FROM TRADITIONAL TO TRANSFORMED
MATTHEW 17:1-9
FEBRUARY 3, 2008 – TRANSFIGURATION/COMMUNION
THOMAS H. YORTY, WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

            Driving out of the church parking lot last week I saw a huge bird descend on a small evergreen in the new WECP playground by the exit drive. It was a red tail hawk.
            The unsuitability of the small tree to support her gave me time to roll up next to the fence where she alighted with a deft maneuver of her powerful wings. I looked directly into the hawk’s eyes who never lost her focus on me. For a long second we stared at each other. The raptor’s confident perch on the fence despite my presence made the moment transcendent.
            At first, I lamented not having a camera, but the hawk’s fierce stare exposed my flimsy thoughts. The bird just feet away was so big and wild I felt my life confronted not by the hawk so much as something beyond the hawk summoning me to let go of self-justification; and to allow the One who is the spirit of all creation to reshape me.

            Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “we can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of [nature]; but when we try to define and describe him, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.”1
            That encounter with the hawk’s wondrous truth and beauty had a holy dimension difficult to put into words. It was a transfiguring moment for me and I am wrestling with it still as I share it with you today.
            My hunch is that that was the experience of the disciples as they stood before Jesus and saw the Holy One burning through him. My hunch is also that many of us have had the same experience in some ordinary moment when the divine power reaches through a person or book or burning bush and grasps your life to reconfigure it.   

            I’d like to talk today about transfiguration as the process through which we move from tradition to transformation. A process by which God’s spirit reshapes us.
            Webster has some interesting things to say about tradition: it is “the handing down of information, opinions, beliefs and customs by word of mouth or example; an inherited way of thinking, feeling, or doing;
            the transmission of knowledge and institutions through successive generations without written instruction.”  

            What strikes me is how powerful and functional tradition is. Did you notice that things so essential as beliefs and customs, so personal as feelings, so far reaching as institutions are given credibility by a process that is neither democratic nor tolerates dissent? 
            From my earliest memory I said prayers before dinner: no one asked me if I approved; nor when I was invited to say the blessing in my youth did anyone hand me instructions, though I cherish and observe this tradition in my family today.
            Yet, in my college fraternity new recruits were oriented with a humiliating process called hazing. A flawed tradition thankfully no longer practiced.
            Transformation, on the other hand, Webster says, “is to change completely or essentially in composition or structure;” to reshape, redefine, or remake.
            While the church is both traditional and transformational, because the church is an institution, it is easier to pass along the beliefs and practices that were passed along to us than redefine those beliefs and practices for the demands of a changing world. I’m talking about the culture of our church-everything from greeting visitors to our assumptions about prayer to what we do or do not talk about.
            Religion from the beginning has faced this tension. When Jesus walked the roads of Galilee, tradition had created a religious establishment that all but suffocated the spirit of God’s people. Yet, Jesus repeatedly lived by the spirit not the letter of the law transforming the practice of faith which got him into much trouble.

            It is significant that the disciples’ vision of Jesus took place on a high mountain-a place in the Bible where revelations occur; locations the Scots refer to as ‘thin places’ where the separation between heaven and earth is as translucent as onion-skin paper.
            I remember being in the wilderness of Maine, twenty miles from Quebec in February a few years ago; it was at a time when I was tired and needed to get away; we were camping on the peninsula of a frozen lake and as I sat at the open expanse of white lake and distant mountains I could see my life with remarkable clarity. Past, present and future seemed to open up before me.
            When Jesus took his three faithful followers Peter, James and John to a high mountain, it was time to get away, to take a look again at what he was calling them to do, what path to follow.

            The Transfiguration occurs in Matthew just after Jesus tells his disciples he will suffer and die as they must to follow him, yet before his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
            He is preparing them to meet the events about to unfold but also equipping them to persevere after his death as they face the same debilitating attitudes he did.
            The voice that claimed him at his baptism claims him again in the same words, yet adds this admonition for the sake of the disciples: “Listen to him,” at which point, weak-kneed, they collapse in fear.

            And here we know Matthew is telling the truth. The reaction to being in the presence of Jesus is so often fear. When he calms the storm, when he tells his followers where to cast their nets for a huge catch of fish, when the tomb is empty Easter morning, his disciples are afraid.
            In fact, a benchmark for our faith might be the experience of fear. I don’t mean fear resulting from an unwanted reality invading our lives, but fear from some deep change we are summoned to make—of habit or relationship or self awareness. Fear we as an urban congregation surely confront as we consider how we need to change to remain a vital, God and Christ centered community.
            This is not the message of new age or consumer spirituality. It is why some people keep their relationship to church at arm’s length—convenient and contained—because being here can mean receiving a scary summons to change ourselves and the world.
            Scholars have long debated the meaning of the Transfiguration. The best thinking says it opened the disciples up to meet the next phase of their journey which was to establish the church. I suspect as they bore their own crosses after Easter, that day on the mountain came back to them like an unfurled banner leading them into new and dangerous territory
            What ever else it means the Transfiguration connects Jesus through the presence of Moses and Elijah with God’s long standing aim to deliver his people from death to life; it is the fulfillment of an ancient promise and also the promise of resurrection.
            What gets those weak-kneed disciples off the ground and moving forward is Jesus’ calming touch and his words of encouragement, “Get up and do not be afraid.” Just as he comes to any who face his truth and summons.

            In the contemporary context of the Presbyterian Church there are some traditions that hold us back and stunt our growth. Yet, it is not the tradition that is at fault so much as we who choose or not to perpetuate tired customs that inhibit deeper community.
            Traditions are fine until they isolate or insulate a believer or church from the real world—as happened to some of the Pharisees who plotted against Jesus.   
            But transfiguring moments shatter brittle beliefs and pivot us from easy self-deception to noble truth. Such moments unstop our ears and remove the scales from our eyes to behold what Christ-like living calls us to be and do. I want to encourage us today to reflect upon and take seriously transfiguring moments that hold the key to our spiritual maturity.

            It is fitting Jesus’ journey to the cross not be shrouded in gloom and doom but illumined in light and revelation, as the painting on your bulletin cover today suggests. For here is a paradox: suffering and glory, darkness and light, death and life belong together.
            Emerson, reflecting on the strange unity of all things seen and unseen noted how acts of heroism or sacrifice seem to draw to themselves the sky as their temple and sun as their candle.
            He recalls the inspiring example of Harry Vane, American patriot and champion of English law, who was dragged to his execution, bound and sitting on a sled as one of the multitude cried out to him, “You never sat on so glorious a seat!” So it is that we remember the sacrifice of Christ and venerate the ordinary, glorious elements of bread and wine he used.1

            Here’s the message today: suffering and glory, darkness and light, death and life belong together as God transfigures us into faithful living and abundant life.
            Life’s transfiguring moments are not innocuous encounters with the holy but holy encounters that offer deeper incentive to serve, to change, to grow so that our traditions will never suffocate us but serve their true end which is Christ’s glory.
            The hawk I met the other day was a holy summons to courage, shattering the veneer of my play-it-safe, image-conscious behavior, inviting me to take up my cross at this particular moment in my life. My idea of a camera was as effective as Peter’s notion of building a dwelling. You cannot prolong or capture such moments. But you can listen to them and let God transform you into something new and bold and useful for Christ. Amen.