To Look Away From God

Jesus starts his ministry by saying “Repent! And believe the kingdom of God has come near.” The word in Greek for repentance, metanoia, means, in essence, to snap out of it. To think new thoughts. To turn from how you have been living, and live differently.

Snap out of it! And believe the kingdom of God has come near. Peter and the disciples loved this message. Yet they struggled to live into it. Just as we do today. They are used to living a certain way. It’s hard to change. They have expectations as to how religious life is supposed to go. They have assumptions as to what makes one holy and blessed and loved by God and who is outside of God’s love.

Jesus preaches transformation. Transformation is practical. It means you dance a little differently. You don’t do what you normally do, you try something else. If someone posts something you think is stupid on social media, and you’d normally be up all night commenting on it in a flame-war but instead you let it go… that’s transformation. If you have an addiction and you admit it and seek support, that’s transformation, that’s turning a life around. That’s seeking community and a new way of living than the same ol’ same ol’.

Today we don’t get transformation. We get transfiguration. Transformation is different than transfiguration. Transformation is being something different. Transfiguration is seeing how things truly are. They are related but very different.

Peter, James, and John go up the mountain to pray with Jesus. A retreat of sorts. And while he was praying, the appearance of his clothes changed and became dazzling white. They saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him.

Theologian Marcus Borg had a similar thing happen to him. He wasn’t on a mountain, but on an airplane. He and his wife were flying to the Holy Land. He was seated right across the aisle from an extremely ugly man. They had just served up the inflight meal when a sensation came upon him. Everything was bathed in gold and seemed to be illuminated from within. Everything was so beautiful that Borg was transfixed. He saw everything as new and shining. Even the extremely ugly man was lit from within and was radiant. This lasted for about 45 minutes Borg thinks because he snapped out of it when they collected his untouched food.

His wife asked what had happened and Borg told her. She responded, “I knew you were going through something, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

This was a mystical experience. It was something that Borg could do nothing with. It came upon him suddenly, he had no idea how to recreate it, but he had a few of those moments in his life. They were a gift when he saw the world as God must see it. Transfigured. Shining. Radiant and beautiful.

Yet my inner-pragmatist wanted to know what he did. How did he change? How did he treat the extremely ugly man? Is he best friends with him now?

“No,” Borg said. “It was a gift from God. To see the world in glory. It must have been what Peter, James, and John experienced on the mountain of Transfiguration.”

Part of me doesn’t like that answer, it’s too subjective. There’s nothing you can DO with it. It’s why I love Peter in today’s scripture. He’s like me. He wants to do something, point to some practical action, to DO something. Peter wants to make three dwellings. He wants to stay in the moment. To create a shrine to it. But the cloud comes and echoes the words Jesus heard at his baptism in the Jordan, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” And then they were alone. In Mark, Jesus orders them to keep quiet. But here, they don’t need that command, they just keep quiet about it and don’t do anything with what they have seen. They don’t have another vision like it in the Gospel of Luke.

Peter wants to build a dwelling place. He takes his eyes off God and wants to freeze the moment. I know that feeling. It’s frustrating how each moment is replaced by another one. If Moses and Elijah showed up, I sure would want to hang out and ask them all sorts of questions. So Moses, how did you feel when the Israelites made you wear a veil when you came off the mountain? Moses, how did you deal with folk having opinions about what you said on the mountain when they themselves refused to go up? Elijah, what was riding on the chariot of fire like? I loved how you mentored and discipled Elisha, do you have any tips for starting an adult faith formation program here at our church?

Peter wanted to stay there because he knew how the stories of Moses and Elijah ended. Some part of him knew that he would have to come down off that mountain and live into an unknown ending with Jesus, and that can be very frightening. It’s easier to look back. Nostalgia can be a deadly thing. It could be the 8th deadly sin.

Back in the Good Ol’ Days! Back in my day… Things were better then… Better for whom? When were the good ol’ days? Probably back before we knew about all the garbage in the world. Before we were aware of all the injustice, of all the hurt and harm, of all the sin both personal and corporate. The good ol’ days when things were simpler because ignorance was bliss.

“When I was a child… I thought like a child… but now that I’m an adult, I have to put away childish things.”

Nostalgia could be the 8th deadly sin because in it, we miss what’s happening. We fall back on the part of the story where we know what happened, instead of living into the unfolding narrative. When we’re looking around trying to see who hasn’t shown up to church in a while, we miss who has. When we mourn who can’t make it to our holiday gathering, we miss who can. When we wish for the good ol’ days, we miss what God is doing today. The message God is sending NOW. Peter and the disciples miss it and God knows this so God speaks from the cloud about listening to Jesus. “Look how the Law and Prophets meet! Look! See him as I see him!”

