“Why Not Joseph and David?”

A Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

Transfiguration Sunday February 11, 2024

Tomales (CA) Presbyterian Church

 

Bulletin Quote:

A form without form, you say: silence, and yet a voice—a powerful effect from a formless figure, and so it must be. . .The more closely defined its features, the feebler would their effect become. Form and definiteness are incompatible with our notions of Spirit. it is the offspring of the wind that preserves the character of its origin.

 --J.G. Herder

The audio of this sermon (a condensation of this prepared transcript) is linked here

 

[n.b.  error in the audio: David is anointed king by the prophet Samuel; it is David's son Solomon who is anointed by the prophet Nathan.]

OT Reading 1 Ki 19:1-13

19 Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” 3 Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there.

4 But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” 5 Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, “Get up and eat.” 6 He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. 7 The angel of the LORD came a second time, touched him, and said, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.” 8 He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. 9 At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.

Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He answered, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.”

11 He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

 

NT Reading: Mark 9: 2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

 

“Why Not Joseph and David?”

[Importance in Mark's Gospel]

a.       Mark’s is the first gospel, and scholars believe that Peter was Mark’s main source of these stories. This fits especially well with his perspective and role in this story. Simon who Jesus calls Peter, the Rock, and Paul calls Cephus in Aramaic

b.      Is no doubt hugging the stones as he falls down in amazement at this dazzling revelation.

Peter's role and his proposal to memorialize the transfigured/transfigurers in tents

a.                The English translation of “dwellings” is unfortunate.

Better would have been “booths,” as in the Festival celebrated then and is condensed in Holy Week that we will celebrate at the end of Lent that Starts this Ash Wednesday.

But the word skene here is what John introduces the incarnation of the logos, and sets up a tent of meeting in the heavenly temple in 

 John’s theology frames Jesus "the word of God as tented among us.” (GJ 1:14) And he is in the heavenly place now, a new kind of temple, in a tent of meeting. Revelation 15:5.

So the Markan theme of Peter’s messianic recognition is that the transfigured personalities are tented in an indwelling relationship with God that emerges, dazzling in the flesh.

In addition to Peter, other disciples are present,  an inner circle that includes John, important to understand John's key to the theology of the messianic appearance to Israel and the world. These thereby make even more profound the one who speaks. In this, Peter is central. Readers are meant to identify with his report. We may take it as symbolic, metaphoric, or historical in a journalistic sense.

The other historical personages do not speak. Instead they communicate toward the messiah's “dazzling” appearance. They are historical figures, but they manifest an eternal and eternalizing contribution. We are meant to ponder who they are, what their role is in the historical people chosen by God to reveal what relationship with God entails. Peter understands it is to “tent” with the presence of God in this life. Not awaiting some rebuilt temple, or some realization “in heaven, the sweet bye and bye” someday. God says over and over to the patriarchs and to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,” and Jesus tells his followers that this was a living relationship that continues. The transfiguration makes clear that God is the God of Moses and Elijah, and as such remains after they fade from view, a special relationship with Jesus that incorporates the Mission of Moses and Elijah but extends them into something much more. Far more ranging in scale and scope. A cosmic shining forth of eternity in Jesus’ transfiguring work.

The figures who to me are tellingly absent include Joseph, a hero to the tribal confederations of Israel that predated the monarchy, and the founding of God’s promised monarchical house, David. They are missing on that tent-revealing mountain. Their absence tells of a tension of the solitary institutional reformers transfiguring here and the institutionalizers of systematized faith: Joseph as an ascendant functionary in the Pharaonic world system and its pyramids of power, and David who receives God’s promise of an eternal house and who then, on his own initiative, vows to mirror that promise by building a house, in the only way he knows from his context—a stone ziggurat--for God to dwell.

So to make theological sense of these three historical figures, let us summarize the germane themes of their mission up to what Peter takes forth into the church age in this story.

