Sermon prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

by Pastor Gregory S. Kaurin

8:30 & 11 AM traditional services, 3/2/03

 

Text: Mark 9:2-9

Sermon:

When Jesus Affirmed His Baptism

 

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Jesus had told his disciples what was going to happen to him, that he’d suffer and die.  Peter took him aside and said, “No, Jesus, that can’t happen to you!”

Jesus rebuked him saying, “Get behind me, Satan!”  Then, Jesus turned to the rest of his disciples and said, “If any of you wants to be my follower you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross and follow me.”  About six days after that, Jesus took Peter, James and John up this mountain.

 

There are these two major times in Jesus’ ministry when the voice of God was heard from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved.”  The first was at his Baptism—the beginning of his ministry.   The second time was three years later, near the end of his ministry on this mountain of transfiguration.

Jesus’ transfiguration was his Affirmation of Baptism, his Confirmation service.  It was a religious, worshipful moment where he visibly accepted where this was all heading and who he was.   Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, were there, because Jesus would fulfill all of the demands of the Law and all of the promises of the Prophets.  Jesus was the Word of God, Law and Gospel.

The Bible says he was “transfigured” before them.  We get that from the Latin Bible.  I like the word we get from the original Greek—it’s more to the point.  The Greek Bible said that Jesus “metamorphosed” before them.  Metamorphosis.  He changed, but not only for a moment: from that time onward.

A metamorphosis—like a grub becoming a crane fly—is a one-way ride.  Or, it’s like Franz Kafka’s well-known book, “Metamorphosis” in which a man wakes up one day to find he’s become a cockroach.  It was a life-changing moment!

So, it was not just a short miraculous moment, where the divinity of Jesus was revealed then quickly covered up again.  It was to make a point to those disciples and to us, to get our attention, to see what’s always there.

 

In fact, that’s really what the booming voice of God meant when he said, “This is my Son.  Listen to him!”  If I were to say, “Look here!” or “Listen up!” I might not mean to literally look at me or to turn up your hearing aid, but that I want you to pay attention.  It works the same in many languages, including the Bible.  God was saying, “This is my Son! the Messiah!  Pay attention!  Watch!  Listen!  Remember!” 

That’s why what happens next is so important.  Peter was ready to build shrines and altars devoted to these three greats, so that people could pilgrimage up this mountain, climb up, and remember this great moment.

I’m sure you’ve heard these stories.  There’s a barn fire, and the somehow the image or profile of Jesus, or his mother Mary, is somehow burned into one side of the barn and people will travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to see it, touch it, until there’s another Mary sighting, or another miraculous image somewhere else.

It’s not just about miraculous moments.  We have a tendency to want to build shrines and monuments all over the place, often because it seems like “the right thing to do,” “lest we forget,” “great moments,” “great people,” “great sacrifices.”  That’s what this was about; that’s what Peter was expressing.

But God said, “Listen, pay attention!” because what happened next is most important.  It wasn’t what Jesus said, but what they did.  They walked off the mountain.  They went back down into the valley, and Jesus immediately began healing and teaching again as he made his way to Jerusalem, to die, to become the Crucified God.

The real image of God, real worship, is not shrined on the mountain.  “Pay attention,” God said: religion and worship is not shrined up a mountain or in a building, not in historical documents or even in a book.  It is a whole movement, from God, through a man, through a holy book, into real action.

The identity of Jesus and his followers, our Christian identity, is a continuous action, and always pointed out, from here, out.  The important movement on the mountain of transfiguration is not Jesus and the disciples climbing up the mountain.  It is the cloud of God descending on them.  That’s where the Christian motion always starts.

 

If you’ve been in adult education the past several weeks, you know this theme.  The motion of worship is not we coming here to God, but God coming to us, in this place that he’s promised to be.  In baptism, in Holy Communion, in song, where two or three gather in his name, he comes among us, just as he did in Jesus.  Christ comes to heal us, teach us, eat with us.

Three weeks ago, Dr. Samuel Torvend asked our adult Sunday school class to look at this group of disciples and followers.  Look at it!  Pay attention!  It had tax collectors (who were people who actively supported and benefited from Roman occupation of Israel and Judah).  It also had zealots (who were actively seeking ways to overthrow that government).  It had working class fisher folk and physicians.  It had questionable women and reputable women, a few Pharisees, and even a philosopher or two thrown in.  These are not people that play well together! 

Jesus sought them out.  He came to them and pulled them together.  God came to them.  He didn’t ask.  He said,  “I will be their God and they will be my people.”

