Next Sunday: The Transfiguration of Jesus / I

I’m looking forward to going to Faith Lutheran Church next Sunday, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, the Sunday we celebrate as the Feast of the Transfiguration when we will listen to the story of Jesus’ glorified change in appearance on the mountain as Mark tells it in Chapter 9:

2 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. 10 So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.

You must read this week’s Journey with Jesus wherein Daniel B. Clendenin asks us: Do we see the transfiguration of Jesus as a “beautiful lie" or an "eyewitness account"? As Clendenin looks over the various ways people try to make sense of the Transfiguration (I myself have experienced nearly all the numerous interpretive possibilities), he asks that "God save us from the safe middle ground of domesticating deism." Clendenin urges us to trudge up that steep mountain with Jesus and his threesome and there stand stunned, shocked, and terrified at who Jesus is.

Yesterday there were only two of us in our Sunday School class: just Harry and me. (Yes, it was quite small.) In preparation for our discussion both of us had read Chapter 10, “Annie Dillard: The Splendor of the Ordinary” in Philip Yancey’s Soul Survivor. Having read most of Dillard’s books over the past thirty years and remembering my pleasure in turning their pages, it came as no small surprise early this morning, when reading Daniel B. Clendenin’s previewing commentary on the Transfiguration of Jesus that he quotes this memorable passage from Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets! Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews! For the sleeping God may awake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us to where we can never return.

It’s my prayer this morning that God will draw all of us “to where we can never return.” Bring your crash helmets.

Image: The Transfiguration of Jesus, The Saint John's Bible