TRANSFIGURATION

There is this story in the Bible – part of the Jesus Saga, which has become known as the Transfiguration.

Here it is in a nutshell: Jesus grabs a couple of his friends and they head up a mountain to pray. While they are there Jesus starts to glow and suddenly there are two other people there – Moses and Elijah and the three of them talk. Then Moses and Elijah fade away leaving Jesus alone with the three disciples. They want to stay. They want to erect some sort of monument. But Jesus tells them it is time to head to Jerusalem and perhaps death.

There is so much going on with this brief story – even if we completely ignore the radioactively glowing Jesus in the centre of the room.

As Jesus life unfolds this is a major turning point in the stories told about him because it separates the before and after in such a concrete way.

You can look at this a number of ways, before this moment Jesus was perhaps a little closed in terms of revealing his identity… he always put off questions and said, I’m not great, God is great. But here he is revealed as somehow special.

Secondly, before this moment Jesus was always focused on the here and now, healing and teaching, going walkabout through Israel. All of a sudden he turns his eyes towards Jerusalem, to be poetic like the Gospel writer Luke. Now he starts talking about his death, and what will come of that.

Thirdly, Jesus came to reform religion. He has some new ideas… and appearing with Moses and Elijah makes him the third in a series of reformers: Moses changed the faith when he led the people to the Promised Land and established them as a nation instead of a wandering people. Elijah represents the prophets and the way Judaism changed when it became more of an established religion with religious leaders. Now there is Jesus, who has come to change it again…

See, this episode, as it is written, has a very important task of changing the focus of Jesus life. It is, one in a series of four episodes: the birth story, the baptism story, the transfiguration, the death… Each of these is meant to illustrate how Jesus was exceptional.

Moments of change – moments of transformation – and moments that happen to all of us.

This is the fourth, and most important reason the story is told: it is about us.

Transfiguration is what happens at those crucial moments in life when everything changes. We might not be up on a mountain, but think about the birth of a child, or graduating from college, getting fired and having to reinvent ourselves… there are these moments when change is forced upon us and we all of a sudden face the future with certainty and clarity of understanding.

This is what I am discovering more and more as I read stories from the Bible and think about why someone wrote them down. What is it about this story that is meant to be passed on and is important for us? Because there is always a reason, always a connecting point that illustrates some great wisdom which would make our lives better.

This is something I wish I knew before now – we are not going to stay the same… life changes us. Life moulds us into something different at crucial moments and we are no longer the same person.

Too often we are like the disciples, wanting to hold on to the past even in the face of obvious evidence that things need to be different. Too often we have change swirling around us and try desperately to hold on to the past with the delusional belief that everything should stay the same.

The story of Jesus is the story of a man who accepted that God leads in different directions and in each moment accepted that and moved on faithfully into the future. From Carpenter, to Preacher, To Martyr.

Hopefully life has a nicer ending for us, but we still need to accept that transfiguration is possible, and when the moment is right, embrace what God is calling you to be.

You Can't Make Me Go...

Religion Today Column for Saturday March 17th 2012, Times and Transcript

Why don’t you go to church?

Well, to be fair, if you are reading this you probably are, but why aren’t your kids?

I have spent a lot of time talking to kids, to teens, to young adults, and even middle age people about this; about why they don’t go, or why they don’t get involved, or where they give their money and the number one answer is because it is an obligation.

The next generations do not want to be obligated to do things; they want to do only the things they care about.

It sounds simple, but it seems to be true… pick a day, and say, "at 10 in the morning on your day off you need to go here"; and no one will.

And when you probe deeper you will find two things to be true, they don’t get anything out of Christianity and they don’t know where they fit into it all. There is no personal investment because it simply does not mean anything to them.

We pretend we don’t have answers to questions like this, but we do. And we also like to play nice and to be open and honest so we don’t point out some obvious truths.

Economic and educational class matter a whole lot. If you are poorer and less educated you tend more towards church participation. The conservative churches have messages geared to this demographic and have higher participation. 

The mainline churches are middle class and hyper educated and no one comes.

Again, it is a rubber meets the road why does this matter to me sort of attitude. The idea that heaven will bring you peace, happiness and riches sure does sound nice when you are struggling to put food on the table. There are no athiests in foxholes as they used to say.

But if you are self-sufficient, buy all the things to make you happy, spend your time thinking about social issues on your own, what difference does the message of faith make, really?

And even the conservatives have troubles now because the message goes against the general way we are socialized no matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old. Nowadays everyone is told we can make it on our own. That we should do what makes us happy. We are told that we just need the right car, or the right jeans to be popular. In fact, society is not only all about me, it is about me and my stuff.

Christianity says stuff does not matter. It drags you down. Christianity says you are just one person, that God loves everyone and so should you.

And what we have all failed to do, whether you are Catholic or Wesleyan or anywhere in between, is really, definitively, come up with an answer to this. We are not fighting back.

Why should you not be self-centred? Why should you not be concerned with material things? Because God says so? So what?

Until we can look the younger generations who are struggling with identity and purpose  in the eye and tell them truthfully, "You are not going to be happy till you start looking outside yourself", with the greatest of conviction, we are not going to convince them.

And they won’t listen anyway; people spend billions ensuring this. If cars do not make you happy, then the auto industry, the economy, and life as we know it is in jeopardy. So trust me, the auto industry alone is throwing more energy, money, and intelligence into creating a value system then the church ever could.

What we need to do, is be there to pick up the pieces. We need to accept that we can be a dissenting voice in society, but like the parent of any teen, it is going to take years of experience before they realize we had something to say in the first place that made sense.

Young people are not the future.

They will be the future of church and religion later, when their kids have died in car accidents, when their friends succumb to Alzheimers, when their marriage falls apart because of indifference and self-absorption.

As sad is it might seem, we have an answer to the meaning of life that no one hears till they are brought to their knees by the failure of their current life.

And having that answer is one of the most important things we are about. We preserve the truth of life, of the Divine nature of the universe, we are hope incarnate. And we will be here when you need us…