A Poem/Reflection for the Last Sunday after Epiphany February23, 2010
St. Andrew’s Episcopal, Nags Head, N.C. Thomas E Wilson, Supply Clergy
Transfiguring
Last week, I was walking out of the library back to my car with a load of books and there is a woman sitting on the curb, talking on her cell phone. She is plaintively yelling into that phone, “God help me, I tell you. This morning I asked Jesus to fix everything. But today it has gone from bad to worse!”
Years ago, I wrote and gave a couple of sermons where I talked to God and paused to listen. When nothing came back, I repeated my invitation with the same question. Another pause of silence. Then I heard a voice from the back of the church say with a sigh: “I heard you!” and the voice of God started to enter into a dialogue with me. The congregation laughed when they realized that I had written the script and was listening to my wife, Pat, reading the part of God, as the sermon devolved to a skit. “God” told me that I was too busy with my own agendas to stop and listen, so “God” decided she would wait until my brain finished its internal conversation with itself.
In the Gospel story for today, imagine here is Peter, so full of himself that when he sees the Vision of Jesus being transfigured, he thinks it is all about him and how he can create a shrine to hold the holy moment, trapping it in religious amber, as a center point of a religious theme park. God answers the folly of their hearts by saying,
“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. But
Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when
they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
When Pat and I were in Israel years ago, we went up on Mount Tabor, one of the hills traditionally claimed as the Transfiguration Mountain. From the top of the Mountain you can see the Valley of Jezreel stretching before you. This is the road of history, a trade route between Egypt and Syria, linking Asia to Africa; from here I could see in my imagination the caravans moving forward in both directions for thousands of years. It is a place that, as the saying goes, “Has too much history.”
I could see armies: from the Book of Judges, on this Mountain, the Hebrew Judge Deborah, sent her commander Barak against the armies of King Jabin, defeating the 900 Iron Chariots under their commander Sisera, bogged down in mud. I could see Sisera fleeing the debacle and finding refuge in a tent where Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, drove a tent peg through his skull, nailing him to the ground as surely as his chariots were stuck in the ground. I could see Deborah and Barak coming into the tent later and seeing their enemy defeated.
From the Biblical Books, of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Kings, in my imagination the armies of the Egyptian Pharaohs, Tutmose III and Necho II marching up, time and again to fight the Assyrians and the Babylonians and being stopped at Megiddo, the city close by which were, only ruins now.
I could see Alexander the Great's armies march down after defeating the Persian Emperor Darius III, on his way to overthrow the 31st Egyptian dynasty, now only a Persian province in 333BC. I could see the blood on the fields of the valley dripping into the ground of of Roman and Byzantine and Arab Conquerors later mingling the blood of soldiers of Crusaders with those of Saladin and other Muslim leaders' armies. In my mind I witnessed Napoleon fleeing from the Battle of the Nile to Syria and Lebanon, the wounded dying on the way. Finally there was the blood of the British soldiers against Turkish soldiers in September1918 at the place called the Hill of Megiddo, or Armageddon, the place where the Book of Revelation prophesied, and the Allied papers hoped, was where the war to end all wars is to take place. Except thirty years later in 1948, the Israeli army fought the Arab League and the battles continue.
It was here in the place of slaughters that were, and were to be, that God tells the disciples to listen to Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Jesus tells his disciples to get up, don't be afraid and go down the mountain to spread healing, justice and peace to a broken world; a journey that begins, ends and saturated daily with prayer.
In his preface to his autobiography Now And Then, Frederick
Buechner wrote about listening to God:
Because the
word that God speaks to us is always an incarnate word—a word spelled out to us
not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the
books we read and the movies we see—the chances are we will never get it just
right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to
what it would be well for us to hear that it is hard to break the habit. But if
we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with
patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we
come to recognize, beyond all doubt, that, however faintly we may hear him, he
is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his
word to each of us is both recoverable and precious beyond telling. In that
sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it
matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.
Often I find myself in what I think is prayer and then I realize “God” telling me that I am too busy with my own agendas to stop and listen, so “God” decides she'll wait until my brain finishes its internal conversation with itself. When my prayers are nothing but marching orders to my heavenly servant to meet my wants and desires, it is then I realize that the woman on the curb talking about God, that she and I are very much alike for we fear things will always go from bad to worse. It is in those moments when my narcissism falls to the ground. I need to look up and like the disciples, “see nothing but Jesus” at the center of my life and prayer, to listen and then follow where the Divine will lead.
The Transfiguring moments are not limited to one mountain in Israel centuries ago, but they are going on all the time, in every place. We just have to stop with our own agendas and listen, and follow where he will lead.
Transfiguring
The voice behind all life came from the cloud,
thundering loud, knocking those disciples down,
in fear and awe, looking like pratfalls of a clown,
slipping on the banana peel of Peter’s ego proud.
Peter’s narcissism wants to claim his own place
as center of the dance of carpenter and Divine,
like religious theme park, sends chills up spine,
to ensure that dance music is only in this space.
Transfiguration Mount, open for paid sightseer,
calls me, my spirit to pratfall down and recant;
doesn’t seem too different than my own slant,
when I should be listening, I’m filled with fear:
when I’m in the presence of Holy and all I see
or think about, is how prayers will benefit me.
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