Each year, before the beginning of Lent, we climb mount Tabor with the disciples. We pause here for a story so miraculous, Jesus orders his followers to keep silent about the sight until after he is risen from the dead. This is the story of the Transfiguration. Every year before Lent, we tell this story. We go to the mountaintop to shout Hallelujah before facing the hard road to Jerusalem.
This morning, I want to dare you to hold this strange story of transfiguration up against the stories our world tells about transformation.
We celebrate surface level transformation stories in our world. We like and subscribe. I wonder whether history books, in talking about the early 21st century will have insets showing our obsession with before and after pictures, for weight loss, for cosmetic surgeries, for dental implants. I can’t go to a doctor’s office anymore without encountering in the waiting room a television show about people who are fixing up a house. They always knock out a wall to make it “open concept.”
We tell a lot of stories about transformation, and these transformations tend to be measured with slimmer waistlines, higher cheekbones, and the addition of a kitchen island. But is that the only transformation we expect? Are our expectations so limited that we can only imagine our life mostly as it is, but with a few more filters applied? With a coat of paint and some subway tile? Is that all we dream for? Or does God invite us to hope for something more?
I want to dare you today, to hold the story of the Transfiguration up against the stories or transformation we see so often. Because Jesus’ story isn’t just about changing something exterior. Yes, his clothes get miraculously clean. But that’s not the heart of the story, is it? The cloud descends. God’s voice says, “This is my son, the beloved. Listen to him.” The transfiguration is about the veil being lifted from the disciples eyes so they can see something which is always true. It’s less about Jesus being transformed and more about the sight, the vision of his followers being transformed.
We need to acknowledge, there are a lot of churches out there that promise external transformation. If you just say your prayers. If you come faithfully to your small group. If you mail in your offering in this envelope, God will bless you. Often the blessed transformation these churches promise is an economic blessing. “God will return your offering to you tenfold.”
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that many of our religious institutions end up fixated on what our world holds out as “success.” Once, sitting in the waiting room at my allergist’s office, I saw one of those fixer-upper shows about a pastor’s house getting remodeled. At the end, he thanked the crew, and he tearfully thanked God for the blessing. Now, here I want to be careful, because do I believe the pastor experienced the renovation of their house as a blessing, absolutely. No question. But something inside of me was also so frustrated by that show.
If blessing is only measured economically. If you can count all your blessings when you file your taxes, because you owe the IRS part of the blessings as income, I worry that your view of blessing is too small, your view of faith is too small, your view of the kind of transformation God wants to offer our world is too small.
Dignity not Detention
This was a week when we saw too-small thinking in action. Many of us in this church journeyed last month up to the roundhouse, to the state capitol, to push for the Dignity not Detention Bill. We were working, with partners, to put one of our ministries out of business. At the Landing here at St. Michael’s we receive migrants who have recently been released from immigration detention. The Dignity not Detention Act would have closed all the detention centers in New Mexico.
We were working to close these centers, because human rights are being abused at the three facilities in New Mexico. We hear story after story about insufficient and spoiled food. I interviewed a young man who had been unable to wash his clothes for weeks, because he wasn’t being paid for his work cleaning the facility. He apologized for the smell. He was visibly uncomfortable wearing dirty clothes. All I could do was assure him I would alert the attorneys from the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center about how he was being treated. The New York Times had an article this week detailing the inhumane use of solitary confinement in these facilities. The list of abuses is long and well-documented.
But, even though the Dignity not Detention Act passed resoundingly through two senate committees, it died on the senate floor. Otero County, Torrance County, and Cibola county officials managed to convince enough senators to prioritize economics over human rights. The counties say they rely on the income the for-profit prisons provide, and their argument swayed just over half the senate to kill the bill. As I said, I believe a majority of our senators thought too small. I’m deeply disappointed. I know many of you are as well. I needed this Transfiguration story this week. I needed the mountaintop. I needed a vision of hope.
Looking to the Saints for Help: Absalom Jones and Desmond Tutu
The senate vote happened on Monday, so I had the week to process the loss. I grieved for the thousands of people who will be locked up in these terrible conditions because of the vote. And I found myself thinking about two saints of the church. Blessed Absalom Jones and Archbishop Demond Tutu.
Absalom Jones was the first Black man, the first formerly enslaved person, to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. But Absalom Jones wasn’t just Episcopal famous. His sermon of thanksgiving for the end of the slave trade is one of the first published addresses of a Black person living in the United States. What is so remarkable about the sermon is that he called not just for the end of the slave trade, but for the end of the institution of slavery in its entirety. This was 1808. It would be almost 60 years before the emancipation proclamation and then the 13th amendment finally ended the institition. Still Absalom Jones dared to say that God had a covenant with Black Americans, and that God won’t rest until those who were enslaved were truly free. Faced with one transformation, Absalom Jones demanded another.
Bishop Tutu wrote similarly about God’s power to transform a racist regime. He and some of his colleagues were meeting with the apartheid Prime Minister of South Africa at a seminary which had been closed by racist policies in the late 20th century. The seminary had chosen to admit both white and black students, so the government shut the seminary down. There was plenty of room to meet. The meetings were frustrating, and Tutu found himself taking a break in the seminary garden. He wrote:
As I sat quietly in the garden I realized the power of transfiguration–of God’s transformation–in our world. The principle of transfiguration is at work when something so unlikely as the brown grass that covers our veld in winter becomes bright green again…The principle of transfiguration says nothing, no one and no situation, is “untransfigurable,” that the whole of creation, nature, waits expectantly for its transfiguration, when it will be released from its bondage and share in the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Desmond Tutu
For Tutu Christians are a people of transfiguration, finding reason to hope in the most difficult hour. Bringing transfiguration, bringing God’s transformation, to our world, this is the Christian vocation. I raise the stories of Archbishop Tutu and Blessed Absalom Jones because Transfiguration is often frustratingly slow patient work.
The Slow Patient Work
As the great Tracy Chapman sings, “Don’t you know, talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper.” There are setbacks, yes, but the work goes on. The work for liberation must go on. Transfiguration is about creation being set free. Transfiguration is seeing the world as it should be.
Sometimes the work of transfiguration seems small. But God always stands ready to transform our vision of what is possible. God dreams that we might expand our sense of how we can live in this world. And, if I may be so bold, God doesn’t care about whether we have an open concept house and a kitchen island. It’s not about the shape of our nose or our waistline. It’s so much more. Don’t settle for a spirituality that only works on exterior transformation.
Elisha surely didn’t. As Elijah was preparing to ride that chariot of fire, he offered a gift, a blessing. Elisha asked him for a double measure of his spirit, the word in Hebrew is “ruach” breath, wind, soul, spirit. Elisha asks Elijah, essentially “make me a prophet like you…not in the exterior measures of power, but give me the depth of soul. Give me the courage of heart. Give me the breadth of vision.” That’s deep. How can we hope for that kind of change in ourselves, in our world?
God invites us up this mountain, to have our vision transfigured, just in time for the hard journey to begin. As you prepare to mark the days ahead, as you choose a spiritual discipline, as you decide whether you’ll join us here at the church for one of the several Lenten offerings, let me leave you with two questions:
In the days ahead, how can you make room for God to reshape the possibilities you see for your inner life?
And
In the days ahead, how can you make room for God to expand the vision we have for our world?
Once you’ve spent some time with those questions, you’re ready to go down the mountain.
Mike Angell 