Moses, the liberator of the enslaved Israelites from pharaoh, was born to rule this  Pyramid of Power world system hegemony signaled by grandiose temples that enslaves. Instead he is called by God to lead the people out. He goes up to meet God on Mount Sinai, and as his meeting is prolonged, the people down below decide to construct the only god they had known, the idol of new birth by gold, a calf, a financial system in which to revel.

To repair this breach in relationship with God, Moses is instructed to meet with God in a tent, an ohel moed, where a covenant altar was placed. Services were specified for this altar, and then the tent of meeting became more formally designed by explicit instructions from God to make it into a traveling tabernacle, a mishkan, to accompany the people toward the promised land. The tabernacle is to be a place where the people are served and tested by their performances of service and obedience to this indwelling God.

So we see a process personified in Moses, from an unmediated relationship with God to a tented-off meeting, to a furnishing an itinerant set of ordained services in the desert. This process is not a progress of architecture, for which I make the case is actually regress, but in the progress of spiritual repair.  

These deinstitutionalizing reformers are thus agents of historical progress. They are the focus, not the structures. Do not be misled: Eccl. 7:10!

What later prophets call turning the heart from its focus on Egypt in all its idolatries to a focus—really a concern with the living flesh of others.

After 40 years in the desert, the people cross the Jordan, and after several hundred more years of new generational testing, God gives into their demand for a king. Saul fails, and David is ordained by the prophet Samuel and his son Solomon by Nathan so that the kings that follow in Israel have to meet with validation by the prophets. The way this plays out in the imperial period is known by scholars as the Deuteronomist history of the Bible.

 So now we may understand how Elijah fits with the transfigured transfigurer, a prophetic reformer. Moses has reformed the people’s living conditions and idea of leadership by liberation and begins the reform of their understanding of the living will of God. By the time of the kings of Israel, 300 years later, David received God’s promise of an eternal "house,” a beit, an eternal lineage of rule. David intends to mirror this promise by building God a house, which becomes his son Solomon’s project of a temple. While service elements are taken from the tent and tabernacle stages of the people’s history with God, the temple is something else, and it’s not simply a progress of  grandeur or exaltation of relationship with the divine, it is in an unexpected way, part of the process of reform & repair, an instruction in how to dwell with God mediated by a king. 

 Solomon’s temple is modeled on what a new monarchy knows of such temples from pagan neighbors. It is modeled on the stone ziggurat: as a path to heaven.  Perhaps not its Davidic idea, but becomes the basis of the tragedies of transactional theologies of God. Its service, performance, and reform fills multiple strands of the OT's commentary on the imperialistic aspirations and impulses of the collective ethnos (a linguistic group and archive, not a kinship structure as the Day of Pentecost reveals in the Book of Acts).

As later kings sin and point to the continuance of the temple, they and the people ruled take confidence that God’s  “house” with them stands. Continuation of form theology is behind institutionalization.

Until the temple doesn’t stand. Twice.

Into this architectural/imperial narrative strand, Elijah comes to present his reform of the prophetic role that Samuel and Nathan had begun by validating the Davidids as king. Elijah now comes to prophetically denounce injustice in the king and by his temple administration and call them to repentance. In the northern kingdom, Solomon’s temple had a breakaway counterpart at Shechem that became associated with the Omrid dynasty. At the time, Ahab and his consort Jezebel were ruling hegemonically and unjustly, zeroing out the prospects of many of the collective people. Elijah prophesized their doom, and Ahab and Jezebel in turn called forth his doom by sending daggers his way. Their mirror to prophecy is the dagger and the spear, mirrors destined ever to be shattered.

