TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD

Exodus 24:12-18

Psalm 2 or

Psalm 99

2 Peter 1:16-21

Matthew 17:1-9

Prayer of the Day: O God, in the transfiguration of your Son you confirmed the mysteries of the faith by the witness of Moses and Elijah, and in the voice from the bright cloud declaring Jesus your beloved Son, you foreshadowed our adoption as your children. Make us heirs with Christ of your glory, and bring us to enjoy its fullness, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

 “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” Matthew 17:5.

Just when the disciples think they finally have Jesus figured out, they find out they don’t. Just when they think they understand what the reign of God is all about, they discover they have a lot more to learn. They struggle to comprehend Jesus’ parables, they question his judgment when he tells them they are bound for Jerusalem and they do not know what to make of the Transfiguration but are clearly intent on making it last. The succeeding generations of disciples have fared no better. We are still trying to figure out who Jesus is, what he demands of us and how to follow him. Over the centuries, the church has made some disastrous wrong turns, not the least of which was turning Jesus into the mascot of empire, the tool of colonialism and, most recently, the patron saint of American racism, genocide, misogyny and homophobia. The way of discipleship is, as Jesus characterizes it, “narrow” and “hard.” By contrast, the way leading us away from it is “wide and the road is easy.” Matthew 7:13-14. Thus, the divine imperative: “This is my Son, the Beloved…listen to him.”

How do people like us who are two millennia removed from Jesus’ earthly ministry listen to him? Of course, the most direct witnesses we have to Jesus are the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. The Bible, consisting of both documents, is understood in my Lutheran tradition to be the Word of God-but only in a derivative sense. Primarily, the Word of God is the Word made flesh, the incarnate Word, Jesus the Christ. In the not too distant past, we would have said that the Bible is “inerrant and infallible.” The abandonment of these terms in our more recent statements of faith caused quite a stir among folks who felt we were watering down the Bible’s authority. But I think jettisoning these terms was a wise decision. They say both too much and too little. They claim too much because they ascribe everything to the text, suggesting that we disciples of Jesus are a “people of the book.” [1] On the other hand, these two terms say too little because they fail to specify the focus of the Bible’s testimony to the Incarnate Word. In arguing with his opponents, Jesus remarked, “you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf.” John 5:39. I prefer to say that the Bible is a faithful and reliable witness to God’s saving acts toward Israel and God’s redemptive acts for all creation through the obedient life, faithful death and glorious resurrection of Jesus. Disciples of Jesus read and interpret the scriptures through this lens. That is how the Bible enables us to listen to Jesus.  

Still, the fact remains that the Bible has not always functioned as a redemptive text or a faithful witness to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims. Throughout history the Bible has been cited in support of unspeakable hatred, violence and cruelty. In both the United States and South Africa, the accounts of Israel’s conquest of Canaan were cited as a rationale for invading, conquering and dispossessing indigenous peoples. Saint Paul’s admonition to respect governing authorities as instruments of God’s justice has been cited to justify tyranny and condemn resistance to it. The Bible was regularly invoked to support the institution of slavery in the antebellum United States and afterward to support the systemic racism of Jim Crow. Biblical passages have been employed to demonize, ostracize and incite violence against gay, lesbian and transgender persons. The Bible is a complex, layered and diverse collection of literature filled with rabbit holes leading to dark and frightening places. It is a dangerous book in the hands of the wrong people.

That brings us to our reading from II Peter where the apostle says, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” II Peter 1:20. That is not to say the Bible needs no interpretation. As noted above, it clearly does. The operative words in Peter’s remark are “one’s own.” Interpretation of scripture is far too important a task to be left to everyone’s individual conscience. It is too important to be placed solely in the hands of ecclesiastical authorities or left to the outcome of any democratic process. Interpretation of scripture is the task of the whole church. We need the wisdom and experience of bishops, pastors and teachers to school us in the lessons learned by the church over the centuries and the hard won teachings that have guided us. We need prophetic voices of preachers speaking from the margines to warn us when our orthopraxy does not match our orthodoxy and call us back to faithfulness. We need writers, poets, artists and musicians to stretch our imaginations and help us to see and understand in new ways our Lord Jesus and the reign of God he proclaims. I daresay we need even the heretics. While we may reject their claims and teachings, we can thank them for helping us clarify, revise and strengthen our own. (And I hope we are learning to treat them more grace and gentleness than we have in the past!) Through all these witnesses, we discover anew the Jesus we thought we knew as he is constantly transfigured and we are by him transformed.

