Last Sunday after the Epiphany
The Transfiguration of our Lord
Exodus 24:12-18
Psalm 99
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9
They say one picture is worth a thousand words. In this part of the Gospel we know as the Transfiguration of our Lord, Matthew has given us a picture of Jesus being revealed a second time as God’s beloved Son. The first was at his baptism. Matthew doesn’t tell us that anyone besides Jesus heard the voice from heaven that claimed him as God’s beloved son. No doubt that was a necessary self-revelation for Jesus. There’s nothing more life-giving than to learn who you are at your core and nothing more affirming than to know you are loved by the giver of all life for no other reason than who you are.
The second picture took place on the mountain. Jesus was transfigured, that is, his appearance changed in the presence of three witnesses, Peter, James and John. Jesus was revealed to them as the Son of God in a way that transcended words, the way only a picture, a vision could deliver. Jesus knew who he was in relation to God and who he was in relation to his friends. He asked them point blank who they thought he was six days before he took them up the mountain with him. Peter told Jesus he knew he was the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
It’s one thing to know something is true, to be completely convinced of the truth of it. It’s another thing to witness that truth, to have some sensory affirmation of it, the way Peter, James and John did. It was one thing to believe the man, Jesus, born of Mary in
During my chaplain residency at UAMS, our supervisor thought we chaplains needed to witness a surgery. He said in order to be pastors to people having surgery, we needed to experience what they went through. He said it would help us to pray for God’s presence during surgery if we actually stood in the O.R. and said our prayers while we watched the doctors and nurses do their work on a human in the most vulnerable state a human can be, and that it would help us get in touch with our own vulnerability as humans. I didn’t like the idea from the beginning. I have grown up with doctor shows on TV and I always covered my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see surgical procedures. But I cooperated anyway.
We all scrubbed our hands and forearms like we were told. We put on gloves, covered ourselves from head to toe and went to our places in the O.R. outside the sterile field on some risers. (It was a teaching hospital so the O.R. was always equipped for visitors). The surgical team had been working for about thirty minutes when we got there. The surgery was the removal of a donor kidney that would then be transplanted in her brother. Now I believed, absolutely, completely, one hundred percent that humans have kidneys. I saw a picture of them in a science book in elementary school. I learned what they do for our bodies. There hadn’t been any reason to call that truth into question between the time I first believed it and when I took my place on those risers. But the truth that humans have at least one kidney was affirmed before my eyes when I saw one taken out of a woman’s body.
One of the things that made my experience as a witness to that surgery different from the experience of the other chaplains was that the nephrology unit was my clinical assignment. I knew that young woman and her brother. I knew their names, I knew their story, I knew they loved each other, I knew how much they both hoped, how much their whole family hoped the transplant would be successful. My supervisor was right and for all the reasons he suggested. Witnessing that surgery had a profound effect on me. I might have known that it would on some level. That’s probably why I was so resistant to doing it in the first place.
When I pray for you all during your surgeries, I have a picture of what is happening to you and around you and that makes me more present to you at that moment, and to God through prayer. But that wasn’t the only reason to witness a surgery, particularly that one.
Maybe you saw in the news last week in India, two healthy, vibrant, young men were cajoled into thinking they were getting a new job. A high paying job that would help them provide better for their families. Instead they were taken to a house, strapped to a gurney by an armed guard, put to sleep by an injection, then a surgeon cut into the sides of their bodies and removed a kidney from each of them. A kidney that would then be sold to someone who needed it and was willing to pay a hefty price for it.
As I watched the video of that story on my computer, I remembered that surgery in the O.R. fourteen years ago as if it was happening before my eyes just then and I felt sick to my stomach. The same sick I felt back then. But it wasn’t just the squeamish sickness I always get at the sight of blood. It was a brand new sight of a human body deserving of reverence.
You see, the other truth that was affirmed to me fourteen years ago was that was God’s beloved on that table. The image of our Creator lying there in flesh and blood. And she was doing a godly thing in giving one of her kidneys to her big brother so he could have a chance for a better quality of life. Holding that picture alongside the one of the men, lying in primitive hospital beds in India with a bandage along the sides of their bodies that in my memory matched the surgical opening I witnessed in the O.R., I was aware that those men are God’s beloved too. By whatever name or path they have to know God, they are our Creator’s imagination in flesh and blood and their bodies were violated.
If I had not witnessed the surgical removal of a kidney I’m not sure the news of the violence done to those two men would have effected me the same way. Bad news is bad news. But seeing anyone as God’s beloved, as the embodiment of God’s imagination, makes it possible to see everyone as God’s beloved.
The revelation of Jesus as the Son of God on the mountain with God’s affirmation that he was God's own Son, that God loved him, and that Peter, James and John should listen to him was to make witnesses of those three men. Witnesses to the presence of God in the body of the man named Jesus so that later on when they see his body beaten and nailed to the cross, they will remember what they witnessed and they will know that violence was done to God’s beloved and God suffered for it. God’s purpose for the witnesses was to testify to the truth of what they saw, which they have done from then until now.
The Church doesn’t need a step by step plan how to be the church in the world, how to carry out our mission and ministry effectively. What we need are witnesses. People who have seen the presence of Christ in human lives of all sorts, including their own. People who see their own belovedness and aren’t afraid to testify to the truth of it. We need our vision transformed. We can’t be effective stewards of the Gospel or of creation or of anything else until we see humanity as God’s imagination in flesh and blood on the earth. We are all God’s beloved. As the Church we need to witness that in somebody to make it possible for us to see it in everybody.
