Sermon of the Week:
Look Them in the Face
A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on February 27, 2022.
Hymns: Every Time I Feel the Spirit
and Shine, Jesus Shine
Keywords: Transfiguration, Healing, Look at your Neighbor, Emmanuel Levinas, Moses’s Face. #pcusa
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Exodus 34:29-35
and Luke 9:28-43a
Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469.
All rights reserved.
Every week I remind myself that these stories are always new to someone.
That’s a particularly helpful reminder for me
on a day like today,
with a story like this one: the Transfiguration of Jesus.
This is one of those stories
that we read and discuss and ponder and pray about
Every year. Year after year.
The Transfiguration is always the story
That helps us stand on the threshold of Lent,
the way we transition from Epiphany
and its posture of amazed wonder
at the gift and presence of a savior and lord and Christ
And what Jesus might mean for us
As we transition from all that to Lent,
The season of introspection and penitence and brooding
With a slower and more melancholy feel.
So if you’ve been doing this for a while, you might wonder,
Like I sometimes wonder, what is going to be new and fresh in this story.
And I ask that question sometimes
When we approach those well-worn pages of our Bibles.
But the wonderful thing is how each and every time I do that
Something stands out differently
Something clicks with the concerns of the current age
And in that moment, we can open ourselves to a fresh word from God
New movement of the holy spirit among us.
And I find some connection with people for whom this is a new story.
Because there is always something new,
every time we consider these stories afresh.
///
We’re jumping around a bit in the Gospel of Luke.
That’s unfortunate, because we miss some of the context
That can help us situate this story a bit.
A few weeks ago we looked at some earlier stories,
Such as Jesus meeting his first disciples at Lake Gennesaret.
That’s where we first encounter Peter.
Jesus asked to use his boat,
So he could teach the crowds from the water,
And then, later, they went fishing
in the heat of the afternoon – who does that?—
but catching more fish than could be counted,
convincing those first disciples to come and follow him.
They then went up a mountain,
probably not the same one we’re talking about here,
but a high place, set apart.
Mountains were retreat type places
Where you went to get away from the masses
Where you’d go to have a conference of sorts.
So Jesus and a group of early followers went up there
And Jesus set the 12 apostles apart, commissioned them, as it were.
They prayed, got oriented to their task,
Maybe did some ice breakers
Red light green light
or two truths and a lie, who knows,
And then they came back down again.
And when they came down, Jesus kicked into action:
There’s the sermon on the plain.
We spent a few weeks looking at that:
Blessings and woes,
Do unto others as you want them to do to you,
And as for your opponents, your enemies:
Pray for them.
Love your enemies even.
Hard lessons, to be sure
because reconciliation and justice and peace are hard,
But with God’s help we can work on all of it together.
There are two, maybe two and a half chapters worth of narrative
Between that sermon on the plain
and where we find ourselves this morning.
And in those Chapters you see this Jesus
going back and forth across Galilee and the Gerasenes
doing two things:
he’s teaching everyone who would listen
about the Kingdom of God,
and at the same time, everywhere you look
Jesus is healing a lot of people:
There’s the centurion’s servant in Capernaum,
There’s the man raised up in Nain,
And then there’s the one possessed, the one with the name Legion.
The story of the hemorrhaging woman is here, too, in Chapter 8,
The woman who reaches out
and touches the hem of Jesus’ cloak in the crowd,
This woman who had been searching for healing, for wholeness,
For twelve years,
Twelve years!
before she found it the moment she touched his hem.
Four significant healing stories.
So notice: Healing was a significant portion of Jesus’s work here.
It wasn’t just the teaching in parables, which he does, also.
The story about the sower and the seeds, the creditor with two debtors,
You find those here.
And it’s not just Jesus demonstrating
in powerful and unmistakable ways who he is
Like when they’re on the lake, on a boat,
And the storm clouds come and he is asleep in the back
And the disciples, nervous, wake him:
Master, Master, we are perishing!
and he calms the wind and steadies the waves.
