‘B’   //   Transfiguration of the Lord   //   2-22-09   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside

 

Scriptures    2 Kings 2:1-12      2 Corinthians 4:3-6      Mark 9:2-9

 

 

“The Transfiguration of the Lord.” How high and holy sounding can it get?

 

And yet, in our spiritual lexicon and way of life: This day offers a glimpse of the Easter greatness to come.

 

It’s a peak experience … a pinnacle moment: This midpoint between Jesus’ baptism and his resurrection. It’s Jesus’ mid-ministry crisis, if you will – high on a mountaintop, midway between earth and heaven.

 

Let’s look at it this way: We have been worshiping at a midpoint between earth and heaven – on this holy hill, in this upper room – for over two generations now. Recognizing this: How may this mountaintop tale form and inform our hilltop witness?

 

*        *        *

 

It’s been over a month since Vicki Baker passed away in Chelsea.

 

Vicki’s is one of those names embedded in our Northside genetic code. She was the wife of our church’s founding pastor, Bill Baker – pastor here through the entirety of the 1960s and ‘70s.

 

The wife of the founding pastor: That may not sound politically correct to state Vicki’s identity in that way. But that’s how she seems to have been remembered. As I picked the brains of our matriarchs and patriarchs for eulogy tips, I noticed two things. First: Little, if anything, was remembered about Vicki apart from her relationship with Bill. And second: She was apparently “gracious” and “supportive” – two words used to describe her over and over and over again.

 

And so it was fitting that the guiding scripture of Vicki’s memorial service would be the words from Paul to the church in Corinth that we hear today: “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.”

 

Now I can understand – per Vicki’s lived example – the Christian witness of proclaiming Christ as Lord, and not ourselves. But proclaiming ourselves as slaves of others: How harsh! How submissive!

 

While it’s important to note here that the Greek word for slave can also be translated as servant: Still …

 

And yet, as we turn in our church year toward its most self-effacing season – linger over that phrase, if you will, for a moment – let’s not overlook in Paul’s words here the mountaintop clarity of his direct and indeed his transfiguring vision of the person and witness of Jesus as Christ and Lord. Not that, per Peter’s proactive lunge today in our gospel narrative, Jesus might be adulated and adored in our university milieu as a rabbi among rabbis. But that we might recognize, in the lofty transcendence of this upper room space, the inescapable connection between his simple confessional identity and his call to us of radical discipleship.

 

“For we do not proclaim ourselves,” Paul writes, “we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord … and ourselves as your slaves (dear Corinthians,) for Jesus’ sake.”

 

 

 

 

First, a historical note: This upper room of a sanctuary was not Northside’s sanctuary of intention. It was designed as simply a way-station for a more formal, pew-laden arrangement set off deeper into the woods to the north and northeast.

 

Due to concerns topographical as well as economic, that sanctuary was never built. And so this upper room, spanning over two generations now of Northside’s life and witness, just might provide us with a worshipful Transfiguration Sunday metaphor to better understand God’s intention for us as we lean into Lent.

 

But let’s be careful here. For how easy it can be for our upper room to become solely a hilltop retreat. Gazing out over the treetops; gawking at the deer below. As some have referred – and not completely fairly – to the theology of that twentieth century great Karl Barth, such an easy transcendence can be dubbed “helicopter theology”: fluttering above the masses and the messes, landing for a moment to kick up some dust or snow, then taking off again into some ethereal remove.

 

And what a lovely holy hill remove this can be! Why participate in rigorous spiritual discipline of any kind – adult Christian education included – when in our one weekly hour of worship we can settle in, to use the words of Annie Dillard, as “tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute”?²

 

Or we might – just might – find ourselves reflected, at least in part, in an equally contented upper room theology Diana Butler Bass describes in her splendid book Christianity for the Rest of Us:

 

Many mainstream congregations (have developed an understanding of) the church as a religious place for social acceptability … Everyone was welcome – with no spiritual demands other than to conform to some sort of generalized Protestant morality. As a result, many mainline congregations forgot the practices that originally formed their traditions.³

 

Practices that include our Lenten series opportunities, come March. Practices that move us gently away from the easy and private and readily packaged accessibility of worshipful words – as well as the many rabbis who have eagerly produced them – and into a more rigorous and more vigorous Upper Room Theology: meditative, and communal, and full of cross-bearing awe.

 

Otherwise, we might find ourselves proclaiming to Jesus today, a la Peter, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be in this Upper Room. Let us build three libraries: one for you, one for our Book Group, and one for our Men’s Gospel Breakfast!”

 

 

 

The beginning of Jesus’ baptismal invocation is repeated: “This is my Son, the Beloved.” But instead of us interloping once again on God’s delight in the Son – “with you I am well pleased” – our disciple ears hear God turn to us and say:

 

 

Or – somewhere, and somehow, beyond the remove and the chatter – it might, and it can, become a more receptive place. Moving us from retreat on the one hand and accessibility on the other to a place of wondrous awe. Moving us – on any occasion – from a cloud of anxious words or activity to the brilliant, silent light of our listening.

 

A deeper and a more human Upper Room Theology – and not simply a higher and holier, or a chummier and chattier, one. Lest the famine of our verbosity, and all our high-minded cultural intentions therein, starve our hearts and our souls from the Lord we would proclaim.

 

And yet, before we would claim more words to proclaim: There’s a spirituality we are to practice, and a world we are to serve.

 

So let us go about these things, this Lent to come: simply … directly … quietly … humbly. That as we bear our individual crosses from this upper room toward Jerusalem, we might become slaves to one another for Jesus’ sake, as well.

 

*        *        *

 

 

That we might allow ourselves – with Peter, James, and John today – to “not know what to say.” That we might admonish one another, as the prophet Elisha told the villagers when Elijah was to be taken, to “keep silent … keep silent.” That out of our cloud of unknowing – and as we glimpse the upper room of Passiontide ahead – we might actually “listen to him”.

 

So go out into the world in peace: not always knowing what to say … keeping silent, keeping silent … and listening to him, always.

 

 

¹See Barbara Brown Taylor, “2 Corinthians 4:3-6: Exegetical Perspective”, in David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (General Eds.), Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Volume 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), p. 451.

 

²Quoted from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk in SAMUEL, United Church of Christ lectionary resource, “Sermon Seeds”, February 22, 2009.

 

³Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith (NYC: HarperOne, 2006), pp. 36-37.