Transfiguration Sunday
Luke 9:28–36
It’s time that I confessed something. My name is David and I’m a huge Star Trek fan. I have been for a long time. I own all the movies, I’ve seen all the series, even the new ones For a while, I even co-hosted with my friend Colby an Annual Star Trek Marathon, in which, every Christmas Break, we would basically lock ourselves in a room, cover the windows, set up the biggest screen we could find and hook up a huge sound system and watch all of the Star Trek movies back-to back, stopping only briefly between films to use the restroom and order more pizza. When we started it, there were 6 movies. The last time we did it there were 10.
The reason I’m telling you this is that Star Trek can teach us something about our passage from Luke today. Specifically, these experiences sound a lot like a Star Trek concept: it’s a tear in the fabric of space-time, a rift in the space-time continuum. And these sorts of anomalies can be both very impressive and very dangerous.
But first, what am I talking about? What is a rift in the space-time continuum? Basically, it means that the universe that we experience in four dimensions, the 3 dimensional spatial world plus one dimension of time, ceases to function properly. The normal boundaries that separate different places from each other and different times from each other are broken down, and different times and places start to coexist with one another.
That’s what happens at the Transfiguration, a breach in the normal pattern of space-time. Jesus takes Peter and John and James up on a mountain, and he starts to pray. And suddenly, the walls that separate the earthly realm from the heavenly realm are broken down, and heaven and earth start to coexist. The normal boundaries that separate the present from the future and the past begin to dissolve. Suddenly, past, present, future, heaven, and earth are all intermingled in one place and moment.
It had just been Jesus and his three disciples up on the top of some anonymous mountain. But when the veil is torn away, we see Jesus as he will be after the resurrection, clothed in glory as at the end of the world. We hear the voice that we heard just after he was baptized and was praying, “This is my Son.” We see into the future at Gethsemane when Jesus will be praying, and his disciples will be weighed down with sleep. We look back and we see Moses on Mount Sinai, when he received the tablets of the Law, and his face was so dazzlingly bright that he had to wear a veil around his fellow Israelites. We see Elijah and his time on Mount Horeb when he saw God, not in the whirlwind, not in the fire, but in the still, small voice. And suddenly this anonymous mountain where Jesus was praying becomes Mount Sinai, becomes Mount Horeb. And we hear Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus about his coming departure, literally his exodus, and we remember how Moses led the people on an exodus out of Egypt, passing through the waters of the Red Sea. And we remember how Elijah made an exodus from this earth in a whirlwind, on a fiery chariot, after he had parted the waters of the Jordan and walked on dry ground. And suddenly they all become one—the Exodus from Egypt, the fiery chariot, and the crucifixion—all one in the story of God’s salvation. And in the same moment, all of those holy mountains become one—Sinai, Horeb, Zion, Olivet—all are one in the story of God’s salvation. Time is meaningless. Space and distance are meaningless. And we see as God sees, all of everything in one.
Peter doesn’t understand what’s happening. How could he, with all of salvation history laid out before him in such a garbled mess? And although he and his companions are terrified by what they see, Peter does know enough to say, “It is good for us to be here.”
The idea of that moment that breaks through the barriers of time and space got me thinking about other kinds of barriers, the barriers and borders that keep people apart. We are separated from other people by governments and borders: by rules, regulations, and bureaucracies. We are separated by cultures: by music, traditions, languages, foods, and customs. We are separated from people by religion: by theologies, dogmas, deities, and denominations. We are separated from people by economics: by classes, castes, and even worlds. We are separated from people by politics: by parties, platforms, and pundits. We are separated from people by time: by years, generations, ages, and aeons. And yet, somehow, for God we are all one.
Demographers estimate that in the entire course of human history there have been about 117 billion people. And about 8 billion of those people are actually alive right now across the world. That means that 7% of all humans who have lived are alive today. So, I was wondering, out of all of those people, how many am I likely to meet personally. According to one calculation, if we live the average of 76 years, we remember the people we meet after age 5, and we interact with an average of 3 new people every day, over a lifetime we would meet nearly 80,000. That’s only 0.001% of the people living today and 0.00007% of all of the people who have ever lived.
That is such a tiny segment of our world. And besides that, most of us rarely come in contact with people who are not a lot like us. We interact most with people who live in the same country and the same region that we do, people who speak the same language, people who have a similar skin tone, who worship in like ways, people who are in the same economic class, who have the same interests, who are about the same age as we are.
But in God’s eyes we are all one. And imagine if the veil were pulled away, and we were no longer separated by political borders. If we all knew each other’s languages. If class and station and nationality and ethnicity and religion and culture and distance and even time and history ceased to be barriers and we were all one. Because God is working to accomplish that, and in time, God will succeed in making us all one. The Transfiguration is just a foretaste of that coming reality.
I have a feeling that we might react a lot like Peter, John, and James, that is, with tremendous fear. Those barriers and walls that keep other people away make us feel safe, and if they were broken down, we would be defenseless, unable to shield ourselves from the differences that divide us. When we are around the people we know well, those with whom we share a lot in common, we feel comfortable. We feel like we won’t be challenged too much. But when we spend time around people who are different than us, especially people who are very different from us, we feel exposed, just like those three disciples on the top of mountain, in the presence of clouds and lights bright like lightning. It can be scary.
And yet, we need difference. It’s our differences that help us to learn and grow. If we are only around people who are like us, we never encounter anything new. We never get the chance to test our beliefs and ideas. We never get the opportunity to encounter something that might be complimentary, or even better, than what we know. God has made us all—each and every one—and God makes us different for a reason. It’s the same reason that God works to bring us together across our differences, that God works to transcend the barriers that divide us.
As we gather around the table this morning, we enact the unity that God desires. We unite ourselves with God in Jesus Christ. We unite ourselves with each other. We unite ourselves with Christians around the world, many of whom are very different from us. We unite ourselves Christians past, present, and even future. In Christ’s sacrifice of himself, through his brokenness, through our brokenness, we are made one. It is truly good for us to be here.