Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
February 22, 2009
Mark 9:2-9

Sacred Encounters with the Light

Have you noticed that the days are growing longer?  That the sun rises and sets further north? Light is creeping back into our consciousness.  Lent is just around the corner.

Speaking of light, today is Transfiguration Sunday – the transforming experience of Jesus on the mountaintop when he is “transfigured” and changed by an unusual radiance, when his face shines like the sun, people long dead appear, and God speaks out of a cloud.  The celebration of the Transfiguration changes with the church calendar every year  because Easter changes with the spring moon, but it always is the last Sunday in the season of Epiphany (which is fixed on January 6th) and the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and Lent, no matter how many Sundays that is.

Now, do you know what the Transfiguration is all about?   Well, the commentaries have trouble with this one, too.  But it’s an important event in the life of Jesus.

The story takes place in all three synoptic gospels.  In Mark, it is sandwiched between two incidences – one before the Transfiguration and one after – in which Jesus is trying to teach the disciples about his death and resurrection, with talk about taking up one’s cross, being betrayed, and suffering.  They don’t understand.   The story also takes place midway in the gospel, just before he turns south toward Jerusalem.  It apparently is a turning-point experience for him.  Perhaps this is when Jesus vowed to carry out his mission to the very end.

But to our scientific-age perspective, the Transfiguration is a little other-worldly – with lights and apparitions and a disembodied voice.  Most scholars would treat the transfiguration as a metaphorical event, perhaps a misplaced resurrection story.

What the story does in Mark’s gospel, however, is to make the case that Jesus is the Messiah, so let’s take a look at what we do know:  Jesus has taken his inner circle – Peter and James and John – up a high mountain.  In an ancient, three-story universe, that’s where you went to get closer to God.  And as Jesus is praying, Moses and Elijah appear and talk with Jesus.  Their appearance in this vision is full of meaning, metaphorical or not.  For Moses, too, had been on a mountain, Mt. Sinai, and his was face transfigured when he was in God’s presence, receiving the Ten Commandments.

Moses, then, represents the Law, standing with Jesus.  And Elijah also had experienced God’s presence on Mt. Sinai, and an encounter with the light.  Elijah, then, represents the Prophets, standing with Jesus.  To fulfill the prophecy, Elijah has to be there when the Messiah comes.

But the Divine, show-stopping word from the cloud focuses all the attention on Jesus,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.”  Unlike at Jesus’ baptism, this time the disciples hear God’s voice – and the order that he is to be listened to!  Of course, the disciples are terrified.  We would be too!  This is an otherworldly experience.  They have been part of a holiness they don’t understand.  They want to make it concrete by building something tangible, something to leave behind.

We can grasp the symbolism, then:  For the early church of the 1st century, Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets; Jesus is the Messiah; he has God-given authority; he must be taken seriously.

And for us in this 21st century?  Where do we stand?  Are we like the disciples who don’t “get it?”  Are we like those who are ashamed of the gospel?  Do we not understand and are afraid to ask like the disciples?  Transfiguration catapults us into Lent and the preparation for Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.  In the Transfiguration we have a blending of time and eternity.  A merging of theology and history.  A mixture of reality and transcendence. 

And there is all this light!  Light is a major theme in the Bible, beginning with “Let there be light,” in Genesis, and “Your light has come,” in Isaiah, to “You are the light of the world,” in Matthew’s gospel, and Jesus’ claim in John’s, “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”  And if you read the texts for this Sunday, you would have run across Paul’s testimony to the Corinthians, “For it is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

There is all this light talk in the Bible!  So here are three thoughts about light that have to do with the sacred:  First, we are meant, all of us, to be whole, healthy, and holy – filled with light:

Perhaps you have seen the film, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Fitzgerald’s story about a child born old whom we watch growing younger and younger as the years pass.  Many of the Benjamins in the film are not Brad Pitt, but images of him, aged, and transposed by 3D animation, computer generated images, onto another figure to represent him at a given age.  I happened to catch a National Public Radio story about the difficulty in making fake people look real.  They are just a little off and weird and scary – like zombies.  It seems we are more comfortable with a robot than with an android. 

A real person has an inner light, an energy in him or her.  We are born with light in us.  The film industry has not yet been able to get the facial nuances and the light quite right in the eyes of a make-believe person.

This week I ran across a picture of my mother surrounded by my three grandchildren, just a month or so before she died.  I was struck with how much light there was in the children’s eyes, and how dull hers were.  It was like she was fading away, the light was going out.  If you have had the privilege of sitting beside someone who is dying, you would have seen the light go out.  The essence, the divine spark, the light leaves the body.  Or it could be a little death – the death of depression or grief or addiction.

We know this light-in-the-eyes phenomenon.  Turn around and look at the people around you.  See the light in their eyes?  In their faces?  See their energy?  Light is the gift of life, and every one of us is filled with light – even if our eyesight is not so good!

Second, we are filled with light when we are able to align our unique purpose in life with God’s purpose for us.  Frederick Buechner1 writes:

“It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a person is called to by God.

“There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work,

and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society,

say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.

“By and large a good rule for finding out is this. 

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work

that you need most to do and that the world needs most to have done. 

“Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. 

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness

and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Think about someone you know who has found that place where his or her deep gladness has met the world’s deep hunger.  I remember Lynda, one of my divinity school classmates, who finally accepted her call to the Anglican priesthood.  It was like watching her throw open all the doors and windows of her soul.  She was radiant! 

The Transfiguration appears to have been such an event for Jesus.  He has been reassured that he is on the right path, even unto suffering.  Not only was his whole being suffused with light, but even his clothes took on a dazzling brilliance.  Moreover, the Transfiguration turned Jesus around and pointed him toward Jerusalem.                                 

One more encounter with the light:

I cannot think about the Transfiguration without thinking about German theologian Rudolf Otto and his seminal work on religious experience2  He coins the word, “numinous,” to mean filled with the sense of the presence of divinity.  By this he means experiencing the sacred – the holy – God, minus the moral and rational mind.  Such an experience would be supra-rational, not irrational, a heightened attentiveness and awareness, related to profound wonder.  It would entail a sense of mystery that is ultimately inexpressible – a connection with another dimension – when something shifts, the light changes, and the distance between oneself and God is erased.  Jewish theologian Martin Buber3 might express it as an I-Thou experience – not an I-It experience of the every day.

I experience it once in awhile – when I’m drifting in my kayak and the light glints off the water in a certain way, or when I hear peepers for the first time in the spring.  And I’ve experienced it here with you, once or twice, when we’ve stood and sung a beloved hymn together.  I’ve read that child psychologists see this sensitivity to the divine in young children before they reach the age of 6, when their rational brain takes over.  Some of you, I know, have experienced it too.      

Now, we are about to step across the threshold into Lent – a season to find our inner light, to explore our relationship with God, to live into our own divinity.  My prayer now is for us – that we will “suspend disbelief”4 long enough to understand the Transfiguration.

May it be so.
Amen.

1Wishful Thinking:  A Seekers ABC
2The Idea of the Holy, Published in English in 1923.
3 Martin Buber, I And Thou.
4 Samuel Coleridge, poet and philosopher, writing in 18217:  “the willing suspension of disbelief in people’s relationship with the arts.”