February 22, 2009
Edwards (Knox) United Church
Transfiguration Sunday, Last Sunday After Epiphany
2 Kings 2:1-12
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Mark 9:2-9
Read the passage: The Message or The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
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The Rev. Dr. George Hermanson
We know all about farewell tours. We make one last trip to a homestead to find some of our roots, and having done that we feel connected to our past.
In the visit we connect to some image or build a shrine. When I was in Japan each corner seemed to have a shrine. This is true of Mexico and other countries. Shrines that are important to the neighborhood or the family or a nation. These shrines tell us something important has happened in this location and we want to remember that event that was transformational. A nation may have been created, think of the controversy around the Plains of Abraham. The shrine can be disruptive or it can be generative. And some times it is both.
Elijah is on his farewell tour. The writer of the text is giving us a narrative about a shift in religious consciousness. In this tour we encounter those important symbols of the nation. At each site some generative event has taken place and now there are groups that are located there and get their identity by location and the meaning of the event that happened. It is limited sacred space, for we will note that Elijah moves on. It is a metaphorical expansion of sacred space.
We also noticed that Elisha is tested at each stop. The choice he has is to be satisfied by what the tradition has been or move on. He moves on. Now that is a risk for he does not know the outcome, there is no apparent plan, just a new stop. He knows though that there is an end but not when or where.
In the image of the whirlwind and the fire the author of Kings is suggesting a new understanding of the role of religion. And we find a new source of leadership. Elijah's mantle is left behind and now Elisha carries on the task. He has earned it by his willingness to face his fear and to continue to follow Elijah into new territory.
This farewell tour is not one of going back to those oldies but goodies of a favourite band. This story of Elijah is a rejection of nostalgia. It is a call to hear newness coming out of the chaos of the whirlwind, for whirlwinds are symbols of radical transformation of reality, the uncontrollable move of the Spirit, pushing us into new realities.
When we turn to Paul we are reminded how our society and our farewell tours are often ways to veil us from reality. Veils are ways where we hide so we don’t go deep into the unknown. They are those images and ideas that maintain the status quo. They are the shrines we build that comfort yet do not challenge, hold us captive in familiar feelings and the unexamined life. Easy answers to complex issues are the modern veils. An example is when people say we have always done this and that ends the discussion. Think of how we accept violence in some sports and in extreme fighting celebrate violence ... Supporters say this violence is natural and never dig deeper into the issue so we can overcome violence by rejecting it, as how things are - that cooperation is actually more natural to human becoming.
The story in Mark tells us how easy it is to resist transformation. And that is helpful for our own spiritual journey. He reads a resurrection story back into the experience of the disciples. He creates a narrative that brings together the shrines of his religious context. He is reminding the early community that their sense of God has pushed them into unknown realities, that they are experiencing a whirlwind, and out of it has come a new way of sensing God.
We sometimes create a veil that cuts us off from deep experiences of the sense of God. We try to locate this sense of God in one way, in one place, in one geographic location. Sometimes our religious practices become so mundane that the vividness of God is gone. And in the face of this mundaneness we stop rather than jumping into the whirlwind to let go of all those familiar sign posts that at one time did work but no longer sustain or make us flourish.
Here is Peter having a whirlwind experience. He is terrified. Peter was so attached to his Jewish traditions that he was terrified to let the veil go. He wanted to keep them (Moses & Elijah) in tents (yet another veil analogy). (My version reads "tents" for "dwellings.") Once the veil is removed, they only "SEE" Jesus who has taken up the "mantle" of his predecessors, yet his "mantle" is a brilliant dazzling resurrected white. This new experience tell them that God is here. But Peter misses the point, for his says let us build some shrines to this moment. He wants to locate the Spirit in this time and place. He wants to freeze the experience in one image.
Of course we sympathize with this need. For we do need to bottle the spirit so we can carry it with us. We need symbols that allow us to live in the chaos of the moment. We need those things that anchor us and give us confidence for the facing of our issues. But like all shrines, like all anchors they can weigh us down. We can spend so much time in one place, taking care of the shrine, that we kill the Spirit that caused us to build it in the first place. We made the experience into something which can inform us through time and space but now that shrine we have created is what we now worship. We have made the shrine into and idol.
Our stories this morning remind us of not only the hidden aspect of God - the sense of the more - which we encounter in mystical moments and events, they remind us that God is everywhere. God is not limited to one image, one geographical place, one way of doing ritual, one religious tradition. God is found everywhere, in all times and places.
The church is in the whirlwind and all the familiar ways doing church are up for examination. We need to see how we do church can actually veil us, has become a shrine that freeze us in past realties. We are being called on a farewell tour that will open our senses to God who is felt everywhere. It is not a tour of nostalgia for the way things were but a move into creative transformation.
The shrines that work will remind us that it is the path of the senses that will take away the veils that hide. This is a preparation of Lent, which is a reflection on loss and newness. It is to shed those things that hold us back and to follow the path of the senses which will enliven our experience.
We will employ sight - reflective observation on the beauty of one’s surroundings and those around us. We will celebrate hearing, the music of others, and the music sung, the birds who sing, and laughter. We will celebrate taste, the taste of the good earth and the products of community, a holy hedonism of delicious food. We will celebrate touch, the life- affirm physical contact between persons. We will reflect upon and become aware of the intermingle joy and pain of the world. In all of life processes we will sense the creative presence of God in every moment. We are called to this vocation of a moveable feast, this sense of God, to point to it in life and to live it in each moment.
George Hermanson
www.georgehermanson.com
