Sermon Text - Feb. 3, 2008

 "Gyname"

Rev. Michael Denton
Conference Minister of the UCC Pacific Northwest Conference

 Matthew 17:1-9

The scripture reading that David referred to might be a let down now – he told it in a much better way than it’s told here! But these are the words from the book of Matthew, Chapter 17, verses 1-9:

“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’ And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, ‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

It really is a pleasure and an honor to be with you here on this day. As you’ve heard, I’m pretty brand-spankin’ new to this position and somewhat to the area. The first time I was actually in Washington at all was for my interview in August. They tricked me - it’s become a little bit cloudier since then. I’ve quite literally been getting my feet wet. But on those days like the weeks before last week when the sun has actually broken out I’ve been amazed by the fact that there are mountains absolutely everywhere. I’ve never seen something so big or so amazing as Mt. Rainier - coming around a corner as it’s just broken out and it stands there. . . I’m learning how to bask in the mountains in the same way as you might bask in the sun or lie beneath the stars or look at the water or look at the ocean. It’s a new kind of thing for me, it’s a new kind of place for me, and I’m happy to be here with you.

It is my pleasure and my honor to bring you greetings on behalf of all of the churches of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, who are with you this day in prayer, in thoughts, mission, and in service. I invite you to pray with me.

“Dear God, on this day, meet us where we are.Amen.”

I was 27 years old and trying to figure a few things out. I was managing a coffee shop and working part-time for a little progressive newspaper in Dayton, Ohio. At that time I was married, had a decent apartment, and good friends. Overall life was really pretty good. It was simple, it was easy, and it was manageable. But I was also very restless.

Although the work I was doing was good and important in it’s own right, I knew it wasn’t the work that I felt like I should be doing, or could be doing. There was another kind of work that was kind of nagging at me, something I wanted to do, a work that I felt called to do. Part of the problem was that I knew that all of the things I was thinking about and doing would require more school. And, well, even though I had 4 years of college at that point, I was still pretty far from any degree.

I’d started degrees ranging from opera voice, to social work, to philosophy, but hadn’t really finished one of them. I’d been on the Dean’s list several times, but it wasn’t that Dean’s list – it was a very different kind of Dean’s list! I was like a shaken up bottle of pop with lots of energy and passion, but no where to direct it. I was also afraid.

To call it a fear of failure doesn’t quite get it. I think it was more of that deeper, darker fear of being inadequate. Of being afraid of being unable to help in any of these ideas or dreams – to help any of them to really come to fruition. Up to that point in my life there were few things I had felt as though I’d actually done well or even completed. I had no good proof for myself that even if I made the more concerted effort to work toward some of these hopes and dreams I would be able to make them happen.

I had Holden Colfield whispering in my ear throughout high school and now was hearing from Willie Lowman. I knew I needed to changes something but I had no idea what to change. But this one day it clicked. I didn’t know all of the steps I needed to take, but I figured out the first one.

I didn’t tell anyone what I was going to do because I didn’t want to have to explain it. I knew it was the right thing for me – I knew most people wouldn’t get it, but I knew it was the right thing for me. I made my plan and I followed through.

Suffice it to say, I think my friends and family were all a little surprised when I shaved my head and got my first tattoo, soon followed, by growing facial hair!  Customers and employees at the coffee shop I worked at didn’t recognize me when I first walked in. A friend of mine yelled at me as I was getting into the car I’d had for at least the last two years, because they though I was stealing it! I really have no good idea how to best describe the look on my wife’s face when she walked through the door. And the miracle in all of it, was at that point in time I didn’t really care what anyone else thought. I looked in the mirror and saw someone different.

I really can’t describe to you how good the wind felt blowing across my bare head or how wonderful that first shower felt. I know it seemed like I had only made a cosmetic change, I know that. But it was something deeper than that for me. For the first time in my life I figured out that this was actually my body and my life and that I could have a part in changing both. I now know that I was someone who could make a decision and stick with it. It was an outward visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.

The singer and songwriter Tom Waite said, “tattoos are a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.” And he’s right. It was something I needed to have that permanent reminder.

My first tattoo was the Sanskrit word pronounced “ohm” – I was really feeling the need to be centered at that moment and that symbol helped me name that feeling. The second tattoo I got a few years later. The shaving of my head and the first tattoo was that first decision that helped me know that I could make the next ones, the next bigger ones.

