Sermons for the Month
DATE: February 22, 1998
SERVICE: Transfiguration of our Lord
TEXT: Luke 9:28-36
Sermons for the Month
The Tunnel at the End of the Light
DATE: February 22, 1998
SERVICE: Transfiguration of our Lord
TEXT: Luke 9:28-36
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
The comfort of a night-light is something I always cherished as a child growing up. The world can truly be a dark and scary place at night. Just having that light down the hall shooed away many of the strange figures that always seemed to lurk in my imagination in the corners of the room and especially under my bed. But by the time we are grown, however, both our eyes and our hearts often become so accustomed to the dark in all its forms that we accept it as inevitable and forget the warmth and radiance that light can bring to our soul. Luke reminds us in this morning's gospel text that one of the primary ways God has made his divine presence known on Earth has been through revealing glimpses of his divine light. Sometimes it is reflected in the form of a great civic leader like a Moses or a Lincoln. Other times it is seen reflected in the faith of people like Paul or Carter trying to convince a secular society like that of Corinth or Georgia of the truth of Jesus
Take Moses, for example. He begged for a glimpse of God. He was honored with a back-view peek on Mt Sinai when God visited him in a cloud; Exodus tells us that ever after, Moses found his face emblazoned with God's radiance which he had so briefly glimpsed in the mist (Exodus 34). Indeed, the people down below were taken back by the radiance that shown in Moses' face as he came down from the mountain carrying the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.
God is always present in creation and humanity. But when God wants to brighten up an event, a messenger or a message, He doesn't hesitate to turn on a light. Today's Transfiguration text introduces one such moment when on a mountain top, there was lit up a miraculous epiphany of the truth of the divinity of Jesus.
The three disciples who went with Jesus that day wanted to build three temples of light at the top of the mountain to remember the moment. I suppose we would have pulled out our cameras. The only thing they could do to remember the event, however, was make a marker. They envisioned a marvelous transfiguration "booth" that would serve as a light, a kind of beacon at the end of the tunnel, a kind of back-lit cross beckoning those squinting from dim tunnel-vision or those stuck at the wrong end of long, dark tunnels. They wanted Jesus to be a kind of night-light, a holy comforter, someone who they could pull up around their chins and feel safe.
Jesus, however, scolded their "light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel" understanding of discipleship and instead challenged them to embrace a "tunnel-at-the-end-of-the-light" discipleship. What do I mean by that? I mean that Jesus saw the purpose of the church not to invite people out of darkness into the light, to be a kind of beacon on a hill waiting for people to find it, but rather to be a lantern we bring into the darkness of the world, a light that goes out seeking the lost and the unchurched. He wanted us to spend less time and money building booths, our own safe "temples of light," and more on bringing that light into the dark tunnels of people's lives.
Jesus' Transfiguration was a revelation to Peter, James and John of who he truly was. By showing himself as he did, Jesus meant to encourage them to carry his light into the world. Sadly, they saw it as a treasure to be kept and rather than one to be shared. It was not until after the crucifixion and resurrection that they finally understood what his epiphany to them really was: an encouragement to go out with the light of Christ to lighten the Gentiles. They thought themselves, at first, to be "lights at the end of the tunnel," servants waiting for people lost in the dark to blunder their way towards them. It was not until the coming of the Holy Spirit that they understood their mission to be rather the opposite, to boldly go where no one else has gone before--into the tunnels of darkness that invade people's hearts. Jesus asked his disciples over and over again, "Will you move forward and further into those tunnels with the light of the gospel? Furthermore, will you poke new windows, not just drill tiny peepholes, into the darkness of the world?"
Over the years, the church has used two primary types of windows to bring light into the world's tunnels. The first is stained glass. We have beautiful stain-glassed windows in our church. Everyone who visits our worship remarks at how inspiring they are. I too love to just sit in this room on a sunny day and bask in the colored light that streams into this worship space. But for all their beauty, they do have one drawback. When you look at our building from the outside as an unchurched person would, to those trapped outside in various tunnels of darkness, our beautiful windows are little more than hazy, dark blurs, a visual cacophony of confusion incapable of casting meaningful, penetrating light on anything outside. Stain glass windows only make sense when you are on the inside. One of the biggest barriers to sharing Jesus in the next Millennium, the 21st Century, is that the church seems to many to be a closed community. All they see is an invisible "For Members Only" sign. In fact, many see friendlier signs on many Rotary, Kiwanis, and animal club doors (Eagles, Elks, Moose, Lions, etc.). I was talking to a church drop out just this week. He was once a member of a non-Lutheran sister congregation here on the west side. His former congregation had gone through some significant conflict and he had dropped out. He lamented his non-involvement and lack of a spiritual base in any change. When I thought it appropriate, I invited him to worship with us some Sunday morning. "No thank you," he said. "I'm not ready for a bunch of scowling Lutherans." I told him ,"Be careful there. I'm a Lutheran and I like to laugh. You might be surprised." In any case, I got the point. His image of a Lutheran church was not an inviting place. I believe we at Faith have made great strides in changing that image but we still have to keep at it. I am grateful the Property committee made a place for wheel-chair bound folk to sit comfortably on a Sunday morning. Their plan is to make our restrooms handicapped accessible. Even if no one ever uses them, it tells people we have a place for everyone here at Faith. One of the remaining hopes of the Renovation and Renewal is to put new flood lights behind our Revelation window. Hopefully, it will allow others out in the community to see the beauty of the light of Christ we often take for granted here on the inside. Although, it will enable those driving and walking by to catch a glimpse of their beauty, I expect those floods to also serve as a visual reminder to us of what we at Faith are to be about. We are called to go out with the light of Christ into the world. I am convinced that the future of the church will be in direct relation to the giving away of our faith to the world.
