"Listen to Him" - February 26, 2017

Matthew 17:1-9

            Sometimes it can be almost as much fun to read a play as to go to see one, especially when the playwright becomes creative with the stage directions.  Maybe the most famous stage direction in English is in The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare: “Exit.  Pursued by a bear.”  My favorite, though, is in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, the play that was the basis for My Fair Lady.  Shaw gives the direction to the main character: “Her face becomes radiant.”  I can just picture a leading lady trying to get that right, staring into a mirror and smiling a dozen different ways until she is radiant, instead of just ordinarily beautiful or joyful.  Some things cannot be acted.  There’s a level of authenticity in a person that eventually finds its way out, and tells who they are in all of their complexities and richness.

            The Transfiguration was one of those moments in Jesus’ life when the disciples who were with him got a glimpse into the depth of his being, and it left them in awe, not quite knowing what to do with that.  Peter and James and John were three of the disciples with whom Jesus seems to have felt closest, or maybe the most at ease.  They were the ones that he would ask later to go with him to the Garden of Gethsemane and stand watch while he prayed.  They were the ones around whom he could be himself the most easily.  This time, though, they saw what being himself could mean.

“Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.”  [Matthew 17:1-3]

If, as we say, you know someone by the company they keep, who was this friend of theirs, this teacher of theirs, who one second was the familiar, if respected, rabbi and the next had begun to glow and was talking to the greatest leaders of their people, one of whom had been dead for over a thousand years and the other of whom had been taken to heaven in a fiery chariot?

            When I was in college, I took a course on twentieth-century American and English poetry.  Among the students there was an older man who generally didn’t take part in the discussions but who paid close attention.  We were about four weeks into the course and studying a poem by Dylan Thomas.

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.”

After somebody said something about Thomas dying young, this quiet man spoke up and said,
“I went drinking with him a couple of times.”  What?  Who was this?  What was he doing in a roomful of undergraduates like us?

            I can imagine Peter and James and John having exactly that kind of reaction, but stronger; not that it was about to get any less intense.  Peter tried to take hold of the moment by suggesting that they somehow commemorate the moment, building a makeshift shrine.  The experience was about to go totally out of control, though. 

“Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.” [Matthew 17:4-6]

The voice and the words are familiar from earlier in Matthew’s gospel.

“And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’”  [Matthew 3:16-17]

Only, this time, the voice adds one sentence: “Listen to him!” [Matthew 17:6]

            Going back to that college classroom, we did listen to what our classmate had to say.  Dylan was a notorious alcoholic and drank himself to death.  When we heard firsthand from someone who told us that he watched it happen, that Thomas seemed aware of what he was doing to himself, and that he almost forced the drink down his own throat, it brought alive lines like

“The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.”

So if a moment like that helps me, at least, understand the death of a poet, how much more would a moment like the one on the mountaintop have led Peter and James and John to listen, listen deeply and intently, to the words of life that Jesus spoke and to try to absorb every lesson that he offered to them.

            And how about us?  When we hear Jesus’ words, do we just hear them?  Or do we listen?  Do they carry for us the announcement of freedom that Moses gave to God’s people?  Do they ring with the authority of Elijah and the prophets, calling us

“to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”?  [Micah 6:8]

Jesus said, right after they came down from that mountaintop,

“I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” [Matthew 17:20]

When we face the serious challenges that we face as individuals or as a church, do we take Jesus seriously? 

There are mountains that need some moving, if you haven’t noticed.  I’m going to speak pretty generally here, since I don’t know this community all that well, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we are all in the midst of a whole vortex of competing loyalties and alternative ways of living right now that are stirring up our everyday lives.  All kinds of problems that have been hiding under the calm surface for years and years are sticking their noses up like sharks waiting for a feast.  The idolatry that puts country before God, the greed that cannot take a Sabbath break or give one to the worker, a lack of respect or even minimal concern for the sick or the elderly, the willful disregard of truth and actual encouragement of false witness, bragging about adultery and laughing at covetousness – everything that those ten commandments Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai forbids – those are being held up as normal and tolerable.  That needs to change. 

That is not a political statement, by the way.  It’s religion.  If you want the Ten Commandments in courthouses, be prepared to abide by them.  And the conflicts that we’re seeing now outside those courthouses and capitols?  They are nothing compared to the clash between Elijah on one side and on the other side King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, and the prophets of Baal.  (Go back to I Kings and read about it.) 

There is a vision of greatness that comes in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that is like no other.  It is the vision of God’s own self living among us, humble and yet majestic, sinless and yet forgiving, strong and yet gentle, determined and yet peaceful.  It is Jesus, at once human and divine, who shows us the way that sinners like us who should fall back in fear at even the thought of facing the Lord instead hear him say,

“Get up and do not be afraid.” [Matthew 17:7]

Hold onto that whenever any other voice should try to speak.  Hear instead the words of the letter to the Hebrews:

“You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. …But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. …Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.” [Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24a, 28.]

Amen.