As some of you may know, both of my children have birthdays this month. My wife posted a wonderful photo montage celebrating our eldest child’s birthday last week, which inspired me to do the same. While looking through and selecting old photos, I could not help thinking about the changes that come with life’s events. I must say that I am continually awestruck and honored to be the husband and father that I am, and to be a part of the changes that life brings into our lives together.
It is amazing how quickly it goes, but the younger years are the easiest to mark. They are also the years we prize the most. You might even argue that entire economic systems revolve around resisting those changes as life goes on.
No matter what we do, change is a constant metabolic reality that we experience every day. I’m reminded here of one of my favorite after-church hand-shake conversations in my first call in Virginia. Often I would ask how he was doing and he would say, “Well, you’re either green and growing or brown and rotting. Today I’m doing my best to be green.”
Change is simply one of two consonants in the universe – the other one being the love of God. We may not like the constancy of change, but for the most part, we live with it. We take our pictures. We share our stories, and we get on with it. The only time we really worry about it is when change is forced upon us – like a loss, or an illness, or even being told to floss or eat healthier or exercise – the kind of change that is out of our control.
Even in a political system that gives us voice and vote, we can still feel like things are being forced upon us when we do not agree with the way things go. That can make us want to cling to the past more firmly and hold it up like a shining example of what life should be about. Truly, there is a certain wisdom in bringing the best of the past into the future.
One of the things I left in Lafayette that will eventually make its way up here is a walking stick I picked up in Ghana that has a carved bird craning its neck to balance an egg on its tail feathers. I was told it was an illustration that, “The future depends upon the past.” Likewise, many of our own indigenous people share the belief that we are always preparing the world for the next seven generations. I think we get that idea here in this historic building, but we must also remember Isaiah’s cry (43:18-19), “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.”
Isaiah wasn’t calling for some weird spiritual amnesia or a denial of the past. He was warning us against worshiping it. That’s important because today we are celebrating a strangely mystic story about the full revelation of Jesus as the incarnational presence of God. This story is important to our heritage and our beliefs, but if you were to try to tell it to someone who is not familiar with it – let’s just say it would be awkward.
First, there’s the name of the story: the transfiguration of Jesus. What does that even mean? Let’s talk about it. Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John. Mountains and high places were holy spaces to the ancient Israelites and to many others in Mesopotamia. It was closer to the dome of heaven – which many thought was an actual, solid barrier between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdoms of the Earth. Suddenly Jesus becomes dazzling white – his clothes, his face, and his skin seem to emanate light!
And if that wasn’t weird enough, he is joined by Moses and Elijah. I’ve always wondered how they knew who these guys were. Did they have name tags? Bowling shirts? Coveralls? I like to think they were already up there and Jesus did some introduction.
“Guys,” to the disciples, “Don’t freak out, but I want to introduce you to some friends of mine.” To Moses and Elijah, “These are some of my disciples, Peter, James, and John.” To disciples, “Guys, this is Moses and Elijah. We’re going over here for a little chat. I need to bring these guys up to speed on some things, and maybe share some best practices. Just hang tight.”
I also love that it says that Peter was terrified, so he just said the first thing that came to his mind. I feel like he blurted this out with all the enthusiasm of a Swifty, “Wow. Wow. Wow. Ok, great! We’ll make tents. Three tents. I don’t need one. James, John, do you need one? No. Of course not. So yeah. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Let’s tabernacle, like…old schoolz.”
Then BOOM! Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening (ok no lightning, but definitely thunder) “Listen to my Son - the beloved” the same words proclaimed at the baptism of Jesus rang out from heaven. Then they had a very awkward walk down the mountain in which Jesus said, again, tell no one about this until after my resurrection.
Here’s why this bizarro story about happy, shiny Jesus matters. Moses and Elijah represent the law and the prophets, and Jesus was speaking with them as an equal because he was seen as the fulfillment of the law and of all prophecy. Jesus was God’s self-revelation for all people, for all time, forever!
That is why this story is so important to the Christian faith that it gets lifted up in one form or another every year. And every year I struggle with the difference between transformation and transfiguration. Jesus is not transformed, he is transfigured. What does that even mean?
Well, essentially it’s a difference between an internal or an external change. Braces, for example, transform your mouth, but a smile can “transfigure” your face. A smile tells us what you are feeling, just as laughter reveals your joy. The interesting thing to me about all of this is that the Greek word in the original text, “metamorpho,” can be translated either way. In fact, the word transfigure didn’t even exist before around the 14th century – kind of like a few other words that entered the text in the 1600s.
