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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Transfiguration Sunday February 18, 2007 Pastor: Kip Ingram Kip@TwinbrookBaptist.com |
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From time to time, when I have trouble getting to sleep or am staying up late for some reason, I will occasionally turn on the radio, switch it to the AM dial, and listen to one particular show. It´s called ”Coast to Coast” with Art Bell. In some ways it is a traditional, old-style talk show, with featured interviews and listeners who call in. But the topics are anything but ordinaryBthey typically cover such things as Bigfoot sightings, alien abductions, ghostly encounters, unexplained cattle mutilations, crop circles, and global conspiracies of all kinds. This is the #1 late night radio show across the country, and judging by those who call in, there seems to be a faithful following for it. Now, I am not nearly as interested in the topics as in why so many people seem to be interested in them. I don´t think the show would work during the day nearly as well, because it´s only in the evening hours, when the structures and routines of the day are gone, that people will let down their boundaries, tune in to a solitary radio voice and entertain the magic and mystery of that which seems unexplainable. People seem genuinely drawn to the unexplained, the incomprehensible, the mysterious The existence and even popularity of such a show says something about our society. You see, we are living in the midst of an industrial, technological age, where the tendency is to see everything more and more as a resource to be used and put under our control. So we mine the mountains and dig the wells, cut the trees and fish the seas, mix the chemicals and manufacture the products. Even the term ”natural resource” carries the assumptions of our age. It implies that nature is only there for us to useBto remove and change and augment and mix and remake. Everything in a technological age is about human touch and mastery and control. But then there is a show like ACoast to Coast,” or if that seems too marginal, there is the popularity of the TV show ”Medium,” about a woman who receives visions and dreams from another mysterious world. There is also a show about a ”Ghost Whisperer,” one about haunted houses, and an older show about aliens called ”X-Files.” It is no coincidence that several centuries ago, at the beginning of the Industrial Age when humanity began to seize control of ever more resources, that such mysterious stories as ”Frankenstein” and ”Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” became widely popular. What all these shows convey is an interest in and thirst for the uncontrollable and the unexplainable. In a way, it makes sense. When technological attitudes replace mystery with mastery, and life is reduced to attitudes of human control, then there is no room for transcendence, for that which lies beyond human determination. When this happens, people will find ways to express their hunger for something more, a mysterious realm not of our making. And the popular arts of TV and radio and literature are places where this becomes manifest. It´s as if we are all made with the capacity for goose bumps. You see, we are created with a yearning for transcendence, created with the ability to wonder in awe at the unaccountable, created to bear witness to another dimension of life beside the one we construct At the beginning of our gospel story, Jesus travels with three of his disciples high up on a mountain to pray. You get the feeling that something is going to happen, because mountain heights are sacred places in Hebrew history. They are unusual, out-of-the-way places, with rarefied air, suitable for mysterious revelations and unidentified burning bushes. Sure enough, while Jesus is praying he becomes radiant in face and clothing. His very being begins to shine, and before the disciples can adjust to the dazzling glare, the figures of Moses and Elijah appear at his side. If only the disciples had video cameras, this surely could have qualified as a ”level 1” paranormal episode! Well, the disciples overhear Jesus talking with these two figures about his coming mission in Jerusalem. At some point, however, the impulsive apostle Peter says to Jesus, ”Boss, this place is freakin´ awesome! Let´s develop this land and build three theme motels for you and Moses and Elijah. Imagine the tourists we could draw by renaming this place - Mystery Mountain!” But Peter realized almost as soon as he said this that he had missed the point. Suddenly a dark cloud appeared and engulfed them all. They weren´t weathermen, but they knew this wasn´t usual. They had a feeling of the uncanny, of fear in the midst of the unknown. They could see the cloud´s thickness, but couldn´t see the reality in it. They knew something was up, but didn´t know a thing. They felt awe in the presence of something other, but did not feel anything physical. They found themselves right at the heart of a mystery. The cloud was like a covering that both revealed and hid at the same time. If you try to think about this for too long you just may need an aspirin. You see, mystery pushes us to the limits of experience, to the very limits of thinking and language, to a place where seeming opposites come together, and we are overwhelmed with a reality too much for words and too thick to get our minds around. The point, anyway, is not to solve a mystery but to participate in it, to let it transform and transfigure us. This point is what separates a mystery from a problem. In a technological society, everything is approached as a problem to be solved. We are all case managers for the world, with a bottom line set of goals to produce. We are apostle Peter-like, wanting to subdue the mysterious dimensions of life to our will, but mystery is not there to be managed according