On Earth as it is…

Mark 9:2-10

Rev’d Dr. David Fountain

O Lord help us to become masters of ourselves so that we might become the servants of others. Take our lips and speak through them, take our minds and think with them, take our hands and work through them and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

I take as my text the Gospel of St. Mark chapter nine verse six. “Peter blurted this out without thinking, stunned as they all were by what they were seeing.”

The transfiguration of Jesus from being a human into some kind of heavenly hybrid is one of the most momentous events recorded in the gospels and Mark’s as first among them is no exception.

 To observe that Peter, James, and John were stunned I would suggest is understating by a mile how they must have felt. Because what we have here is a pretty wild event. And for these guys this was wild amid a couple of years of witnessing Jesus do some pretty wild stuff. So, for those of you who read the gospels as history and not as allegory this transfiguration incident, took on then, as it would today, a Spielbergian, alien, UAP, cinematic quality in that Jesus body as well as his clothing lights up, he’s chatting up a couple of long dead Jewish icons, and that’s not all. A disembodied voiceover from, a cloud mind you, instructs the three handpicked disciples who witnessed all this, to henceforth try to pay attention to what Jesus had to say. Hardly necessary if you ask me. Jesus would have had my full attention after that!

 Central to a proper understanding of the transfiguration narrative is the recognition that in all three of its Gospel versions it has the literary genre of an "epiphany" rather than of a "theophany" or "vision." Allow me to break that out for us a bit.

 Understood as a technical designation for a biblical literary genre, "theophany" refers to a description a coming of God recognized by the terrifying circumstances that accompany it, such as an earthquake, lightning or a storm, a burning bush — that sort of thing…rather than by seeing the actual figure of God. Today no one seriously reports such thing apart from an occasional internet posting of a piece of toast with Jesus image emblazoned on it. Don’t believe me? Get out your phone and Google Jesus face on a piece of toast if you get bored with the sermon.

 A "vision" is a disposition of literary motifs which narrates the vision or seeing, by a privileged individual or group of supernatural phenomena located mainly in the heavenly realm. A vision employs a verb of “seeing” or its equivalent and centers upon a witnessing heavenly realities reserved to the viewer. Once again hardly anyone can honestly say they have had an authentic vision that isn’t self-authenticating.

 Finally, as in the case of the transfiguration an "epiphany" as a modern, technical designation is a sudden and unexpected manifestation of a divine or heavenly being experienced by certain selected persons as an event independent of their seeing, in which the divine being reveals a divine attribute, action, or message. So, in short what we have here is an epiphany. And here I want us to stop and consider that all of us, from time to time witness words and deeds of some who reveal at just the right moment some attribute, action or message that embodies the gospel of Jesus that transfigures us or the moment we are in.

 So, the initial epiph-anic action of this pivotal mandatory epiphany occurs as Jesus transfigures, into a heavenly (in this case a lit up) being while still on earth, indicating to the three disciples his future and permanent attainment of glory in heaven as promised to the righteous after their death. I think the real epiphany here is the instruction to pay attention to what Jesus says. That was an epiphany!

 Luke’s gospel however, unlike Mark’s does not use the word “transfigure” in his account, possibly to avoid giving his readers the impression that Jesus was metamorphosed, or changed from one form into another in a fashion that might be mistaken for popular and frivolous pagan Roman mythology, like when the Roman God Jupiter turns himself into a bull in order to have one of many serial extra marital affairs with the Goddess Europa.

 Transfiguration is all about as Jesus said in his prayer “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and here’s the punch line: “on earth as it is in heaven.” Transfiguration, you might say, for the purpose of my sermon this morning, is replicating something we associate with heaven, here on earth.

 Now, here’s a transfiguration epiphany story for you: Some years ago, when I served as Associate Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard, I was given the duty of entertaining an elderly Anglican clergyman by the name of Trever Huddelston who was visiting Harvard. My senior colleague was out of town so I was stuck with the thankless task of taking him to the Faculty club for fortified spirits (sherry and port I was told he would enjoy…in excess) and dinner. He ordered the horse steak out of curiosity, (a menu holdover from World War II meat rationing days) and was liberal in his washing it down. He mumbled throughout the meal with an accent that was so donnish and British that I nearly fell face down in my Indian pudding by meals end. I took him to the a guest residence “The Spark’s House” and almost literally tucked him in and left wondering how I had been saddled with such an undistinguished and utterly booooring guest to have to tend to.

 Fast forward and by way of contrast, a year later, Archbishop Desmond Tutu came to Boston and Boston College, Major Ray Flynn (no friend of Harvard’s) as a political affront to the university lavished a Fannual Hall photo-op for him. The Black Student Union Faculty Advisor and Massachusetts Hall asked me to take the Harvard limo (a faded old model black Contentinal left in some alumni will) across the river to get Tutu and tour him through Harvard. The reason they picked me to host him rather than some Harvard muckitie-muck was because Tutu had called on the President and Fellows of Harvard College to boycott any company doing business with South Africa by divesting themselves of their rather formidable university stock portfolio (something I had publicly advocated, which they had no intention of doing,) therefore only a fool from Harvard, or one with a circumspect future would host him through the university. In this case…me.

As we walked through the yard I asked Tutu how he had come to enter the ministry. It seems there was a young white Anglican priest who helped his mother pick up some fallen packages one day to the shock of white as well as blacks passing by and to the disbelief of Tutu as a young boy. Whites demonstrating that kind of simple courtesy was unknown to Tutu’s childhood. It wasn’t uncommon for a white South Afrikaner to ask that a black person to move so their shadow wouldn’t “touch” them. He never forgot the kindness of that man in the collar and Tutu knew he wanted something of what that man possessed.

“Who was that man,” I asked.

 “Trever Huddelston,”  Archbishop Tutu replied.

 Here’s the point of all this rambling up here. Trever Huddleston was transfigured from within from being a participant in a white apartheid South African culture of racist suppression, into someone willing to help a black African woman struggling with carrying and spilling her groceries, while tending a little boy. In doing so he unknowingly altered history by inspiring that little boy to become a Nobel Laureate who with Nelson Mandela transformed a society and modeled for the world the power of transfigurational change. Trever Huddleston whom I thoughtlessly derided, behind his back, had revealed something of the kingdom of heaven, here on earth by simply picking up a bag of spilled groceries.

 Most of us will never find ourselves with such an opportunity to live that kind of transfigurational presence - with such dramatic international impact and consequence. But, we are all composing lives that have the opportunity to reveal life as Jesus imaged it being in heaven — here in our everyday lives.

 Most of our choices will have consequences that will touch those 20 or 30 or 40 people, who know something of us more than our name. But those simple divine acts will become our life story, the stuff of generational memory. And amid that story we write we will make the difference for someone perhaps someone whom we may not even know. We will be for them a transfiguration.

 Teach us, O God, to walk trustfully today in thy presence, that thy voice may encourage us, thine arm defend us and thy love surround us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.