Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 3, 2008
Transfiguration Sunday

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We’ve all heard it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” It’s a quote of Acts 16:31, and for some reason it’s usually recited in that archaic, King James language. Christianity’s most common message throughout most of its history has been: Believe on (or in) Jesus. That’s what’s required for salvation. That’s what God wants from us. Christians have proclaimed this message so loudly for so long that it has virtually drowned out any other message the faith might have, but here’s one really important thing about that message. It says that what is important is our relationship to who Jesus was, and is. It says nothing about what Jesus had to say. If believing in Jesus is what the faith is all about, then what he had to say really doesn’t matter. “Believe in him” here usually means believe that he is who the faith has always said he is, believe the right things about his identity. Believe that he is your personal Lord and Savior. And that’s about all. It really has nothing to do with anything he might have had to say.

Which, for me at least, makes the story of the Transfiguration, which appears in all three Synoptic Gospels, particularly striking. In that story, as Jesus is transfigured and talks with Moses and Elijah, a voice comes out of a cloud. Pretty clearly we are to understand that it is the voice of God. It says: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased….” Matthew 17:5 NRSV And then it says one more thing. The voice issues a directive to Jesus disciples, represented by the three who went up the mountain with him in the story, and through them to us. What does it say? Does it say “believe in him”? No. To what I imagine must be the chagrin of a great many evangelical Christians is doesn’t say “believe in him.” It says: “Listen to him.” Listen to him. In this story, and I believe in truth, what God wants from us is much less that we believe in Jesus as that we listen to him.

And here’s the problem: Believing in him is so much easier than listening to him, at least if we mean by “listen” not merely hear but heed, which I am sure is what the voice in the story means. Believing in him is something that we can do just with our minds. Believing as it is usually used here means merely giving intellectual assent to what the Christian religion says about him. That’s easy, once you make the decision to do it. You say: OK. I agree. I believe in him. And you’re done. You’re saved. No problem. Listening to him, hearing and heeding him, is another matter altogether. It’s another matter altogether because what he says is really radical. It’s really difficult. Here’s mostly what he said, as the great scholar and popularizer John Dominic Crossan told a large crowd that included five of us from this church at University Congregational Church on Friday evening. God is a God of what Crossan called “distributive justice.” That means that God wants every person to have the necessities of life, not just a privileged few. And God is a God of radical nonviolence.

On Friday Crossan cited several texts from the Hebrew prophets to support the idea that God is a God of distributive justice, and he said that this kind of justice is what the Eucharist, which we’re about to celebrate is all about. And he cites a text for the proposition that God is about nonviolence that I’d never heard cited for that proposition before. We all know Jesus’ line from John: “My kingdom is not of this world.” John 18:36 KJV Crossan pointed out that the next line, which most of us don’t know, tells us what that line means. Jesus goes on: “If my kingdom were of this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over….” John 18:36 NRSV But, he repeats, my kingdom is not of this world, which is why, we are to understand his followers are not fighting to free him. Crossan interprets this passage as saying that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world precisely because it is non-violent. Jesus’ followers were not fighting to prevent his arrest and execution. In another part of the Passion story that appears in all four Gospels, Jesus actually stops one of his followers from fighting to prevent his arrest and execution. See, for example Matthew 26:51-51. That’s how you know his kingdom is not of this world. That’s what it means for it not to be of this world. The world is violent. God is nonviolent, and Jesus calls us to participate in God’s way of nonviolence. That’s what he did. He lived nonviolence. It got him killed, of course. It’s gotten lots of people killed. It might well get us killed if we truly followed it, but that doesn’t matter. It is God’s way.

And the world hates it. The world hates nonviolence because it shows up the sinfulness of the world’s ways. It shows up how the world fails to follow the way and will of God. It shows up how the world refuses to listen to God, to listen to the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Yet there simply is no denying that if we truly listen to Jesus, as the voice of God in the Transfiguration story tells us to do, then we know ourselves to be called to the radical way of nonviolence in the cause of justice, distributive justice, the justice of equality and the equitable sharing of resources with all people everywhere.

And that’s really hard. We’ve all been conditioned by the world’s messages that contradict the messages of God. We’ve all been conditioned to think that nonviolence doesn’t work and that violence solves problems. That’s not true, but we’ve all been conditioned to believe it. We’ve all been conditioned to think that our primary job is to look out only for ourselves and our families and that doing that requires a whole lot more of the world’s resources than it really does. That’s not true either, but we’ve all been conditioned to believe it, myself included. That’s why listening to Jesus is so difficult. Listening to Jesus is not a passive activity, as believing in him can be. Listening to Jesus is transformational listening. It is listening that calls us to transform those worldly ways in which we’ve been conditioned to think, in which we’ve been conditioned to live. In our story this morning Jesus was “transfigured.” Transfigured means basically the same thing as transformed. Jesus was transformed on that mountaintop, and the voice of God from the cloud that says “listen to him” is calling us to be transformed as well It is calling us to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus, to have what Crossan on Friday evening called a “character transplant.” The Christian call to transformation is a call to replace our worldly characters with Jesus’ character and to live the ways of God in the world as he did, the ways of justice and of nonviolence. That’s really hard. It can be really dangerous. Never mind. It is God’s way. It is the way Christ showed us and the way to which God calls us, and with the power of the Holy Spirit, we can do it. Amen.