2/23/20 “Marked by Love” by Nancy E. Petty

Scripture: Matthew 17:1-9

Good stories are like an open door to a mysterious world waiting to be explored. They invite us to walk in and discover all that’s inside. Have you ever noticed how a good story will often elicit from the hearer the phrase, “That reminds me of the time…”? Or that story names something I have hoped for, dreamed of, long to have happen all my life. We live by stories—true ones and made up ones. We make sense of life by the narratives we tell ourselves as well as those we tell one another. A good story can transport us back in time, to some experience that still holds meaning in our lives; or they can propel us into a future time where we dream of possibilities. But stories also help us make meaning of the present, and they can help shape how we see our selves and the world in real time. Good stories help us define who we are and who we want to be, right now. And they inspire us to reach for our dreams, our longings, and our desires.

The story of Jesus’ transfiguration on that mysterious mountaintop is such a story. It is an open door to our life as followers of Jesus, inviting us to walk in and explore every dimension of it. Maybe for you, it reminds you of your own mysterious mountaintop experience. It does that for me—that summer of 1990 with 80 youth sitting on top of a mountain peak looking across the Blue Ridge Hills of western North Carolina. It reminds me of that mountaintop experience in Tbilisi with Malkhaz having my eyes opened to the wideness of God’s world as Malkhaz pointed out seven countries that could be seen from that one mountain peak. Maybe it connects you to a personal story when you felt transfigured, changed in some way. Or maybe it is leaving you with a longing, a desire, a dream, for how you would like your life to be transfigured, changed in some way. Or maybe you are looking for what is it saying to you/us, now, in this present moment?

We have a saying here at Pullen that we like to pull out when we encounter text such as this one: stories that speak to mystery and to the supernatural. It goes like this: “Just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” What we mean by that is that even though we might not believe in the blind seeing again or the dead coming back to life or virgins becoming pregnant we can still find meaning in those stories. We are keen to say that the man was healed of his spiritual blindness. Or that we know resurrection is real because we have experienced coming back from the dead places in our spiritual lives and finding new life. I have said those things myself. And they help me make sense of these stories of my faith. I firmly believe that we don’t have to take things literally in order to find truth and meaning in such events. I have never rested my faith on a literal interpretation of stories such as Jesus’ literal resurrection or the virgin birth. It doesn’t really matter to me if Jonah literally survived living in the belly of a whale or whether the shepherd boy David really killed a well armored giant with a slingshot and five smooth stones. I believe that we can be healed of our blindness. I believe that resurrection is real because I have been in those dead places in life and found new life. I believe that we can survive going into the depths of our darkest nights—the underbelly of this world—and come out and into the light. I believe that those without power can confront the powerful find justice. I believe that willing souls can say “yes” to birthing something extraordinary for God.

And yet, this story of Jesus’ transfiguration has me wondering this morning, “What if it really did happen?” What if on that mountaintop something so mysterious, unexplainable really happened? What if the light in Jesus shone through him so bright on that day that it made him and his clothes look different? What if Peter, James and John heard a voice that was so real that it caused them to tremble? I’m wondering: What if we stopped thinking of such events as magic and thought about them as mystery? Would it help us hear the story differently? Would it help us discover something new about our own faith if we opened our hearts to the mystery of God’s activity in our lives and world?

I am afraid that I am too much like Peter in this story. Maybe you are too. At the thought of seeing God so clearly, of hearing God’s voice so profoundly, we become overwhelmed and afraid. We turn into Peter in those moments, stammering around for what to do to normalize the situation. I know, let’s build three more buildings to house God in. It’s a bumbling, endearing proposal, if a bit tone-deaf, even presumptuous. But do we not, like Peter, turn to our known customs and rituals to make sense of it all—of the mystery that confronts us when we encounter the presence of God? You say surely “Peter was thinking of the Greek custom of building a shrine at the site of a god’s appearance. Or of the Festival of Booths, commemorating the Exodus. [In those moments, like us,] he was trying to corral the astounding wonder into something more manageable, more domesticated? [Like us, in the face of mystery] he was simply at a loss, grasping for something to do, something to offer?

