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But Only Jesus
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 22, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 30:29-33 Mark 9:2-9
"Glory is to God what style is to the artist," writes Frederick Buechner. "A painting by Vermeer, a sonnet by Donne, a Mozart aria--each is so rich with the style of the one who made it that to the connoisseur it couldn’t have been made by anybody else, and the effect is staggering. The style of an artist brings you as close to the sound of his voice and the light in [her] eye as it is possible to get this side of actually shaking hands…. Glory is the outward manifestation of [God] just as holiness is the inward. To behold God’s glory…is the closest you can get to [God] this side of Paradise…. Glory is what God looks like when, for the time being, all you have to look at [God] with is a pair of eyes." So it was that Peter could write, long after the fact of the transfiguration, "…we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory…." So also, Mark says of what they saw with their eyes, "his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them." And then, "a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice….” We who live on this side of actually shaking God’s hand come together, week after week, expecting to see only Jesus upon the molehills we have made into mountains. Yet we come, as well, to beseech God for eyes to see more, to see God’s glory spilling over and out of the stuff of our existence, like God’s signature, God’s grandeur invading and marking our days with mercy and grace and love. “You can wait forgetful anywhere,” says the poet to those who would behold God’s glory, “for anywhere is the way of God’s fleet passage, [you can] hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away. Or you can pursue him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh…. I am both waiting becalmed in a clift of the rock,” she confesses, “and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out! …I know you’re there.” Now before the event of the transfiguration--whatever it was, whatever it looked like--you could say that the disciples were waiting forgetful anywhere with Jesus, following Him whom they called Lord with the earnestness of students following a teacher. They had come to know Jesus, by and large, becalmed: as we know one another. Specifically, from Mark’s telling of the tale, they had been called from their ordinary tasks to what was admittedly the extraordinary adventure of discipleship; they had watched as Jesus healed the man with an unclean spirit, cured all manner of folks brought to Simon’s house in Capernaum, cast out demons, stilled a storm, fed the five thousand, walked on water. Mark records of their becalmed perspective slanting slightly Godward, "They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’” Story after story, parable after parable, teaching upon teaching Mark tells of this relatively becalmed waiting until, finally, the ones who have been present through it all are asked the question asked of each one of us who would behold God’s glory: "Who do people say that I am?” Who is this who cures the sick, cleanses the lepers, casts out demons, forgives sin? The answer, at first, is becalmed: some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others one of the prophets. In other words, they see only Jesus, a human being used of God, in the line of the law and the prophets before him, whom they have come to call Lord. "But who do you say that I am," he asks. And Simon Peter, risking a shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh exclaims, "You are the Messiah…Come on out! I know you’re there!" The Lord whom they have followed forgetfully across the countryside is confessed from below--for the first time and by Peter--as the Son of the living God…as the manifestation of the Holy One…as what God looks like when, for the time being, all you have to look at [God] with is a pair of eyes…as the one in whom God’s glory was about to shine! This is the creator of the heavens and the earth come close, the God who would be known, loved, thanked, praised by the likes of us. The effect is staggering. First, to use W. H. Auden’s words, "Already the mind begins to be vaguely aware/ Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought/ Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now/ Be very far off." In response to Peter’s confession, Jesus spins out the consequences of God’s glory shone upon the world’s darkness, begins to tell them of his death. It is a truth they cannot bear. Second, Peter, James and his brother John [the same ones who soon are unable to stay awake with him one hour], are summoned up the mountain where "he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white," where they were brought as close to the sound of God’s voice and the light in God’s eye as it is possible to get this side of actually shaking hands. There they began to do what human beings can only do in the presence of God’s glory: they invented a response…a movement. Peter stammers into motion like Moses stammered into speech before