All those things are here,
Providing movement and support to the narrative about Jesus
Who he is
What he’s about
Who is behind it all.
And, prominently, at the heart of it all
we have these healing stories.
Is that what you think about, when you think of Jesus:
Jesus the healer?
The people come to him, yearning for health and for wholeness.
Jesus responds with compassion and conviction
And he helps them find it:
Healing the body, and the mind, and the spirit.
The whole person.
///
These days the particulars about Jesus’ healing
Often strike us as bizarre.
And they should, honestly.
I find them that way, when I read through all of this.
We don’t think about physical or mental illness
In the same way that they did in the biblical period.
We know a lot more now about medicine, today,
about bacteria and viruses and hygiene.
We have medicine and DNA sequencing and x rays and vaccines.
All of us have had a crash course in the modern epidemiology techniques,
And even if many of our friends and neighbors
seem to have forgotten
the basic science they learned in high school,
we are in such a different place than they were
when these texts were written.
And these texts reflect the time in which they were written
Where demons were thought to be the principal cause
of mental illness or neurological disorders
and where skin conditions were enough
to get you banned from the community
shunned from friends and family.
So even though there’s a significant distance, right,
Between the medical understanding of these texts and our day and age
I want to highlight two very important things
for us to pay attention to here, nonetheless.
TWO, maybe THREE important points.
One is that its ok for us not to assume a biblical cosmology
When dealing with our modern medical problems.
God gave us minds to see and understand the world,
Which has led to 2000 years of scientific observation and medical advances
Thanks be to God.
Many of you know that I use a CPAP machine
every night to breath while I sleep
Some of you know
that I was born with a lung full of fluid, respiratory distress syndrome
requiring a stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit—
two personal examples of how far we’ve come.
We should try to understand a greater meaning behind these texts
While giving God thanks for the advances
that render them somewhat odd even so.
Second, and this is the greater meaning here,
we should never fail to see
that a significant part of what God is doing here
Is teaching us to be concerned about the health of our neighbor:
The physical and spiritual and emotional wellbeing of others.
Healing is a major part of what Jesus does.
And when Jesus heals, he shows that God is at work.
The Kingdom of God isn’t just a place where people
Live in peace, rooted in justice, and bound together by reconciliation,
Though it is that.
The Kingdom of God is also a place
Where people flourish
Where the hungry are fed
The thirsty have something to drink
The naked have clothes
The lonely find community
The outcast are welcomed
And, significantly, where our wounds are bound up.
This is why communities who faithfully follow Jesus
have long been concerned with healing.
Our particular denomination has built hospitals and trained doctors
And provided medicine for two hundred and fifty years,
We join other faithful people of other denominations
And other faith traditions who have done the same.
Healing, health, wholeness: these matter to us
Because they mattered to Jesus
And because they matter to God.
That’s the second thing for us to lift up.
And third, finally,
we should note that part
of what Jesus is doing in these stories
Is restorative healing:
The healing Jesus offers
almost always goes beyond the physical or emotional malady
and addresses other ailments, deeper wounds, community scars.
To the woman not able to find healing for 12 years,
Healing for her means finally finding rest
after SO MUCH stress and strain
YEARS of worrying about her health and her healing.
For the centurion, it was access to a faithful tradition that wasn’t his own
That would give him welcome and belonging and understanding and hope.
Time and time again,
people who found themselves ill, or broken,
Or, sometimes, in their understanding, possessed
They were broken off from the community.
They were shunned or isolated or rejected.
We see this not just in these healing stories, but elsewhere to:
The good Samaritan
The ten lepers
The man born blind…
And each time, when he healed them,
Jesus restored them to community,
He corrects that brokenness.
Go, report to the priest, let him see your arm…Jesus says to the lepers
For example.
Another way to say this is that healing
is always a holistic activity for Jesus
Always far more than the acute issue that presents itself.
Healing puts people back together,
Not in a way that leaves behind no scars,
But in a way that promotes better interpersonal functioning
And, often, opens the door to enjoying life again
Being in relationship again
And serving one another again.
///
Jesus was a unique healer.
