“It (Trans)Figures”
Matthew 17:1-9
First Presbyterian
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February 3, 2008
The Transfiguration of the Lord
It is a book that has had more
impact on me than any other in my life save for The Bible and any Mary
Oliver collection of poems. It is
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and I am going to ask
you to indulge me as I read to you a passage from it for a reason that will
become apparent. Pilgrim
is a series of essays Dillard wrote while spending a year in
“It is early March.
I am dazed from a long day of interstate driving homeward; I pull in at a
gas station in Nowhere,
“All the time we talk, the
boy’s new beagle puppy is skidding around the office, sniffing impartially at
my shoes and at the wire rack of folded maps.
The cheerful human conversation wakes me, recalls me, not to a normal
consciousness, but to a kind of energetic readiness.
I step outside, followed by the puppy.”
“I am absolutely alone.
There are no other customers. The
road is vacant, the interstate is out of sight and earshot…Before me extends a
low hill trembling in yellow brome, and behind the hill, filling the sky, rises
an enormous mountain ridge, forested, alive and awesome with brilliant blown
lights. I have never seen anything
so tremulous and live. Overhead,
great strips and chunks of cloud dash to the northwest in a gold rush.
At my back the sun is setting – how can I not have noticed before that
the sun is setting? My mind has been
a blank slab of black asphalt for hours, but that doesn’t stop the sun’s
wild wheel. I set the coffee beside
me on the curb; I smell loam on the wind; I pat the puppy; I watch the
mountain…”
“Shadows lope along the
mountain’s rumpled flanks; they elongate like root tips, like lobes of
spilling water, faster and faster. A
warm purple pigment pools in each ruck and tuck of the rock; it deepens and
spreads, boring crevasses, canyons. As
the purple vaults and slides, it tricks out the unleafed forest and rumpled rock
in… shape-shifting patches of glow. These
gold lights veer and retract, shatter and glide in a series of dazzling
splashes, shrinking, leaking, exploding. The
ridge’s bosses and hummocks sprout bulging from its side; the whole mountain
looms miles closer; the light warms and reddens; the bare forest folds and
pleats itself like living protoplasm before my eyes, like a running chart, a
wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present
moment. The air cools; the
puppy’s skin is hot. I am more
alive than all the world.”
“This is it, I think, this
is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind,
this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the
mountain. And the second I verbalize
this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy.
I am opaque, so much black asphalt…”
Dillard reflects further:
“Catch
it if you can. The present is an
invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is
fleet, and fleeing, and gone.”
“That
I ended this experience prematurely for myself – that I drew scales over my
eyes between me and the mountain and gloved my hand between me and the puppy –
is not the only point. After all, it
would have ended anyway. I’ve
never seen a sunset or felt a wind that didn’t…No, the point is that not
only does time fly and we do die, but that in these reckless conditions we live
at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to
know it.”
“Stephen
Graham startled me,” Dillard goes on to write, “by describing this same gift
in his antique and elegant book, The Gentle Art of Tramping.
He wrote, ‘As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of
the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the
great door, that does not look like a door, opens.’
That great door opens on the present, illuminates it as with a multitude
of flashing torches.” (1)
I love that phrase, the one that captures exactly for me the
way life seems and is in those moments when the veil between heaven and earth,
creator and creature, eternity and time is pulled back, and I am mysteriously or
poignantly or wondrously filled beyond full with life:
“The great door, that does not look
like a door, opening.” That
is what it feels like when life is transfigured by an experience of great beauty
or deep pain or astonishing mercy or amazing grace.
“The
point is that not only does time fly and we do die, but that in these reckless
conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain
inexplicable moments, to know it.” Surely
it has happened for you, those inexplicable moments when you knew you were being
carried to a deep place, an ecstatic place, a grateful place, a place where
everything seemed to cohere and it was as if a
great door, that did not look like a door, was opening and you felt so
alive.
It happened for Eugene Peterson, a pastor friend of mine in
Baltimore days who is famous for his paraphrase of the Bible called
The Message when,
hiking
early one Monday morning, the shores of Assateague Island
became for him a great door, that does not look
like a door, opening. He wrote
rapturously of his experience in a poem, exclaiming, “I
walked nine miles of ocean beach today. I
drank God.”
It happened for me a week or so after Katy died when
Mackenzie Sandberg knocked at my office door, I think she was seven at the time,
and told me she wanted to play a song for me that had helped to heal her heart
after her grandfather’s recent death. Mackenzie
was for me that day a great door, that does not look like a
door, opening and I imagined for the first time, in the company of that
little girl, that I might survive my great loss.
It happened for Peter, James, and John when they climbed to
the top of
By including the story in his telling of the gospel, Matthew
clearly wants Jesus to become for us a great door, that does not look like a
door, opening and hopes that our lives will be transfigured and
transformed by knowing him. When the
face of Jesus begins to shine in the story and his clothing turns radiantly
white, it is the gospel writer’s way of saying, “Look, this luminous Jesus is
the splendor of God.” When
Moses and Elijah make their appearance in the story, it is the gospel writer’s
way of saying that Jesus is the human embodiment of everything that has been
taught in the Law and the Prophets. The
ways of God that have been written about are not just theoretical or
hypothetical; they actually can be lived. Jesus
is doing it.
Maybe you have noticed when you have been on
At first, Peter, James, and John were overwhelmed with
ecstasy by their peak experience with Jesus.
Then, as they became aware that they were being told to listen to him and
were being asked to invest their lives in the enterprise of the kingdom he came
preaching and living, they began to fill with fear and trepidation for they knew
that was no easy row to hoe. But
they found a way to trust that call on their lives, to see in Jesus a
great door, that does not look like a door, opening to them.
And so, walking through the door and attempting to live in the ways that
Jesus showed them – with compassion and courage, mirth and mercy, justice and
joy, giving and forgiving – their lives were transfigured, too, and they found
themselves to be more alive, more engaged, than ever before.
On the cusp of Lent, we, too, are being asked, again, to
live, in the contexts of our times and with our lives, the gospel ministry of
Jesus, to live in the transforming light and transfiguring love of God.
Living the gospel is still the road less traveled by and it often is
excruciatingly difficult and it is always costly and it sometimes seems beyond
our grasp and ability and we undoubtedly shall encounter our own crosses along
the way as we seek to bring goodness and beauty and hope and healing into the
world. In the eyes of many people,
considering its cost, to live in such a way that the gospel asks does not
figure. It is too topsy turvy, too
hard, goes against the grain of convention and convenience.
So, they are right. Living
the gospel does not figure as the world figures.
But, it (trans)figures, and I today, again, commend it to you.
Amen.
(1) Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
(2) Long, Thomas G., Matthew.