a passage, I’ll get stuck on a turn of phrase… and how it can draw you deeper: What on earth? My mother said that a lot when I was growing up, “Gregory, what on earth… are you doing now?” “What on earth” means that something doesn’t seem to belong on earth; doesn’t seem normal.

In the positive, Biblical sense it might mean any time the Kingdom of God comes near. When this world and the Kingdom of God collide…wherever the mountain intersects with the city.

The disciples ask, “What on earth” can rising of the dead mean? In the literal sense, of course, Jesus was referring to his own resurrection… But it so telling that Jesus immediately re-entered the towns of Caesarea Philippi with these disciples and throws them back into the ministry of healing and teaching.

People will say that they experience God most in nature…and he is there in the still-quiet mountain scene or the powerful voice of waves and thunder. “Who needs a Temple, when we have this?” but we are wrong…to think that is where God sits, or remains. God is most powerfully present after he comes off the mountain, when he brings us down off the mountain to care for others, to engage them, feed them, hold them, listen to them.

The real Transfiguration, on earth, is about engaging others. And the more closely we do it, the more we get involved in what we are called to do, the more we will feel it. We still have a tendency to hang back and find excuses from actively taking part in Christian life.

I am very proud of our Food Bank, the way all of you as a congregation have responded to the needs of folks around us. And more recently the Community Dinners, putting our Gathering Space to use, inviting, feeding and sitting down, talking and listening to the folks who come to eat. What might happen if we bring those two resources together? So that a couple of times each month, we could feed, a few volunteers could sit, eat, listen, talk and even gently invite, and then give a take-home bag?

My brothers and sisters in Christ, the great commission, is to let Christ’s grace transfigure us, change us, into living examples of his compassion and love, so that other lives can be changed. Some will not be able to hear until they are cared for. But, just like God, the care we give needs to come with a face, arms, ears, and a voice.

When we take care of God’s creation, we are bringing the Kingdom down to the earth. Heaven and earth are, in fact, always connected. When we care for creation, or critters or other people, we living the prayer, “Thy will be done …on earth, as in heaven.”

The Transfiguration did not stop on Mount Hermon. Christ’s true Transfiguration was the way his gospel changed the world, by healing one person, and preaching to one village at a time.

That is what we are called to do.