Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Transfiguration Sunday

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos CA February 3, 2008

Holy Encounter

2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9

2 Peter 1 begins: For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made know to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,… Wow! You could have fooled me because much of the Bible, and particularly today’s Gospel scene on the mountain top, sure sounds like a myth to me. It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels, and, yet, not without scriptural precedent. Exodus 24:12-18 tells of Moses transfiguration when a cloud covered the mountain, and The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; and on the seventh day God called to Moses out of the cloud. It was out of this experience that Moses returns with the tablets of commandments that provide the basis for organizing the Hebrew tribes in a civil compact.

This is myth at its best: a story told to reveal a deeper truth. Despite the claim of 2 Peter that we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty, the Transfiguration has the ring of myth to it. But the early church believed the stories told of the experience. It made sense in their world. Even without the voice from the cloud to explain it, the disciples had no doubt what they were witnessing. It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they had walked with over so many dusty miles, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they had seen hungry, tired and footsore as the rest of them. But it was also the Messiah, the Christ, in his glory. It was the holiness of God shining through the humanness, his face so afire with it they were blinded by the light.

Is this just a cleverly devised myth? There are other cultures, even contemporary cultures for whom this account is completely believable, but, generally, not for us. There are those among us, even a voice within us, we 20th century children of the Enlightenment that says, “I think the truth got stretched in the retelling.” And there is something to that, because Matthew is trying to express the truth of Jesus of Nazareth - Messiah, Christ of God - to the early church. It is as if Matthew, the artist, has moved into his late first century studio and saying “How can I symbolize the incredible truth that Jesus disclosed the very light of God and we were transfigured in the reflected glory of this person – Jesus, crucified and risen?”

The word for “cleverly devised” in Greek is sophizo, from which we get “sophist.” Sophistry, which is the mother’s milk of political campaigns, is clever but false arguments, salacious, deceptive and misleading comments. Thus some Bible translators interpret this phrase as false stories, or fables. This may seem a subtle distinction between fables and myth, but it is important to make the distinction because we depend upon myth to tell our history and we must learn to separate it from false stories.

Thanksgiving, for example, is one of the great American myths. We gather each year to tell the story which is not historically accurate. We dress up in clothes that Pilgrims wouldn’t wear, and we eat food they couldn’t imagine. We envision a peaceable kingdom between the settlers and the Indians, supporting each other in mutual aid and suspend our knowledge of the wars of extermination of native tribes that will take place in the next twenty years, or the fact that native tribes had been decimated by disease prior to the Pilgrim’s arrival. We share the ritual of 5 grains of corn – which, I am sorry to say – never happened. This is an American myth, and largely an invention of late 19^th century imagination. There is something important to remember about the founding of the nation, and we have to work hard to separate out the fantasy and the sentiment, from the deeper principles upon which our democracy is founded.

Christmas is a myth: a story told to reveal a deeper truth. What we call Christmas is the combining of two different “parables” by Matthew and Luke who write like novelists creating an imaginative origin story that sets the scene for what will be revealed by their main character: this is the son of God. We even fold into the Christmas story, the legend of St. Nicholas, a generous and compassionate Turkish bishop who was later martyred. But, we don’t want to dwell on martyrdom at Christmastime, so we cleverly devise Santa Claus, the eternal sprite of goodness and gifts. Can you sense the subtle distinction between myth and fable?

Maybe it is better described as the difference between fantasy we create and the dreams that invade our unconscious. I used to day-dream as a child – wait! I still day dream – but I have had night dreams that have come to me uninvited that have informed my life, revealed truth, and changed me.

There was a period of my life when I was having a succession of violent dreams in which I kept uncovering dead and mutilated bodies. It was also a time when I was learning about some of the hidden secrets and shameful actions in the church I was serving. It took a while for me to put it together but I came to believe the dreams were telling me that I was strong enough to face whatever was being revealed in the church – and some of it was pretty horrific. This was all going on in my head but it was the experience that revealed a deeper truth that allowed me to work in that situation.

I remember a young man in my youth group came to me very agitated. He was an intense and imaginative guy who was trying to make sense out of this god-stuff. He told that he had been praying at night to God to prove “he existed.” He said, “Nothing! Nothing happened.” But there he sat in my office nervously rubbing his hands together.

