February 18, 2007 - Transfiguration and baptism

Transfiguration of the Lord
18 February 2007
Luke 9.28-36
Transfiguration and baptism
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

About twenty-five years ago at a pastors conference, our leader for the week guided us through a process by which we would access deep spiritual imagery within ourselves. He taught us techniques to still our body and quiet our mind. We let our imagination work out a specific place to locate ourselves as a beginning point for the sequence of events that would unfold deep within our spirit. Then the leader played for us a long selection of evocative music, which he did not tell till afterward was Richard Strauss’s study for thirteen solo strings, Metamorphosen.

As you might imagine, some of us found it so difficult to separate ourselves from the concrete reality around us—the temporal moment we were in—that we could not fully immerse ourselves into a vivid world of spirit. As you might also imagine, others of us so easily dissociated from concrete reality that immersion into a deep inner world apart from “actual facts” was as natural as falling off a log. And as probably everybody has already imagined, I fell off the log first and farthest. Awake or asleep, I am perfectly content to live in worlds other than this one most people call real.

So here’s what happened in my world of the spirit twenty-five years ago. I began from a place outdoors among trees. I ran, Forrest Gump-like, for quite awhile and then reached an opening in the earth, through which I ran and then kept running in a cave-like tunnel. For a while, I sped through the tunnel faster than I could run but without actually moving my legs. When I emerged again to the surface, there was all around a desert, and I kept running until I started up a grade into dry, rocky foothills. Eventually, I found myself clawing my way up a slope of loose stones and finally reached a plateau.

In time, a great black bird landed next to me, and I understood I was to climb on its back. The bird flew with me out over the vast stretch of desert that spread out for miles. I was watching for life, for changes, for anything unusual or threatening—anything new. We circled back to my observation point on the plateau. The bird left. I looked around, and there was hovering behind me a enormous eye, the size of, oh, this church building, looking directly at me. The eye receded up to the sky, never turning away its gaze. I stood alone and watched for life and activity in the desert.

The music ended, the leader called us back to awareness of the room we were in and each other. When I opened my eyes, it took me a minute to get reoriented to time and place. I’d forgotten I had been there.

When telling this to someone, I’ve gotten one of two reactions. The person either gets really fascinated or is struck with uncontrollable yawning, as if fighting against sleep. The difference doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the person’s religion, depth of spiritual conviction, intelligence or curiosity. Fascination and sleep are simply two ways of responding to something that reaches one from someplace other than immediate consciousness. Like Peter, John and James at the Transfiguration, the body seems to get confused about awareness and sleep around things like this.

This was not a dream. For I was fully awake, alert and conscious of myself. Neither was it like writing a story. Rather it was being and knowing in another way. I had simply decided to allow something like another dimension of experience become real and immediate, a dimension where I could make decisions, act and even remember. Many times, over the years, the memory of this experience has helped me understand my life, my vocation, my soul and God. I do not consider the experience a separate source of revelation, along the lines of Joseph Smith’s revelation in our neighboring village [Palmyra, NY] that led to his founding the Mormon church. I do consider it a lens by which I see the meaning of my world, my life and my faith. In this sense of being a lens, I refer to the experience as visionary.

When Peter and John and James climb up a mountain with Jesus and see him change, something like this is happening. They see things that don’t occur in the temporal moments they share with others in their normal awareness. They’re in a state of not exactly sleeping but not really awake to the normal reality of things.

“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.” And at the end of the visionary moment—after the terrifying cloud and its voice—the once extraordinarily present Moses and Elijah are now missing. There is only Jesus.

From my personal experience, then, I reject the choice some try to force us to make about such reports as these in scripture. Some people explain the story as the product of a vivid imagination in an attempt to interpret the specialness of Jesus as holy person—indeed, as the very son of God. Other people insist we believe that, had we been there with a camcorder, we’d have recorded entities as concrete as the two people in the pew on either side of you were standing on either side of Jesus, in the forms of Moses and Elijah.

Now, you can believe a storyteller created a fiction to explain the wondrousness of Jesus, but I think most of us are not satisfied to reduce these scriptural phenomena to reasonable fictions. We read a story like this, and if we care to seek and live under the power of God, we deeply long to feel a powerful movement of life and spirit in our engagement with them. Most of us, if we listen to the longing of our soul, expect that these stories in scripture will transform our life, if only we can let them enter our consciousness, excite our nerve pathways, and realign our reality as we know it.

Isn’t it why you come here to church on a Sunday morning, that you know something is not quite right—or that something is even terribly wrong—with what is real in this world, so far? Reality, so called, may just be the holding pattern for what God is preparing to perform among us. Reality, I for one most earnestly pray, is something far broader, more vibrant, more gracious and more glorious than all this. Reality is where the holy is not content to peek out bashfully only occasionally to the lucky soul who happens by at the moment, but it is where the holiness of everything shines forth in dazzling beauty.

