Monumental Transformation - February 26, 2006
Transfiguration SundayMark 9: 2-9
Have you been watching the Olympics this year? I've seen bits and pieces here and there, but overall, I've watched a lot less than I used to. Maybe I'm busier these days than I was two years ago when the last Summer Games occurred, or four years ago when the last Winter Games were played out. Is it me, or have the Olympics changed?
I remember when the Olympics used to be about excellence and sport. I remember when Olga Korbut, this impossibly tiny little girl danced on a thin beam, and flew off at the end of the routine with a power that defied her delicate frame, and how little girls all over the world wanted to become gymnasts. It didn't matter so much where Olga was from, it was all about the grace, and strength, and athleticism. I remember Dorothy Hammill flying across the ice on skates, doing jumps and maneuvers that to me seemed to defy the laws of physics, yet she made it seem so easy. And always with a smile, and great hair!
Today the Olympic stories - the ones that get broadcast, anyway-- seem to be less about healthy competition and the amazing athletic abilities of the competitors than they are about the personal relationships between the highest profile team members. And doping. I don't remember ever hearing about doping before about 12 years ago. Or am I looking back through a lens of romanticism and seeing only the things I want to remember?
That human impulse to capture and remember things drives us to memorializing either the best parts of things, or sometimes the worst.
Peter James and John find themselves in a rather mystical place in today's Gospel lesson, having some rather mystical experiences - something we could find in our favorite fantasy novel. In our passage, we find a scene that could be written by Tolkein, Lewis, or Rowling. Jesus' ordinary earthly clothes, surely dark with dirt and the stains of just plain living suddenly become un-earthly white. My favorite line in this passage is in verse 3:"such as no one on earth could bleach them." That just jumps out at me, and I find myself asking, "What did that mean in the ancient world? Surely they did not know about Clorox back then." What an unusual way to describe what has happened!
But, is it that unusual? The writer of Mark tries to put this mystical experience in earthly terms. Since no one who hears this story re-told would really understand what this must have looked like, the writer uses the closest metaphor he can to try to describe the indescribable. When I am preparing each week for the sermon, I of course begin early in the week, reading the passage that I have selected ahead of time, consulting commentaries, doing a word study here and there to help me understand what is going on in the world of the scripture itself, in order that I might come to more fully discern all the things the Sprit might have for us to hear this week.
But when push comes to shove, and I have lived with a text for four or five days, the deadline approaches when a sermon must be written; I sit at my computer and I reach out as far as I can in trying to find a metaphor that we will all understand for the grace that is beyond comprehension. Because we use what tools we have; as a preacher my tools are words.
Peter tried to use the tools that he had. For Peter, using what he had meant trying to hammer out a monument in the form of a booth - three booths, actually, for each of the three who appeared there on that mystical mountaintop. We can imagine, can't we, the overwhelming desire to somehow contain what they had seen? It's as if nothing had prepared Peter for what he saw, and so he felt as though he must do something - anything - to preserve this experience as long as possible.
The author of Mark's gospel gently reminds us that Peter, James, and John find themselves in over their heads. Hear verse 6:"He did not know what to say, for they were terrified." Makes sense to me. When I think back to all the times that I have groped for words to describe my fear or sorrow or immense social discomfort, I can remember saying some pretty ridiculous things when I didn't know what to say. Sometimes, the best we can manage is to admit that we don't know what to say. But Peter was kind of "out there" as Biblical characters go, so he said the first thing that popped into his head.
There is nothing, really, that prepares us for what the transfiguration brings. There is no earthly bleach strong enough to turn our ordinary lives dazzling white. There are no earthly words mystical enough, there is no earthly monument big enough or grand enough to contain God.
A few years ago, I had the occasion to visit an actual Olympic village: Squaw Valley in California, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics. Squaw Valley is now a ski resort, of course. I tried to imagine what it must have looked like all those years ago, filled with people, and the excitement of the games. I had to use quite a bit of imagination, because the Olympic Games I was trying to conjure up in my head took place before I was born, and before the media-saturated age we live in today. I imagined throngs of athletes and spectators. Squaw Valley is shaped like a bowl, with mountains all around it, so I imagined it as a bowl full of people. But on that day I saw it, it was an empty shell. There are signs everywhere commemorating the games gone by, but the Olympic Village looked kind of pitiful by today's standards. Everything looked a little rough around the edges. The monument they built to those days did not stand the test of time in the way that the games themselves do.
What are the ways we build monuments to our experiences of God? Are we willing to live into the moments of transformation instead of building booths of remembrance of days gone by?
I'm always amused and a little bewildered when I see people wielding video cameras at special occasions. When parents and grandparents spend the entire graduation, musical performance, baptism, confirmation, wedding, etc with a camera stuck in front of their face, I want to say, "Put that down! Experience what is happening in the life of the person you love. Be present in what is happening in the room." Because no video can truly capture what is happening in the room. You can no more digitally reproduce a sacrament than Peter could contain the transfiguration in a box. But we are sometimes desperate to re-create what we don't fully understand, aren't we? And although Peter could not fully grasp what was happening up on that mountaintop, he wanted to preserve it.
Jesus does not stop to chide Peter for what Peter had said out of his fear and ignorance, even though Peter would have been better off if he had remained speechless. Jesus must have known that it was a long walk back down that mountain to the ordinary routine daily living, without its mountaintop moments and dazzling displays. In fact, on the walk down, Jesus asks them to keep to themselves what they had seen. Maybe Jesus wanted to preserve the memory for those three, and not have it sullied by what happened when a story gets around. Maybe it was a loving gift he could leave each of those men, to let them remember for themselves what they had seen so that they could have each had their own experience of it, instead of homogenizing it into a universal story.
Perhaps Jesus is preparing the men for what he knows will come next; maybe he is giving them just enough Glory, just enough glimpse of ultimate joy to tide them over through the pain that is in the days to come, days he hints at when he reminds them that the Son of Man must die and raise from the dead.
In one of his essays, J. R. R. Tolkien distinguishes between different kinds of climaxes. The tragic tale, with its sorrowful ending, he calls a "dyscatastrophe"; for "the Consolation of the Happy Ending" he coins the word "eucatastrophe": the blessed cataclysm by which lovers are reunited after many tests and trials, or the true king is separated from all pretenders and finally ascends the throne. "In such stories," Tolkein says, "when the sudden turn' comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of the story, and lets a gleam come through." Mark's "eucatastrophe" cracks open his story at midpoint, leaving us stunned and speechless. Like Peter, we press into service whatever transformations, transmutations or transmogrifications we have known, clumsily likening them to what we have glimpsed on the mountain. We say what we can say and wait "until after the Son of Man be risen from the dead."[1]
The days of Lent are fast approaching, brothers and sisters. The days when we will need to remember our experiences of God, those moments when the gleam of joy and grace pierces through the web of this earthy life. We will need: not memorials or monuments to God; we will want: not to watch a video of transformation, but to recall the real thing. It may leave us momentarily speechless, this change that God is about to bring to the world. God is preparing for us a season of remembrance, and God will provide for us exactly what we need to get us through it.
Thanks be to God.
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien quoted by Patrick J. Willson in Willson's article originally published in Christian Century magazine, January 26, 1994.