to an agenda, this is what makes it different than a problem If you want a problem to solve, you can do a Sudoku puzzle. My family got me started on these things about a year ago, and I got hooked for awhile. I think I even started dreaming in numbers for a period of time. With some skill and mastery and luck, you find a number for each place, and once you have filled in all the numbers in the correct places, you have solved the puzzle. But this is not a mystery, for a mystery would be why we have numbers at all and what kind of orderly world God has made to make numbers meaningful in the first place. This distinction between problem and mystery holds true throughout life. For example, you can read a textbook on the mechanics of childbirth and even master it as a medical discipline, but you have not captured the mystery of new life coming into the world. You don´t solve such a thing, you participate in it, and find in doing so that it changes you. The same is true of life´s ending. You can study all the processes of how the person´s body succumbs to age or illness, but it´s not the same as being in the room when the mystery of death occurs. When such a moment comes, it feels like a kind of overwhelming thickness, there´s too much to wrap your mind around. It almost feels unreal and dreamlike, but it´s not unreal, it´s so real that you can hardly handle it. That´s mystery. Back on the mountain with the disciples engulfed in mystery, a voice comes from out of the cloud, a sacred voice which comes from who knows where, and this voice announces that Jesus is the chosen son, and that he should be listened to. Then, in a flash it is all over, and Jesus is left standing alone with the disciples. Although they had not seen it, and could not prove it, they realize that the voice in the cloud had been the very voice of God. Then Jesus leads them down the mountain, toward people who need his ministry, and eventually to the cross in Jerusalem The mountain top cloud points us to the reality of God´s mystery for our world and our lives. We understand something of God´s mystery when we look at what earlier Christians called God´s two books-the book of nature and the book of scripture. In the book of nature, we see something of God by looking at the natural world. Consider the size of our universe and the immensity of God. If you take a thimble full of sand and dump it out on a flat surface, each grain of sand represents the number of stars you can see on a perfectly clear night from a perfect vantage pointBabout 2000 altogether. Imagine one of those tiny grains of sand is our sun, with all the planets and moons in our solar system. Next to the grain of sand representing our sun is the next grain of sand representing the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri. If light travels at 186,000 miles a second, it would take about 4 2 years at that speed to reach Proxima Centauri from here. Now, if each grain of sand represents a star in our Milky Way galaxy, we need more than a thimble, we will actually need a dump truck full of sand, for there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Now, how many grains of sand does it take to represent the known stars in the universe beyond our galaxy? Well, imagine that you are looking across at a railroad car full of sand, each grain representing a star, only the railroad car is part of a long train. In fact, a railroad cars are passing by you at the rate of one per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 years, each grain of sand representing a star in the universe. What does the size of the universe say about the immensity of God? We are tempted at times to put God in a box of our own making, to fit God into the narrow confines our own understanding, but the God of the universe, the God of Jesus´ transfiguration, is more than we can control and master. God is immense, yet God is with us wherever we are, always the mysterious Other in our midst. So we should remind ourselves that the reality of God is always more than the words and images and systems we use to talk and think about God. The poet Alfred Tennyson writes of this truth: And the first hymn we sang today echoes this truth: May the church at prayer recall that no single holy name but the truth behind them all is the God whom we proclaim. This awareness of God´s mystery should keep us humble and open, always ready to reconsider our ideas and images for God. Too much fighting has gone on between Christians over limiting proper ways to name and talk about God, yet the mystery of God should push us to embrace as many different names and images as possible, for God is more than any one name, and we limit our experience of God when we try to control what names can be used. There is a surplus of understanding in the life and ministry of Jesus, which keeps pushing us to find ever new ways to understand and experience God in our world. And this is where our capacity for wonder comes in. Right here, in this place, we are surrounded by a holy mystery. We can´t see this mystery, although we may feel certain promptings. We don´t fully understanding this mystery, yet flashes of wisdom and insight come clear to us in moments of clarity. This mystery is not here to be mastered and controlled, like one more resource in our world. The mystery of God is here to participate in, to let ourselves be drawn in, made open to this moment and this presence, and to find in doing so that we are changed in the process. Transfiguration is bearing witness to the mystery of God, not only in the life of Jesus, but in our lives, right here, right now. i. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), vol. 1, 260-61. ii. Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement: Contemplative Lessons From Black Holes, Supernovas, and other Wonders of the Universe (Notre Dame: Sorin Books, 2006), 7-8. |
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