Something clearly happened out there, something like a transfiguration, because this story is so important to the early church that it’s heard in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, and every single year, on the Second Sunday of Lent, we hear about this ultimate religious experience. Surely if anything was going to change your life forever, it would be this. Jesus with just a few of his disciples, three to be exact, on the top of a high mountain, and an experience of light, and sounds, blinding visions and clouds. It revealed to this handful of disciples a secret, a powerful secret, who Jesus really was, what was underneath the outward reality.
What’s always been most remarkable to me about this transfiguration, though, is that it didn’t really “take.” It lasted but a moment, and then it was over. When it was over, there was no one there but the four people who’d been involved, all looking pretty much the way they did before. And these three disciples, who had seen the truth, who had had Jesus’ true nature revealed to them and them alone, who had heard the voice of God the Father, seen Moses and Elijah, did these three become the most faithful, the most holy, of all the disciples? Well, read the rest of the gospel, this one from Matthew or any other. They didn’t become new people, it seems, no better than the other ones, they argued and failed to listen, and one of them, Peter, many of us like just because despite all the miracles he heard and saw and believed, he could fail so often, miss the point, and even abandon Jesus just a few chapters later on when Jesus looked a little more human. The transfiguration seems to have slipped his mind.
So if today is the Sunday of the transfiguration that is really the temporary transfiguration, what does this have to do with us?
We have two temptations when it comes to interpreting experience — and now I’m talking about our experiences, the events and the decisions and the experiences that have shaped our own lives. These temptations are really two assumptions that we make about our transfiguration, simple assumptions, assumptions that for us can spell the difference between life and death.
The first assumption is when we assume that because we have done something in which we are disappointed, something bad, perhaps something truly evil, a relationship where we’ve been wrong, or cruel, or perhaps just a sense of disappointment in the way we’ve treated others, or let down our own ideals, whatever haunts us, we assume that we have been turned and shaped forever by that experience. Now in one sense, of course, our past does shape us, and can’t be undone. We have histories and commitments that can’t be changed. But none of that can ever be allowed to contradict the message of the gospel, to let us assume somehow that the message of Jesus, the message of new life, our ability to go out of this church today and live out our baptismal promises has been changed forever by something we’ve done. There was not a person in Jesus’ ministry that was so discouraged, so possessed by evil, so cut off from goodness, that Jesus couldn’t reach, who couldn’t be washed clean in baptism for a new beginning in the Christian life. It isn’t easy, it isn’t painless. But if we have left something undone, it does not need to remain undone.
That’s the first mistaken assumption, the assumption that evil has a permanently transfiguring power over us. The second assumption we make is the mirror image of the first, and perhaps it is even more insidious. It’s to assume that once having done a good thing, once having made choices that we think mark us as an upstanding, or generous, or well-meaning person, it’s to assume that our work, in some sense, is over.
This one hurts. Because it is the failing of the basically good person for whom the battle with sin and commitment has faded a bit into the background. We are surrounded in this parish, as you all know, with basically wonderful people, people who have committed their time and energies to their children, their community, to this parish. And yet our work, our fight, may not yet be quite over. The story always continues. Our goodness has not transfigured us, at least not quite permanently. No transfiguration here on this earth is a permanent one. Even people whose lives have been shaped by goodness and honorable commitments may be surprised to find that they are called by God to someplace entirely new, someplace they may not want to go, some decision that means they have to change their attitude about money, or how they feel about the poor, how they value status, how they regard people who could never live here in West Windsor. Our good works give glory to God; and yet we are never done with the work of finding new ways to turn our lives over to him.
If Father Tim were speaking to you today, he might decide to sing you a song at this point, but maybe he doesn’t know this one. The old blues singer Bessie Smith used to sing a number called the “Lost Your Head Blues.” And in that song she used to sing: “Once ain’t for always,” the refrain went, “and two ain’t but twice.” Now the rest of the song isn’t exactly religious in context, to say the least, and if our cantor stands up to sing it at the preparation of the gifts, you should probably take your children out of the church, but the point that song makes is an important one: Our lives aren’t made up of once-and-for-all moments where the way we are, our future course, is decided for us. We can say “I love you” once, but we need to act it out again and again. Once, after all, ain’t for always.
If these gospel stories of Jesus’ ministry have a message during Lent, it is surely that our need for conversion is never quite done. Our transfiguration, for good or bad, isn’t for always. Lent comes every year, no matter what, and every year at Easter, we start over, renewing our baptismal promises and trying to begin again, and every year we look for some transfiguration. Every year, we need one. Every year, it is there, if we remember that we need it.