I went back to college. Stayed on the better Dean’s list this time, and actually finished a degree. The second tattoo named a different kind of moment and has become a different kind of reminder. This time I was tattooed with the North African symbol “gyname” – the title of today’s sermon. Gyname means both fear no-one as well as only God. It named a different moment, it was a different kind of encouragement. It didn’t just mark what I wanted to do, it named the moment of that experience.

Today’s scripture has always been a hard one for me to preach about. Give me a healing story or one of Jesus’ scolding of the rich, or a parable any day and I’m just fine. But these kinds of stories, they’re a lot harder for me to deal with.

First of all, let’s be honest - the story is kind of weird. If they would have just gone to the mountain and had a great talk no problem - but this one? Around here you’d probably just call the 1800 ft. rounded Mount Tabor a big hill, but in Israel it was a significant high spot. It’s about 3 times the height of the Space Needle.

To get to the top would have been a pretty good day’s hike. So Jesus invites Peter, James, and John along with him on this hike and while standing on this mountaintop, with these witnesses, Jesus was transfigured.

Now we’ve got to take a moment with this word “transfiguration” or “transfigured.” We come up with some strange and wacky words within the church world. The basic idea of this awkward word was that this moment that Jesus became someone different, he became a new figure. But if you were to read the original Greek, it says something a little bit different.

The Greek word is the same root as the word “metamorphosis.” I really think this adds something to it. A caterpillar goes through a metamorphosis that when it becomes a butterfly, this process of change is so significant, that we don’t use one word for this creature even though the caterpillar that changes into the butterfly IS the same creature. The weird little worm that eats and eats and eats becomes this beautiful multi-colored thing that flies. This change is so significant that our minds separate the one creature into two.

This moment on the mountaintop is suppose to be closer to this kind of transformation more than any other, which really just adds to the weirdness. On this mountaintop the same Jesus is also becoming something new. His clothes become that dazzling white in this dusty time and place – plain old white clothes were pretty uncommon and difficult to maintain. And this was white beyond white. A color that made Jesus appear clothed more in light than anything else.

As Jesus goes through a metamorphosis, he becomes something new. Yes it’s the same Jesus in some ways, but in other ways . . . the great leader and prophets Moses and Elijah appear there too and speak with Jesus, but what they really say is a mystery. We have no idea what they talked about on that mountain.

And Peter is clearly awed. He offers to build 3 dwellings on the mountain for Jesus, Moses and Elijah to commemorate this moment. A Jewish hearer of this story would have recognized this as a special kind of place of worship being set up that was a place for reminding Jewish folks of their own unfolding story, their own cultural metamorphosis. This was an offer to specially make that connection and recognize this particular moment as another significant moment within that peoples history.

Then in the story comes more fireworks followed by the voice of God naming Jesus as his own. The voice of God recognizes this moment in the same way that the same way that the caterpillar reveals himself as the butterfly. Jesus again is revealed as something different.

In Mathew, this is the moment that the mantle is clearly passed. It’s at this moment that Jesus is most clearly named as someone to be lifted up – someone with the leadership of Moses and the prophetic gifts of Elijah. This story ends with Jesus leading Peter, James, and John off the mountain, and back into the rest of the world doing what now must seem like some of the more regular miracles – healing the sick, challenging the social structures, and talking about love, allot.

While researching this sermon one of the themes that came up allot in the commentaries and sermons about this text was a criticism of the desire to build dwellings on the mountain more than any kind of real talking about what happened there. I found myself wondering if part of the reason there is this tendency is because so much of my preaching sisters and brothers find preaching on the transfiguration as difficult a task as I do. And I can say why it’s tough for me – so much of what Jesus does has a certain credibility and reasonable extraordinariness to it.

He’s very quotable, he can think up a good story, and he works to overturn oppressive social structures. Sure there is this whole healing thing, but we tend to rationalize that so much, and it’s so much a part of our stories that it becomes more palatable. But this transfiguration thing . . . it’s more difficult to explain.