Here is a poem about perception that transfigures and its transformative potential by Jennifer Jean.

Doors of Perception

My father leapt on stage at the Hollywood Bowl

to grab drum and cymbal sticks

from a star—he wanted to be

a star, a door, a Door. White. Security

thugs dragged him off

John Densmore. He saw doors everywhere, he saw Doors

everywhere—at the Whisky,

the Beanery, the Magic Mountain fest—and

in primary colors

in Windward, Oakwood, or North of  Rose. He wanted

to forget war in Venice, to be a door in Venice

and face the faux canals.

Later, he flew to Paris to pay homage to the Door who died

with a head of Alexandrian hair.

He carried huge pale poppies

to the “Poets’ Corner” in the Père Lachaise,

to this stranger under a cream coffin

door nailed shut. He said, Break on through.

He put a poppy in his pocket

like a receipt,

and chased daylight till he landed

in LA, saw a wave of  white

stars rippling

on the Pacific on new moon nights,

when the ever-present rust cloud was blown out to sea.

He found a motel room door, particle door, and shut it

on all that he owned

for fifty years. He lived there, adding up primary colors,

hour to hour in Bliss Consciousness—

crossing his legs on the bed, letting electric snow

hush the TV. Hush

gunfire and

blood. He forgot his father’s father’s Cabo Verde

and let himself   be Italian there—

a different kind of   Venetian—because who he really was was

too close to Black.

Source: Poetry (October 2020). Jennifer Jean is a poet, translator, editor and educator. She was born in Venice, California and lived in foster-care until she was seven. Her ancestors are from the Cape Verde Islands. She grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley. She earned her BA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and her MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College. Jean has been awarded fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Disquiet/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Kolkata International Poetry Festival. She received the Jean Pedrick Award from the NEPC, and an Ambassador for Peace Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jean is the founder of Free2Write: Poetry Workshops for Trauma Survivors, and has been the poetry editor for Talking Writing Magazine and MER. You can read more about Jennifer Jean and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.

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[1] My friends who insist on an inerrant Bible find themselves drawn down a thousand rabbit holes, having to defend a literal six day creation, a literal worldwide flood and a literal halt to the earth’s rotation against all scientific evidence. This is necessary because if the Bible is found to be unreliable in any single detail, its credibility is destroyed and faith is undermined. But this is to do exactly what Jesus’ opponents were doing, namely, placing faith in the scriptures rather than the God to whom the scriptures testify.  

FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY

Isaiah 58:1-12

Psalm 112:1-10

1 Corinthians 2:1-16

Matthew 5:13-20

Prayer of the Day: Lord God, with endless mercy you receive the prayers of all who call upon you. By your Spirit show us the things we ought to do, and give us the grace and power to do them, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of injustice,
    to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
    and to break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
    and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
    and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” Isaiah 58:6-7.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” Matthew 5:13.

Salt had numerous uses in the first century. It was used for enhancing the flavor of food as it is today. Salt was also employed as a preservative, critical for warm climates. It was used to brighten the light of oil lamps, increase the efficiency of baking ovens and as a cleansing agent. Salt was a component in ritual sacrifices, sometimes spoken of as a symbol of Israel’s covenant with God. For more on this, see Nolland, John, The Gospel of Matthew, (New International Greek Testament Commentary, c. 2005 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). We need not settle on which particular use Jesus had in mind to appreciate the metaphor. Whether acting as seasoning, preservative, cleanser, brightener, cooking aid or ritual symbol, salt is always used to benefit something else. The one thing salt cannot do is salt itself. Salt that has become degraded, diluted or altered in some way such that its effectiveness is impaired cannot be restored by adding more salt to it.

As we move further into this section of Matthew known as the Sermon on the Mount, we hear Jesus becoming increasingly critical of the religion practiced by many of the scribes and Pharisees. He makes clear, however, that his criticism is not of Judaism and its practices. To the contrary, he makes clear that he did not come to abolish, but to fulfill the Torah. Jesus is fully supportive of his opponents’ practices of fasting, prayer and almsgiving. His criticism goes rather to the failure of their fasting, prayers and giving to inspire them toward observance of the “weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” Matthew 23:23. In this Jesus was consistent with the prophet Isaiah who chides his own contemporaries for their scrupulous observance of ritual fasting on the one hand while ignoring the needs of their needy neighbors on the other. Faith that does not embody empathy toward the world of neighbors is not Christian, however much it might be plastered with crosses and smothered with mouthed praises of Jesus.