“Then why are you here?” I asked. “Because, I had a dream last night,” he said. “I was praying to God on a mountaintop, when suddenly a wind rose up, cold, like icy knives. It sliced and tore my body apart and blew it away. I haven’t been able to settle down all day.” Maybe it’s just me, but I thought he had experienced God’s answer and was overcome with fear, ready to fall on his face like the disciples in our story.

I remember the time I experienced the burning bush – orchard, really. It was at the end of 110 mile bike ride from Sacramento to the Anderson Valley. It had been hot, and it was late afternoon when I came down out of the hills. I was tired - and dehydrated, I am sure - when I saw the sun set behind the orchard and, suddenly, every leaf was aflame in shimmering waves. Insects flitted by like luminescent fairies and all was aglow with fire and I collapsed onto the ground in wonder and awe.

I know I could explain away what I saw to my stressed condition, but my experience was of the glory of God’s earth. That is my truth, as true as Elizabeth Barret Browning’s words in her poem Aurora Lee:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

and every common bush afire with God.

But only he who sees takes off his shoes,

the rest of us just sit around and pluck blackberries...”

Life at the mythic level happens to all of us. Leonard Fein writes in the American Rabbi: “Now and again, in the synagogue or in the woods, in the bedroom or the nursery, in the concert hall or in the theater, we are visited by a moment of transcendence; but we do not suppose we might live there, the air is too thin at the peak and besides, there’s bread to be earned and the Superbowl is on this afternoon.”

The difference between myth and fantasy is that we want to continue the fantasy. We want to be in love forever. We want to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, to win the lottery and live happily ever after. The truth is it is not going to happen. Myth stands beside us and informs us and tells us to get back to work in this life, but with a more profound perspective.

And Peter said, “Oh my God! Am I glad we are here. Let me get the camera so we can record this one for the books. We’ll build three booths, with displays so people can come and see the spot where it all happened. We can preserve this for all eternity.”

“But,” scripture says, “Jesus came and touched them.” Until a few years ago, I never paid attention to this little phrase. In all the times I have prepared a sermon on the transfiguration I never saw the words “Jesus came and touched them.” Matthew does not allow us to separate the glory from the struggle of living in the world. Jesus touches them and says, “Rise and have no fear.” (Which, of course, is easier to say than do.) And when they get up, and lift their eyes and look around, they saw no one there but Jesus. Down the hill they come and are immediately confronted by an epileptic boy. The Divine myth pushes us back into life.

Howard Thurmon once said: “God expects us to come into His presence with the smell of life upon us.” We serve a down-to-earth God in ordinary places. One moment we see glory, the next moment it’s gory. But, if we have paid attention, we have heard the voice of God saying: “Here is my chosen one. Listen to him!” This is nothing less than the breath-taking announcement of God’s new age in which the gory becomes transfigured. The crucified becomes the uplifted, death becomes a symbol of life, and the principalities and powers are put on notice that their time is limited, and God’s time is eternal.

William Martin (The Way of the Word) wrote: “Look at yourself. You are alive! Yet every atom in your body has been replaced in the past ten years. Not one atom is the same! Yet something is still the same. What is it? What are you? When you can answer that, you can live.” Then speaking of eternal life he says:

It is here now. / You need only stop and know it.

Know it from an inner knowing.

and in that knowing, / you will know God.

And in that knowing, / you will know all life.

If you have caught a glimpse of the glory of God, or heard even the whisper of the voice, or winced before the shining; if you have sensed the connection of past, present, and future - if only for a moment – then you have seen a deeper reality. And once seen, twice changed. It does make a difference to have glimpsed the holy mountain, to know we are standing on holy ground, and that those who are present with us are holy people. With a little work, and a lot of faith we might even look at our neighbor with holy eyes, and our neighborhood as holy ground. What a difference it would make to realize the city dump is a holy site, and our trash is lost treasures, or the people who sleep on our porches and fields, or are warehoused in our prisons are still God’s own children. What a difference it would make to train our inner eyes to see the world transfigured in the light of God - every common bush afire?

We say we can’t live in such glory, and even Jesus tells us to be quiet about it. People wouldn’t understand, I suppose, even as he touches us, and asks us to get up and come with him. And we listen to him, because, now, we know who he is.