2 Kings 2: 1-12 Psalm 50: 1-6
2 Cor. 4: 3-6 Mark 9: 2-9
Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening. Amen.
It seems that there are any number of television programs these days whose primary objective is transformation. Houses are transformed, bodies are transformed, careers are transformed, love lives are transformed, unruly children are transformed. The sheer number of programs devoted to transformation suggests that we are enamored with the idea that perhaps, we too, can be transformed into something other than what we are. We watch because we are hopeful that our homes, bodies, careers, love lives, and yes, even the unruliest members of our households can be transformed. Even if those unruly ones happen to be our very selves.
Peter, James, and John had a brush with transformation, rather with transfiguration. There they were, on just an ordinary day in ministry. We aren’t sure exactly what was going on with Jesus and the disciples, but we know it was six days after something. Reading earlier in Mark we find that Jesus was teaching the disciples. He was explaining to them that he would have to suffer and die. He was telling them that Kingdom of God would be coming with power and that it would be coming soon. And what we learn in Mark’s Gospel is that the disciples didn’t often understand exactly what Jesus was saying. Suffer and die? What kind of Messiah suffers and dies? Where is the power in that? The Kingdom of God will come soon? How soon?
So perhaps it is out of sheer frustration or exhaustion that Jesus takes only Peter, James, and John up the high mountain by themselves. Maybe it was a private tutoring time with their teacher. Or maybe Jesus thought it would be easier to deal with a smaller group, instead of all twelve of them. But for whatever reason, they were there on the mountain with Jesus, when suddenly Jesus began to glow and his garments became the whitest white and standing with him were Elijah and Moses, who were long since dead.
The church observes this day as the Feast of the Transfiguration. It’s the final Sunday after Epiphany and before the beginning of Lent. And most of the time, that is all we have to say about it. There aren’t any figurines to set up, like a nativity scene. We don’t wave anything about like we do on Palm Sunday. It’s an odd, misunderstood day.
But what we know about this day, for sure, is this: something happened on that mountain, something so powerful, so enlightening, that the disciples did not want it to end. They wanted to stay there with Jesus, to build three dwellings and never come back down off of the mountain.
I imagine that all of us can name some transformative experience in our personal lives. Passionate loves, births or adoptions of children, perhaps finding that perfect job or going on that mind expanding trip.
But what I’d like for us to think about today is what transformative experiences we have had as a church, as both the “big C Church” and as the little c, church, this congregation. How does what happens here transform us from who we are now into who God has created us to be?
Next month we will celebrate sixty years of ministry in this place. And in those sixty years, the places where transformational ministry has happened are very likely not in Council meetings or committee meetings or budget meetings or annual meetings. Very likely, the places where transformation ministry happen involve relationships. Relationship with one another. Relationships with our community and our world. And, relationships with Jesus, who has invited us to come with him up the mountain.
Because I have only been your pastor for (almost) three years, I do not have the breadth of collective memory to be able to reach back very far for stories of community transformation. I have heard about people whose very presence here, in the ministries they served, were transformative. People like Tom Smith, who apparently taught everyone he met, not just what it meant to serve Jesus, but also how to make a viable paper airplane and fly it from the balcony. I’ve heard stories of Kitty Peck and the very gracious way she shared hospitality, which is such an important Biblical principal. I’ve heard stories of how Jordon Moe transformed this place, even as he literally transformed it during Lent by being the person to drape this cross with purple shroud. And of course, we continue to be transformed by the ministries of people like Dick Chapman, whose passion for our young people and whose belief that we could dream creative ways of doing ministry and then do them, was transformative. And people like Donna, and Tara, and Heidi, and Eileen whose work with our Sunday School students transforms them into wonderful young disciples.
And experiences transform us as well. Hosting the women and their children from Mary’s Place transformed their nights without shelter and food into nights with warm, private, safe spaces with delicious food prepared with love. Becoming the emergency hub for the NW end of Seattle has the potential to transform the chaos of an emergency situation into the surety of a safe neighborhood gathering space.
Friday evening I returned from being at Trinity Lutheran Seminary for a time of meeting and interviewing seminary students and candidates for ministry who have an interest in serving as our intern. I have shared with you already, in my weekly online update, what a profoundly hopeful experience I found this to be. These are a diverse group of people: women and men, second career and just out of college, single and married, and they have a variety of gifts. But they have all responded to a call from God and the church to train and prepare for ordained ministry. That call is a call that comes at great cost, financially, emotionally, physically, and in numerous other ways. But what each of these sisters and brothers shared with me last week was their joy in being called to ordained ministry and their eagerness to be present in a congregation for a year of internship. I am absolutely certain that this will be a year that transforms both us as a congregation and our intern in their preparation for ministry. We will be transformed, not just by what the intern brings, but by the very act of partnering with the larger church to raise up a pastoral leader for the Church. Don’t underestimate how important this will be. We partner with professors and pastors and bishops and candidacy committees to help form these students more fully into their pastoral identity.
Here’s how I know how important this is. Last week I was fortunate to be able to squeeze in visits with people who had been vitally important in my own formation as a pastor. These were people who were a part of my internship congregation. One was the President of Council when I was there. Her name is Vivian, or, as she prefers to be called “Nanny Viv.” Viv is in her seventies and is retired. But far from that, she is a transformative person in the lives of the senior members of that congregation. You see, whenever there is an event at the church: a worship service, a dinner, a meeting, a ministry fair…whatever it is, Viv gets into her mini van, dubbed the “Nanny-mobile” and drives throughout their town picking up people who can no longer drive or are no longer comfortable driving. What a sight it is, to watch the Nanny Mobile pull up and six or seven folks get out, come in, and participate fully in the life of that church. She is transformative, transformational in the lives of those folks and in the life of that congregation.
So, here’s the Gospel news, the good news for this day. Each of us, all of us, has been and will be transformative in the life of someone else and each of us will participate in the transformational ministry here, in this place. And through those experiences, we are reminded again, more clearly each time, who Jesus is. Because that’s what the Feast of the Transfiguration is really about. Peter, James, and John could not grasp just from the teaching who Jesus was, and so the trip up the mountain is where they saw him and finally understood who he was. May our transformative experiences reveal to us more clearly, the Messiah who stands with us, on every day and in every place of our lives.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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