Last Epiphany – March 6, 2011 – Year A – RCL
Well, until the rains came and nearly washed us all away, we had a few days there where we saw the sun again and it got a little warmer.
It felt good to doff our coats for a moment and let some of that warmth soak into our bones—let the wearying load of our many responsibilities, real or imagined, fall to the ground for a second or two, and just bask in the light of God’s goodness.
This may or may not have been what Peter, James, and John felt like doing, that day on the mountain, when, all of a sudden Jesus’ face and his clothes began to shine so brightly that it dazzled their eyes.
They were probably pretty frightened, too, but Peter would appear to have caught the momentousness of the occasion when he suggested that building some sort of shrine to commemorate their vision of Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus might be an appropriate thing to do.
This is probably as close as Peter got to suggesting that they all might just take a moment and bask in the light of God’s goodness.
If they weren’t afraid when they saw Jesus transfigured before them—glowing, I guess, might be a good way of putting it, the disciples were definitely afraid—the writer of Matthew says that they “fell to the ground”—when the bright cloud overshadowed them and they heard a voice say, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”
They “were overcome by fear,” is how Matthew phrases it.
Whatever it was that they saw, whatever it was that they heard, whatever it was that they felt, the disciples simply couldn’t handle it.
Rather than basking in the light of God’s goodness at that moment, they probably wished they were somewhere else.
Except that they were so frightened they couldn’t move.
It helped that Jesus spoke to them then.
“Get up and do not be afraid,” is what he said to them, and when they looked up, all they saw was Jesus and nobody else.
Moses and Elijah were gone; the cloud was gone; the light was gone.
Everything was the way it had been before.
Except for one thing: The disciples now carried within them a memory that they had not possessed before, the memory of whatever it was that they had seen, heard, and felt.
Even though Jesus now looked the same to them as he had before, they would never quite think of him in the way that they had thought of him before; he would never quite be to them what he had been to them before.
He would be a lot more, although they probably weren’t too sure exactly what.
But, when Jesus told them not to tell anyone about the vision “until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead,” he gave them a pretty good clue, though they probably didn’t realize it at the time.
Theologian Marcus Borg, author of The Heart of Christianity, the subject of our Lenten Soup & Study sessions last year, devotes an entire chapter of his book to the phenomenon that best explains what Jesus’ disciples must have experienced that day on the mountain.
Borrowing the term from the wisdom of ancient Celtic spirituality, Borg invites his readers to think of moments when they have found themselves especially aware of God’s presence in their lives as “thin places”.
The late Urban T. Holmes, III, dean of our seminary, liked to describe encounters with such “thin places” as “being in a liminal state”—when, all of a sudden, you’re standing on a threshold, and the space between dream and reality is momentarily blurred; oddly enough, for some reason, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass suddenly springs to mind.
“Thin places,” Marcus Borg tells us, “can literally be geographical places. For Celtic Christianity, the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland is a classic thin place. So also are [other] traditional destinations of pilgrimage: for Christians, Jerusalem, Rome, Canterbury, …; for Muslims, especially Mecca, but also Medina and Jerusalem. Mountains and [other heights] are thin places in many religious traditions, including the Bible and Native American traditions. But…there are many [more] kinds of thin places,” Borg points out. “For example, nature, especially wilderness areas, can sometimes become a thin place. …For some, the arts… Music, poetry, literature, the visual arts, and dance can all become thin places in which the boundary between one’s self and the world momentarily disappears. …People can become thin places,” Borg continues. “Many of us have known at least one or two people through whom we experienced the presence of the Spirit at particular junctures in our lives. Jesus in particular,” Borg adds in what almost seems like an afterthought, “ [Jesus] must have been a remarkable thin place; his followers’ devotion flowed out of their experience of him as such. And the saints, known and unknown, Christian and non-Christian, were (and are) thin places.”
Somehow, we are not that surprised when Borg goes on to state that worship can become a thin place, though we are perhaps somewhat taken back, when he asserts that the “primary purpose in worship” of the Nicene Creed, for example, which we will soon be reciting together, as we do most every Sunday morning—that its primary purpose “is not propositional but sacramental”.
Despite what Borg boldly calls “clunky words that stumble in the presence of Mystery, [the reality of] God is mediated [and these] words that [some of us] know by heart…become a thin place as we join ourselves in the sound of the community saying these words together. As we do so,” Borg concludes, “we also join ourselves with a community that transcends time, all of those centuries of Christians who have heard and said these words. We become part of the communion of saints….”
Obviously, what Borg wants us to consider is the strong possibility that being able to say the words of the Creed together as members of the Christian community is more important than being able to agree with every word that is said.
When people have religious experiences, like the one that Peter, James, and John had—when people encounter “thin places” in their lives, they can respond by doing one of three things: They can spend the rest of their days trying to duplicate the experience, building a kind of shrine in their souls to the memory of whatever it was that they experienced; they can let themselves be so overcome with fear that they spend the rest of their days trying to forget or even deny that it ever happened; or they can simply get up and move on, knowing that if what they have experienced does not make that much sense to them now, it will make sense to them later, when they have gone where they need to go, when they have arrived at where they need to be.
Getting up and moving on was, of course, Jesus’ solution; it is what Jesus wanted the disciples to do.
For Jesus, getting up and moving on meant “setting his face steadfastly toward Jerusalem,” where he would be betrayed and put to death, but on the third day be raised from the dead.
For the disciples, getting up and moving on meant following Jesus to Jerusalem, where they would share in his betrayal, witness his death, but eventually in an entirely different sense of the word become witnesses to his resurrection.
Trying to capture or recapture forever the moment of glory was not the answer, but neither was it to recoil in fear and deny that anything life-changing had ever touched them.
The answer was to get up and move on.
Happily, the way we worship helps us to do both: to bask in the light of God’s goodness and to get up and move on.
Just as a piece of music would cease to be a piece of music if the player or players landed on a note or chord, however beautiful the sound, and never moved to the next (though adventurous composers like John Cage have actually experimented with the idea), our liturgy would cease to be liturgy if all it aimed to do was produce a spiritual high in its participants and then try to sustain that high indefinitely.
Liturgy to be liturgy must do both: invite us to bask in the light of God’s goodness and urge us to get up and move on, blending the promise of abiding mystery with a call to faithful ministry.
But thank God for thin places, especially the ones that we happen upon (or that happen upon us!) when we least expect them!
They reassure us when we need reassurance that we are part of something a whole lot bigger than ourselves, and they give us courage when we need courage to keep on putting our faith into action in the world as grateful witnesses of God’s power and glory.
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