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.

Therefore, in my sermon today, you will forgive me if I am unable to speak about this event as it ought to be depicted. This whole story seems too wild and outrageous for me to add much more than the gospel writer already said. Of course, the standard sermon on this passage usually goes something like this: “Well, folks, we all know that God gives us mountaintop experiences. But don’t be like Peter and try to stay on the mountaintop forever. Hurry on down, because there’s a whole lot of work waiting for you down in the valley.” I’ve preached that sermon a couple of times and I think it’s a sound approach to this unbelievable story.

And yet, as I read Mark’s account of this story that appears in some form in each of the gospels, I find myself wondering a simple question. How did we find out the story of the Transfiguration? Jesus presumably did not talk about it, and the three disciples who were with him were instructed not to do so either. In Luke’s description, the disciples “kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.” It makes you wonder how the gospel writers ever heard about it, much less whether they questioned the wisdom of writing it down.

On the other hand, the moment the story broke, it was private no more. All kinds of people started sifting through it, trying to find hidden meaning here and stark symbolism there. Barbara Brown Taylor writes on this text, “I guess that is all we know how to do with an experience (like the Transfiguration) that does not fit any of our categories. We keep handling it until we wear it down to the point where it feels safe to us. We keep analyzing it until we can say something intelligent about it.”

In the Transfiguration, we are presented with an intensely private moment between Jesus and God, so private that much of it happened on a mountain, in a cloud, away from everyone. These disciples were witnesses, but in spite of the fantastic goings on it was all they could do to stay awake, as if God had slipped them something to keep them from seeing things they were not equipped to see. What they did see, they misunderstood. They were terrified by it, which may be why they kept silent, and “in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.”

I wonder if this event is not also a parable of sorts for we who gather on Sunday mornings. On the mountaintop that day, these three disciples were privy to an event unlike any that had ever happened before. It defied imagination. And when it was finished, the whole thing seemed like a dream to the disciples. To Jesus, it simply appeared to be another step on the journey. Or was it? In the same respect, my image of people in worship is that we come here hoping to soak up as much of God as we can to last us to our next worship experience. When we leave here, we may wonder, am I any different?

Perhaps, at first glance, your life is not noticeably different. You are wearing the same clothes as you arrived in, have the same ailments that you did when you came in, and return to the same problems that you had when you last left them. So it is very tempting to believe that nothing has changed during our hour together and that, for us too, being here simply appeared to be another step on the journey.

Yet for Jesus, something very significant happened that day many years ago. It was something that filled him with a singular focus. Prior to this experience, Jesus taught, healed, told parables, exorcised demons, raised people from the dead, and performed other miracles. He still did some of these things following the Transfiguration too, but it was this event alone that honed his focus towards Jerusalem, towards an unavoidable confrontation with the religious and civil authorities, and finally, towards the cross.

For us, something very significant happens as well. Perhaps it doesn’t happen every week. Perhaps it only happens a handful of times. I know from speaking to many of you when there is something that moves you, touches, impacts you in worship with a presence of the divine. What seemingly began as just another worship service, as just another step on the journey, suddenly becomes a moment when everything connects and is made clear. Who knows why it happens? Who knows how it happens? It just happens.

Frederick Buechner once said, “A voice in a dream. A statue that weeps. A miracle is an event that strengthens faith. It is possible to look at most miracles and find a rational explanation in terms of natural cause and effect. It is possible to look at Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus and find a rational explanation in terms of paint and canvas. Still, faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles proceed from faith in God.”

I think such moments as these when they happen are indispensable to our faith, whether it is because of something I’ve said, something that happens during worship, or something that happens later in the week that finally makes life look a little clearer, a little better, or a little easier to live. Then, in some stunning moment of worship, in some dazzling glimpse, we see who Jesus is. He is put in the context with the other great people of God from the past for what seems to him to be another step on the journey. And yet we know that it was not merely that. We heed the voice as it was spoken in the past, in the present and in the future, saying, “This is my Son, listen to him!” And we so listen. And so we see. And so we believe.

Amen.