In the stormy chase and challenges that follow in the Book of Kings, Elijah is reduced to terrified “petrifaction.” His mission to reform the monarchy freezes him in fear.  Fear “stones” him, if you will. He sits down and prays to God for death.  God passes by to rouse him. Our first reading this morning notes how Elijah revives with a favored though oblique “appearance.” And a summons expressed in the most gentling and reformative way, that is to become the manner of all prophets hence:

“The word of God said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

The translation “sheer silence” of the Hebrew  דְּמָמָ֥ה דַקָּֽה is to me better understood as a “slenderest calm,” picking up on the imagery of the opening of the Book of Genesis where the Spirit hovers over the deep. Elijah has been put into a deep sleep by terror, chased by storms of raging malice, and God here reveals that those storms and earthquakes are not God, but the sliver of light emerging from the terror is the briefest breath, a whisper really, a shadow of a whisper, a soothing stillness that revivifies and reforms the prophet and the prophecy. It is by this prophetic gift of voice Elijah now experiences that will set him to reform the rage of institutionalized power establishments whose exclusionary impulses turn murderous when challenged.

God’s voice originates in our nothingness. A shadowing whisper is our savior. Silence stills our inner turmoil and prepares us for mission. We are not commanded by thunder to go forth to reform institutions frozen in place, but with a slightest sense of call that centers and brings forth our own gifts and wisdom, our own commitment to experience and study. We both then recognize and counter the demon rage of false institutions. Their call for spiritual war, their calls to demonize empathy and the advancing civilization of care as the enemy.

 When we move forth from this merest breath of summons we embark on a path to luminous transfiguration that mirrors the divine centering of and in uncreated light. The transfiguration is not portrayed in any physical dimensions; it lights the mountain on which these personalities meet in a quite different way. As I try to envision the Transfiguration I struggle to comprehend and sense something of the essence of the innermost altar, the uncreated light from which the earliest creation and now shines through history from Moses to Elijah into the world to accompany God’s creation-correcting reform. The unchanging, unchangeable light. The eternally enduring figure of which is culminated in the institution negating, creation-reforming, saving Messiah. That I cannot envision the unchangeable, I am emplaced on earth to participate in a generation's reform, not institutionalizing my guesses about eternal form. My participation in the historical and thus ever provisional that carries to new generations by the Spirit that leads humanity forward.

God’s voice originates in our brokenness to reform and reshape us. The prophet’s voice will be sent to the nothing-making of stones—to the hardened servants of temples that have taken hold of the dead hearts of people fallen from the Torah reforms begun in a tent with Moses. Elijah is revealed as the forerunner to the transfigured transfigurer who takes the next stage of reform to call the institutionalizers and the elites to the necessity to care for all the people, to exclude none.

And now let’s return to Peter as he’s making sense of Moses and Elijah appearing as they meet in conversation with Jesus in this dazzling moment. "Six days" before, Mark situates Peter on another mountain, likely Hermon, in ch. 8:

8: 27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”

This region was replete with a variety of pagan temples, and contemporary Palestine was replete with pretender messiahs, so that alternative visions of the divine messenger were readily at hand. As Peter and the disciples followed the country-side preaching of Jesus encountering real world struggles of the peasantry and other excluded Israelites, only Jesus among the presumptive messiahs and idols promised a program of peace, one that included the reforming impulse that sanctifies outside of institutionalized stones, transforming them.

So next in the narrative sequence in Mark of Jesus’ life is Peter’s identification of a dazzling lighted path unified by his tent-memorializing neighborhood of historical progression from Moses the liberator and reconstitutionalizer of the people, Elijah the prophetic reformer archetype who calls the selfish, unjust, and hegemonic monarch to account, and now Jesus who remains alone shining after being connected in glory on this transfiguring mountain. Standing now alone, Jesus has an integrity of person and role separate from Moses and Elijah and other prophets but as Messiah, he incorporates them all. All their gifts, all their assignments and missions. Peter, the rock, likely prostrate and hugging the ground at the vision, comes to know. Peter is us.

Jesus’ transfiguration is revealed as he approaches the (second) Lenten phase of his ministry that begins for us this Ash Wednesday. That part of the transfiguring messianic story becomes the next 6 Sundays’ preaching.