Here’s why this matters. Language changes over time, and that’s usually a good thing. Language changes to more accurately reflect our experiences. This word, “transfigure,” became important to this story because there was so much change happening in the world at that time. Culture and art, science and math, and the very concept of the earth and the stars were changing, and there was a deep need to know that God – the God revealed through Jesus – was still reliable.
I think we can identify with that. The need for solid ground – physically, philosophically, and theologically – flows through our art and culture and public lives. I saw this a while back when reading a Sci-Fi series called “The Long Earth” that describes a new reality that becomes opened up when humanity discovers a way to step into alternate versions of the Earth in new dimensions. A new balance between chaos and order had to be found, and in the midst of it, there were children who began to communicate with new speech patterns that seemed almost telepathic because they were processing information at a higher rate. That last part sounds like science fiction until your child grabs your phone out of your hand to show you how to use it to order coffee!
As I was thinking about all of that it occurred to me that we are living in a time of great change that involves a shift in our cosmology. We can see deeper into space and further into the fabric of sub-atomic structures than ever before. We are constantly exploring new realities that are both virtual and real, and cultures are clashing on every shore. We are faced with new debates over religion and faith and ethics that are reshaping our very society and our global community. In the midst of all of that, we probably want to know that our faith in Jesus is still reliable!
Perhaps this story of the Transfiguration of Jesus still has something more for us that is beyond myth and legend and is bolstered by our faith in Jesus as the revelation of God’s unchanging love. Perhaps our faith tradition might even help us crane our necks to balance the egg of our future. When I say “our faith tradition” I don’t just mean the Protestant Reformation. I mean the early church. For a little over a thousand years the church used the Greek or Latin form of the word “transform” to describe what Jesus did on the mountain. It wasn’t that he changed in substance and became “Super Jesus.” It was that he became something else in the eyes of the disciples.
From this point on, Jesus was no longer the Rabi who taught about God. Jesus now began to demonstrate that he was the one like Elijah who spoke for God, and he was the one like Moses whose actions were the actions of God! Jesus – according to John’s Gospel – was the embodiment of the words that spoke creation into being. He was the one whose actions demonstrated the power of God’s love over sin and death. That means that God’s love cannot be diminished by any of those other changes that may also be out of your control. That’s the first thing I want you to remember.
The next is to say that I used to think that only Jesus could be transfigured and that we were all transformed by God’s love through him. That might still be true, but I’ve come to realize that the transformations that I have seen and experienced have all, in some way, revealed the true nature of a person as God’s beloved child.
While I believe that these transformations happen over and over throughout a life of faith, some of you have heard me talk about one of my earlier experiences at a Montreat Youth Conference. I was raised in the church and already considered myself a believer, and I was beginning to think about what life would be like after high school. I had a notion that my brother and I were going to open an ad agency and take on the world! As providence would have it, the theme of the conference was “Branded” and the general idea was that the world tries to make you feel needy and define you by brand loyalty, whereas God’s love helps you see who you are as a child of God.
I walked away thinking that following Jesus and going into advertising might be a harder walk than I wanted. God bless you if you’re walking that path, but I took a left turn and went home by another way. I guess you could say that I was transfigured in that I’ve been seeking to know myself as a child of God ever since.
There’s another story about transformation that I want to share with you. It’s about a man named Herb Green whom I met in Lafayette in the course of my journey, but I need to give you a trigger warning because it starts with the death of a child. I won't go into detail about that, but after losing his child, Mr. Green gave up on God. He lost his faith, and he was in a bad way.
Who could blame him, right? Well, Mr. Green, began to take solace by playing his djembe in a park nearby. It was about the only thing that gave him joy. A woman heard him and asked if he could teach her grandkids. He said he would, and he did. After he began to teach her grandchildren something softened in him, and he realized that God still had children for him to help raise, and doing so (little by little) restored his faith. He started teaching more children. Given his background in Psychology, he began to see that so many of the problems we have as adults are because we do not learn to manage our emotions as children – especially when there is trauma at a young age.
It is amazing how quickly it goes, but the younger years are the easiest to mark. They are also the years we prize the most. You might even argue that entire economic systems revolve around resisting those changes as life goes on.
No matter what we do, change is a constant metabolic reality that we experience every day. I’m reminded here of one of my favorite after-church hand-shake conversations in my first call in Virginia. Often I would ask how he was doing and he would say, “Well, you’re either green and growing or brown and rotting. Today I’m doing my best to be green.”
Change is simply one of two consonants in the universe – the other one being the love of God. We may not like the constancy of change, but for the most part, we live with it. We take our pictures. We share our stories, and we get on with it. The only time we really worry about it is when change is forced upon us – like a loss, or an illness, or even being told to floss or eat healthier or exercise – the kind of change that is out of our control.
