This week a friend was telling me about a movie he’d seen recently. The film is Arrival, and let me caution that I haven’t actually it myself, so I can make no recommendations as to its quality and I don’t even know enough to know if I’m giving out spoilers in this sermon. So if you haven’t seen it and you want to, apologies in advance. But anyway, the basic premise is aliens arrive on earth, and the linguist tasked with the job of trying to communicate with them discovers that their language disrupts the passage of time. In their language there is no chronological past, present, or future, communication exists beyond the bounds of chronology. So for my friend, the central question of the film was not how do we communicate with aliens, but rather how would we act if we knew the future? Would we take risks, if we knew they would end in failure? Would we fall in love, if we knew it would break our hearts?
Because we were clergy at a pastors’ conference, we discussed these questions long into the night. My first impulse was, of course I would. Of course I would still take risks, still fall in love. Hindsight is a powerful tool; looking back from enough distance we can see the good moments that preceded the most painful heartbreaks, the learning that came only in the midst of failure. Of course, I thought, I wouldn’t give those things up. If I could know the future, I would know I would survive the hardest heartbreak, would know I could get up after the most painful fall. I wouldn’t have to be afraid of the worst thing that could happen, because I would know what it was and would know there was something on the other side of the end.
But the more I pondered the question, the more I wondered if I could really be that brave. Would I have the courage to go forward through the pain, for the fuzzy rewards along the way? Or would I instead give up joy in exchange for a life free of pain?
These are, of course, hypothetical questions, for we humans are a time-bound species. We have varying levels of persisting forward and delaying gratification, some of us are built for marathons, able to press on slowly for long periods of time in the hope of a future reward. Others of us are sprinters, moving quickly from thing to thing, burst of hard effort for faster pay-off. These seem, from our perspective, very different ways of living. But in the grand scale of time, the longest marathon is but a blip. C. S. Lewis described the flow of human history as a point along the edge of a ruler. All of us, sprinters or marathoners, are moving in the same direction at the same pace along the ruler. We can only know clearly the moment we are in. God, on the other hand, is the air around the ruler. God is, at the same time, our past, present, and future. God is the hope past every heartbreak, and the questions beyond every joy. And that really is too much knowledge for us. If we could comprehend every joy and fear, hope and heartbreak, we would become paralyzed with indecision by the fullness of it all. And we would, I think, miss out on the joy out of fear of the fear. So God does not give us all of it to know. Instead, God offers us a glimpse of that future. Not so much that we become overwhelmed by it, but just enough to keep us moving. Just enough to promise that the end is not the end, and there is life on the other side of this instant.
That is what the Transfiguration is. The Transfiguration is a moment in which all past, present, and future is condensed into one, so that we can see where we’re going and where we’ve been, and that promise can give us hope for the journey.
“Six days later,” the gospel reads, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain.” The mountain, like the mountain in the Sermon on the Mount, is not named, which should key us in that this mountain is more theological than it is geographical. The point is not the mountain; the point is that we are in a place of revelation. God is about to reveal something to us. And like the Ten Commandments to Moses, like the still small voice to Elijah, that revelation is an opportunity to get a peak behind the veil at the overwhelming glory of God.
At the Transfiguration, Jesus was transformed, and his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white. And with him were Moses and Elijah. Past, present and future, all rolled into one. Here, Peter, James, and John is where you’ve come from, and here’s where you’ve been. Here are the promises fulfilled in the journey, the Israelites out of Egypt, the greatness of David, the rise and fall and rise again of the nation of Israel. The heroes who led you, the prophets who challenged you, the times God has saved you, Moses and Elijah are proof of that history, a reminder of where you’ve been. And here, in the shining glory of Jesus, is where you’re going. God saved you before, as you saw in Moses and Elijah, and God indeed will deliver you again.
And Peter, good old Peter, demonstrates the risk of such knowledge, the reason we can see only a glimpse of the promise. Because, gazing at the fulfillment of our history, and the greatness yet to come, what is Peter’s response but, “Lord, it is good for us to be here… I will make three dwellings.” Peter cannot see the unfolding of the story; he can only see the moment he is in. And given his own option, Peter would rather stay frozen in the current moment, than run the risk of greater glories yet to be.
The gift we have, that Peter did not, is that we do not have to wait for Transfiguration moments. We are not bound by singular moments of remembrance. We have a gift that Peter did not; we have in Scripture a portable Transfiguration. It does not offer us the whole story, but it can remind us of where we’ve been, and show us where we are going. We can read our history and remember that no matter how desperate it looks, there is always something more. The Israelites thought Egypt was the end, until Moses led them across the Red Sea. The wilderness looked endless, until there was Canaan. Isaiah said Israel will fall, but God will lead you home again. What is scripture but a series of stories of heartbreak and hope, joy and despair, of God’s people wandering away, and God sending prophets to bring them back, again and again and again, as many times as it takes and more. From each individual point on the ruler, it seemed like the end. But to God who is the air before and after, it is nothing more than the breath in, breath out of life.
The disciples went from the mountain of Transfiguration into the long walk to Jerusalem, and we go from this Sunday into Lent. Lent gets a bit of a bad rap for being depressing, which its purple paraments, minor keys, and somber calls for repentance. The church has done Lent no favors, by making it a season of self-denial and sacrifice. But Lent is not harsh, it is honest. The point of Lent is not to make ourselves feel sufficiently bad about ourselves in order to earn God’s forgiveness. The point of Lent is remind us that when things are bad, God still loves us. All too often, we mistake faith for ease. If I am faithful, then God will bless me. If I am not feeling blessed, then it must be that I, or God, is not faithful. That is the perspective from a point on the ruler of time. But God, who is both before and beyond, does not think in moments but in presence. So Lent is not about feeling sufficiently bad about ourselves to bring us closer to God, rather Lent is about the unwavering promise that when things are bad, God too is there. If you’ve ever felt sad, Lent is for you. If you’ve ever felt scared, Lent is for you. If you’ve ever felt anxious, or hopeless, or alone, Lent is the promise that those feelings are not the absence of God, but that, like the Israelites in the wilderness, like the Babylonian exile, like Daniel in the lions den, God is every bit as present in our fears as in our joys. And Lent, with its set forty days followed by the glory of Easter, is the promise that darkness, that sadness, that despair does not last. That death has been defeated by hope, and life lives on beyond our darkest imaginings.
At the Transfiguration, we are given wisdom for the journey. Not so much that we become paralyzed, but just enough so that we can go forward in the confident promise of resurrection. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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