 

While Pauline and I were visiting her brother in New York we asked him to get some tickets to one Broadway show and one off-Broadway.  We said the off-Broadway show needed to be one of those theatres of the absurd, abstract, kind of shows.  We wanted a show that we could walk away from saying, “Well, that was odd.”  He succeeded.  It was a play called “Panic!” parenthetically titled, “How to be happy.”

I have no idea what the title had to do with the play, and most of what we saw was beyond me.  It was written and directed by Richard Foreman, put on by his theatre company, the Ontological Hysterical Theater Company.  I also found it interesting that it was performed in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in the Bowery, an active church that has a couple hundred-year history of supporting the arts, both religious and secular. 

After some thought though, I do think the major thrust of the play was about human society, throughout history, and how we don’t seem to really learn anything.  In the play, there were moments when the characters would transcend.  They would sometimes climb up a mountain and have an experience of touching God.  Or, they would retreat into themselves, or into spiritual hidden places.  These moments sometimes changed things for a while, but then they always dissolved into pride and power plays and war, and death.  It was the old Greek cyclical pattern of life: we transcend only to fall back down.

Let me read the writer’s notes from the play, and I’m using this because—if you listen closely—there are themes of transcendence that caught my attention.  Richard Foreman says his play is “a theater of heightened ‘NOTICING.’  A kind of theater which LURCHES (on purpose) towards the emptiness of unavoidably frustrated human effort and desire.  It falls apart, re-groups—and tries, in its broken awkward elegance, to open the door to what is here, now, in front of us—but unseen.”

Human effort and desire tries “to open the door to what is here, now, in front of us—but unseen,” but the effort remains empty, unavoidably frustrated, circular.  We occasionally touch the divine, but we immediately get jealous of our relationship with God.  The disciples came off the mountain with Jesus and almost immediately they started arguing over which of them was the greatest.   We get a sense of his love for us, and immediately begin to guard our special relationship from others, demanding that: “You can only touch our God when you meet our requirements.”  At that very moment, we lose him; as soon as we impose requirements for reaching God, we have stopped worshipping God, and are, instead, worshipping formulas and our own images.

The play that Pauline and I say would be right—life would be circular and frustrated—if reaching and maintaining faith had anything to do with whether or how often we climbed spiritual mountaintops, or we are deeply and mysteriously spiritual.  We do not attain God.  That is always a frustrated lie.

You can make an idol out of ideas and morals.  You can even make idols of Christian creeds and religion if you’re only worshipping the religion, or the stuff of religion.

 

God came to us.  We did not climb to him.  Transfiguration, metamorphosis is not about our making things spiritual through religious or spiritual mumbo-jumbo.  God already created the physical and spiritual together.  That’s why sharing a glass of wine with a friend can be a wonderfully holy moment, even when you don’t realize it.  It is also why an alcoholic taking another drink is so very hellish.

It’s not just physical, it’s always more amazingly or devastatingly spiritual.  We are always in the presence of the Crucified God who died to love us.  Always.

 

You will experience this love and his peace only when you trust God enough to stop worrying about it, and start thinking of others more.  That is what it means to truly “Affirm your Baptism.”  It means you trust God the love of God, and you trust him to keep his promises, so that you can stop fussing about yourself, about your feelings, your health, your gossip and your drama. 

Stop searching for a spiritual ideal, trying to build some internal or external spiritual shrine, or demanding that someone build it for you.  Start living authentically.  Start living as a part of the real world, the world that doesn’t revolve around you.

Use this brief time in Church, in prayer, or in your Bible to learn and feel that motion of God coming to you.  Then, continue the motion he started.  Worship is life.  Living is worship.  Take your peace, your faith to others.

Our Christian identity, our affirmation of faith, like Jesus Christ’s Affirmation of Baptism, is experienced mostly in what happens after the mountaintops, and how we care for others.

 

So, heaven might be in a pencil, a personal check, a teddy bear, a movie, a wetland, an orphaned cat, a sinner, a prostitute, or even a politician or a president.  We can find Jesus Christ in any of these.  It all depends on what we do with them, how we pray for them, or whether we choose to care for them.

If faith is real, if God is real, which I absolutely believe, then we truly and honestly can relax our fears, and hyper vigilance.  Even here in the Great Northwest, where we are the second to least Christian state of the Union, God is here no less than anywhere else in the universe, and he will not leave, until God decides his work is done.  He asks you to be a part of it.  Walk off the mountain.

 

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