The first set of stories are those we can share with our secular friends a little. And it sounds as though we’re just talking about any other great religious leader - but, these kind of stories? It’s a little tougher in a culture where the voice of the literalist and the voice of scientific reason have become both so loud and in so much conflict in so many senses. This is such a difficult story to put in the context of the other stories that seem more reasonable to us, that I know why I’ve tried not to deal with it too much, too directly.

The fact that these dwellings are on the mountain are not built gives something else for us to dwell on and criticize. We can use this moment to talk about how sure this moment on the mountain is important, but we shouldn’t dwell there. We always need to come off the mountain and do the valley work and I’ve preached that sermon before too.

It’s a good one that fits right in with those ideas, that for me have been the ones that have helped me stay involved with Christianity and in the church when I’ve sometimes found myself embarrassed and ashamed by some of those things that my more literalist Christian sisters and brothers have sometimes said.

For a long time, I’ve dismissed the suggestion of Peter to build these dwellings on the mountaintop because I had no desire to dwell on what happened on that mountaintop. And yet, I have these tattoos and the shaved head and this hair on my chin. Sure the tattoos have begun to fade just a little bit. Sure there isn’t nearly as much of my hair I have to shave anymore. Sure the facial hair I have is becoming greyer and greyer every day.

Still these are symbols of a significant time of metamorphosis in my own life. Really they are their own kind of dwelling. They help me dwell on those moments when I look back over my life it really is a collection of these moments that recognize these significant moments – this ongoing metamorphosis. I still have my diplomas, I still have some pictures from my wedding, and the wedding band that now sits in a drawer at home as a reminder of my divorce.

I have different gifts that I keep and are meaningful, not because they’re something I would have picked for myself, or would have kept for any other reason, but because of the people that gave them to me. In very traditional ways we all dwell on other significant moments. Every birthday celebrated, every marriage and reception, every holiday we gather together, every funeral we attend, every accomplishment we honor, every baptism we celebrate, every time we gather around this table and share in a sacred feast together, all of these are dwellings constructed in the midst of metamorphosis, that is in it’s own way miraculous.

We rarely stay in these moments, in fact some of what these moments and memories help us do are honor a moment, and then integrate it into our lives. So, this sermon on this transfiguration Sunday, I’m not critiquing Peter for suggestion they should stay on this mountaintop for a while and build these dwellings. This wasn’t a moment of irrational exuberance for the man, he wanted to honor the moment somehow.

No he probably didn’t understand any more of what was really going on anymore than we do now. Every rational cell of our minds tends to dismiss this moment as benign religious fabrication, or as simply a story that was intended to point to a great truth. Maybe it was these things, but maybe, just maybe it was something more. I know that even suggesting this in a progressive modern day church makes some of us tense up, but even if we don’t believe the story actually happened, that doesn’t need to stop any of us from believing that it’s true.

This story names an experience of and with Jesus. That this story names a moment of metamorphosis and Peter offered to honor that moment. This is a good thing, this means that he had some idea of the momentousness of this Jesus person.

This meant that he wasn’t so willing to let this weirdness pass by without reflection, this meant that he recognized this was a moment that deserved it’s own moment in the same way that we’re transfixed to see a caterpillar to emerge out of a cocoon, or watch a child take their first steps, or see a friend graduate from high school, or honor a friend who has passed away, or hold a party to celebrate an accomplishment, or give a special gift to our church to honor the community.

We love or tell the story of some unique, unexplainable moment in our lives or even shave a head, get a tattoo, and grow some facial hair. None of these moments need be moments of extravagance, but when they are they are ideally moments that are somehow in proportion to the holy and important metamorphosis that we’re trying to recognize.

One of the poets that I first began to read and understand was a guy named Seamus Haney. And he’s got this great poem from a collection of some of this writings “The Cure at Troy” that has sort have been subtitled “Double Take.”

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home. 

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme. 

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells. 

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky 

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term. 

I imagine that Peter would be gratified to know that 2000 years later in this time and place, we’re taking this moment to honor the story that was told so long ago. I imagine that Peter would be gratified to know that 2000 years later in this time and place, there is a chapel on the top of Mount Tabor that commemorates this particular sacred moment.

I imagine that Peter would be gratified to know that 2000 years later in this time and place, we’re still struggling to understand the same moment that he quite couldn’t understand either. Amen.

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