To summarize the institutionalization dimension of that story: Jesus goes forth to witness to the temple establishment in Jerusalem and is met with hope by the people excluded by the corrupt authorities. He foretells the temple’s destruction and he acts out [cf. Zech. 14] a condemnation of the false representation of God in the outer temple courtyards where money changing and transactional portrayals of God’s service represent the failures of the temple service and its institutionalizing of finance as witness to the living God. Which devours the houses of widows [Mark 12:40-44] and keeps women outside the inner proximity, and thus distanced from God. Insitutionalization represented and actualized in the temple is not just to be reformed, but destroyed. And the people’s restorative relationship to a tent of meeting with God will bring the Bedouin character and way of life of Abraham to its spiritual fulfillment in Jesus by his atonement on the Cross. The narrative of the crucifixion exposes that he was killed by the corruption of justice in an unholy enmeshment of temple authorities and the most brutal regime ever constructed by humanity. The ungodlike substitutionary ethics of Caiaphas (“better one man to die than the whole nation” John 11:50)  and the most craven politician, Pilate, who asks, “what is truth?” (John 18:38) as he washes his hands and sends Jesus to that death meant to warn other reformers.

 This injustice is transfigured by the supplicating merits that reveal the good news of God's character: God is ever given to mercy, and such "justice" performed on the Cross is not God's, and to the extent that God allows such, it is revealed as subsidiary to the operation of grace. In Christ's supplicating prayer and the blood that covenants it, God's judgment of Christ's followers is expiated on the Cross, dissolved by both blood and word and confirmed by the resurrection. That is the Gospel. 

I’ve tried up to now to portray the historical theology being revealed to Peter, who represents us, on the Mount of Transfiguration. These reformers who were sent to the death-dealing and stone-age making institutions of their day. They were beset with crippling fear and revived by the gentle and gentling voice of the Spirit. In the case of Moses, his heart set on the stone pyramid system of world hegemony became a heart of flesh. In Elijah, his reform of the prophetic call was preparatory to his calling hegemons in Israel to account for injustice. To me, this inner light, this slim still voice starts in the heart and pushes through to the appearance. These  reformers manifest to Peter on the Mount their participation in the messiah's star-skin, the dazzling light of that most inner uncreated light with God. Psalm 104 (cf. Hab. 3:3-4) says of God,

1b      You are clothed with honor and majesty,

2a        wrapped in light as with a garment.

Theirs is a different kind of royal clothing, a garment of a new kind of flesh that testifies to their de-petrified heart--an intention set on stone advertisements. The image of the transfiguration is not distorted by the garish and cartoonish images of superheroes implanted by too much CGI videogames-- the visuals of strategic compulsion: no shoot-em-up lightning bolts, no flames erupting from crowns, nor some strobing, stop action sound-track accompanying the axe-throwing 6-million dollar arm of Thor.

I will conclude with three applications of what I’ve presented of historical and spiritual theology of the transfiguration:

First, the religion of the messiah is reformed, always reforming. Our institutionalization of the church—the way denominations send down instructions about practice and about doctrine—is always provisional. We open the temple walls of religion to the excluded by age, background, gender and scrupling. We are mindful to reform where those walls have been tragically erected. This reform impulse of the medieval church got a lot of people killed before Luther barely escaped to set the modern Protestant reformation program in motion. And very quickly Calvin came to institutionalize it in civil governance, and at least in one case participated in an unjust killing of a political opponent. And yet it’s Calvin’s so-called magisterial, institutionalized reformation that we honor most today.

rather than the excommunicated John Wycliffe or the martyr Jan Hus. And the many others before and as the Protestant Reformation took hold in Europe.