Even in a political system that gives us voice and vote, we can still feel like things are being forced upon us when we do not agree with the way things go. That can make us want to cling to the past more firmly and hold it up like a shining example of what life should be about. Truly, there is a certain wisdom in bringing the best of the past into the future.
One of the things I left in Lafayette that will eventually make its way up here is a walking stick I picked up in Ghana that has a carved bird craning its neck to balance an egg on its tail feathers. I was told it was an illustration that, “The future depends upon the past.” Likewise, many of our own indigenous people share the belief that we are always preparing the world for the next seven generations. I think we get that idea here in this historic building, but we must also remember Isaiah’s cry (43:18-19), “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.”
Isaiah wasn’t calling for some weird spiritual amnesia or a denial of the past. He was warning us against worshiping it. That’s important because today we are celebrating a strangely mystic story about the full revelation of Jesus as the incarnational presence of God. This story is important to our heritage and our beliefs, but if you were to try to tell it to someone who is not familiar with it – let’s just say it would be awkward.
First, there’s the name of the story: the transfiguration of Jesus. What does that even mean? Let’s talk about it. Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John. Mountains and high places were holy spaces to the ancient Israelites and to many others in Mesopotamia. It was closer to the dome of heaven – which many thought was an actual, solid barrier between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdoms of the Earth. Suddenly Jesus becomes dazzling white – his clothes, his face, and his skin seem to emanate light!
And if that wasn’t weird enough, he is joined by Moses and Elijah. I’ve always wondered how they knew who these guys were. Did they have name tags? Bowling shirts? Coveralls? I like to think they were already up there and Jesus did some introduction.
“Guys,” to the disciples, “Don’t freak out, but I want to introduce you to some friends of mine.” To Moses and Elijah, “These are some of my disciples, Peter, James, and John.” To disciples, “Guys, this is Moses and Elijah. We’re going over here for a little chat. I need to bring these guys up to speed on some things, and maybe share some best practices. Just hang tight.”
I also love that it says that Peter was terrified, so he just said the first thing that came to his mind. I feel like he blurted this out with all the enthusiasm of a Swifty, “Wow. Wow. Wow. Ok, great! We’ll make tents. Three tents. I don’t need one. James, John, do you need one? No. Of course not. So yeah. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Let’s tabernacle, like…old schoolz.”
Then BOOM! Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening (ok no lightning, but definitely thunder) “Listen to my Son - the beloved” the same words proclaimed at the baptism of Jesus rang out from heaven. Then they had a very awkward walk down the mountain in which Jesus said, again, tell no one about this until after my resurrection.
Here’s why this bizarro story about happy, shiny Jesus matters. Moses and Elijah represent the law and the prophets, and Jesus was speaking with them as an equal because he was seen as the fulfillment of the law and of all prophecy. Jesus was God’s self-revelation for all people, for all time, forever!
That is why this story is so important to the Christian faith that it gets lifted up in one form or another every year. And every year I struggle with the difference between transformation and transfiguration. Jesus is not transformed, he is transfigured. What does that even mean?
Well, essentially it’s a difference between an internal or an external change. Braces, for example, transform your mouth, but a smile can “transfigure” your face. A smile tells us what you are feeling, just as laughter reveals your joy. The interesting thing to me about all of this is that the Greek word in the original text, “metamorpho,” can be translated either way. In fact, the word transfigure didn’t even exist before around the 14th century – kind of like a few other words that entered the text in the 1600s.
Here’s why this matters. Language changes over time, and that’s usually a good thing. Language changes to more accurately reflect our experiences. This word, “transfigure,” became important to this story because there was so much change happening in the world at that time. Culture and art, science and math, and the very concept of the earth and the stars were changing, and there was a deep need to know that God – the God revealed through Jesus – was still reliable.
I think we can identify with that. The need for solid ground – physically, philosophically, and theologically – flows through our art and culture and public lives. I saw this a while back when reading a Sci-Fi series called “The Long Earth” that describes a new reality that becomes opened up when humanity discovers a way to step into alternate versions of the Earth in new dimensions. A new balance between chaos and order had to be found, and in the midst of it, there were children who began to communicate with new speech patterns that seemed almost telepathic because they were processing information at a higher rate. That last part sounds like science fiction until your child grabs your phone out of your hand to show you how to use it to order coffee!
As I was thinking about all of that it occurred to me that we are living in a time of great change that involves a shift in our cosmology. We can see deeper into space and further into the fabric of sub-atomic structures than ever before. We are constantly exploring new realities that are both virtual and real, and cultures are clashing on every shore. We are faced with new debates over religion and faith and ethics that are reshaping our very society and our global community. In the midst of all of that, we probably want to know that our faith in Jesus is still reliable!
