Brightening up or clouding up?

Their steps slow as they climb. The energy they felt when they set out hours ago has disappeared. So have the sounds of the lakeside village left far below. All you can hear now are footsteps on the rocks and the sound of laboured breathing. Jesus walks ahead of them as he often does. Peter, James and John, in a line behind, trying to keep up.

When they finally reach the top, they stretch out on the ground, too tired to think. They may have dozed off. Then they hear another sound, voices speaking quietly together. The sun breaks through the clouds and this light falls on Jesus. Just then there is a roll of thunder or something.

They never could quite agree on what took place that day. A dream, a vision, the voice of God. But whatever it was, they could never again look at Jesus the same way. Why, the whole world looked different now, after that dazzling light.

Epiphany is the season set aside to reflect on the light of God’s revelation. We have traced that radiance over these past six weeks from the bright star guiding the magi, through the appearance of the spirit at the baptism of Jesus, in stories of call and in healings of the body and community, to this final brilliant epiphany on a mountaintop.

On this high place, the disciples see Jesus transfigured before them. The Greek word here is ‘metamorpho.’ Jesus is changed into shining light. The experience is a revelation and yet they can’t see all that clearly. The clouds obscure the scene. You’d think the brightness of God’s revelation would illuminate the scene but it dazzles and obscures vision.

Therein lies the irony of God’s revelation. It not only reveals a path forward, it can just as easily confuse our way. It raises questions about what we thought we knew. The disciples come down the mountain quite bewildered by the experience. It’s not only the metamorphosis of Jesus, it’s also another step in the metamorphosis of the disciples. They are changing.

A question came to the floor at a church meeting. Someone asked, “How many United Churchites does it take to change a light bulb?”

After some vigourous debate, a respected, well informed member of the congregation stood up and said, “We’ need to slow the process down. Before any vote, we need four committees to consider the idea in principle:

One committee to review the biblical scholarship regarding change in an historical-critical study,

A second committee to consider whether its an essential change to the polity of the church and in agreement with our Basis of Union,

A third committee to formulate the final report and present it to the courts of the church, Presbytery, Conference and finally the General Council.

And a fourth committee to plan the potluck after.”

More discussion ensued until one final person stood up at the meeting and said, “Change!? What change? My grandmother donated that light bulb and now you want to change it?”

Faith traditions have always had this struggle to manage or adapt to change. We don’t always do that well. We are remembered as the ones who rejected Galileo and a host of other scientists. And still we are trying to balance tradition and innovation. Mark describes a balance between these two powerful forces. The disciples have a vision of Elijah and Moses, the two greatest prophets of Judaism in conversation with Jesus. They understand God to say, “This is my beloved, listen to him.”

For Mark, Jesus is linked to these teachers from the past and yet he offers a revelation for his own time. Faith develops in this conversation between a community’s present and past.

Individually too, each one of us is on a journey of understanding. Our faith is in development. There have been many attempts to trace psychological development through various stages. Some of you have read Piaget, Ericcson, and Fowler.

Author, Scott Peck, once said that when people came to see him for psychotherapy, the religious ones often left as sceptics or atheists, while the atheists and sceptics left as deeply religious people. This caused him to put together his own stages of spiritual development.

The first stage is undeveloped spirituality or chaos. At this stage people may appear to be caring but they are actually manipulative and self-serving. The lack of integrity or lack of principles leads them into all kinds of social problems. They might end running a huge corporation or they might end up as habitual criminals or both.

The second stage is Institutional Order - when a stage one person who lives in chaos suddenly finds religion, it often is a rigid, and legalistic kind of faith. At this stage the desire is to have order and clear guidelines. Churches that find themselves in stage 2 are authoritarian. This is the stage for fundamentalist religion. You show you have faith by obeying the rules, the fundamentals. The image of God is the rule giver, the commandment maker. God is the judge who is going to punish everyone who does not follow the rules and reward those who do.

Then we come to stage three - scepticism. This is the stage where you accept nothing on authority. You realize that the authorities you thought had all the answers, are as fallible as the rest of us. People at this stage often leave faith groups that do not allow for their questions and doubts. They may be more advanced in their thinking and spirituality than persons in stage 2 but they cannot feel comfortable in many churches.

I once heard Marion Best one of our UnitedChurch moderators say that at a World Council of Churches gathering, one of the other religious leaders said, “You in the UnitedChurch are the doubting Thomas denomination.” What a compliment. Faith should have room for questions, reason, and science.

Peck says there is a fourth stage of faith development. In this stage, we appreciate reason but also recognize its limitations. We can’t depend on intellect to provide all the right answers or questions. There are other ways of knowing, other avenues to discover truth.

John Ralston Saul has described the limitations of reason. He points to non-rational processes such as common sense, intuition, imagination and memory. Saul says a good example of this is Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky said that he played hockey by skating not to where the puck was but to where the puck was going.”

The experience of the disciples on the mountaintop may or may not have happened as Mark told it. But as one aboriginal teacher said...this is true and it may even have happened. The disciples were operating in the realm of imagination, intuition, and vision.

It’s the awareness that beyond all of our chaos,order and logic, there is a spiritual connection that we share as human beings. Maybe it’s an ability to wonder. We have all sung with little ones, Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. But even if we are clever enough to learn the chemical components of a star, that wonder should never disappear.

Thomas Merton once wrote, “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes...it becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without (God). It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.”

A couple of nights ago I saw the film adaptation of The Stone

Angel. Parts of it worked beautifully. But they left out some crucial theological reflection in the closing scenes.

Crusty Hagar is lying in a hospital bed. She does not have much time left. A minister stops in and offers to pray. She interrupts him, asks if he knows, All people that one earth do dwell. He does and he sings it for her. It ends with the words, “Come ye before him and rejoice.”

The words are an epiphany for Hagar. “This knowing comes upon me so forcefully, so shatteringly and with such a bitterness as I have never felt before. I must always, always have wanted that - simply to rejoice.”

Those critical words never made it into the movie but they are there for those who still read. It is that ability to rejoice over the wonder in the world and in our neighbours that keeps moving our hearts from stone to flesh. May it be so for us. May your metamorphosis continue.

with thanks to:

William Sloane Coffin, Margaret Laurence, Thomas Merton, Scott Peck, John Ralston Saul.

Brightening up or clouding up?

Posted on: 02/23/2009 11:33

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