him, “’Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’” “It is the curse of theology,” writes Gerardus van der Leeuw, “always to forget that God is love, that is movement…” toward us beckoning us to invent a new movement in response. Van der Leeuw imagines this movement to be the dance. It “is the discovery of movement external to man,” he says, “but which first gives him his true, actual movement.” Movement is all Peter has in the presence of God’s glory because, says Mark, “he did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” No doubt this scene seems barely connected to our becalmed and forgetful days, full of problems and worries and riddles. Those who were witnesses described the scene as light. My eyes, as far as I know, have never seen such a light: I know as much of this light as I have been told by other pairs of eyes, leaving me still in the dark, leaving me only to grope for the hand, to invent a movement as much to summon the light as to respond to it. For most of the time, at the bottom of the mountain, I look around and see no one dazzling, but only Jesus. Yet if that is all, if we are left in the valley with only Jesus (meaning a human being, albeit the best, in a line like us) then God remains a distant “holy fire burning self-contained for power’s sake alone. Then [God] knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind and alone….” The poet is speaking of God's holiness, of who God is within God’s self, but goes on to ask, not in so many words, after God's glory, after God made manifest to a pair of eyes: How could we know otherwise in this world of darkness and death, how could we know God has dealings with us, that Jesus is anything other than a better John the Baptist or Elijah or Moses? "By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it evolve?" Though neither our capacity nor nature’s evolution is at issue here, but only God’s graceful choice to be known. Yet what do we know? For again, in relation to our selves, mostly we say that God’s light, if it is at all, is hidden from our eyes. Mostly we believe the darkness in which we walk, therefore, is light enough. Mostly we would say, with the rest of the disciples, that it is enough to follow one like John the Baptist or Elijah or Moses until, on that mountaintop, we are told--by eyewitnesses--of a light which shone like the sun in the face of Jesus Christ. It is as though this hand we cannot shake, nevertheless, reaches down and touches the earth’s tip, lest we believe we are left with only Jesus, when in fact, in Jesus,, we are having to do with the "God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’" shining as God’s glory in his face. Still, this is nothing to us unless God’s light should choose to shine on us and in us. “But who do you say that I am?” he asks of each one of us who would behold God’s glory. Could this be the Sunday when, risking a shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh, we exclaim, “You are the Messiah…Come on out! I know you’re there!” The effect could be staggering if "the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’” should shine “in our hearts." But for some reason, such a movement on God’s part and our ours remains both unimaginable and incomprehensible on this Transfiguration Day. Perhaps these light years away from Bethlehem and Golgotha, the problem is not so much with our mind’s capacity to prehend this mystery, but with the church’s telling of the tale. The effect is seldom staggering. "We are not," says Karl Barth, "here and now excluded from the glory of God. But the form in which we are surrounded by it, is the form of the Church: proclamation, faith, confession, theology, prayer. …It is as we are gathered to the Church, as the Word is proclaimed to us, as we believe and profess our faith, as theology does its work, as all this being and action is a single prayer…that we really glorify God and share in [God's glory]." Yet if the church and so theology forgets that God is love…is movement…then we will look around becalmed and see only Jesus. Says van der Leeuw, “The dance reminds theology that God is love, is movement toward us…” incarnation…stepping into our flesh and showing forth God’s glory. “In the dance shines the recognition of God, himself moving and thereby moving the world.” A paralytic was once asked to tell a story about his teacher and he told how the Holy Baal Shem Tov used to jump and dance when he was praying. As the paralytic was telling the story, he stood up and the story carried him away so much that he had to jump and dance to show how the master had done it. For that moment, he was healed. This, concludes Martin Buber, is how stories ought to be told. This is how God tells us the story of God’s love in Jesus Christ on the mountaintop. This is how the church ought to tell the story of God’s love, God’s movement toward us, God’s glory shining in the face of Jesus Christ. It therefore remains only for his present day disciples to invent a movement, here and now, in response to the God whose glory waits to shine in our hearts. Deck thyself, thy soul, with gladness, for now the Lord most holy stoops to you in likeness lowly. Amen. |