Scripture

Have you ever tried to take something away from a toddler? Phew. Jacob is getting old enough to be aware of his desires and to express them with much zeal, and if he offers a book to me but he doesn’t want me to actually take it from his hands, he will throw himself on the floor, face to the ground, and sob. He hardly speaks 3 words, but how he feels about something being forcibly removed from him is abundantly clear. 

I wonder how we feel when something is forcibly removed from us. We probably feel about the same as Jacob does, though we express it differently. When our health or physical able-ness drains away bit by bit, or is ripped out from under us in one fell swoop, when the community or relationships that moored our lives drop out at the bottom, when reality is so changed that we hardly have words for the new world that we are shunted into – we might be mad, we might be sad, we might feel hollowed out and dry-mouthed and as if we are strangers, in a strange new land. 

I don’t believe that God rips our health from our hands, or that God is the one who drags us away from the life we love, or that God is responsible for the changes of our circumstances. He isn’t the one to blame when cancer strikes or when divorce happens or when addiction takes hold. These are evil things that prowl at our doors and claw into our homes because of the brokenness of this world. These are sad facts of what reality is in this fallen life. 

And the real problem is denying their power over us. I don’t really need to tell you this – you have seen in your own life the way that abuse distorts a human heart. You have witnessed with your own eyes the way that cancer and terminal illness wastes away precious people. You know the destruction that death and dissension and denial itself wreaks on us. We know that the battle is really within us. That evil isn’t just all around, but that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. And this battle can often feel like it is against our very selves; that the grief we feel consumes us, that the anger wells inside of us without end, that the pride and the despair and the wrongs done to us and the righteous indignation and the terror of insecurity isn’t just something to fight against, but is knit into our very souls. 

And that’s what makes it so hard to let go of. The anger is not us, it is an emotion that passes. The grief is not us, it is a wound that can heal. The despair and the righteous indignation are blankets to protect us from the searing heat of life. The terror of insecurity is our signal that we’ve put our eggs in the wrong basket. So we cling to these things because they at least feel better than what we fear might happen or might be required of us if we were to let them go. These things, our grief, our anger, our despair, in a way, they keep us safe, the hem us in by making things stay the same, by making us stuck. If we are planted in anger, we do not need to change. If we are in a siege against insecurity, we cannot possibly move outside the walls. If we are sleeping in our grief, we need not be roused to another unpredictable day. And yet, what kind of life is that?

See, God doesn’t take our grief out of our hands, we must offer it to him in order to transform it. He won’t forcibly remove the sins we hold dear, even though he is God, and he could do it if he wanted to. 

I wonder whether one of the reasons he doesn’t do that is because, just like a toddler, if it’s taken from us, we cling to it all the more, we refuse all the more to release its power over us. If we don’t recognize in ourselves that we need to let go, give it up, nothing God can do will change our minds. 

We must always ask for a soft heart, a heart of flesh, in order to surrender those demons; we can’t even do that without God’s help. We must ask to be released from them. And that’s exactly what happens in the passage after the Transfiguration in Luke.

Hear the Word of God: “On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. And behold, a man from the crowd cried out, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only child. And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out. It convulses him so that he foams at the mouth, and shatters him, and will hardly leave him.’” (Luke 9:37-39) 

This man offers up the suffering of his son. He begs on his behalf for deliverance. Somehow, physical illnesses seem easier to give over to God than the griefs in our hearts. But the anger that eats us up and the denial that corrodes our minds is no less fatal than diseases that afflict the body. I wonder if that’s why there are so many stories of Jesus healing people of demons and of mental illnesses Scripture – those internal battles are important to God, just as much as our flesh and our bones. 

So I believe it is not at all a coincidence that the story immediately following today’s Gospel lesson on the Transfiguration is a story of healing a boy’s spirit and mind. 

In the Transfiguration, we learn that God reveals new facets of himself to us all the time, and we see that we are always changed by close encounters with the divine — just like Moses in the Old Testament lesson. In prayer, we offer up bits of ourselves, and God takes whatever it is we deign to offer him and he transforms it before he gives it back to us.

So in today’s passage, Jesus goes to the mountain to pray, and in his humanity, on our behalf, offers himself to God — we see this by looking, too, at the passage before where he speaks of his death, as well as the subject of the discussion between him, Elijah, and Moses.

All of this happens in front of Peter, James, and John, and then, God in Jesus gives back to us a revelation of his glory and he answers these men’s questions about who Jesus is by showing them Moses the redeemer, and Elijah the great prophet. Jesus himself the fulfillment of these promises, embodying and enacting the relationship between God and humanity in the confines of his very flesh. 

Jesus and his disciples go to pray, and what does it say that the disciples do? They’re weighed down with sleep, that sweet bliss of unconsciousness, right? I wonder if the same might be said for our desire to be asleep to, to deny, to not look at or acknowledge the wounds we cling to, and the pain we grip, and the grief we hold so close. What might it mean to be awake as we pray? 

How might God be revealed to us if we open our eyes wide in the presence of God, despite temptations to doze off to the truth of ourselves? What might we see if we are attentive to our internal surroundings, to our hearts, as we approach God’s presence? Scripture tells us that these beloved disciples were heavy with sleep, “but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory.” Not only that, but the were enveloped by a cloud, they heard a voice from the sky, they were struck silent by the experience. In a word, they were changed. 

My  beloved Brothers and Sisters, may we have the courage to offer ourselves to God, to be awakened to the truth of ourselves, to have hearts soft and malleable for the Great Potter, and to joyously await the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.