There was no one like Jesus,
And there can’t be anyone like Jesus again in this regard.
It is true that Jesus is said to have given the disciples
some of this power to heal
Though it’s unclear what is meant by that:
The power to help with many ailments, perhaps
Maybe also the ability to challenge, to concern to care about
the brokenness that illness creates in community also
in such a way that it gets tied together
with that work of peace and justice and reconciliation
that we talked about last week.
We’re reminded, on a day like today,
How human beings
can do so many things that promote healing, for sure,
but we can also cause so much harm,
And not just drastic things
like missiles and the bullets of war over in the Ukraine,
But also structures we build
that provide or constrict access to medicine,
How our own systems of medicine often fail impoverished communities
Indigenous communities, communities of color.
We’re reminded, on a day like today,
How even some of our states, (looking at you Texas),
Are threatening the health of Transgender children and their families
As they seek to score points in cultural battles
That when you look at it show that they care very little
about the health and well-being of the kids involved.
But we can also do a lot to help heal, to promote healthy communities.
We can share good food and clean water.
We can listen to doctors and nurses and medical professionals
during a global pandemic.
We can work to ensure that our neighbor
won’t lose their savings and their livelihood
because of the cost of a significant health crisis.
Those of us who seek to follow God on the way of Jesus
Aren’t expecting to have the same healing powers that Jesus had.
Jesus was Jesus; we are not.
But we do seek to find ways to build and nurture healthy families and neighbors
Because we’re concerned not just about ourselves,
and not just about our own tribe.
But we’re concerned about others too.
Because of Jesus.
///
You might have noticed right about now
That I’ve not said all that much about the Transfiguration of Jesus yet.
That is true.
If you noticed that, well done.
What does any of this have to do with the Transfiguration story,
you might wonder.
Has the preacher gotten off track again?
Does someone need to go whisper in his ear
Hey, preacher: mountain top, shiny face,
Peter, James and John
and three shelters for Jesus and Moses and Elijah
You know, preacher: Transfiguration.
Fair point.
But there’s a reason for all of this.
In all those years when I’ve been reading this transfiguration story
Here on the doorway to Lent
Or maybe one of the other versions of this story
told over in the Gospel Matthew or Mark
I’ve almost always honed in on
the events that are happening there on that mountain, you know,
without stepping back a bit to see
WHERE the authors place the story itself
WHAT they’re trying to say about Jesus’ transfiguration
from a broader point of view.
And that’s ok.
A deep and close reading
about Jesus and his disciples up there on the mountain
is wonderful and helpful and good.
But I haven’t noticed
how Matthew and Mark and Luke, each of them,
After Peter and James and John and Jesus go up the mountain
And Jesus’ face shone like the sun, says Matthew,
And the hem of that cloak of Jesus,
the very same cloak the hemorrhaging woman touched,
it’s the very same word in the Greek
that cloak turned dazzling white,
more white than anyone could ever bleach it, says Mark,
and the cloud overtakes them and there’s that voice from heaven
maybe the same one that spoke at the river Jordan the day Jesus was baptized
This is my Jesus, my Son, my Chosen, my Beloved, listen listen listen
And they see those paragons of their faith, Moses and Elijah…
Could there be a more powerful moment for these fishermen
These disciples, these ordinary people seeing this extraordinary thing?
And they offer to build a few humble huts
to maybe make the moment last a bit longer
they don’t know what they’re doing,
what they’re suggesting,
what they’re offering, comments Luke,
but they offer it, because they’re anxious and unsure and
they KNOW that something bigger than their understanding
is happening right there before them
and they want to be useful,
want to not be in the way, want to not be a burden
and then just as suddenly as it all happens the cloud is gone
and Moses and Elijah are gone
and it’s just them and Jesus and an awkward walk back down…
I didn’t notice, how Matthew and Mark and Luke, each of them,
When they get down there and start seeing people again
The very next thing they each tell us about
is a story about healing.
Again, here’s Luke:
“On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain
A great crowd met them.
