If I took a poll right now, going around this room, about what’s up in everyone’s life – which obviously would be completely inappropriate, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I do it – we’d hear a lot of things. We’d hear about some joys – maybe some exciting things, maybe some everyday things. We’d also hear fear or anger or annoyance. .
But if my own work pastoring people is any indication, there ‘s going to be one underlying phenomenon that would be much more common, much more shared, than any of us would wish. If we tease things open and really go to their root causes, this one thing would probably be present in all shapes and sizes around the whole room. It might be motivating or even driving a lot of us. And that one, very human, and very difficult, thing is: loss. Letting go of something that is known and that is part of us.
Letting go is a core experience in both the Old Testament and the New Testament readings today. In the book of Kings, we hear about the great prophet Elijah – one of the biggees, right up there with Moses. But whereas Moses, after a track record of pretty extraordinary feats, experienced a very human death and burial, Elijah gets to go to out in style – he ascends, he is taken up. Which is great, it’s just that his disciple, the next in line, Elisha, isn’t really impressed with all this glory; he doesn’t want Elijah to go. Elisha wants to hold on to his mentor and friend. He says to Elijah three times, “I will not leave you,” just in case Elijah didn’t get it. But Elijah does what he must – and when the horses of fire and the whirlwind come along, he climbs on for the ride.
And whatever happens for Elijah in the several centuries following that, wherever he’s hanging out, he gets to make one more biblical appearance, in the story of the Transfiguration that we heard today, this one from the Gospel of Mark – Jesus on the mountain with Elijah and Moses, glowing and transfigured. As in the book of Kings, the clothing is regal, and the natural setting becomes unnatural and surreal to the point of being intoxicating and delirious. It’s this crazy moment when, into the regular difficult day-to-day life of the disciples comes what can only be called deluge of grace, a flood of visible grace. You want to know what grace actually looks like? – watch a transfiguration. And as in Kings, the main disciple – in this case, Peter, the one who had confessed Jesus as Messiah just a few lines before this passage, inspiring the nutty human misconception that somehow Peter is the basis of the church – this beacon of faith makes a blunder.
When confronted with his Master suddenly transfigured, Peter’s first panicked instinct is to say: “Rabbi” – not Messiah, like a few passages before, so he’s fallen back into a comfort zone – “it’s a good thing that we, your busy bees, are here to take care of things – we’ll make three tents, one for you, one for each of your prophet buddies. Now there’s a plan!”
Now, as ridiculous as that might sound, Mark tells that we are to see it sympathetically: the next phrase is “Peter did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” He wasn’t seeing this transfiguration as grace, he was plain scared. And when we’re that scared, we grab the most familiar solution that comes easily to mind. And in this regard, Peter’s reaction makes sense. He’s essentially processing the whole thing and trying to put it into some known place in his head.
First, he reverts back to “rabbi” – a little easier to get his teeth around than “Messiah.” Then in his mind he goes to the Jewish Festival of the Tabernacles, described in Leviticus but it’s something all good Jewish people would have known well, a holy day where little booths made of interwoven branches are dwelling places for the holy.
In his anxiety, Peter tries to equate the present with the past to keep it all tied together. Understandably, he’s trying to use the past to control the present. Equally understandably, it’s not going to work.
And that’s one of the themes that unites these two passages from Kings and Mark, quieter than the garments and splendor, but still there. That the journey of relationship with God involves the loss of things we simply cannot hold onto. And that loss can mean a shift in our own identities.
In fact, that shift in identity was probably one of the main things that Elisha and Peter were really reacting to, underneath it all. In both cases, they were right at a juncture between their old identities, and new ones. For Elisha, it was having to go forward alone as a powerful prophet in his own right. For the disciples, it was the first time they’d seen Jesus a little more in heaven than on earth, in this intoxicating glimpse of what the “glory of God in the face of Jesus” was really like. What was it gonna mean for them not to have Jesus working beside them and looking, for all the world, just like any other human? Little did they know they were glimpsing the future church.
In both cases, Elisha and the disciples were having a plain-old, gut-fear reaction to the idea that something important was leaving them, and with it, their identities were going to change. Their human identities – things about the journey ahead. But maybe even scarier was that it involved their godly identities, and changes there. The power of their relationship with God, and what that would look like in the world. And in both stories, it meant awareness that they would have to grow into greater authority in their vocations, an authority they had yet to fully comprehend.
All they know is that the ground is moving under their feet. The old familiarity, the old ways of seeing relationships, is jeopardized. Something new is going on – and maybe what’s most frightening is that they realize that that new thing has probably been going on for awhile, just not as visibly as whirlwinds and white robes. I think most of us know that a new identity doesn’t just hatch overnight.
