Sermon on Transfiguration Sunday

Sermon

This week, a familiar and unwelcomed feeling crept back into my heart: the feeling of powerlessness. When the pandemic started, and we suddenly shut down and stocked up on flour and feared what could happen, I felt so powerless to do anything to prevent this terrible virus from spreading, apart from staying home and wearing a mask and washing my hands.

This week that feeling came back. Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops. Texas Governor Greg Abbot declared certain gender-affirming treatments for transgender children — including gender reassignment surgery— “can legally constitute child abuse.” Here in Portland, 60-year-old June Knightly, who was providing traffic control for a legal protest, was shot and killed by a man who hurled misogynist slurs at her and her companions and claimed he was defending his home, a nearby apartment.

I feel utterly helpless to confront these abuses of power, these displays of violence, the very hatred that seems to underlie all of these situations.

So on Thursday, when I realized I needed to throw out the sermon I had and try again, I started thinking about this story of the Transfiguration of Jesus and if it has anything to do with the feelings of powerlessness that I, and maybe many of you, are feeling.

One way to look at this story is to consider it a story of power, manifested in this glory that surrounds a glowing Jesus as he talks with Moses and Elijah, men who displayed God’s power in their own lifetimes. It’s the story of Jesus’ power to heal a young boy.

But this is also a story of the powerlessness of the disciples.

Peter, James, and John follow Jesus up the mountain and there experience something they cannot explain. When Jesus is revealed in all his glory, they don’t know what to do. So Peter, wanting to do something, for heaven’s sake, blurts out that each of them (Jesus, Elijah, and Moses) needs a booth. As if that weren’t enough, a cloud engulfs them and a voice proclaims that Jesus is God’s beloved son, and they should listen to him. Then they all come down the mountain. The next day, an anxious and powerless father asks the disciples to heal his sick son, and they cannot. They come face to face with their powerless again.

Do you know that feeling, when things beyond our control confront us and we must admit that despite all our knowledge, despite all our technology, despite all our tools and wits and connections, we cannot do a danged thing?

It feels as though we cannot do a danged thing about war in Ukraine, or injustice in Texas, or violence in Portland. It almost makes me wish for the early days of the pandemic when the best thing we could do was stay locked up at home, seeing no one.

Is there anything we can do to prevent powerlessness and hopelessness from joining forces?

Our first instinct might lead us to some Peter-like response, to jump to doing something that really isn’t going to help at all. It’s like sending old T-shirts to people whose homes have been wiped out by a tornado – sure, we clean out our dressers, but people who’ve lost their homes have nowhere to put any clothes, and maybe they would prefer to receive something new.

Still, people are trying. NPR reporter Frank Langfitt posted a photo on Instagram Friday morning of a small auditorium with a few dozen people in it, with a caption that read, “Organizing villagers to head to front lines to fight Russian army.” That breaks my heart. One day you’re living your life in your village, and the next day you’re receiving basic training to go fight a professional army. But they are doing something.

A friend of mine asked pastors in Texas what we could do about the governor’s recent decision. One person suggested writing Gov. Abbott and showing your support for the trans community, or giving money to the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or offering hands-on support for families looking to relocate.

But really – is the governor going to read our letters? Or will some aide toss them in the circular file? And those villagers going to the front lines – it feels like an ant meeting an elephant. We are powerless.

Then again, how much power have we ever had? Certainly humanity has always had the power to destroy, to fly airplanes into skyscrapers, to bomb children, to poison drinking water. We’ve had the power of death. And yes, we’ve had the power to create vaccines, to go to the moon, to invent a microchip that has changed the world. But do we have the power to create life where there is death?

That ability has not been given to us; it is God’s alone. The disciples witness this extraordinary transfiguration of Jesus and yet when they come down the mountain and return to their daily lives, they cannot even help a sick child. But God can. And God in Jesus does.

That’s where our hope lies – that God does what we cannot do. That God heals. That God brings life. That God wages peace that is mightier than war.

Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote something helpful about all of this, this week. “So, here’s the thing: I have a goal. You know how you’ll be in a personal storm…money problems or a relationship crisis, and you think ‘I’m perishing here, God.’ I mean you’re sure you are perishing…but when you look back on it 6 months or a year later, after everything worked out or didn’t but you are still alive, and the world didn’t end, and you think, ‘I don’t know why I was so freaked out…’ well, I want some day to get to the point where I can trust God in the moment and not just in retrospect. Maybe things will work out, maybe they won’t—but I can either have a sense of God’s love during the whole thing, or I can be so freaked out I forget it’s there.” https://thecorners.substack.com/p/freaking-the-hell-out?utm_source=url

She continues, “Because here’s what I believe: the Triune God, whose love is powerful enough to raise Christ from the dead, simply will not be separated from me or from you. Not by a storm, not by a crisis, not by a pandemic, not by a war and not even by death.”

And that is where true, eternal, unconditional, hope-filled power is found: in the love of God. It’s the love we saw in Jesus when he healed that sick boy, and the blind person, and the lame person, and the person with leprosy. It’s the love we saw in Jesus when he had compassion on a hungry crowd and made sure that everyone ate their fill of bread and fish. It’s the love we saw in Jesus when he laid down his life for his friends.

And we see microcosms of that love in people. In the people who wrote eulogies for June Knightly, better known as T-Rex, and brought flowers and candles to Normandale Park, where she died. We see that in people who love their black and brown neighbors enough to protest that they receive justice.

We see that love in the people of Russia who are protesting this war that Putin has begun, thousands who have marched and signed petitions and decried this action. We see that love in Ukranians helping their fellow citizens to find food and shelter as they flee their homes.

We see that love in schools that write policies that affirm that nonbinary students have a home there. We see that love in churches that welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people with open arms. We see that love in the prayers that have gone up this week, and the weeks and months and years behind us – prayers on Sunday mornings, prayers at noon, prayers at bedtime, prayers in foxholes and cathedrals, prayers that we cannot even utter but offer from the heart.

I think if we were to come into direct contact with the love of God, we would be blinded, the way we could become blind by staring at the sun. So we get that love refracted a little in this Jesus guy – the love is all there, but it is adapted for us so that we don’t go blind but so that we see a little better with his light.

And that light is refracted a little more as it leaves Jesus and comes to us, and maybe we’re not as bright and shiny. Maybe we don’t have the power to raise the dead or even to heal a sick child. Maybe we cannot stop this war, or stop the violence, or stop inane leaders.

But we do have the power to love, to bear light in the dim places, to bring warmth in the cold, hopeless places, to say, “All we can offer is love, and God willing, that will be enough.”

Please pray with me.

God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.
(adapted from a prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr)