Preachers these days
are urged to do what some people call “life application” sermons. That is, to
preach a sermon that applies to each of your lives so you can take it home with
you. To preach in a way that teaches each of you what to do about whatever
scripture you heard in church. I often think, though, that preaching a “take
home” sermon is one more way of letting the world dictate to the gospel instead
of the gospel dictate to the world. Yes, I’d love it if you took something home
from a sermon that made you think about it all week, but not necessarily in a
practical or even relevant way. I think, as I friend of mine always says, “I’d
rather be faithful than relevant.” I believe that. I believe it because I think
in the act of being faithful we become relevant by doing what God calls us to
do.
Mind you, I wish
preaching the gospel was as easy as an instruction booklet labeled “Relevant
Preaching.” I could look up the scripture in the booklet and know just what to
say to tell you how to lead your life. That seldom works though, because so
much of the gospel of Jesus Christ asks us to step far beyond an instruction
booklet and into a world of mystery and transfiguration. To let the world
dictate the gospel is to let the gospel become relevant by taming it down, when
what we really have is a gospel that is extra-relevant, extra-revelatory, and
extra-ordinary.
We
trivialize the gospel when we try to “make it personal.” The Transfiguration of
Jesus on the mountain is hardly personal. The Transfiguration is neither
personal nor individual. The Transfiguration has to do with God.
The Transfiguration
shows Jesus transformed into a being of shining light, dressed in white
garments. There is nothing personal about this. The Transfiguration is probably
one of the most impersonal things Christians believe in! The birth of Jesus is
personal; all of us were born the same way. Maybe shepherds and angels didn’t
attend us, but we were born of a human mother. The death on the cross is personal.
One of the things theologians will tell us is God sacrificed for each one of us.
And the same thing can apply to the Resurrection; each of us can lay hold of
eternal life through the promise of the Resurrection.
All these are
personal; they can, in fact, apply to our current lives. We all need a God who
understands what it is to be human. We all need a God who suffers with us. We
all need a God who offers us eternal life. But do we need the Transfiguration?
The Transfiguration holds within it the idea that metamorphosis, that
transformation is possible. The Transfiguration holds within it the idea that
God finds the world, no matter how bad it may seem, how troubled, or how
violent, and transfigures the world with blessing. The Transfiguration tells
us, as the African-American artist Henry Tanner once remarked, “The world
doesn’t have to be made perfect before it can be made new.”[1]
The Transfiguration is the
event that revealed Jesus fully as both gloriously human and gloriously divine.
The Transfiguration is the moment when time both stood still and kept right on
going and the reign of God was truly past, present and yet-to-come. The mystery
and the glory and the blessing of this event is neither personal nor relevant,
or for that matter, practical. Instead the Transfiguration is extra-relevant,
extra-revelatory, and extra-ordinary.
The transfiguration
is about changing the way we understand the world and God working in the world.
It is far more than the surface change of shining garments. In the
Transfiguration, the surface change is not the focus, it is that the entire way
of understanding God and time and how the past, present and yet-to-come meet when
God interrupts death to give new life. And the Transfiguration, while it can
seem personal, is really extra-relevant, extra-revelatory, and extra-ordinary.
The
Transfiguration, because it consists of God doing an entirely new thing, sends
out that new thing far beyond the person or thing God touches and transforms.
Instead, God transfigures the world itself.
The light of the transfigured Christ now beckons us to look beyond the
personal and the individual to how we are in the world. The light of the
transfigured Christ calls us to see where God does new things. The light of the
transfigured Christ invites us to join with that new thing God has done and is
doing and will continue to do. And that is the light God gave us and gives to
take the shining Christ as a candle into the world’s darkness. AMEN.
The
Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2018
[1] Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859-1937)
African-American artist best known for his paintings of religious subjects and
his depictions of African-American subjects as whole persons rather than the
typical caricatures of his time.
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