Peter missed it. And we can miss it. As we celebrate 200 years, we can look back and miss what we are. Many of you commented how you were a little lost in last Sunday’s sermon. The wording, the concepts, the fact that there were no jokes or stories… yeah, preaching has come a long way in 100 years, and you saw that. You got a taste of what we used to look like and it helped us see how we are today. We saw our evolution and our transformation.

Maybe transfiguration helps us with transformation. Maybe we see a vision of how it could be, how it should be, how God sees us, and we are so inspired, so convicted, we try to live differently. To know that God loves me… Wow. I mean I say it every Sunday and I mean it, but I don’t always see it. Sometimes when I hear others talk of Jesus, I wonder whom they’re talking about. They make the good news sound so awful. Yet there are times when I stand in awe of the Transfigured Christ and I say, “Oh man, I want more of that! More love. More peace. More love of neighbor and enemy. Forgive my imperfect witness and send your Advocate to help guide me.”

I don’t always feel loved. I feel snarky, and angry, and impatient, and like most people are annoying and an inconvenience, but that’s not how Christ sees people. Christ sees everyone in love. And we’re trying to see that Transfigured world and transform it. So let us not build dwellings for Moses, Elijah, or Jesus, we have enough of those. We should build homeless shelters. Homes for Habitat for Humanity or in Costa Rica. We should welcome in our kids and have them explore because as Neil DeGrasse Tyson states, “We spend the first years teaching [our kids] to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.” Hear we listen to youth, we let the children come to the Lord with their loud, rambunctious selves and all their questions.

And if those children happen to be gay… If we tell them that God loves them and Jesus saved them and the Holy Spirit will guide them… but when they discover their orientation or gender expression, that won’t change our teaching. I will bless and pray and marry them. I mourn the decision by the United Methodist Church this week. They have built a dwelling to their book of discipline that was changed in 1972 to outlaw same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ clergy ordination. They doubled-down on that this past week with a “Traditional Plan” and new sanctions,, despite thousands of hours of work from members on alternative ways to be the church.[1]

Look… If I’m wrong… who am I hurting? If I’m wrong, then people hear that God loves them, and I will have to answer for that. I will confess that I misunderstood the gospel and let in more folk than I should have, and I’ll be in Peter’s shoes and Paul’s boat, shipwrecked on the shores of Grace. That I believe that God sees us all like Marcus Borg saw that airplane cabin during his flight. I believe God loves everyone, that Jesus came for everyone. And he wasn’t killed because of those he excluded. He was always killed for who he INCLUDED. The leper, the sex worker, the tax collector, the diseased, the poor, the lame, the blind; he made no distinction between Jew and Gentile, he sought ALL of humanity and commissioned his disciples to go and make disciples of ALL nations, from Jerusalem, Samaria and the ends of the earth. It is well with my soul on this conviction.

Yet if the “traditional plan” is wrong… well we already see the pile of bodies that this theology has left.  Suicides. Teen homelessness because their parents kicked them out. People leaving the institutional church in droves because they were taught “God loves you but…”

“God loves you but… change… live this way, don’t do that, don’t be gay or trans, don’t be this or that…” Or will we say, “God loves you SO…” God loves you, so what are you going to do about it?

Can we see the world like Christ does? Can our vision be Transfigured? Will we accept what God gifts us with, that vision? Will we heed God’s words, “This is my son… LISTEN.TO.HIM?” Or will we say, “I liked God better in the good ol’ days.” And build a dwelling for that?

Will you look upon everyone like they have the potential to be Christ? Will you allow others to live into their potential and fullness, to watch them be Transfigured and Transformed before you? Will we remove the veil from on the faces of LGTBQ+ folk and remove the ones on our hearts?  Will you risk it? People will talk, they’ll say things. They’ll say, “They let anyone in. Look how they meet and eat with sinners.” Which is what they said about Christ and the prophets. They’ll want to build dwellings and turn from God’s vision of all people, all nations evolving into Christ so that the representative product becomes the general product.[2]

How will you write your sacred story of “God loves you so what are you going to do about it?”

Works Cited

 https://www.umnews.org/en/news/gc2016-tackling-44-year-stance-on-homosexuality

Samuel Fritsch, Christ and Evolution: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/christ-and-evolution/

Further Reading: The Bible does not condemn “homosexuality.” Seriously, it doesn’t. by adam nicholas phillips

Comments

  1. I am beginning to understand how our forefathers could have “excommunicated” a saloon-keeper who was not even a member of the congregation.

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