 Second and flowing from the first, the greatest reforming theologian this country has produced, no doubt in my mind, is MLK. I know this is controversial for some. And—that the most tragic are those theologians in the south and at places like "Old Princeton" whose names are on their buildings and libraries--who died never having released their slaves or released their tacit endorsement of slavery as "adiaphora to the Gospel." They prayed the Lord’s Prayer, which calls for Jubilee, and either were too ignorant to make the connection—they did not tent with God-- or were too hypocritical to care. The institutionalizing impulse leads ever to injustice that transmits intergenerational traumas that we are still dealing with. It is up to us as reformers to transfigure the deadening legacies of the institutionalizing impulse. MLK was itinerant and polarizing while blessing, reviled by the entempling elites who construct gated plantations and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

And that was their last will and testament, their binding their slaves to their pyramid like Pharaoh,

but our transfiguring witness transfigures the meaning of the old institutional and binding impulses propagandized as “solutions” that instead sire stigma based on social comforts and so sire crisis after crisis.

The metacrisis today is the institutionalization of the closed off head and the subordination if not exclusion of the open heart, a strategizing logical structure to get ahead in the world of strivers, to get yours before others take your share of a fixed pie. However, it is not some transcendent light in our mind that breaks through to dazzle our skin’s appearance, but transcendent light of the heart that makes others the destination of the pie—the sharing Golden Imperative of neighbor love, concern, and the civilization of care. We are transfigured by our heart never solely by our head, which follows the heart's progress. The ongoing Reformation of the Church is deinstitutionalizing what I call, “the Church of the Discourse over Belief.” "Beliefers" who set up norms of no import, no ethics.  Instead the Reforming Church is becoming recognized in the individual practice of pastoral virtues that redeem the present moment encountered in our awareness as we sojourn through the streets and wildlands of daily existence, recognizing the divinely created emplacement of those, of every encounter intended by God to reform our heart from stone to living, shining flesh in small-scale moments, tented meetings with neighbor and God-in-Christ at the table.

In the end, MLK recognized that the contemporary temple is the military- industrial, predatory capitalist impulse. As every generation gets stuck in stationary darkness, feeling inexorably pulled into the suck of the world’s so-called “realists” ever sending them to war. Reformers who tent with God know the metaphysics behind the Book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount: it is impossible to bring peace through war. Impossible. When MLK moved from civic development to protest class exploitation and the Vietnam War, he was assassinated. Can we recognize that as a “transfiguration?”

Yes: it’s reform vs. institutionalization. It has ever been for the church.

Finally, it's important to note that the most effective reformers, the transfigured transfigurers, are seen as polarizing. They invade our comfortable places and get thrown into prisons like Paul and down wells like Jeremiah, and yes, are put to death as the Bible notes of so many holy men and history of so many holy women. Reformers and their missions are misunderstood because God and Jesus’ mission are misunderstood.

Their mission and their reforming personalities made them itinerant prophets and preachers. They lived out contemporary, Abrahamic expression of living in the tent of meeting.

Transfiguring reformers, on the other hand traveled like Abraham in a kind of spiritually Bedouin existence through hostile deserts with God their oasis. The interiority of such a life is manifest in the earliest Hebrew poetry, and in the Psalms. It is later the vision by the prophet Ezekiel [40—48] of the heavenly dwelling—a tent of meeting in Rev. 15 inside  the vision of temple centered by a Palm tree, its deep roots symbolizing  the processing holy water found in the driest places.

These itinerant reformers attend to God’s gracious will both within and without as they find provision. The bread of life they prayed for daily. They were in terms of their tented existence with God both itinerant and polarizing, blessed by and for the regular people for their sacrificial shepherding of them, and reviled by the elites who wanted their temples and pleasure palaces to feed and celebrate themselves.

 Instead of interpreting history’s heroes beckoning backward calls of institutional return [as if we were to put David and Jacob's son Joseph in a constructed pantheon of transfigured history], we become aware of the inexorable appearance of the anointed reformers in every generation stuck in stationary darkness. 

So now we arrive at this moment in your congregation. A new itinerant tent maker is coming to this building. Your new Pastor Lisa, who will bring change. New pastors always do, and some try to hold to the comfortable way things have always been done. Your committees can try to interview for it—I confess my anti-institutionalizing personality has failed many interviews. So now, how are you going to welcome this itinerant into your tents?