If the Sermon is to be preached faithfully, the preacher must recognize that it is an indictment of our own worship as much or more than that of Jesus’ contemporaries. Ours, too, is often worship that is more form than substance. It is one thing to issue preachy-screechy social statements condemning poverty. It is quite another to “bring the homeless poor into your house.” It is easy enough to condemn colonialism from comfort of our homes and offices built on land our recent ancestors stole from indigenous tribes. It is quite another to consider what it might mean to reverse the colonial systems from which we obviously continue to benefit. It is easy to lament and issue declarations of apology for our church’s participation with and complicity in our nation’s shameful history of slavery. As those of us who have been urging the church to take concrete steps toward restorative justice and reparations for Black Americans, acting on such bold declarations is not something our leaders are keen on pursuing.

The Sermon on the Mount is good news. To the poor it throws open the door to God’s reign of plenty; to those who groan under the yoke of oppression, it promises liberation; to those who are persecuted, it promises vindication and blessing; to the rich, it promises liberation from addiction to wealth; to the privileged, it promises demolition of the walls that separate us from the neighbors who have for too long paid the price for our consumptive way of life. In the Sermon, Jesus invites us to join him in a new way of being human in an increasingly inhumane world. No matter how beaten down one might be under the crushing oppression of empire, no matter how deeply one might be implicated in driving that oppression, the inbreaking of God’s reign opens up opportunities for repentance, justice and reconciliation (in that order). Jesus invites us to become “like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail.” Isaiah 58:11. He calls us to become a sign of what our world can be.

That brings us back to salt, the substance that seasons, cleanses, preserves, enlightens and sanctifies-among other things. Disciples understand that they cannot establish the reign of God through their own efforts. They can, however, and must witness to it in deed as well as word. That is what food pantries in the church basement are all about. They do not make much of a dent in world hunger, but they season a nation, half of which is starving from lack of nutrition while the other is starving from lack of compassion. Protests against Donald Trump’s private army of ICE thugs killing their neighbors may not break the resolve of our government to inflict terror upon our neighborhoods. But it will shine a light on oppression and highlight the humanity of its victims. Sanctuary churches are not the solution to anti-immigrant violence and oppressive policies. But they do, along with numerous other communities of faith and humanitarian organizations, hold together vulnerable communities and provide essential support for families in the greatest danger of arrest and deportation. The preachers who find courage to speak truthfully to their congregations about what discipleship means in an age of bigotry dressed up as patriotism will not move the needle of public opinion. But they can perhaps light a flame that God’s Spirit will one day fan into a fierce and cleansing fire. Like salt, Jesus’ disciples are called to be agents of seasoning, preservation, cleansing, illumination and sanctification.

It may seem counterintuitive to think of salt as a healing agent. Nobody likes the idea of “rubbing salt into a wound.” But pain is an inevitable part of healing and recovery. A pinch of salt in the right places can be the catalyst for needed change. Here is a poem by Larry Neal celebrating the many people whose lives and struggles have seasoned the long (and as yet incomplete) sojourn of Black Americans toward liberation from the oppression of white supremacy. 

O God make us strong and ready

Source: Hoodoo Hollerin’ Bebop Ghosts, (c. 1968, 1974 by Larry Neal; pub. by Published by Howard Univ Press). Larry Neal (1937–1981) was an American writer, poet, critic and academic. He was a well known scholar of African-American theater who contributed to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Neal was a major force pushing for black culture to focus less on integration with white culture. He sought rather to lift up its unique features within an equally important and meaningful artistic and political field celebrating Black heritage.

Neal was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Woodie and Maggie Neal, who had five sons. He graduated from a Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia in 1956. He later graduated from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in 1961 with a degree in history and English. He then went on to receive a master’s degree in Folklore which became a major subject of many of his later works. Neal was a professor at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia and a copywriter in Wiley and Sons. He held professorships at City College of New York, Wesleyan University and Yale University. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for African-American critical studies. You can read more about Larry Neal and sample more of his poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.