Now then, if most of us are not satisfied with reducing all Bible stories to their reasonable explanations, neither are many of us content to be told that our only other choice is to believe the stories literally. We know that there are many inconsistencies and incongruities in scripture. The problem with having four gospel accounts of the life of Jesus is that they don’t always match up on the details, and that tells us that strictly literal acceptance of their stories was never the first concern of the authors or of the church that remembered those stories. Literalists want us to maintain our grip on this plain, everyday consciousness so much that they are willing to insist that there is no other depth of awareness or that there is no deeper reality to be aware of in it.

But this is where literalists, far from strengthening our faith by controlling our mindset toward scripture, instead would deprive us of the best that scripture offers for our faith. They would deprive us of the many vast dimensions of vision, truth and holy engagement through which God has been making God’s very being manifest to our world. Over the lifetimes of all the sinners and saints that ever were, mortals have been shaken, formed and startled into life by dreams and visions that set the mundane and ordinary aside and replace it with the wild and strange. Who is any literalist to tell you that something inconceivable from this side of the veil cannot in some deeply true and meaningful way, if not a literally way, be true? They want you to believe that certain miracles are simple facts, but they would deny you a spirituality of the simply miraculous.

So then, if you do not accept the lie that the Bible must either be reduced to explanations or set in concrete, you may enter the moment of the Transfiguration and, like Alice through the looking glass, find yourself in an astounding adventure.

Come to think of it, we believe something about as astounding as the Transfiguration is about to occur before our eyes. Three little babies are going to commit their lives to Christ. Now, I don’t want anyone to feel insulted, but I have to tell the truth about these babies. They do not sit up well, for starters. Even when someone puts food in their mouth, the part that goes down their throat isn’t half what dribbles off their chin. When you tell them things you want them to do—“calm down”; “please sleep the night”—they ignore you. When they want something, they make disturbing noises but never say what it is. So tell me, how does a person like that, in a literal sense, commit her (or his) life to Christ?

But here we are baptizing them into their committed life with Christ. The parents will answer questions on their behalf, renouncing sin—sin? a baby?!—and professing an intention to follow Jesus. The congregation will, as a sort of communal godparent, promise to support these three new Christians on their spiritual journeys. The minister will sprinkle water, say prayers and pronounce such words as will remind us that God is pouring mystery over them and through them. It all stretches our credulity, if we think about it. A reasonable person might scoff at us. We’re not embarrassed, though. We believe in what we’re doing. We believe these floppy, burpy humans will begin their relationship to God in Jesus Christ just minutes from now.

But who is to gainsay us? Someone who has arrived, whose spiritual life has advance to the state of all-knowing and all-seeing fullness? If a baby has made a quarter inch step on a thousand mile journey of faith, shall you or I or the best Christian you know, having traveled maybe six inches on the thousand mile journey, bear such superior authority as to pass judgment? No, we will not compare ourselves comfortably with the spirituality of a child and the spiritual possibilities of the universe in eternity. Let us then gather at this font in great humility and still trust our sense for mystery more than our thinking faculties.

Besides, who of us would not trade places with one of these little ones, beginning again the path toward wholeness, before all the brokenness starts to take its toll? Put yourself in their place. Become the child approaching baptism for a moment: Something a little different this morning there is in the mother’s touch, the father’s arm. A little more tension than usual, a little more determination. More deliberate care in dressing. A silence a little longer, maybe; a question answered a bit more brusquely than on other Sunday mornings. At the church, something anxious in the waiting, urgent in the watching. Rising; standing still at an odd place. Some man talking in odd tones, and then you are in his arms, somewhat awkwardly. Coolness on your head, wetness there; a firm, unfamiliar touch on your head. Back in familiar arms, a more than tender squeeze. Don’t tell me you do not know something more than common has just become of you.

I can’t say what these little ones will feel or know or wonder in their baptism, any more than I can say all that Peter, John and James felt or knew wondered when Jesus was transfigured before them, however that happened. I am, though, familiar enough in my small way with mystery that it delights me to suppose that a powerful, surprising and relentless love shines light where darkness had been. Such a mystery never leaves any one of us alone without the hope of grace, however much the world, and even its Christian religionists, would turn us against ourselves and alienate us from who we are and how we each in our own way come to know God.

Whatever these children—Grayson and Mara and Lindsey—experience, today, I know of a certainty that they will pick up a spiritual golden threat that runs through the fabric of the universe from their spiritual forebears Peter and John and James. These children are hereby sewn into the fabric of the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of this we are all witnesses. Amen.