Lisa is a friend of mine: our sons attended pre-school together back at seminary and are joined 15 years later in exploring college options. They are in a place of transitioning into adulthood. They are joining the increasingly itinerant adult generations seeking their place in the world that they will come to know as broken. Lisa too is in a place of itinerant transition, and I imagine some prophetic anxiousness on her part. What I want to suggest is that a pastor has different roles. Like Moses, she has trained to seek liberation of those in bondage to sin, to trauma, to ignorance.  Moses’ followers repeatedly gossiped—the Biblical word was “grumbled”—about how they wouldn’t do it this way, a culture that repeatedly manifested itself in the Exodus generation from Egyptian slavery calling Moses to bring them back to the comforts of Egypt. To the institutions that enslaved them but fed them for their labor but denied them wine. These disgruntled followers of Moses in the desert, on their way to their promise, repeatedly felt the nostalgic call of a golden period when their ancestor Joseph was in charge there. These are the dynamics of the tented meeting place with God of Mosaic, liberating leadership. Please contain grumbling and comparing the way things were done in the past. These transfigurers are not servants of the way things always have been done. She may speak as a community servant to a different space or as a prophet like Elijah as wise to the destinies of the unjust. Lisa will have different audiences in mind as she learns to address you inside the chaos of a world in metacrisis, so that if she speaks on something that isn’t your concern that Sunday, please don’t tell her, “I didn’t feel fed.”

Feed her instead with your joy. Because Joy cycles.

In addition to a reconstitution of a witnessing and mission sent collective like the transfigured role of Moses, all new pastors are trained and gifted to act as prophet—a role for Elijah, by which I mean not that she is subject to direct visions of the future, but that she has a prophetic wisdom of how the world has been constructed to call for the practice of the Golden Rule and to predict that the violations of unjust leaders and rulers to zero out the marginalized will meet with doom. A prophetic pastor knows that if one zeroes out others, that one will become beset with a crippling and fulfilled anxiety that others will see that and mirror the same, first to others of their followers, and then to the unjust leader himself. Their suspicions become a mirror of the leader's own fallen intentions, and these will swallow all up in nihilism—the idea there is nothing to the world other than their own will and self-created methods of achieving power. The Elijah role, the John the Baptist role, is to prophetically call these persons and cultural forms to repentance. This the lonely and polarizing and misunderstood life of a prophetic pastor. Because God is misunderstood, the reformer is misunderstood esp. by those who think they already know God. This is what Jesus means when he says, “'A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.” This is a role too for pastors. Please pray for us. esp. when you are frustrated by us. By this, you pray for yourself as well, a prayer I believe will be approved.

I have attempted to present a critical reading of a traditional, historical text to de-institutionalize God’s word from inside a temple to an outdoors and peripatetic, tent-seeking of meetings. The Transfiguration symbolizes the glory of reformers, and appropriately, it starts the season of Lent when our personal journeys into reform begin by following Jesus into the wilderness.

This year, the fast of Ash Wednesday and the feast of  St Valentine’s Day coincide. The reformed paths of always reforming involves both. A feast of the inward place of meeting with others as joy, and a fast of struggle against the civilizations of stones thrown at others (they will be returned!) rather than bread shared with others.

The radical distance of God becomes human and beautiful in God’s imprint-- the energy, the strain, the joy, the polarizing lack of ready smiles, the grief, the triumph, and the failure of the ministry of Jesus. All of these you will see in your pastors. All these you will see in your neighbors. Transfigure them by your love. Transfigure yourself by your love. Put away the stones of your cultures. Invite others into your tents and serve them, extending them the Golden Rule. Enemies too.  Enemies foremost. Because in their own reform is God’s glory met. Shine a light. Share what is transfigured and transfiguring. May it be so for you and for me, Amen.