Perhaps this story of the Transfiguration of Jesus still has something more for us that is beyond myth and legend and is bolstered by our faith in Jesus as the revelation of God’s unchanging love. Perhaps our faith tradition might even help us crane our necks to balance the egg of our future. When I say “our faith tradition” I don’t just mean the Protestant Reformation. I mean the early church. For a little over a thousand years the church used the Greek or Latin form of the word “transform” to describe what Jesus did on the mountain. It wasn’t that he changed in substance and became “Super Jesus.” It was that he became something else in the eyes of the disciples.
From this point on, Jesus was no longer the Rabi who taught about God. Jesus now began to demonstrate that he was the one like Elijah who spoke for God, and he was the one like Moses whose actions were the actions of God! Jesus – according to John’s Gospel – was the embodiment of the words that spoke creation into being. He was the one whose actions demonstrated the power of God’s love over sin and death. That means that God’s love cannot be diminished by any of those other changes that may also be out of your control. That’s the first thing I want you to remember.
The next is to say that I used to think that only Jesus could be transfigured and that we were all transformed by God’s love through him. That might still be true, but I’ve come to realize that the transformations that I have seen and experienced have all, in some way, revealed the true nature of a person as God’s beloved child.
While I believe that these transformations happen over and over throughout a life of faith, some of you have heard me talk about one of my earlier experiences at a Montreat Youth Conference. I was raised in the church and already considered myself a believer, and I was beginning to think about what life would be like after high school. I had a notion that my brother and I were going to open an ad agency and take on the world! As providence would have it, the theme of the conference was “Branded” and the general idea was that the world tries to make you feel needy and define you by brand loyalty, whereas God’s love helps you see who you are as a child of God.
I walked away thinking that following Jesus and going into advertising might be a harder walk than I wanted. God bless you if you’re walking that path, but I took a left turn and went home by another way. I guess you could say that I was transfigured in that I’ve been seeking to know myself as a child of God ever since.
There’s another story about transformation that I want to share with you. It’s about a man named Herb Green whom I met in Lafayette in the course of my journey, but I need to give you a trigger warning because it starts with the death of a child. I won't go into detail about that, but after losing his child, Mr. Green gave up on God. He lost his faith, and he was in a bad way.
Who could blame him, right? Well, Mr. Green, began to take solace by playing his djembe in a park nearby. It was about the only thing that gave him joy. A woman heard him and asked if he could teach her grandkids. He said he would, and he did. After he began to teach her grandchildren something softened in him, and he realized that God still had children for him to help raise, and doing so (little by little) restored his faith. He started teaching more children. Given his background in Psychology, he began to see that so many of the problems we have as adults are because we do not learn to manage our emotions as children – especially when there is trauma at a young age.
That was 30 years ago. Since then he has established “Pouchi Percusion” – a program where he connects with children through music. He teaches them to be aware of their emotions so that they can control them. He offers God’s love by example and intent for children who may or may not have ever heard about Jesus. Most of them have not had good examples of Christ’s teachings to follow, and Mr. Green is very intentional about offering such an example.
He even arranged a trip to New York for these children to play on stages they could not have imagined playing on before. When I saw them play, I saw a man of God who was present with children in trauma, and both he and the children were being transformed by the grace and mercy of God!
Friends, as we end this season of enlightenment that is epiphany and move toward the time of preparation for Easter that we call Lent, we are going to continue exploring the incarnational nature of God! We’re going to explore what it means to be the body of Christ in the world as we, like Jesus, set our face toward the cross, the empty tomb, and the resurrection that awaits us all.
Hopefully, this all has you thinking about the ways that God has been active and present in your life, and maybe even about the ways your true nature as a child of God might yet be revealed.
At least, I pray that it will be so with me, and with you, and to God be the glory – now and always. Amen.
He even arranged a trip to New York for these children to play on stages they could not have imagined playing on before. When I saw them play, I saw a man of God who was present with children in trauma, and both he and the children were being transformed by the grace and mercy of God!
Friends, as we end this season of enlightenment that is epiphany and move toward the time of preparation for Easter that we call Lent, we are going to continue exploring the incarnational nature of God! We’re going to explore what it means to be the body of Christ in the world as we, like Jesus, set our face toward the cross, the empty tomb, and the resurrection that awaits us all.
Hopefully, this all has you thinking about the ways that God has been active and present in your life, and maybe even about the ways your true nature as a child of God might yet be revealed.
At least, I pray that it will be so with me, and with you, and to God be the glory – now and always. Amen.
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