February 14, 2010

2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2; Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)

“Listen To Him”

Today is Valentines Day – when love reigns, but it is also Transfiguration Sunday – when awesome reigns. It is the day the church remembers and celebrates Jesus’ transfiguration when standing on a mountain, flanked by both Moses and Elijah, his clothes turn dazzling white. In a way our observance of the transfiguration of Jesus acknowledges our desire, as well as our need, to be in the presence of a transcendent, awe-inspiring God.

His disciple Simon Peter is beside himself, he is amazed by what he has seen and responds by wanting to do something right away - which of course is all wrong. Peter is all excited about what he has seen. He’s energized. He’s ready to do what any of us might do. But instead of the ‘go ahead,’ God’s answer to Peter is “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” Listen to him? So, what was it Jesus had just told them? He has called them to stop and pray. And earlier he told them what would be expected of them. What Jesus understood his and their calling to be was different from what his disciples understood and this voice from above says, “Listen to him!”

Peter was definitely ‘in the moment,’ he was pumped, he knew what to do, and he was ready to do it. But a voice drowning out his said, “Don’t put this experience in a “box” to preserve it. LISTEN TO HIM. What’s he been saying? In other words, the voice sounded a lot like Saint Paul in my earlier years who sang, “slow down, you move too fast… you gotta make the morning last.” Peter’s immediate response is to do something without first keeping still enough to know what’s really going on. Simon Peter, like all of us sometimes, had it all wrong.

The story of the transfiguration reminds us that whenever we think we know how to handle the amazing and unexplainable presence of God in our lives – we don’t. Instead, we should just clear our mind of all the ideas we have of God and LISTEN to him – to listen to what Jesus has really said. His presence in our life is way beyond our control, and God’s plans for us are way beyond anything we might ever imagine. Instead of designing monuments or building ‘boxes’ to put God in, we should be asking, “Hello, lamp post, what ya knowing… I've come to watch your flowers growing.” There’s that voice again, trying to slow us down!

Kosuke Koyama wrote, “God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love” and he says, “Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed . . . It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not.” Maybe that was Peter’s problem: he was going 100 mph and God was walking along at three miles per hour - the speed of love. When you “got no deeds to do, no promises to keep” – when you take time to listen – ‘all IS groovy.” Or so the voice sings.

Scholars tell us God's voice is heard by the disciples there on the mountain, but God's power is dramatically revealed in what happens below, where people are suffering. Listening to him, we get a glimpse of whom we are following up there, and - “listening” - a look of what we are following him to down here. Our experience of God then, rather than being for our own benefit, is instead linked to a ‘real response’ to the suffering of the world. "The more open we are to God," N.T. Wright cautions, "the more we seem to be open to the pain of the world.” That may not be what we have in mind, but if we do listen to him, it is what we have been called to.

Barbara Brown Taylor (Home by Another Way) says that what all of us are after is an experience of the “living God.” She says we have had enough explanations of God, what we want is “to come face to face with the real thing” in a place “where God is no absentee landlord but a very clear presence (here and now).”

Jesus models for us just that kind of God – the image of an ever-present God. Paul spoke to the Colossians, and to us, about the freedom that comes from our transformation into the very same image of Christ. It’s not a transfiguration he is talking about, but it is something equally as awesome – our transformation into the reflected image of Christ. Stop and think for a moment about what that means. It means: God ever present in us. It means looking into a mirror and seeing Christ in us. It means God’s response to the world’s suffering through us. It means, above all, God’s love in us.

Author and theologian Thomas Merton wrote, “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.” That light shinning through came in the person of Christ, who taught that the kingdom of God was a revolution of love that would eventually free all of creation from slavery to sin and death. His death and resurrection would bring about a “new creation.” Paul says it is this hope that allows those who are in Christ to “act with great boldness.” The presence of God, the work of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit all result in our transformation.

Paul reminds us that, in Jesus, God’s mission in the world comes to life and is in fact a proclamation of God’s plan of liberation for all of creation. He is saying God’s Spirit brings “freedom,” but what kind of freedom is it that requires so much of us? It seems counter-intuitive to think freedom comes from our obedience to Christ which requires our listening to him rather than listening to ourselves.

Put another way, the more we live into the mission of God - of loving other as we love ourselves, the more we engage the Spirit and allow him to work in us and through us, and the more we are freed up to realize our true purpose as kingdom and new covenant people. Listen to him.

On this Valentine’s Day, we are reminded that God loves the whole world and calls us to love it with the same kind of sacrificial, joy-filled and transformational love that Jesus modeled so well. God has set us free in Christ, and it’s up to us to use that freedom to participate with God in making the kingdom a reality “on earth as it is in heaven.” Listen to him.

“Life, I love you, all is groovy.”