Back to home page

Quick info

Services:
Sundays
8:15 & 10 am
Child care provided

Office hours:
Tuesday - Friday
9 am - noon

Location:
5705 Lacy Rd.
Fitchburg WI 53711
View map

Phone:
608-273-1008

Calendar
Our events

Contact info
Names, e-mails

"Like" us

This Can't Be Happening
By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (Please feel free to email questions or comments)
February 14, 2010
Exodus 34: 29-35; Luke 9:28-36

More light, more truth is breaking from your Word.
More light, more truth, Holy Spirit, help us hear what needs to be heard. Amen.

If you were to experience what the ancient Israelites experienced with Moses – his face shining so brightly that he needed to hide it with a veil – or what Peter, James and John experienced with Jesus – seeing his body become luminescent – you’d doubt your eyes, maybe even your sanity.

“This can’t be happening,” you might say.

Indeed, both of these readings challenge our understanding of the way the natural world works. They bend the limits of science and so they become easy to dismiss as fairy tales that contribute to the gap between scientific thinkers and people of faith.

That’s one element of these readings I’d like to spend a few minutes pondering with you this morning. I don’t, however, think that is the most important element.

What I understand these stories to be about is how our encounters with the divine can change our lives. We may glow for a bit if we sense the divine in our lives, but that’s only the beginning. We don’t get to pitch tents and stay on the mountaintop.

But first the science part.

You may think of this weekend as encompassing Valentine’s Day or the beginning of the Winter Olympics or the extended weekend of President’s Day. There’s something there for romantics and sports fans and patriots.

It’s also been tagged as Evolution Weekend by a significant number of religious folks – I would be among them – who use this opportunity that coincides with the Feb. 12 birthday of Charles Darwin to note that religion and science do not need to be at war with each other.

To say that they need not be at war does not mean that they have had a happy co-existence. Ask Galileo. Ask Charles Darwin, for that matter. They both felt the hostility of religious figures in their time. Or ask scientists who read stories like we have today about Moses and Jesus if they can give credence to what seems like totally unscientific versions of reality.

What the 12,000 clergy persons who have signed onto the Clergy Letter Project say – along with 460 rabbis and 220 Unitarian Univeralists in companion letters – is that “religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.”

These stories today of Moses and Jesus are not science stories. They are not necessarily even history stories. They are faith stories – stories that tell us something about God and humanity and how our understanding of God can affect our lives.

Think about Moses for a minute. In the book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, Moses had numerous encounters with God.

He experienced the presence of God in a burning bush calling him to lead the Hebrew people from slavery to freedom. The Exodus story is a central image of God’s relationship to humanity – moving people from enslavement to freedom.  

Moses experienced the presence of God on Mount Sinai and Moses experienced the reluctance of the Israelites to trust in the God who has led them to freedom. Moses returned, encountered God again, and this time the Israelites saw Moses reflect the glory and the power of God. They enshrined the Ten Commandments he brought with him as the ethical foundation of their lives.

Have you ever looked at the parents of a new baby just after the birth or at a couple as they leave their marriage ceremony or at a graduate holding her diploma high or at quarterback Drew Brees just after winning the Super Bowl? Did you see a glow on their faces? Did you see a transformation in their appearance?

As the Israelites told the story of Moses, can you not imagine how they might describe his appearance after he encountered God?

As the early Christians described Jesus, can you not imagine how they also might have described the way Jesus reflected the glory of God?

I think that’s what these stories convey. Many of us grew up with images that made God seem distant and harsh and inaccessible. In reaction to that, we tend to gift short shift to the images of God that seem to emphasize glory and awe.

Yet across cultures, across religious belief systems, one element of the divine is that which pulls out of ourselves into a dimension that is beyond our human limitations, that is grander, more powerful, more creative, more compassionate that what we can normally wrap our minds around.  That’s the God who comes through in these stories.

We call this experience of Jesus on the mountain with his friends the Transfiguration. They see him with Moses and Elijah – the two towering figures of the Hebrew Bible, one representing the journey to freedom and the giving of the law, the other representing the voice of the prophets who called people to live out their relationship with God.

Artists love this moment. In the book of Gospels on our table today is one depiction. This is from the only handwritten Bible of our era, with new illuminations and illustrations done for St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn. Some of the full-sized pages are on display at the Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum for the next few months.

I love the sense of light that envelopes Jesus in this depiction.

Novelist Mary Gordon writes of the Transfiguration in her wonderful new book, Reading Jesus. She writes that the power of this scene has to do with light and shadow, with she calls “the lure of illumination” and with “the splendor of the luminous.”  

Luke, the writer of the Gospel, describes Jesus’ face as changing – like that of Moses? – and his clothes becoming “dazzling white. White, like a snowscape or like the Milky Way stretching across the darkness of a night sky.

