Trying "Be Not Afraid"

Trying "Be Not Afraid" The Dover Church
Matthew 17:1-9 March 2, 2014 - The Transfiguration

This morning's lesson can seem like another difficult to understand the point of and therefore even more difficult to believe episode in the Jesus story - bright shining light, Jesus glowing, the voice of God speaking out of a cloud, Moses and Elijah, great heroes of faith but dead or at least gone to heaven for a long time, showing up. What can we possibly make of this?
I don't often do Bible study in sermons, but in this instance I think some background and context will bring us face to face with some challenging truths. Matthew, the person who wrote the Gospel of Matthew, was writing for a Jewish Christian community, Christians who had been traditional Jews before following the messianic strain of Judaism which became Christianity, as opposed to Christians like the Corinthians who came to Jesus as Greek pagans.
As a Jewish Christian, Matthew draws on Hebrew Bible stories, characters, and motifs which his congregation would have known and which would have added deep resonances of meaning. In so doing, he was placing Jesus within their worldview. For starters, the transfiguration happens on a mountain which is meant to be a second Sinai as Matthew's Jesus is the new Moses. On Sinai, God's people were given the law to listen to as their pathway from death into life. On Mount Hermon this morning, God's people are given the person of Jesus to listen to as their pathway from death into life. When Moses came down out of the cloud atop Sinai where he had spoken with God, he was so brightly shining that the people had to avert their eye, in the same way that Jesus shines so that the disciples fall on their faces in fear.
And how about the two characters who show up at the transfiguration? Moses and Elijah were and are central characters of Jewish faith. Moses embodies the law and Elijah the prophets, people who brought God's word to God's people, while Jesus is God's word for God's people. Moses died and was buried in an unknown location while Elijah was taken up into heaven alive in a flaming chariot, making them the only two Hebrew bible characters with ambiguous posthumous -nesses???. In other words, so much of what Matthew is saying in his telling of this story is that the Jewish God story has come to completion in Jesus.
So that's some of the texture of the story, but we also need to look to the context. This scene comes after two crucial episodes which this scene rounds out. Jesus has been teaching, healing and performing miracles around the Sea of Galillee and then pauses to ask his disciples who they think he is. A strange question when you think about it - "uh, you're you, Jesus...", or "Mary and Joseph's son...", "a prophet in word and deed..." This question clearly reflects the church's wrestling with who Jesus is rather than an accurate portrayal of Peter's confession: "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." Which, if you really think about it, only clouds the waters for us as we wonder off in ruminations about what that might mean.
The scene then unfolds with Jesus explaining to the disciples that being the Messiah, the Son of the living God, means going to Jerusalem to be betrayed and killed by the authorities, at which Peter tries to talk Jesus out of going. Jesus then offers one of his most memorable sound bites, "Get behind me Satan. You are thinking not in God's terms but in human ones." So the preceding scene ends with a strange Messiah, son of a god, whose suffering is inevitable and unavoidable.
Which brings us to our mountaintop this morning and the bedrock truth that Jesus is pointing to. The glory of the mountaintop walks hand in hand with the passion of the Cross. Both are fleeting, impermanent, shifting, there and not there. The polarity of the two are the real lived tension of the human experience. Each of us and all of us live stretched between glory and suffering, between our mountaintops and our crosses, running towards one and away from the other. The faith that Jesus points toward, not necessarily the Christianity proclaimed in his name, but the experience he pointed towards, is neither a flight from reality nor a groveling in the dirt, but a constant tightrope along the razor's edge between glory and passion.
I am indebted to the northern Irish theologian, Peter Rollins, for the perspective on the human condition, the nature of God, and the goal of salvation. Rollins argues that all of us experience a void in life, a sense that everything is not quite right, that we lack something, a sense of alienation and separation. He goes into the psychology of separation from our mothers as the universal trigger of this human sense of lack, the experience of subjectivity, but the main thing is we all see life as a void which needs to be filled if we're going to be happy, an alienation which we need to reconcile if we're going to be OK, a separation we need to bridge if we're going to be fulfilled.
So every human being experiences a void in life and every human being seeks to fill it, fill it with things, work, people, experience. Moreover, all of us cross a line and ascribe the power to something to be the answer our problem. We make idols of things that are actually powerless. For some of us this is success, achievement, money and power; for others it is sex, relationships; for others it is youth and vitality; for others, it is God and Jesus or God by some other name. The name of the book Rollins wrote is The Idolatry of God. Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction, and he argues that most modern Christianity is just that, an idolatry of God and Jesus, in the words of some of our songs, if I just have God and Jesus, everything's going to be OK, I'm going to be OK. Rollins writes that the salvation Jesus offers is not freedom from alienation, separation, the void.  "For what if we cannot grasp the manner in which Christ is the solution to our darkness and dissatisfaction precisely because he isn't the solution? What if, instead of being the solution (i.e., the one who offers us a way to gain certainty and satisfaction), he actually confronts us as a problem, a problem, that places every attempt to find a solution for these ailments into question? To put this another way, what if Christ does not fill the empty cup we bring to him but rather smashes it to piece bringing freedom, not from our darkness and dissatisfaction, but freedom from our felt need to escape them?...in the figure of Christ we are confronted with an atomic event that does not destroy the world but rather obliterates the way in which we exist within the world. In concrete terms, this means that the darkness and dissatisfaction that make themselves felt in our lives are not finally answered by certainty and satisfaction, but rather are stripped of their weight and robbed of their sting. In this way the new creation that arises in the aftermath of the Christ apocalypse is not "out there" but is a lived reality bubbling deep within. As Jesus once said, "the kingdom of god does not come with your careful observation nor will people say, "Here it is," or "There it is," because the kingdom of God is within you"(Luke 17:20-21).
Think about it, in our lesson this morning Jesus is glowing like the sun one moment and just a man the next; speaking with God, Moses and Elijah one moment and acknowledging his impending death the next. But this is not some hocus pocus or scriptural ambiguity. Peter does as any of us would when confronted with such an intensity of proximity between the poles of our existence, he tries to organize things, get them sorted out and squared away. We do too. We organize for success and we try to compartmentalize our suffering so that it doesn't bog us down. But Jesus invites us to embrace it all, just as he embraces it all. If we reflect on our lives, we know that we can see the glory of God in an autumn leaf, and be struck with sadness at how ephemeral it is. We see the glory of God in each other's faces, and the passion of rejection and betrayal. In our own bodies we can feel the spirit moving and our mortality. And when our times come, we pray that we might acknowledge the beauty and the pain of our lives and wouldn't want to change a thing if we had it do over. And yet, that is exactly what we try to do every day.
Which is why Jesus tells Peter and us "do not be afraid." Because we are. It is fearful thing to face uncertainty when we crave certainty. It is a fearful thing to confront the glory and the passion of our lives when what we really want is control and mastery. It is an awesome realization to know that God is both beyond our capacity of imagination and able to be intimately known in the taste of bread on your palette or wine on your tongue. It is a fearful mystery we live every day. And yet Jesus invites us to try, for that is where the newness of fullness of life, eternal life, lies.