The sermon, with music preached by Don Portwood on Feb 14, 2010
This is the last Sunday of Epiphany, (the season when the light is revealed to the world, starting with the Star of Bethlehem). It’s also the Sunday before lent…which means it is transfiguration Sunday. When Jesus went up the mountain, was transfigured and talked with Moses and Elijah. If we had more time it would be interesting to see how the Luke account differs from the accounts in Matthew and Mark, both in what Luke added and deleted. It helps you realized each gospel writer was writing to a specific audience and tells the story in a different way to make their point, theologically or thematically.
Traditional Christianity sees this scene as a glimpse of the God nature of the divine Jesus when the kabod, (glory or inner being) or presence and light of God, is seen in and around Jesus as he is praying. God was often portrayed in ancient Israel as being surrounded/enveloped in light, unapproachable to humans. And orthodox faith teaches that this scene represents the transference of the glory of God to the person of Jesus as the messianic one. Luke also seems to use it as a foreshadowing of the upcoming passion and resurrection story. Only in Luke are the disciples asleep (like at the garden of Gethsemane the night he was arrested) and the words, “And behold, two men”…are the exact words Luke uses on Easter morning at the empty tomb…behold two men stood by them…in dazzling apparel.
Even when Jesus and the disciples come down the mountain and meet the boy with seizures and Jesus heals him, Luke says…all were astonished at the majesty of God. We can assume they mean God, the creator…but could also mean this divine Jesus God.
Jesus talks with Moses and Elijah…representatives of the law and the prophets….and in fact Jesus…portrayed in the gospels as the new Moses….talks with the old Moses of the exodus story, about what? Jesus departure….which in Greek is exodus and how his way of embodying God’s love…would lead to his death in Jerusalem.
Like Peter…wondering what to do with this information and suggesting building a booth for Moses, Elijah and Jesus….I’ve often thought – what do I do with this information? How does one preach this? If your understanding of Jesus is different from orthodox Christianity, what do you preach? What does this have to do with us today?
The faith and fellowship group has been reading Bishop John Shelby Spong’s new book, Eternal Life: A New Vision, in which he talks way too briefly about his new vision of life, consciousness, Jesus and eternal life. He writes that he’d like someone to do more work on his new understanding of Jesus. Not as some half divine half human being…not as some God/Human creation…but as a fully human one. “Jesus was a human life so deeply lived, a human life through which love flowed without barrier or interception, a being so courageously present that he was open to the ultimate ground of all being. He had stepped from self-consciousness into a universal consciousness that brings us into a profound oneness with all there he. He had become one with God”.
So Jesus is fully human, enlightened or awakened, in Buddhist terms, a master in Qi Gong terms. Spong writes, “John’s mystical approach to Jesus shouts the reality that we share in the life of God, just as Jesus did. We share in the being of God, just as Jesus did. Does that mean that our consciousness shares in the consciousness of God? I think it does, and as we become more deeply and fully conscious, we move from the being of survival to the being of love and we participate in and reveal the reality of God”. Spong and the mystics say this is who Jesus is…this is who Jesus reminds us we can be….this is who we are called to be as fully human”. And Jesus also calls us to live that way of life, that way of love.
Not stay on the mountain, but come down to that place where people really live, where little boys have seizures and need healing. That’s the kind of love we learn from Jesus.
Because it’s transfiguration Sunday and I wasn’t sure what to say…I started working on this sermon last Monday morning. I did a lot of research trying to understand what it meant and might mean to us. And I went to bed Monday night with all that information going around in my head having made a ton of notes that morning. Tuesday morning I woke up at 4am with a jumble of thought going around in my head….thinking about Jesus aglow on the mountain…about coming down the mountain and showing that love…by healing the boy with epilepsy and then I thought about a meditation Barb does, it’s a Qi Gong meditation led by Master Linn, a local Qi Gong master….in which he has people imagine a little ball of light in the very center of their being, behind your belly button….and as part of the meditation you imagine that ball of light getting bigger and bigger both inside your body and outside your body….and I thought, maybe Jesus as an enlightened master, was able to “activiate” his energy body…or show his aura…to use another term you may have heard. Or since we are all simply made up of energy, some way, the disciples saw Jesus’ energy body glowing as he was praying.
So there I am at 4 a.m. on Tuesday morning, lying in bed…trying to make sense of all that, the light around or in Jesus, the call to love and heal and how could I help us catch a glimpse, like the disciples did of the power and glory and call that we all our capable of….as we live our fully human and fully loving lives.
Boom – the words to a song came into my head…light of the world, shine on me. Love is the answer. I laid there thinking, I need to look it up the rest of the words to that chorus. I was sure it was by Seals and Croft. Having gotten that far on the sermon, I was able to go back to sleep. I got up later, went to you tube and looked up this song by Seals and Croft. Not there. Instead I found out it was written by Todd Rundgren for his band Utopia in 1977, whom I didn’t know. But then I found out that the version I was remembering was covered, not by Seals and Croft, but by England Dan and John Ford Coley. Another minute of research and I found out that England Dan is Dan Seals, brother of Jim Seals of Seals and Croft. So rather than saying any more, I want us to stand up…and sing as much as you can of this song….along with the music that will be playing. Because as well as I could put it together, Todd Rundgren in writing this is saying what I wanted to say…it’s about listening to Jesus as one who bears the light and reminds us we bear it too, in love….in love….always in love. I’ve changed the words very slightly to have the light shine in us out…rather than just on us. If Luke can change Mark and Matthew’s gospel to fit his theology, I can change Todd Rundgren’s song to fit my theology.
Notice too in the chorus, the words “set us free” – doesn’t that have something to do with exodus?
So stand and sing where you can…or listen….to the word of God for today…as it comes to us through Todd Rundgren as sung by England Dan Seals and John Ford Coley…and all of us.
*HYMN Love Is The Answer
(Written by Todd Rundgren 1977 for Utopia)
as covered by England Dan and John Ford Coley (1979)
with a few minimal word changes.
Name your price
A ticket to paradise
I can't stay here any more
And I've looked high and low
I've been from shore to shore to shore
If there's a short cut I'd have found it
But there is no easy way around it.
Light of the world, shine in me
Love is the answer
Shine in us all
Set us free
Love is the answer
Who knows why?
Someday we all must die
We're all homeless boys and girls
And we are never heard
It's such a lonely lonely lonely world
People turn their heads and walk on by
Tell me is it worth just another try?
Light of the world, shine in me
Love is the answer
Shine in us all
Set us free
Love is the answer
And we, are we alive
Or just a dying planet?
What are the chances?
Ask the one in your heart for the answers
And when you feel afraid
Love one another
When you've lost your way
Love one another
And when you're all alone
Love one another
And when you're far from home
Love one another
And when you're down and out
Love one another
And when your hopes run out
Love one another
And when you need a friend
Love one another
And when you feel the end
Love, we got to love, we got to love one another
Light of the world, shine in me
Love is the answer
Shine in us all
Set us free
Love is the answer
Light of the world, shine in me
Love is the answer
Shine in us all
Set us free
Love is the answer
