“Transfiguration”
A Sermon for Feb 27, 2022
The Rev. Casey Kloehn Dunsworth

Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.

My preaching professor in seminary told us that there were three kinds of sermons: comfort, celebration, and challenge. That’s very tidy. They all start with the letter “c” there’s a nice trinitarian 3 of them, and they make it sound like preaching, as a discipline, will fit nicely into boxes, week after week. By the end of this sermon, maybe it will circle back around to fit into one of those categories, but here, at the beginning, it’s a lament.

The practice of lament has a long history, probably as long as human history, if we’re being honest, since pretty much as soon as there was life, there was pain and grief. In our scriptures, most notably in the psalms and in the book of lamentations, a voice cries out to God in despair and distress. How long, O Lord? Weeping and wailing, people mourn their losses and lament the harsh realities of the world.

There are some Christian traditions in which it is falsely taught that we should not raise our voices to God. That our prayers should never be angry, because, somehow, God cannot handle that. If our scriptures are any indication, it is a longstanding tradition of the people of God to raise their voices in anguish. Jesus even did so. Perhaps you were raised in this no-feelings-allowed school of prayer. If that’s the case, and even the last few years of global upheaval have not given you the authorization you seek, I would like to formally sign that permission slip.

Just as easily as you sit down to dinner and say, “Thank you, God, for this food” it should roll off your tongue when you address your creator that you are tired, and angry, and in pain, and that it is high time that God worked with you to change that.

I doubt that you will have to reach all that far to find something to lament, but in case you aren’t sure just what kinds of things I think we should be bowing our heads and shaking our fists about, consider the events of this week.

On Tuesday, I scrolled through social media, like many of us, and learned rather quickly that Governor Greg Abbott of Texas had done something very, very wrong. He directed Family and Protective Services in the state to include gender-affirming care, especially healthcare, for transgender kids as statutory child abuse.

This means that if a teacher in a child’s classroom learns that that child is using a different name than the one given to them at birth, or is choosing to express themselves via clothing or accessories or friendships differently than is “normal” for that child’s assigned gender, or that they are receiving pubertal blockers or other gender-affirming healthcare treatment, that teacher is required to contact Family and Protective Services to report that child’s parents.

To be clear, God loves trans kids and other queer kids, just as they are, and as they are becoming their full selves.

We don’t know how and if this hateful order will be enforced, and I have hope that it will be overturned, but in the meantime—in Texas, and in other states poised to follow suit—gender-non-conforming children, teens, and their families are terrified.

We lament this. How long, O Lord, will your children live in fear?

In the early morning hours of February 24th, when it was still dark, missile strikes began across Ukraine. Russian forces, at the direction of Vladimir Putin, began the siege in their tanks and their aircraft. Ukrainians rushed to find safety underground, inviting neighbors into their basements and seeking refuge in subway stations. Many began to flee the cities, heading for airports and train stations, traffic jams stretching for miles. As Putin’s forces infiltrate sovereign Ukrainian soil, fear spreads.

We lament this. How long, O Lord, will your children live in fear?

In addition to Russian aggression in Ukraine, armed conflict has killed hundreds of people in several nations every day this week. US-led and Israeli-led air strikes in Syria and Somalia. Ongoing major armed conflict in Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and Palestine, and certainly others of which I am not presently aware.

We lament this. How long, O Lord, will your children live in fear?

For millennia, we have waged war against one another. Our scriptures are full of armed conflict between people of different regions, tribes, religions. It is quite difficult to be a reader of scripture and not wonder about why the history of the people of God is so, so violent. There’s a connection, somewhere, between violence and fear. And not just, of course, the fear of violence, but the other way around. Those who commit these acts of atrocity are, first, afraid.

These men—and forgive me the gendered generalization, but in our global history it has been men who have initiated our world’s wars—these men are afraid. They are afraid of what the world could be like if they were not at the top. They fear change, they fear freedom, they fear their own smallness in the grand scheme of the universe. They fear emptiness without their weapons and their trophies and their lap dogs.

Our scripture has these men, too. You remember Pharaoh and his fear and his hardened heart. And Herod and his fear and his slaughter of innocent children. And King Saul and his fear and his massacres. The link between these men is their fearful, idolatrous violence.

In our Psalm this morning, Psalm 99, it could not be clearer. “God reigns,” the psalmist opens with. And later, “O mighty Ruler, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness.” We “proclaim the greatness of our God; God is the Holy One.”

There is no God but God. To do violence to one another, to put individual power over justice and freedom for the collective, it is common, yes, but it is idolatry and it is a sin. Whenever anyone has traded innocent lives for their own power, they have sinned against God and their neighbor.

Moses taught this. The prophets taught this. Jesus taught this. And yet here we are.

We lament this. How long, O Lord?

This week we are also given the story of Jesus’ transfiguration from the Gospel According to Luke. This story is in all three of the synoptic Gospels, and that’s generally a hint to its importance in the life of the early church. Everybody had this one, and so we should heed it.

Jesus climbs a mountain with Peter, James, and John, the “inner circle” of his disciples. They trek up the mountain to pray, and when they get there, Jesus is transfigured before them, shining with the glory of God. And then Moses and Elijah appear. The two most revered prophets of Peter, James, and John’s Jewish tradition. Moses is representing the Torah, and the Jewish people’s chosenness by God. Elijah is standing in for all of the prophets, all of God’s truth-tellers along the way.

Peter, known the world over for speaking without thinking, says, “let me build you each a home here, and we can stay here forever, together, because this is the coolest thing that has ever happened and will ever happen to me”. That’s a paraphrase. But at that moment, a cloud overtakes them on the mountain top, and they can’t see anything any more, but they hear a voice from the cloud, “this is my son, my chosen one, listen to him.” Jesus reappears and the other prophets are gone. But this encounter has placed Jesus in their lineage, on their level. Peter, James, and John are, rightfully, stunned into silence.

This story is paired with a story from the Torah about Moses encountering the face of God and, in turn, his own face shining like the sun, so bright that he has to veil it. These men, sacred and human, leaders of their people, are alone in the experience of encountering God in this way. Nobody else meets God face to face and returns shining. But many of our Biblical matriarchs and patriarchs encounter God and are changed. I was going to start listing them, but I actually think it’s everyone. Which proves the point I want to make, which is that it is impossible to encounter God and not be transformed. 

We may be born into a world full of violence and smallness of imagination that says that the only way is war. But we must allow our encounters with the holy to change us into people who dissent. We must be transformed by the power of God into people who wage peace; people who work for justice; people who act with mercy; people who share and grow and build and dream.

This morning, we hear of Jesus being transformed into the version of himself that would journey toward Jerusalem, toward his own torture and death.

On Wednesday, we’ll enter into the season of Lent, during which we will encounter God in ways that renew and reform us. We will follow Jesus on that road and we will witness what looks like the end of the story.

But like Christians for centuries since, who know that death does not have the last word.

The story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection will teach us that there is no such thing as redemptive violence. It will not be his torture and death that save the world, but his rising to new life. It is not war or violence of any kind that brings God’s kingdom on earth. It is love, and life, and freedom, and justice, and mercy, and joy. We know that much to be true. We know that there is life beyond death. We know that there is peace beyond war. We know that there is love beyond fear.

But today, today we are still in the middle of the story.

And so we lament. How long, O Lord?