Just then a man from the crowd shouted,
“Teacher, I beg you to look at my son;
He is my only child.
Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks…
It mauls him and will scarcely leave him.
I begged your disciples to cast it out but they could not.”
And if you’re reading that, like me, your heart breaks for this man,
So worried for his son,
So unable to find answers,
Worried about his future.
Can’t you help me Jesus.
///
On days like today, I wish we had the unlimited power of Jesus.
There are too many times when healing is not possible,
When children die too soon, when parents die too soon for that matter,
Or friends or loved ones or whomever.
There’s so much brokenness in our world.
So many people who turn a blind eye to their neighbor.
Who are concerned just about themselves
Who aren’t willing to love their neighbor, much less their enemy.
And OUR healing, our human healing, is imperfect.
Our bodies do not last forever.
Well, they didn’t in Jesus’ time either,
But we know that all the same in ours.
But healing is possible in our world.
It’s actually better than it ever has been,
And, on our better days, when our better angels guide us,
We attend to more than just our physical and emotional ailments
But we attend to the brokenness of our communities as well.
In that story that Pat read for us this morning,
Did you notice what happened to Moses when he held court with God
His face glowed with the presence of God
So bright it was that the people couldn’t look him in the eye.
But don’t turn away, Moses said to them.
Look at what God is doing. Pay attention.
A veil helped. It blunted the kavod, the glory, just a bit
So they could take it all in,
But they were urged not to turn away, but to pay attention.
Fast forward to that mountain top
where Jesus and Moses and Elijah are chatting
and Peter and James and John, having not fallen asleep,
see the amazing glowing countenance of their leader
and a cloud—a powerful symbol of the presence of God
comes and surrounds them
and if to add an exclamation mark on this whole thing
a voice from the cloud shouts: this is my son, my son, my son
Listen to him!
And then it’s all gone.
They go down.
And the crowds are still there.
The hurt and the need and the hope and the possibility, all there.
The teaching and the mission awaits.
And the man approaches with his epileptic son
And he calls out to Jesus: JESUS…LOOK at my boy!
I’ve not been able to get help. Your disciples can’t fix this.
Help us!
///
What is going on here?
Jesus bemoans the fact that the kingdom of God isn’t here yet.
Not fully. He’s working on it.
How much longer?
How much longer do we have to deal with not just illness and heartache
But people like this man who feel alone and without hope?
People like this son who has been rejected.
People won’t look at them. They won’t pay attention to him.
He doesn’t get the healing he needs.
Jesus! Look!
And Jesus looks. And he heals.
And in doing so, he teaches us to do the same.
///
The Transfiguration of Jesus is noteworthy because
What Jesus looks like changes.
Jesus glows with the very power of God.
And Jesus USES the attention he garners
By pointing it at others, at those who need us to help them
To care about what hurts, and how we can help.
I was reminded,
as I thought about the disciples SEEING the face of Jesus
The Israelites, seeing the face of Moses,
The crowds, NOT seeing the face of the man with the son
Or the hemorrhaging woman
Or the centurion’s servant
Or the Man named Legion…
I was reminded of a simple lesson
of the Lithuanian French Jewish philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas,
writing in the embers of the holocaust:
That the face of another person
Creates in us a responsibility to care about them.
When you see the face of another person,
You MUST care about what they need to survive, and to thrive.
This is exactly what Jesus does, in his ministry.
This is why he is constantly healing and restoring and renewing
People and the communities that they are a part of.
He sees them. He validates their need and their worthiness.
He works to help them find healing and wholeness.
To help your neighbor, you have to look at them first,
And see them as a child of God.
And when WE are captivated by the Kingdom of God
That Jesus has come to share,
We’ll be moved by Jesus’ example
And we’ll be motivated by the Holy Spirit
To do what we can
to nurture healthy people and families and communities too.
And, when we do, my friends,
we’ll be working to transfigure the world.
And that would be a beautiful thing indeed.
So may we give thanks for this wonderful calling,
And may we join with helpers everywhere
As we seek to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world.
May it be so.
Amen.
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