Mystery makes us uncomfortable. It sends us into a frenzy of logical, explainable explanations: the science of the sun’s rotation in that moment cast a supernova light on Jesus that made him look like he was glowing; the bright cloud that overshadowed them was the result of an unusual weather pattern that happens every thousand years. Oh, I get that mystery is uncomfortable, especially when it comes to matters of faith. “Mystery tends to offend the cognitive mind because it’s not explainable, and we get scared of things we can’t explain. Mysteries threaten our world view and make the ego feel out of control…[But mystery is] part of the natural world. Mystery just IS. Life is inherently mysterious, so we’re always surrounded by mystery, and yet, we don’t like mysteries. We like solving mysteries but we get uncomfortable with unsolved mysteries. They make us feel unstable. We like to tie everything up in a nice little package that we can explain. A little mystery makes the world exciting, but we tend to get nervous when life is filled with too much mystery. It makes us wonder what is real, and we don’t like having our sense of reality threatened. Mystery makes no sense, and this can be uncomfortable.”

But what if one of the greatest gifts of our faith is to make us uncomfortable in the mysteries of how God works in us and in the world? Imagine what we might discover about God and about ourselves if we dared to live into the mystery of things like resurrection and transfiguration and forgiveness and grace and, above all, hearing God call us the beloved. Imagine, for a moment, if we could suspend our need to know, our need to explain, our need to see the world a certain way and open our hearts to the possibility of something unexplainable, something new and different from how we always thought of things and understood the world—that new heaven and new earth that God talked about; the lamb and the wolf lying down together; a little child leading us; dividing walls of hostility being dismantled, and dead people—people who only know how to live from the ego—rising to new life. What if we lived embracing such mystery?

Sometimes I feel like we get so caught up in trying to explain away the mystery of our faith that we miss the message in the mystery. Jesus’ face shining like the sun and his clothes becoming dazzling white is mystery. Moses and Elijah appearing on that mountain and talking with Jesus is mystery. The bright cloud that suddenly appeared and overshadowed them is mystery. The voice that came from that cloud is mystery. But it is the message that came through all that mystery that is the true gift of our faith. A message in six words. “This is my Son, the Beloved…” On that mysterious mountaintop—with all that bright light, through all the clouds, and the mysterious voices that spoke—the transfiguration of Jesus was about being marked by love—God’s love. “This is my Son, the Beloved.” When we can hear that voice calling out to us—You are my daughter Nancy, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased—we too, are transfigured—changed into the brightest of light that radiates the presence of God in mysterious ways. I wish I could go around this sanctuary and call each of you by your name and speak those words to you: “You are the Beloved.” I can’t. But you can. Turn to the person to your left and call them by their name and say to them, “You are the Beloved.” Now turn to the person on your right, call them by name and say to them, “You are the Beloved.” If you don’t know their name ask them. When we can know ourselves as being marked by God’s love, we, too, are transfigured—changed in mysterious ways.

I have found myself in recent sermons reassuring you that I am not becoming a biblical literalist. But I am becoming more convinced of something that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote. He writes in his book The Cost of Discipleship:

The real trouble is that the pure Word of Jesus has been overlaid with so much human ballast—burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations—that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision for Christ.

I would say that this way: The real trouble is that the teachings of Jesus have been overlaid with so much human ballast—burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations, questions of who has the truth and who doesn’t, fighting over whose political party is good and whose is bad, who can marry and who can’t, who can use which bathroom and who can’t—that it has become extremely difficult to make a genuine decision to follow Jesus.

I don’t know about the “pure Word of Jesus” but it is my intent to spend this Lenten journey that is upon us peeling away the layers of human ballast—the burdensome rules and regulations, false hopes and consolations, the need to know and explain everything, the one world view that, in these days, has me more often in despair than hope—put all of that aside and consider how I might be transfigured through the mystery of hearing God’s voice say to me, “You are my daughter, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” And my prayer for each of you as you begin your Lenten journey, I hope by joining us for our Ash Wednesday service this week, is that you will be able to hear that voice speaking to you saying: “You are my daughter, my son, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” And that each of us will be, in some way, transfigured—changed—by those words that, from our birth have marked us as God’s Beloved. When we live knowing we are marked by love we are, indeed, transfigured along with Jesus.

Sometimes our moment of transfiguration—that moment when the divine breaks into our human experience—doesn’t happen on the mountaintop. Sometimes our moment of transfiguration—that moment when the divine breaks into our human experience—happens when we are in the valley of the shadow of death, at our lowest of lows, when hope seems lost, when we have all but given up. Whether we are on the mountaintop or in the valley below God is always calling to us saying: “You are my Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” When we can set aside our human ballast—all the burdensome rules and regulations, the false hopes and consolations, the need to know and explain everything—we invite the mystery of being marked by love—and that mystery transfigures and changes us. May we allow that mystery to light our path in the days ahead. And might we allow the good stories of our faith to be that open door that invites us to explore a world filled with mystery that is waiting to be discovered. Whatever open door you decide to walk through, know this: you are marked by love—God’s love!