Some of you, I know, have visited churches who have forgone the expense of stained-glass windows but have instead erected great panes of frosted, glazed-over, glass. While they let more of the world's light in, they still obscure any view of what lies outside the walls of the sanctuary. In the early 18th century, when the imperial English colonized the wild Welsh, proper English travelers who ventured from England to Wales used to close the curtains of their carriage to shut out the "horrid scenery." They didn't want to be disturbed by the horrors of the outside world.
How many of our churches are using frosted glass for the same reason? For us to see the outside world as it is rather than through our rose-tinted glasses would mean that we must come to terms with the fact that it's a different world out there. How people see themselves, see life, see the world and see the church has changed and is changing. In many, many churches, no matter where you look on a Sunday morning, you can't see out. You can't see into the world. And that means, conversely, people can't see or hear what we say, sing or confess. Yesterday, many of you met for a Faith Leadership workshop to review the trends currently affecting our world and how successful churches are reinventing themselves for the 21st century. The information pushed me to "the edge of my envelope" in that many of the concepts and ideas shared moved me in directions not common to the experience and practice of many ELCA congregations today. Some of what we saw and heard pushed us to the edge of our comfort zone. On the other hand, what we were doing yesterday was attempting to open the curtains of our carriages, discovering the realities that we often hide from when we worship in a room without a view. How can we offer light to the world when our view of what that world is like is filtered through the frosty panes of old perspectives? Don Birdsell sent me via email these interest quotes: an 1876 Western Union internal memo once read, "This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." H.M Warner of Warner Brothers Studios said "Who in blazes wants to hear actors talk." And how about this one by Gary Cooper, "I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face not Gary Cooper [in that new overpriced movie "Gone with the Wind."]
(At this point in the sermon, ask your people to close their eyes and keep them closed until you tell them to open them. With their eyes closed, climb on a chair, and hold over your head an open laptop computer. Tell them to open their eyes and as they open them jump off your chair with the computer over your head. They'll think you've lost your mind! But stay the course: ask them what they just saw? Do it again. After the second jump, tell them they just witnessed Moses redux coming down from the mountain with the new tablets of revelation for the 21st century.)
There is now a third new window for this world that has been and will in every greater ways be poking its light into the tunnels of the 21st century -- the computer screen. When you boot up Microsoft Windows '95, or Apple's OS8, what is the first visual you see? The colored panes of a software stained-glass window. We Protestants have had a love affair with the bound book ever since typesetting was invented in mid-15th century Mainz. The mission to put a Bible in every hand, in every pew, even in every motel room pushed the church and Christ's gospel message out into the darkest places in the 19th and early 20th century. A couple more quotes from Don Birdsell, ""I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943. "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, President, Chairman and Found of Digital Equipment. Today, this new world is not getting its inspiration the Gutenberg Way. Today, the way people carry on the fastest communication and obtain their most important information is no longer from the pages of a book. Instead, our postmodern culture is turning toward a new kind of stained-glass window for its sources of light.
Christianity is now undergoing a visual metamorphosis. Our image of images is being altered. The image, not the word, has become the primary unit of cultural currency. I grew up in a world where texts were better and images, or pictures, were held in lower esteem. A book with pictures in it was inferior to one without pictures. In fact, if you had a lot of pictures in your book you had written a (gasp!) "coffee table" book. Christians of the 21st century will be hypermediated Christians experience God in a variety of ways. One of those ways will now include a sensory web made possible through powerful new visualization technologies. One of the reasons why the three generations born after 1964 are not in our churches and have not become Christians is that we have not made it easy for them to become hypermediated and metamorphic believers through multisensory worship.
I believe the church will continue to ever so slowly poke these new windows in the tunnels at the end of the light. The Light Service; The Web page; are just the beginning. Old Trinity downtown has ideas of making the internet an integral part of their ministry with electronic book stores and simulcast worship. I can remember the Church Council meeting when I introduced the fact the church will no longer be producing 16 mm movies, that everything visual in education was going to video tape. We urged our need to invest in a VCR and TV rather than a 16 mm projector. Today, I am sending and receiving daily email messages. I am also discovering members are passing on my Emailed Jokes of the Week to all points of the country. My daughter Stacy tells me they are even circulated at the Brokings Institute in Washington DC. And they need some clean jokes there.
Brothers and sister is Christ, we have this light. Jesus asks us to take his light into the world. That is what we are about. That is our call. We will need to be creative in that endeavor. We will need to continue to push our envelopes of learning as we seek to be viable witness to the truth of Jesus in the 21st century. I leave with you this transfiguration hope brought to you by our savior Jesus Christ. It's captured in a song we all used to sing when we were little children? It goes like this: "This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine."
AMEN