A Transfiguring Touch

A Transfiguring Touch

Text:  Matthew 17:1-8

(Gary W. Charles at Cove Presbyterian Church, Covesville, VA, 2-26-2017)

The season of Lent arrives around this time, every year on the heels of the Transfiguration story. In that strange story, no sooner do Jesus, Peter, James, and John make it up the mountain then Jesus’ face starts to shine. Then, more than his face, Jesus’ entire body is transfigured, in the Greek, is metamorphisized, by God.

It is one thing to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” when Jesus is someone much like us, a person we can relate to, someone who laughs and cries, who occasionally loses his temper and raises his voice. It is quite another thing to make sense of an eerie, glowing Jesus, who looks not like he has seen a ghost, but who looks like a ghost himself.    

Read on and the story only gets stranger. Just as Peter and the Zebedee boys set sights on the transfigured Jesus do the time travelers Moses and Elijah arrive. Peter tries to bring some reason to the surreal setting by offering accommodations for everyone. It is the first concrete, common sense  thing that has happened since the boys went up the mountain.

Before anyone can book a room or pitch a tent, though, a cloud, a deep fog, sets in and the scene shifts from sight to sound. A voice from above declares, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

The three disciples, who earlier felt privileged to be the only ones among the twelve to go with Jesus into Jairus’s house and are the only three invited up the mountain, now feel terrified. There is something about the voice of God throughout Scripture that brings people to their knees.

And if not strange enough already, what happens next strikes perhaps the oddest note in the entire story. The whiter-than-white-face-shining-like-an-angel-fully-transcendent-no-one-like-we have-ever-known Jesus reaches down to this terrified trio, touches them, and tells them to: “Get up and do not be afraid.”  

Neither Mark nor Luke say a word about Jesus touching anyone on the mountain; for them, Jesus is transfigured, transcendent, untouchable. For Matthew, though, whether standing transfigured on this mountain with Peter, James, and John or later risen from the tomb and standing on the mountain with all his disciples, Jesus never stops being “Emmanuel,” God with us, a God who is never too distant to enter our fear or too aloof to soothe our worried brows.    

 I said earlier that Lent arrives on the heels of this story. Actually, for most people today, Lent does not arrive at all. Unlike Christmas – a key economic engine of the American economy – Lent has little commercial value.  We can quite easily ignore this season and most people do. Even in the church, many skip Lent and avoid all the tough texts ahead, ones that speak of Jesus coming down the mountain and walking right into the heart of darkness in Gethsemane and finally in Golgotha.   

I would suggest that this is not a good year for anyone to skip Lent. There is way too much fear in the air. It is tangible and it is devastating and it is everywhere you turn. For our first several months at Cove, Jennell and I lived atop Afton mountain where fog is a regular guest. We would often wake to find ourselves surrounded by a vast, natural, cotton ball of fog. If someone were to ask us, “Just where is the fog exactly?” my response would be: “It is everywhere you turn.” That is the way it is with fear today – it is everywhere we turn.

Some fear an assault from radical Islamist terrorists. Some fear a federal assault on the earth and air and water. Some fear a press that is out of control. Some fear an administration that is out of control. Some fear that the chemo will not work. Some fear that sobriety is about to end. Some fear that the sands of time are slipping through the glass too quickly. Some fear that they will never be old enough to be taken seriously. Some fear that we are approaching a nuclear winter. Some fear that they will never be forgiven. Some fear that they will never be able to forgive. Fear is everywhere we turn.

Fear shuts us off and shuts us down. It isolates us and insulates us from others who may be in pain. Fear gives us permission to be ugly and to shout obscenities and to send eviscerating emails. Fear is a malignant tumor that eventually will kill you, kill the church, kill the nation.

It is no accident that the two most popular words in Scripture are “fear not.” These two words are not spoken by enlightened humans who have assessed the situation and then decided, with FDR, that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” These are words spoken by God, again and again in Scripture, and precisely in those times when there is every reason to be afraid. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus not only speaks these two words of comfort, he puts his arms around his friends; he touches them in their time of overwhelming fear.

 In just three days, on Ash Wednesday, we will gather here again at noon to worship God and to be marked with ashes. We will come into this sanctuary, fears and all. We will once again be reminded that “from dust we come and from dust we shall return.” A big black ashy smudge on our foreheads will be a telling sign to the world that death is not optional. As we feel the ashes touch our foreheads, we will also be reminded of the God who brings life out of death, even death on the cross.

For the past couple of years, two of my young colleagues at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta and I would put on our pulpit robes, get our ashes ready, and head to the nearby campus of Georgia State University and to the nearby MARTA station. We were an odd sight by our robes alone, but even more so by the sign we carried that read:  “Get Your Ashes Here.”

Some people would pass us by much like I often pass by a homeless person who is holding a sign on the street corner. Some would engage our eyes, smile, and walk right by us. A surprisingly number of students and even some busy transit riders would stop and ask for ashes. Many would preface it by saying, “Now, I’m not religious, but this couldn’t hurt.”  

When we walked back to the church, we were met by a large crowd of men lining up to get into the Central Night Shelter. They were ready for us. I nearly ran out of ashes, with Shelter guest after Shelter guest asking if they could be marked with the cross. They not only asked for ashes, but they asked us to pray for them and more than a few tears fell along weathered cheeks. A few of the guests told me that this was the first time someone had touched them in months. Then I joined them in the weeping. God was present in this holy touch in a way that I cannot begin to explain.

Maybe that is the invitation of the strange Transfiguration story, to come down off the mountain, to come out of our safe sanctuaries, and to go where people are cowering in fear and to touch them with a holy touch. Not to shout them down. Not to shut them up. Not to pass them by, but to listen to them, to embrace them, and by our presence to assure them that they need not live in fear.  

Ready or not, Lent is almost here with all its stories of betrayal and entrapment, denial and death. But on Wednesday, whenever you splash water on your face to wash away the ashy smudge that was imposed on your forehead, remember that there is no cleansing agent strong enough to wash away the transfiguring touch of the One who loves us and who leads us out of the dark shadow of fear by word and by touch.    

May God grant you and yours a holy Lent!

                                        AMEN