“Faces Afire”

Mar 2

Luke 9:28-36

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

David Shirey

Years ago in NC, I remember listening to a woman as she reminisced about her childhood. Given her age, that would have been around 1910. What stuck in her mind through all those years was a look on her grandmother's face. She pointed a crooked finger at me and said almost in a whisper, "I could always tell when Grandmamma had been speaking with the Man."

"The Man?" I asked.

She then pointed heavenward and continued, "There'd come a time during the day when Grandmamma would excuse herself from what we were doing. She'd go back to her bedroom down the hall and quietly close the door. In time, I'd hear the door open and I'd hear Grandmamma's feet shuffling back down the hallway toward us. I knew what she’d been doing. I could tell by the look on her face: She'd been talking with the Man.” Miz Eva had trouble remembering what she had for breakfast that morning, but there was one thing she hadn’t forgotten: the look on her grandmother’s face after she’d been talking with God.

The people of Israel would understand. Down through the generations, they passed on stories about Moses. And there remained etched in Israel's memory an image of how Moses looked after he had been talking with God. Exodus says, "As Moses came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God" (34:29). And Peter, James, and John would understand. Up on the mountain, while Jesus was praying, “the appearance of his face changed.” (Luke 9:29).

The church's word for these faces afire is transfiguration. Trans as in transition: a change. Figuration as in configured: the way something appears. Put it together and you get transfiguration: a change in the way somebody appears. Grandmamma after prayer. Moses coming down from the mountain. Jesus flanked by Moses and Elijah. Faces transfigured by being in the presence of God.

The look on our faces really does say a lot. You can read some people like a book. Was there ever a time when your parents took one look at that innocent little angelic face of yours and asked, "What did you do?" Or, see someone and say, "You look like you just saw a ghost!" Or, "Well, what have we here? You look like the cat that ate the canary." Our faces are revealing.

Which raises a question: Years from now, will anyone have a memory of the way we looked after we had been in the presence of God? Just as the moon shines with the reflected light of the sun, do our countenances radiate the light of God?

Teachers and sponsors of our children and youth. When our youngest disciples are grown up, will they have a memory of the way their teachers and sponsors looked when they talked about their faith in God?
Teachers of adult Bible and book studies and discussion groups: What does the look on your face say about the subject you’re trying to teach?
Band/ Choirs, if we couldn't hear a word that came out of your mouths or a sound that came out of your bells, could we still get the message of your music by looking at your faces?
Or, turn the tables. What would candid snapshots of your faces during worship say?
As you volunteer – serve – does your face offer a gift that is every bit the blessing as what your hands are offering?
Wendy and I aren’t off the hook. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said he would have entered the ministry were it not for all the pastors he knew who acted like undertakers. Kennon Callahan reminded all pastors and worship leaders, “It’s Sunday morning, not Sunday mourning.”[1]

The people of Israel remembered Moses’ face. Peter, James and John remembered Jesus’ face. Will anyone remember the way we looked for having been in the presence of the God?

The fact of the matter is that people out there expect people's lives to be somehow transfigured as a result of their spending time with God in here. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was one of the great writers of the 20th c. Having just concluded Black History Month, it’s fit and right to remember her. Such literary giants as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou are all literary progeny of Zora Neale Hurston. She grew up in a Baptist church where her father was pastor and she remembered as a child how “some of the congregation told of getting close enough to peep into God’s sitting-room windows. Some went further. They had been inside the place and looked all around. They spoke of sights and scenes around God’s throne.” She adds, “That should have been enough for me. But somehow it left a lack in my mind. They should have looked and acted differently than other people after experiences like that. But these people looked and acted like everybody else.”[2]

She’s right. Too many Christians, rather than reflecting, even dimly, the face of God in Christ, pretty much look and act like the rest of the culture. These days, that’s not good. One of the most pointed statements I read in the wake of the events of January 6 four years ago was by the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, a man named Russell Moore. It was well done. Titled “The Roman Road from Insurrection,” he grappled with “engaging culture without losing the gospel.”[3] At the end of his analysis, he bemoaned the decline over the past decades of his Southern Baptist church, but he could be speaking for declining churches conservative, moderate, and progressive when he wrote (I will paraphrase): People, especially rising generations, are walking away from the church not because we believe too much too zealously, but because we quietly put up with too much and stand for too little in the face of so much that is not of Christ, not good, not godly.

People expect people's lives to be transfigured – changed – as a result of their spending time with God. There’s a church right here in Fort Collins that has stenciled above their door the words Loving God Loving Neighbor Changing lives. It can't be stressed enough. One of the bedrock beliefs of the Christian faith is that God, working through the power of the Holy Spirit, can and does change, transform, transfigure lives.

Peter, James, and John got an eyeful up there on the mountain all right, but it’s the earful they got that was the real takeaway from their mountaintop experience. Luke tells us that when Peter, James and John woke up from a cat nap on the mount and saw Jesus’ face transfigured with Moses and Elijah at his side, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here … let me take a selfie! (That’s from the RSV – Revised Shirey Version) Whereupon “a cloud came and overshadowed them … Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’” (vss. 33-35). I think the whole point of the mountaintop experience was not to dazzle the disciples, but to call for their obedience; not to give them goose bumps, but a commission: Listen to him! Bible commentators remind us Moses and Elijah embody the two major sections of the Old Testament: the Law or the Pentateuch (represented by Moses) and the Prophets (represented by Elijah). That is, their standing in awe of Jesus is saying the entirety of the Scriptures point to Jesus as the fullest expression of God’s Truth. Barbara Brown Taylor refers to Moses, Elijah and Jesus standing there as the Mount Rushmore of Heaven[4]. The real test of a mountaintop experience is not how it makes us feel at the moment but how it inspires us to live after we’ve had it. Peter, James, and John got an eyeful and an earful: Listen to him and live for him.

The Season of Lent begins this Wednesday with our Ash Wednesday worship service at 7 p.m. Lent is 40 days with God. Not 40 seconds. That’s microwave spirituality. Not 40 minutes. That’s an hour-long television show recorded without the commercials. Lent is 40 days spent listening to God and Christ and as a result, being changed.

I can imagine Miz Eva back in NC saying, "There'd come a time during the year when the church would excuse herself from what she was doing. She'd go down the hall and quietly close the door. 40 days later, I'd hear the door open again and I'd hear the church’s feet shuffling back down the hallway toward me. I knew what she’d been doing. I could tell by the look on the church’s face: She'd been observing Lent.”

Would that each of us and our church be changed this Lent. Transfigured.

AMEN.

[1] Kennon Callahan, Dynamic Worship, p. 18

[2] Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, (Univ. of Illinois Press: Chicago), p 267.

[3] https://www.russellmoore.com/2021/01/11/the-roman-road-from-insurrection/

[4] “Dazzling Darkness” at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=639