Sermons
Imagine That!
March 6, 2011
Transfiguration
Exodus 24:12-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9
The Reverend Stephen P. Bauman
Not long ago a small boy, maybe around 4-years-old-or-so asked me on a Sunday morning if I thought God would show up today. He asked it eagerly, not cynically as though repeating something he heard his father toss off in sarcasm. I told him I thought there was a very good chance of it. Did he hope for it? After a tentative pause he said he didn’t know for certain—it sort of scared him.
This brought to mind my own memory from about the same age as my new acquaintance—the earliest memory I have of being in church. During Sunday worship I sat on the edge of my pew waiting for God to make an entrance. I had my eyes glued on the carved altarpiece at the back of the chancel thinking God would emerge from the shadows behind. I was both excited and scared.
Needless to say, God didn’t appear that day in the manner I was expecting. Although, I don’t remember being disappointed, just a little confused. But I suppose I could say I’ve had my focus fixed on that spot ever since—waiting expectantly, hopefully, with just enough fear to make my desire honest. It is God we’re speaking about here, after all, the one who flung the stars into distant space and fashioned life out of dust.
Childhood dreams are generally washed away by encroaching adult realities, of course. The imagination succumbs to the onslaught of secular education and the demand for sticking to the tangible and material. The five physical senses have pride of place in our culture over the one that has a bead on Mystery. Spiritual yearnings get short shrift in educational and family settings overfull with busy industry. I’ve heard many of you tell me your version of this transition as you’ve shared your histories—the lost perception of mystery and transcendence about life.
Interestingly, this can even happen within the church. Actually, I think it routinely happens within the church. Adult religion is easily stripped of a present, intimate sense of the transcendent. And it can happen in both conservative and liberal settings that gather in the rather comfortable state of being quite clear about who God is or is not, honing it down to either a kind of quasi science or explicit set of propositions.
At this point God is more of an idea than a living, dynamic reality—a construct. The forms of prayer can seem anachronistic, certainly nothing that really amounts to much now that we’ve outgrown childish fantasies and superstitions.
And true enough, there are plenty of superstitions we ought to leave behind. There is a lot of bad religion out there, neurotic religion, narcissistic religion, destructive religion. We all know something about that. Some of us know of it quite personally. And you know people who are persuaded that all religion is bad, or at best simply irrelevant and devote themselves to what they deem are rational or material pursuits only. For them to be an adult means, in part, leaving behind in the toy box what they might refer to as the crutch or the delusion of God.
For me, that would be like leaving my heart behind in the toy box, or my soul—the precious aspect of my essential identity. I’ve never understood why so many people do not see this the way I do, that is, don’t see God lurking everywhere behind creation and sense God mixed up in the air of every breath they take. This is a great conundrum to me: that what I know to be the deepest truth would be for others a curious improbability.
You can tell the designers of this space understood what I’m talking about. We can surmise by the results of their obvious effort and investment of resources that they thought God should be seen and heard here.
If not, this was a horribly expensive folly. There are plenty of New Yorkers who think that, of course. They think that the purpose for which this place was built is complete bunk, although they like that it sits here on the corner as opposed to, say, yet one more high-rise condominium. They may like that they live in a city with useless but very attractive cultural artifacts.
When I first moved into the city in 1987 at the tail end of a hot building boom, I was routinely telephoned by real estate developers who shared the exact same rap: “Reverend, did you know that you’re sitting on one of the five most valuable undeveloped properties in all of New York?” And I repeated the same response each time. “And here I thought that it was developed.”
I think you’d agree that when you make your way into a place like this on a Sunday morning in this city you’re behaving counter-culturally, notwithstanding the polls telling us about the religious/spiritual nature of the American population. You know that many of your friends and business associates did not go to a religious observance this weekend. And they’re not entirely certain what to make of those who do.
From their vantage point it’s a bit strange that people actually choose to gather in these extremely decorative buildings on an otherwise perfectly fine Sunday morning, sing songs about someone named God, offer prayers, and read opaque ancient writings while working their way through esoteric rituals with people wearing purple and white robes.
But then that’s all part of the mystery we’re marketing. We use imaginative means and materials to hook all of our senses so that sixth sense might be tweaked into action. This is set up counter-intuitively, counter-culturally, on the chance someone’s vision and hearing are bent just enough so they might hear or even see God.
To be completely truthful, what we’re really selling here is change. If we were simply concerned with portraying an entertaining, diverting idea about God and leave it at that, church would be a bit like a religious zoo with our version of god safely caged. With the passing of the plate we’d pay our price of admission, throw a few peanuts in the direction of that which we’ve come to see and be on our way. As Annie Dillard has asked in exasperation, “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”
What we’re really after here, is God uncaged—God on God’s own terms. But to actually allow for that possibility requires a break with the status quo in our lives. It requires an expectation like that of my young 4-year-old friend asking if God would be showing up on a Sunday. I’m reminded of Jesus once commenting that unless we become like little children we will never find the kingdom of God. Children have an innocent anticipation of what they do not know because they realize they know so very little really. Are we brave enough to be childlike in this sense?
Again, Annie Dillard offers this observation: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? …It is madness to wear…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 wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”
We don’t know what happened at Mt. Sinai as Moses led the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt, but we do know this: that whatever happened “released a torrent of spiritual energy which transformed Israel into a people of priests and prophets, bringing enlightenment to humanity,” and establishing a course of human civilization to the present day. (Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayerbook)
In the Gospel passage concerning the disciples’ vision of a transfigured Jesus, that Sinai experience is recalled. Again the sacred event happens on a mountaintop. Peter reports that Jesus was changed. When they looked at him one way it was the same old Jesus, but then looking again they were astonished and rattled by glory. The witnesses would be changed as well, but they wouldn’t get the full force of it until some time later, after they descended the mountain and got on with life.
Commenting on the transfiguration, Harry Emerson Fosdick said an inner transformation took place in Jesus…”faith replaced fear, strength for anxiety, confidence for hesitation, inward power adequate for outward tension. That showed in his face.” Ultimately, it would show in the faces of Jesus’ witnesses, and the spiritual power released through them brings us to this moment 2000 years later.
The 40-something man said he wanted to speak with me during the week as he left the sanctuary. He had been profoundly shaken. Monday morning he called me; we met that afternoon. He wasn’t sure what had happened, he said. He even felt a bit childish. But something had turned him upside down and inside out. Something I said sliced like a knife into a deep part of him. He added, “No offense, but I didn’t even think that the sermon was all that hot.” Nevertheless, it was during the music following that he felt the deep incision. He couldn’t stand for the offering hymn. His knees were wobbly when he finally got up to leave.
He was a successful corporate officer, Harvard MBA. Traveled all over the world; had dropped in on church off and on, but it had never felt like this. This was different. He was like a kid in Sunday school. “Imagine that!” he said. “I went to church and found God…” He had the same look of excitement, fear and confusion as the boy who asked me if God would be showing up on a Sunday.