And all this fear stuff makes sense to me. After all, what’s it like for us, when we’re on that threshold between old and new identities, that liminal space? What’s it like, when we totter back and forth between familiarity and old patterns, on one hand, patterns that we may know are destructive for us – and, on the other, God’s voice saying, “Hey, don’t look at the old stuff. I’m making something new over here, and it’s really neat! Come see!”
The problems is that it doesn’t usually feel very ‘neat.’ Let’s face it – loss is usually everything it’s cracked up to be, everything lousy bit of it. First of all, it’s not always clear what we’re supposed to lose. Not everything has to be let go of, even if some things do need to change. Then there’s figuring out the difference between the old and the new. When you see horses of fire, there’s a clear sign something new is happening. And sometimes it’s like that in our lives. But more often, the old and the new phase in and out.
And then there’s the experience of loss itself, which in human terms usually involves sadness, fear, grief, or anger – our most favorite emotions. It means feeling out of control, or seeing we never had the control we thought we did. We are less able to define the future; it might feel like it just happens to us. Like Peter, though we might try to use the past to control the situation, it may not end up being very effective anymore.
That’s the downside of that space between the old and the new. But you know what? – there’s an upside, too. I’m not so sure of my own ability to transfigure my own life anyway. If it were in my hands, I’d probably never make it out of first gear – or, to be truthful, reverse. And in a liminality, in an in-between space, all our pieces are up in the air for a moment, and they haven’t come down yet. And for a moment, we, too, are suspended. Our identities are fluid – which is scary but it’s good, too. We are becoming something new. No matter how old or young we may feel, we’re becoming something new. And that’s the moment when God the Creator is happy as a pig in mud.
Because God just can’t keep the divine fingers out of the clay. As soon as we think we’ve got this Christian thing nailed down – what tasks we have, what roles we have, what worship looks like, what God looks like – as soon as we think we’ve got our heads wrapped around it, dang if God doesn’t up and change the game.
But unlike how I’ve just described it – as if God is just a really good chess player – what we have to remember, especially at the moments when we’re on a threshold between the old and the new, is that God does not do things just to dupe us or to play with our heads. That’s not in God’s nature. God is transforming – transfiguring – us. Turning us from glory into glory.
If we bring that nice churchy idea back around to our own lives, then that puts these threshold moments into an entirely new light. And only you know how that looks like in your own life, but the best place to see this altogether in community – the best liminal threshold I know, and we get to see it Sunday after Sunday – it’s the moment when we stand with our toes on this line and take bread and wine into our bodies or receive the blessing of its presence. In that moment, we are suspended between the old and the new. We are in freefall. Which means we are free.
Because we’re not the same each week when we come here, like a piece of wood that simply gets a new coat of paint. We are different on the inside – time has passed since last Sunday, things have happened, all the stuff we would have found out about if we’d taken that poll around the room. And though we might walk up here feeling like we’re just carrying the baggage of the week, the Eucharist does something with that baggage. Whatever you believe about what happens with the bread and wine, how it becomes the body and blood of Christ – a debate as old as the church is, and if there were any clear answer, believe me, we would have found it by now – the point everyone seems to agree on is that what happens is renewal.
It’s this experience somehow giving us new life. Not just shifting around the baggage or moving around the chess pieces. But creating some kind of new energy flowing up somewhere in your life. Maybe someplace unexpected, maybe someplace subtle. But somewhere, it’s going on.
And like Peter, we may want to use the past to contain it. But like Peter, we won’t get very far with that. Because we can’t define what new shape the new pieces are gonna fall into. And we may end up finding ourselves with new responsibilities and new powers to fulfill those responsibilities. And in the process, we may up feeling God’s absence, seeing our idea of God evaporate up into the clouds. But then I bet we’ll find that stretches our experience of God, and God’s mercy and glory, way beyond how we’d been seeing it.
But think about that whole cycle again for a second: losing the old, maybe feeling God’s absence, then seeing who we are in a new way, and God’s love and mercy in new ways.
As we stand today on the threshold, the liminal space of Ash Wednesday, that’s all just to say, Welcome to Lent, Welcome to the cross.
Jesus probably didn’t know exactly what lay on that journey, and neither can we. So what’s going on in your life? – the stuff you’d tell me if I did take a poll. See what Lent is going to hold for you; listen to the wind, see where the new shoots are sprouting up, feel what beckons to you. Listen for the new thing that life is asking you to do and to be.
It probably will involve some kind of letting go, including what will almost surely feel like letting go of God at times. But things won’t stay that way, I promise you. Christianity is not fatalistic. Think ahead from this Sunday, through the journey of Lent, when we tuck away our Alleluia’s, to Easter, when we unfurl them again.
After confession and cross comes glory, and I swear that’s a pattern that you will not see only once in your life. Look for it, again and again. And again and again, you will find it.
As we prayed in the opening collect this morning, we will “be changed into Jesus’ likeness – from glory to glory.”