Luke 9: 28-36
I was thinking this week:
- Most of the Western world only associates Transfiguration with Professor Minerva McGonagal…
- Who teaches Transfiguration at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.
The popularity of the Harry Potter books is understandable since we now seem to live in a world without magic.
- The history of humanity was full of magic.
- Throughout the ages the transcendent and mysterious was woven all around the mundane and certain…
- And alchemy was the rage…
- An alchemist is a person who transforms or creates something through a seemingly magical process.
- (some highly imaginative tax shelters are dreamed up by accounting alchemists).
- And Christians are all alchemists: we transform the mundane into God’s grace and love.
- Until a few hundred years ago that is…with the dawn of the enlightenment.
- When we discovered the scientific method…we no longer needed alchemy and superstition and the supernatural because we had human reason.
- We now could look from our little sliver of history back to all the millennia that went before us…
- And sneer at their ignorance and superstition.
The Lord be with you.
Well…it seemed…in Western thought…that we had arrived.
- There was finally nothing that Newtonian Physics and basic Chemistry could not explain.
- We had what humanity always needed…and that was answers.
- And since science was the most reliable way of knowing truth…then everything in the Bible also must be scientific fact.
For quite some time after we discovered science…we lived in what was called the age of progress.
- We looked only forward and never back.
- That which was old was suspect.
- We concluded that our world and our lives could be improved through our own reason and cleverness.
I get this…but I also get that my own reason and cleverness only gets me so far in life.
- I need a story bigger than the story of me and my culture.
- I need a reality larger than the one I can understand.
- I need some transfiguration.
So…in our Gospel story for today…Jesus is transfigured before Peter…James and John…
- His clothes are bleached blindingly white and suddenly he is talking to Elijah and Moses.
- And in case you do not keep track…
- Those guys had been dead for centuries.
- Well…OK…Moses and Elijah really never died…
- They were taken into heaven on a fiery chariot.
- But that’s its own Bible story.
- For now…we will stick with this one.
It feels magical…this story of Jesus transfigured on a Mountain talking to Moses and Elijah.
- It is as though time ceased to be a neat…straight line with the present in its appropriate distance from the past and the future.
- Instead…on the mount of Transfiguration…the line of time was all crumpled up…
- With past present and future all touching for a moment.
Then a cloud overcomes them…and God says this is my beloved son…listen to him.
- All this is difficult to comprehend.
- So…Peter says it’s good to be here…
- Because he did not know what else to say…he was terrified.
- In the face of the holy and unexplainable what else is there for us to do?
- That is the thing about God.
- The more we know…the less we know.
So…it is good for us to be here.
- Not so that we can get answers.
- Because certainty can sometime obscure mystery.
- Easy answers are easy.
- What takes time is to have the story of Christ lived out in a community of saints and sinners…
- Just like us.
- And have that story transfigure us slowly like water forming a rock.
- It is good to be here.
I want us to be people who are re-enchanted.
- Not ignorant…Not gullible…Not superstitious.
- But re-enchanted.
- To hear stories of miracles and healings and forgiveness.
- To remember one night a couple millennia ago when Jesus had his last meal.
- To gather around a table to share that same meal and remember the promise that God is with us.
- And for a moment the past present and future are all tangled up…
- And Newtonian physics does not explain any of it.
That is not to say that science and religion are separate.
- Because while we came here to touch the mystery of God…
- At the same time…we get to celebrate the miracle of modern medicine and the magic of Lois’s successful oblation surgery last week.
- And the miracle of Pam’s cancer surgery.
- And if there is anything in this world that is worthy to be enchanted by…
- Is it how we now know that in Taylor Rahdert’s womb is a child of God.
- We live in a world worthy of being enchanted.
- That is the crazy thing about being part of a religion that is so unapologetically physical…
- That mystery and grace is found in things like bread and water and wine.
- I am somehow much more comforted by mystery than by certainty.
- I want to be speechless and a little terrified.
- To not know what else to do but say it is good to be here and listen to Jesus.
- I desire some magic.
And while we could dress up and go to Harry Potter’s Wizarding World at Universal Studios in Orlando…
- And feel enchanted for the cost of a $100 ticket.
- There is something about this
- This story of heaven touching earth on a mountain 2000 years ago…
- Which promises something no other story can.
There is something about this table around which we gather every week.
- This table that promises to be true in a way that myth and legend and fairy tale never can.
- This thing…this Jesus thing is real.
- The Gospel is real…Heaven touching earth is real.
- The body and blood of Christ is real.
- And only this kind of realness can re-enchant the world again and again.
- It is good for us to be here.