Sermons:
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 Another
Step on the Journey?
a sermon based on Mark 9:1-9
by Rev. Brian T. Flory
One Saturday morning, shortly after my
wife Kimberly and I moved into the church parsonage in Ambler two and a
half years ago, we were working outside in the yard and garden when a
neighbor rushed by and yelled to us that there were peacocks in a tree
down the street and around the corner. Kimberly and I looked at one
another skeptically. Peacocks, there’s no way that peacocks could be in
our neighborhood. After all, Ambler is a suburb of Philadelphia, a place
where one does not expect to find rare, exotic birds.
Still, even though we believed our neighbor to be mistaken, curiosity
won us over as Kimberly walked up the street to verify the claim while I
dashed into the house to find a camera. When I arrived at the scene
shortly thereafter, a small crowd of people stood there marveling at two
large shapes up in a tree. Sure enough, there were two peacocks on
branches about twenty feet off the ground. They were large, beautiful
creatures that seemed aware of the group gathered below, but desired to
act ignorant of our presence.
Kimberly and I remained there for a few minutes, trying to find the
best angle for the picture that would clearly show the peacocks. Then,
we went home, completed our outside work, and went inside the house.
Twenty minutes later, however, I was inside my office at the house when
I looked out the window towards the parking lot and spied the same two
beautiful peacocks perched on the fence. Imagine my surprise. Again,
that is something one does not expect to see everyday.
I called out to Kimberly and immediately grabbed the camera to get
another set of pictures. By the time I got outside, however, the small
crowd of people who had been up the street looking at the peacocks had
also flocked to our yard to get a better glimpse of them. Needless to
say, our yard and parking lot transformed into a virtual circus for the
next hour as Kimberly and I tried to keep the peacocks from reaching
Bethlehem Pike and tried to keep some overzealous children and adults
from touching the peacocks.
Of course, my favorite part of the whole scenario happened when I
called the Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown, where I learned the peacocks
came from, and the voice on the answering machine picked up with the
greeting, “You have reached the Elmwood Park Zoo, the zoo in your own
backyard.” Fortunately for us, zoo officials eventually tracked down and
captured the peacocks. Yet it is still difficult to describe the full
image of this chaotic scene. Part of the reason why we took the
pictures, in addition to the obvious, was because we guessed that no one
would believe our story to be true without them. Even to me, it still
seems so out of the ordinary that I have a difficult time imagining it.
I can imagine that Peter, James, and John felt the same way at the
Transfiguration of Jesus. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to
compare the revelation of God’s voice accompanying the persons of Jesus,
Moses, and Elijah standing together with the unexpected visit of two
lost peacocks. No peacocks, no matter how beautiful they are, could
measure up to that comparison. What I am comparing, however, is the
feeling of unbelieving incredulity that I felt upon seeing something so
totally out of the ordinary realm of normal thought with the same
feelings expressed by the three disciples. [continue]
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