If you were here last week for Youth Sunday, then you know that one of the young preachers cast aspersions on the age of at least a couple of the pastors, decidedly on one more than the other. While John Weicher was challenged to remember what high school was like for him, I felt challenged even to remember that there was a high school in my time. I hasten to add, then, that indeed there was a high school way back then and that, in fact, I can remember quite a bit from those years. I am finding that my long term memory sharpens with the turning of every calendar year these days.
But to put the ages of John Weicher and me in proper perspective, while John was still an infant in swaddling cloths – and let’s not rush to comparisons here; there have been more than two babies over time wrapped in swaddling cloths – I was taking youth on work camp trips and to the national Presbyterian Youth Triennium that John will be attending this summer with some of our youth. What I especially remember from those Triennium events is that they tended to be mountaintop experiences. A couple thousand or so teen-agers packed into the auditorium of Purdue University, revved up into a kind of frenzy by religious singers and “energizers.” The kids really got into the relative ecstasy of it all. “Why isn’t church like this all the time?” became a recurring lament. But soon all that would be over. It would be time to go back to parents and peer pressure, to college entrance exams and competitive sports. The real world.
But on this Transfiguration Sunday let us remember that it’s not just the young who often feel a disconnect between the mountaintop and the plain below. All of us – young and old – find in life that we are not always on the top of the mountain. Even if we are privileged to have wonderful mountaintop experiences – and, I hasten to add, I think more of us do more often than we are inclined to admit – our real lives are infused with both delights and sorrows, with both triumph and tragedy. Peter – the disciple in Scripture who most consistently speaks for us – would like to stay there on the mountaintop. To savor the exquisite moment. But Jesus tells him that they must go back down to the foot of the mountain where the real world beckons them. That the living out of their faith must take place here, not there.
In her memoir, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx, Heidi Neumark tells a powerful story of transfiguration far from any mountaintop. In the gritty streets surrounding the church she served for almost twenty years – a church aptly named Transfiguration Lutheran Church – the work of Jesus Christ became real. The community was struggling, barely surviving, when she arrived. Standing amid poverty and the myriad problems that can accompany such a demon – crime, drug abuse, lack of education and opportunity, lack of hope – Transfiguration Lutheran Church had kept its doors shut tight to the world around it.
But Pastor Neumark made a connection between the story of the Transfiguration in Scripture and new possibilities for a dying urban church. She especially focused in her mind on the last verses of that story – the verses that recount the healing of the little boy by Jesus after he and the three disciples have come down from the mountain. “When Peter and the others came down from the mountain,” she writes, “they found a father and a child gasping for life. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And they found transfiguration.
“And so it is. When the disciples of this Bronx church unlocked the doors of their private shelter and stepped out into the neighborhood, they did meet the distress of the community convulsed and mauled by poverty. . . . But they also discovered transfiguration as a congregation in connection with others.”
We can find our own example not unlike the church in the Bronx. Ours is known as Broad Street Ministry in what used to be a proud old church known as Chambers-Wylie Presbyterian Church. Years ago it was full of people and money and power. But much of all that moved out at the same time that Broad Street began to thrive as an arts center. The Kimmel Center is virtually across the street. What used to be an imposing church building began to be dwarfed by the larger secular institutions surrounding it.
The Presbytery of Philadelphia went through a long deliberative process trying to assess how best to use or dispose of the old property. And in the midst of that process a young – and, we might say, itinerant preacher named Bill Golderer, someone who himself had wandered into the church in a somewhat unorthodox way – had a vision to do something different and new with a decaying old church. One of the first things was to unlock those impenetrable doors to the street and welcome those who were passing by.
A few suburban churches lent money and leadership. We were not among that first group, but now we have become a partner through our youth ministry and outreach programs. The old pews in the sanctuary are being replaced by chairs, for which an appeal is made in the most recent newsletter. Some of you sitting here this morning have donated and/or refinished chairs that will help fill that sanctuary on Broad Street with people who may look quite different from most of us gathered here on a Sunday morning but who, very much like us, hunger for the bread of life.
Speaking of bread, much of the ministry of Broad Street Ministry includes table fellowship and food that nourishes the body. Many who wander in from the street hunger for both spiritual and physical food. The newsletter advertises a special Shrove Tuesday celebration this coming week with a menu of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, and applesauce! Attendees are invited to bring “your wonderful self and anyone else you know who likes people and delicious food.” I wonder how many of those who now attend regularly might have been suspicious of church people in the past but are beginning to experience the hospitality and acceptance of Jesus Christ through those who have created a ministry right in the teeming real life of south Broad Street. It’s a transfiguration story for sure.
Before Broad Street Ministry came into being there had been lots of prayer by lots of people. And it is not an insignificant detail in Luke’s Transfiguration story that he alone describes the event in the context of prayer. Luke’s Jesus prays more often than either Matthew’s or Mark’s, and when Jesus prays big things often happen. In the story of the Transfiguration it’s while Jesus is praying that his face takes on a glow and his clothes become dazzling white. Luke wants us to see this transformation as an indication of holy transcendence. The disciples are meant to see all of this as the fulfillment of their ancient story in which Moses’ face shone, too, in the presence of God. “‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’” comes a voice from the cloud shrouding the mountain. And the disciples are mystified.
They go down from the mountain as Jesus leads them, back to a world in pain and in need of healing and comfort. But they have been changed. Into the midst of the real world of suffering, they take with them a lasting glimpse of transcendence that will infuse the work before them. They will not always be able to make the connection between mystery and reality – that is, they won’t always be able to understand the relationship between glory and suffering – but they will take courage and gain strength from the realization that in this world of sin the God of the universe yet hovers and upholds.
As Harry Emerson Fosdick once observed, “I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it [all].”
Mary Goshert picks up on this theme of mystery that envelops us all. “God-with-us happens,” she says, “at all points of life; but we are more attuned to God-with-us, perhaps, when we are open to receive – having opened ourselves in prayer, through fasting from food and from the distractions of everyday life, having gone away into the wilderness. Or when we open ourselves to receive by silent contemplation before the loveliness of painting, sculpture, words in poetry; when we are vulnerable to our dreams, or allow ourselves to be loved by another – as we allow the sacraments of our Church to penetrate deeply into our consciousness; when we know ourselves near death, and at new birth – when we are desperately in need and helpless to help ourselves. . . .”
At the top of the mountain that day as his appearance was transfigured before the ones who knew him best, we can only assume that Jesus received what he needed to be able to return to the city and offer himself up for the sins of the world. God did not rescue Jesus from the passion that was coming. Yet God was not absent from him. Even the massive evil, the calculated brutality of those who would crucify him, could not smother the glory of God that was in the Christ.
But the Transfiguration is not just about how Jesus was changed in those moments on the mountain, it is also about how his disciples were changed because of their experience of God through him. We, too, have been claimed and named as children of God through Water and the word. Whether dramatic or hidden from our sight, God has chosen us.
As we prepare to enter the season of Lent, we most certainly are coming down from the mountain – from the bright lights of Christmas and the revelation that is the season of Epiphany to the trenches of our faith. But having glimpsed the revelation of our God means that this world is never the same. Neither are we. Amen.