“This is my Son, my chosen, Listen to Him!”
Listen to Him! That’s our theme for this morning.
I read a startling statistic recently that said that the average listening attention span of an adult in the United States – that is, the amount of time one gives one’s full attention to listening – is 18 seconds.
I don’t know if that is true or not, but we all know that listening is becoming a lost art. And if we are becoming less and less able to listen to one another – how on earth are we able to listen to God? Particularly at this time when we really need God!
Today is the Last Sunday in the season of Epiphany, the season of discovery, revelation,
the revealing of who Jesus, as God, is.
Luke’s Gospel has led us through those reveals
in the presence of many witnesses.
And today’s Gospel gives us the biggest reveal of all: The Transfiguration.
It is such an important reveal that it appears twice in the lectionary for us to take in – once on August 6th, Transfiguration Sunday, and today, the last Sunday before our journey into Lent and the Passion of Christ.
It is an extraordinary scene,
fit for space odysseys and aliens.
It appears in all three Synoptic Gospels,
each attempting to put into words what happened there --
the cosmic bending of time and space,
the glimpse into a world beyond this one,
the voice of God, directly, to a trio of cowering disciples.
Ignatius of Loyola, in the 16th century
understood that our intellect
can only take us so far in our understanding
of the power and mystery of God.
He understood that although knowledge and study
are important, we can get stuck there.
Knowing stuff is not the same as sensing,
understanding, and believing from within.
Knowing stuff doesn’t help us Listen.
Ignatian practice, still going strong today,
Asks us to enter into the stories of scripture
And the stories of our everyday lives
With God’s greatest gift to us – our imagination.
So, let’s do that, let’s enter in, imagine,
and experience the Transfiguration for ourselves.
In Luke’s telling of the story,
Jesus is leading the way up the mountain to pray.
What a hike that must have been
with Peter, James and John following behind
the long, sure strides of Jesus, all the way to the top.
I imagine everyone, except Jesus, is out of breath –
bent over, hands on knees breathing heavily.
It is a mountain after all and not a hill.
Once at the top, Jesus begins to pray.
We’re told the disciples were
“weighed down with sleep, but managed to stay awake” --
and so they must have been able to see
not only Jesus’ body but his face.
I imagine Jesus standing to pray,
arms slightly out by his sides,
face tilted upward to the heavens.
And then it happened. The air changed,
the light changed, the sounds changed,
the clouds moved, and Jesus’ face became almost translucent
and his clothes dazzling white,
nearly blinding the disciples,
whose hearts were pounding out of their chests
and their mouths agape.
This man they loved was turning into something else.
Suddenly there were two other men there,
standing with Jesus,
and somehow the disciples knew instantly
that it was Moses and Elijah – also dazzling.
Moses whose face shined so brightly when he brought down the law
from God to the Hebrew people, that he had to wear a veil.
And Elijah, the most revered of all the prophets,
who ascended alive into heaven.
There they were -- the Law and the Prophets speaking with Jesus about “his departure which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.”
I can’t imagine that those words, affirming the upcoming passion,
registered with them at all,
as they watched, frozen in place.
The second part of this story is even scarier than the first.
Peter, having regained some of his wits,
wants to build dwellings for the three holy men before him.
And then something else happened.
The air changed again and the cloud cover
began to move and shape itself and descend,
overshadowing the frightened disciples.
I imagine it almost like a spaceship of cloud
that lowers over them as a voice like none other
speaks 9 words: two phrases and a command.
“This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him!”
The vibration rattles their bones.
Listen to him! Listen to Him!
And isn’t that the whole point?
How much listening do we really do?
How much time to we take to be quiet enough
to let God in and to actually listen and remember?
The disciples forget almost as soon as they get down from the mountain.
Back down in the world they lose the thread,
succumb to doubt, argue with each other
and forget what they have experienced,
what they have seen with their own eyes.
Thousands of years later, we do the same.
We tend to forget our personal experiences with God,
we lose the thread, minimize the experience
or begin to doubt whether it happened at all.
God is drowned out, we grow distant,
and we believe less and less that God
will concern Himself with this wicked,
broken world.
I think The Transfiguration story asks us to tell our stories
about how God has worked in our everyday lives—
how we’ve actually Listened sometimes
– and tell what we’ve seen, heard, experienced.
If we tell our stories to one another,
even if we’ve told them before,
we remind ourselves that we are in this together,
that God is always present,
that we are not alone
that God is alive in the small and gargantuan.
Telling our stories. Listening together in the quiet of prayer,
using our imaginations to remember –
That is how we love
That is how we trust
That is how we strengthen our belief that God is bigger
and more powerful than we are or this world is.
That is how we face the truth
That is how we generate hope.
We must tell our stories.
Ok, I’ll go first.
In 1985, in Iowa City, I sat on the floor
of the front porch of the old house I had rented, weeping… not knowing what to do.
My 11 year old daughters were spending the afternoon at a friend’s house.
I had just completed my MFA in Directing,
having taken a year off from my job teaching
at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale,
where I had recently been divorced.
I did not want to go back there for so many reasons.
The smart thing to do, however, is to go back to my job and then get a job from a job.
I had applied for the only three jobs in the country
that were available in my field and at my rank.
I flew to be interviewed for all three
and came in second in all three.
I was exhausted.
I sat there for a long time, my tears had gone,
and I stared out at nothing.
Quietly, I heard a voice.
I thought it was more of my rambling, disconnected brain,
but it repeated the two words I had heard.
I sat up. It was kind of scary.
And I began to listen, really listen.
The quiet voice said “Go Home.”
It was gentle but it was not my voice.
I asked, what do you mean? Do you mean just go??
And I heard again, “Go Home.”
As I sat there, with my heart pounding,
I could feel a shift in my whole body.
I felt oddly light.
I cried again but these tears were different.
Long story short:
I sold 2/3 of my library and most of what we owned,
and I moved back to California with twin daughters in tow,
to stay with my mother until we found a place of our own.
None of it was easy, but it was a decision that changed our lives,
pointed us toward new life. I listened.
It was a decision I never would have made on my own.
That’s one of my stories, one of my encounters with the Divine.
Most others have been less dramatic, but they have been real nonetheless.
OK, Now it is your turn—
to share your stories, when you listened,
when you felt the spirit moving in your everyday life.
Let this Lent be a time of growing our attention spans larger than 18 seconds.
Let this Lent be a time of sharing and remembering when you heard and listened to God.
Let the telling give you a renewed commitment to follow Christ to the cross and on through to the Glory of Resurrection.
Let the sharing give you courage and hope with each other.
And remember…..always Listen to Him!
AMEN