Have you ever had a dream so vivid, so intense that you wondered if you had been dreaming at all? The colors, the people, the dialogue were so real and seemed so at hand that you could swear it was reality. Likely, you shared the experience with others the next day to test your sanity. Perhaps the memory lingered for weeks and still you had your doubts.
The Scriptures are full of dreams and visions: Moses and the burning bush, Jacob and the ladder of angels, Job and the voice out of the whirlwind, angels speaking in dreams to Joseph and the Magi. Today we hear about Moses’ encounter with God and in the aftermath his shining face—so blinding that he had to wear a veil and then this fantastic story of Transfiguration. All of these reveal the mystery of God and our human inability to fully comprehend God’s essence but this episode in today’s Gospel is a centerpiece in the life of Jesus and his disciples.
We may want an explanation for it. Clearly, Peter, James and John must have. In their silence following this epic event I wonder if they were not scratching their heads wondering – like we do – was that a dream I just had or…
Mystery. We’re not comfortable with it. We want to solve it. We want to know all the details and we want to know the “whys” and “wherefores.” It’s terribly frustrating when we don’t get those answers.
Methodist bishop William Willimon tells the story of his friend’s aunt who used to attend lectures given by theologian Paul Tillich whenever he spoke in the environs of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tillich was brilliant but his renowned works do not constitute “light reading.” Though she was by no means a theologian, this woman would sit there transfixed by Tillich’s remarks.
“You mean she was able to understand what Tillich was talking about?” Willimon asked. “Are you kidding,” replied his friend. “My aunt never understood a word of it. But she said that she loved listening to him because she knew that whatever he was talking about was very, very important. As a starting point I’d say that unexplainable and mysterious as it is, this Gospel account of how Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John is very, very important.
American Biblical scholar Marcus Borg offers two metaphors which he believes are central to being Christian: Open hearts and Thin places. Together, they express a transformational vision of the Christian life. The word “heart,” often used to refer to the whole self, appears well over a thousand times in the Bible. We associate the heart with love, as on Valentine’s Day, but also with courage as in “brave hearts” and with grief as in “broken hearts.”
“Thin Places” is a term we inherit from the tradition of Celtic Christianity, a form of spirituality that flourished in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and northern England beginning in the 5th century. Thin Places involves a particular way of thinking about God, as the encompassing Spirit in which everything is and affirms that there are minimally two layers or dimensions of reality—the visible world of our ordinary experience and that of God, the sacred, Spirit.
“Thin places” are places where these two levels of reality meet or intersect; places where the boundary becomes very soft, permeable; places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God and experience the one who is both all around and within us. A thin place is any place where our hearts are opened because the sacred becomes present to us in a way we didn’t expect. It is a means of grace: nature and the wilderness, music, poetry, literature, and dance—experiences where the boundary between one’s self and the world momentarily disappears.
On the mountain that day, Peter was all set to set up camp, a task that would have kept him and his companions busy for a while. But the door of the “thin place” is only cracked open for a moment and the darker clouds of our ordinary days and routines return to bring us back to reality. Peter, James, and John had to come down from the mountain and face the tough road ahead, one that would lead to betrayal, violence, and crucifixion of their friend and teacher.
The Transfiguration event we celebrate today was a wonderful and exciting occasion, one which we may or may not at all understand or grasp, but that mountain of God is not meant to be a shrine for the past but the meeting place where we along with Elijah and Moses and Peter, James, and John can envision a future of justice and peace on our planet and in our time.
I’m sure they all would have preferred to stay up on the mountain and reveled in all that warmth and coziness and mystery but that was not the plan. It was not what happened on the mountain that would make a difference in the world but what they did when they left.
We may love our Sunday morning worship time here and I would imagine there are days when the circumstances of our lives are such that we may wish we did not have to leave, but our worship is really not complete until we connect what we say and hear and do here with earthly need.
The success of our Sunday morning—of our “thin place”— is best measured by what we do on Monday and Tuesday and beyond. In the words of an old saying in Pentecostal churches, “It ain’t how high folks jump that make ‘em Christians. It’s what they do when they hits the ground.
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