I’m sure that most of you are thinking to yourselves – “Didn’t we just hear this story about the Transfiguration? Wasn’t it just a few months ago?” Well, you’re right. Every time we hear it, we can be pretty sure that we just heard it a few months ago, because it pops up in our lectionary every year – and twice in some years. It is always the gospel on the last Sunday before Lent, rotating between the versions according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, and we hear it again in August, on the feast of the Transfiguration. This story, centered on Jesus’ being physically changed by and encounter with God, holds important teaching for us about our relationship with the Holy and with one another. Each time I hear this gospel, my attention is drawn to a particular facet of the story. This time, I’ve been drawn to wonder about the disciples’ experience of the event and the way it must surely have colored their understanding of Jesus and their own call to ministry in this world.
This event happens about eight days after Peter recognizes Jesus as the messiah. Immediately after that, Jesus tells the disciples that he will be killed and will be raised on the third day. We can only imagine that the disciples are still trying to take in all these words – still trying to understand how the long-awaited messiah could be killed – not to mention how he would be raised from the dead. It’s been eight days of wondering and questioning. We can imagine the disciples talking among themselves, asking each other what he could possibly have meant, perhaps gathering the courage to ask Jesus to help them understand, perhaps wondering how they can convince Jesus that he’s wrong – that he’s mistaken about the road ahead. At the end of this week of wondering and questioning, Jesus takes Peter, John and James up to the mountain to pray. While Jesus is praying, the disciples manage to stay awake, so they see his appearance change, and they saw Moses and Elijah talking with him.
The sight of Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah triggers an amazing response in Peter. Peter, the disciple who’s always first to speak, the first to set everyone else straight, is actually quiet for a few moments. Then, as he sees Moses and Elijah leaving, he leaps into action, saying – and I paraphrase – Wow – what a terrific opportunity! It’s so great that you brought us along with you today. We can build little houses for you and Moses and Elijah. No more traveling all over the countryside, no more worrying about where we’ll be tomorrow. You can set up shop right here – and the people will always know where to find you.
As Peter says this, a cloud encloses them all, and the disciples are terrified. Then they hear a voice saying – This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him. Listen to him.
When a close encounter with the Holy occurs, we humans tend to be overwhelmed. And then we tend to try to cling to that moment – to build a little house to keep it in. We forget to pay attention to what has happened. We just want to hold on to that moment when earth and heaven are joined. We want to stay in that moment of wonder and awe. We want to stay in that moment of good feeling. We want to stay on the mountain.
My first mountain top experience was my first extended retreat – a week-long retreat with about 40 people, all there to examine our work lives in the light of the gospel. We spent the week in group meditation and in individual prayer, in reading scripture and in talking about our work situations, in examining the ways people behave in work groups and in looking at our own responses and behaviors. Slowly, as we moved through the week, we uncovered new understandings of the situations we worked in. We saw more clearly the way those places worked, we saw our individual parts in the big picture more clearly, we saw the ways each of us could shift the dynamics of the workplace, beginning with ourselves.
When it was time to leave, I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t ready to go home. It had been a week of encounter with the Holy and I didn’t want it to be over. I wanted to stay there, wrapped in awareness of God’s love for me, wrapped in the presence of God like a child wrapped in a blanket. I didn’t want to leave, but it was time to go. And when I left the retreat house, the entire world was different.
The cars on the freeway were faster than ever before, the noise of televisions and appliances and voices in my own home was overwhelming, and the prospect of returning to work and the pain of an organization in the first throes of down-sizing was more than I even wanted to think about. So I sorted my laundry and thought wistfully about my mountaintop time at the retreat house and empathized with Peter’s reflexive desire to build three little houses to hold Jesus, Moses and Elijah – to build a place where he can keep the Holy right where he can always find it.
Just as I learned and Peter finds out, we can’t stay on the mountain. We can’t stay on the mountain top, and we can’t contain the Holy in little boxes. We walk back down the mountain into our lives and into the work we have been called to do in Jesus’ name.
That day on the mountain, Peter, John and James hear the voice of God after Peter announces his plan to build the little houses. Immediately, they hear God’s voice telling them to listen to Jesus. Listen to him, do as he says, live as he teaches, be open to change just as Jesus is changed by his encounter with God.
God calls us into those precious moments of encounter with the Holy, but staying in those moments doesn’t seem to be an option. If we look at the lives and works of all those people down the ages whom we recognize as models for living lives of connection with the Holy, it’s pretty clear that living in relationship with God doesn’t mean staying on the mountain top but working for the transfiguration of the world.
Today, as our headlines and newscasts are filled with news of violence in the middle East, we remember a different kind of transfiguration. On this day in 1945, the world was transfigured by a brilliant light that did not come from God. Our world was changed forever by a light that brought death, destruction and a new understanding of fear to all of us.
Today is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Over 100,000 people died that day. An unknown number of people died later of the “bomb disease” – the after effects of their exposure to radiation. One of those who died was Sadako, a teenager who suffered leukemia as a result of the bomb. After she got sick she tried to fold a thousand paper cranes because she believed she would be cured of her disease if she was able to accomplish this task she had set for herself. She folded more than 800 cranes before she died. Her friends completed the project.
In Hiroshima there is a Peace Memorial with a statue of Sadako. She wrote about her cranes: “I will write Peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.” Folded cranes have become a symbol of prayer for peace and for an end to nuclear weapons. There is a Children's Monument at the Peace Memorial. Each year, hundreds and thousands of folded paper cranes are brought to this monument by children from all over the world. An inscription at the base of the monument reads: “This is our cry...This is our prayer...Peace in the world.”
Each week we come to this mountain – to touch and be touched by the Holy. As we leave this holy space, we are called to shift the dynamic of this whole world, beginning with ourselves. We are called to share with the world the peace that Jesus brought to share with us. May we all be transfigured into instruments of God’s peace, that we may transfigure the world.