Think of these images – radiance and whiteness, making life luminous, breaking the boundaries of what we can rationally see or experience.  Think of these images taking us out of ourselves for a moment. Think of these images confounding the followers of Jesus who were with him.

Confounding them, yet inspiring them to want to stay in this amazing place, putting up dwellings for Jesus and Moses and Elijah, to hang on to this moment, to keep it away from the messiness of everyday life.

The story from Luke we heard today ended with a sense of the power of God’s presence in the life of Jesus: “This is my Son, the Chosen: listen to him.” But the story in Luke’s Gospel did not end there. They did not get to stay on the mountain.

Listen to what happens next:

“On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. Just then a man from the crowd shouted, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.’ “

Jesus is not happy that his disciples could not deal with this. Just before he went up on the mountain, he gathered his twelve closest followers around him, told them to extend his work of casting out the demons in people’s lives and curing diseases. He told them to travel lightly.

And when crowds gathered to hear Jesus, he showed his closest followers how to gather as many as 5,000 people into small groups and feed them by making a little food go a long way.

So when the man tells Jesus that his followers could not drive the demon out of his son, Jesus looks at them and says, "You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” Sounds like he was a bit discouraged with them. He says to the man: “Bring your son here."

You know what happens next. The demon leaves the boy, who is healed and goes back home with his father.  And the people are amazed by the glory of God, Luke writes.   They could experience God through the compassion of Jesus for this troubled youth.

Not only did Jesus not linger on the mountain, hanging out in a tent radiating whiteness and glory. He went right back into the messiness of daily life, dealing with followers who could not always grasp what he wanted, with people making demands of him, with the discomfort of a young boy having convulsions.

There’s a kind of rhythm in these stories of Moses and Jesus that might be instructive to us. They moved back and forth between the splendor of the mountains where they could experience the glory of God and those places back down below where life was chaotic and messy. They knew when to nourish their spirits. And they did not shrink from the chaos around them. They let the experience of God in their lives shine forth for others.

I read a book last week that I think offers a good concluding note for this reflection.  The author is Sara Miles, who has a fascinating story in her own life.

She was raised in Greenwich Village in the 1950s by confirmed atheists who gave her “boundless love, liberal politics and secular morals.” She worked as a cook in restaurants in New York and as a journalist in Central America during the wars of the 1980s. She is a lesbian, a mother of a child born outside of marriage, someone who deeply distrusted dogma of any kind.

On a Sunday morning about a decade ago, Miles wandered into an Episcopal church in San Francisco. Once inside, though, she wound up eating the communion bread as it was passed to her. She passed it to the next person, saying she felt “compelled to find new ways to share what I’d experienced.”

In the process, she came to see this piece of bread as way more than a symbolic wafer. She saw it as bread that gave life. And she knew how that sounded to her friends: “It seemed as crazy as saying I had eaten a magic potion that could make me fly.”

Flying was not in the cards for Miles, but feeding people was. She started coming back to this church and sharing in communion there regularly. Then she convinced them to start a food pantry. Then she helped start other food pantries. Her explanation, given in her earlier book, Take This Bread, was simple: “If I wanted to see God, I could feed people.”

Her new book that came out this month is called Jesus Freak, Miles’ tongue-in-cheek characterization of herself.   But there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about what she thinks living as Jesus lived is all about:

“Heal the sick. Cast out demons. Cleanse the lepers. You give the people something to eat. You have the authority to forgive sins. Raise the dead.”

None of that fits into a crisp scientific paradigm of how the world works, especially that raising the dead part.  It doesn’t even fit the standard social service models.

In her book, Miles tells the stories of the people she encounters and how they actually do these things.  They are a wonderful bunch of misfits who stumble their way into making a huge difference in the lives of one another – sort of like those early followers of Jesus. Maybe sort of like us.

“It doesn’t take much to feed,” Sara writes. “You don’t have to start a food pantry… and serve 800 people a week. You could just invite a stranger to dinner.

“It doesn’t take much to heal. You don’t need to change careers and become a nurse… you could just tell an addict about your own addiction, hug a friend instead of giving him advice, sit with a dying woman and not try to pretend.

“It doesn’t take much to forgive. Well to be honest, it does: it took me almost ten years to forgive someone who’d hurt me. But then one afternoon, unprepared, I just gave up: what the heck, I thought; I wish him happiness.

“And raising the dead?  This is what we Christians do whenever we continue in simple, literal acts: breaking bread, praying without hope of perfect outcomes, admitting our weaknesses and loving people who don’t deserve it. It’s what we do when we remember that death is not the end.”

One last word from Sara Miles: “Jesus is real, and so, praise God, are we. Every single thing the resurrected Jesus does on earth, he does through our bodies. You’re fed, you’re healed, you’re forgiven, you’re pronounced clean. You are loved, and you’re raised from the dead.
 
“Go and do likewise.”