Transfiguration and Gospel Music Sunday
Psalm 27 and Matthew 17:1-9
February 26, 2017
Rev. Amy P. McCullough
While this morning is Gospel Music Sunday and we gather our strength around such Spirit-filled music as “We’ve come this far by faith,” this evening many of us will gather around our televisions to watch the 89th annual Academy Awards. Who will win the Oscar for Best Picture? Will it be the front-runner, La La Land, with its dazzling music, dance steps and story of young love? Or will the brooding themes of loss and failure – as well as the enduring ties of family - found in Manchester by the Sea make a surprise win? If I were a voting member of the Academy, I would cast my vote for Berry Jenkins’ film Moonlight. That conclusion surprised me because Moonlight is a tough film to watch. It is beautifully shot but achingly painful. One reviewer wrote, “to describe Moonlight as a movie about growing up poor, black and gay would be accurate enough. It is also a movie about mass incarceration, drug abuse and school violence. But truer to the Spirit of the film is to say that it is about teaching a child to swim, about cooking a meal for an old friend, about the feeling of sand on skin and the sound of waves on a darkened beach.”[1]
Each of the three films tackles an element of being human. La La Land evokes the longings inside of us to do what we were put on the earth to do. Manchester confronts us with the tragedies of our own makings, the horrible fact that one mistake can change our lives forever. Moonlight reminds us that every heart needs love. To be a creature in God’s world is to fall in love with it, even its chaotic, broken pain and to seek that love in yourself and another. It is to discover, as another reviewer stated, freedom and pain can exist in the same frame. [2]
The psalmist knows something about freedom and pain existing in the same moment. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” As the psalm unfolds it becomes apparent he or she has much of which to be afraid. There are evildoers who assail me, cries the writer; a whole army is encamped against me. Back and forth the psalmist goes. There are false witnesses are breathing out violence, yet I will be confident. Though enemies are all around me, I will make a melody to the Lord.
What sustains the psalmist’s faith? The psalmist tells us directly. Each day, O God, I will seek your face. I will find shelter in your tent. I will go to the temple to ask about your presence. Here is a relentless pursuit of God and a confidence that the search will find its proper ending. I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. The courage to seek God changes the moment. What stays in the sightline is not the adversaries but the One whose love does not leave; not the foes but God who says beloved, find refuge here with me.
If you haven’t watched Moonlight, I suspect you’ve seen an image from the movie titled “the swimming lesson.” Chiron is a young boy – neglected, bullied and quiet. Juan, an adult with his own complicated connections to Chiron’s world, befriends him, unexpectedly. One day Juan teaches Chiron to swim. The lesson happens not in a small body of water but in the Atlantic Ocean, giving Chiron a taste of the world. You remember learning to swim or teaching someone else: the disorientation of the waves, learning the unique motions that work in water, and the letting go in trust required of floating. In one dimension Juan simply is giving a young boy a swimming lesson. On a different dimension he is introducing him to a new, tender, trusting world – a world of which Chiron has had too little. You know enough of life’s horrors, the scene whispers. You know the failures of others. You know all about being scared, hungry and alone. Just for this moment feel the beauty, take in the mystery and float on life’s love. It’s a way of saying “take courage, wait for God, because the goodness of the Lord can be seen in the land of the living.”
One day Jesus took three disciples up a mountain. As he did, he introduced them to another, more eternal world. By now he had told them of his future suffering. Peter had confessed you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God. The disciples were suspended between knowing but not knowing, between confusion and trust, between fear and hope. They were holding in one frame the pain of what lies around the corner and the freedom that is God. Perhaps they thought Jesus was simply giving them a breather, a chance to touch the clouds, to soak in the silence, to be together. Yet on that different, deeper level surely they knew treks up mountains were moments of meeting God. They receive another revelation: the glory of heaven, the brightness of God’s light, and the assurance of the ancestors, who have walked their own hard paths of obedience.
Icons of the transfiguration show Jesus’ dazzling brightness, alongside Moses and Elijah, and the disciples prostrate in fear. But the point of praying in front of the icon is to see the brightness reflected back on our faces. The sacred pictures draw us to contemplate – in front of God’s glory – our own transfigured life. Belden Lane says it this way: “icons of the transfiguration imply [that] the viewer’s own humanity is translated into something never before imagined.”[3] Feel the beauty, take in the mystery of God, dwell in the glory and let it change your outlook. Let it infuse you with hope, gird you with courage and turn you into something you never before imagined.
The voice of God says, “This is my Son. Listen to him!” Listen to him talk about the hard road. Believe him when he speaks of crosses, death, and my great work. Let the pain and the freedom held together transfigure you, too.
If my favorite movie of the past year is Moonlight, then the best book I’ve read is Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. This fictionalized yet agonizingly accurate portrayal of slavery brings freedom into the pain by imagining the Underground Railroad as an actual network of rails, tracks and cars living beneath the earth. Stations are accessed through trap doors down ladders deep into the ground. Each station is different. Each is a mysterious reality to be revealed, often when most needed. The book’s main character, a runaway slave girl named Cora, during one leg of her journey, cannot distinguish whether she is riding on the railroad or creating it herself. She wonders,
“Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the level of the handcar she drove a pickax into the rock…Who are you after you finish something this magnificent – in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end, a new person steps out into the light. The up-top world must be so ordinary compared to the miracle beneath….”[4]
The same transformation occurring on the mountaintop happens here beneath the earth, just as the Jesus who shines in glory will be buried in the ground in order to transform the world. Each time we take up the struggle of being faithful, of being human and of facing the pain while dreaming of God, we are on the same journey. We are on the journey of being transfigured in ways we cannot imagine.
[1] A.O. Scott in The New York Times. October 20, 2016.
[2] Hilton Als, “Moonlight Undoes our Expectations” in The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/24/moonlight-undoes-our-expectations
[3] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (Oxford: Oxford University, 1998), 128.
[4] Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 303-304.