The glory of God who is. February 11, 2018 The Rev. Kathleen M. Sturges

Mark 9:2-9

Remember Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz?  At the beginning of her story she's in Kansas and rather unhappy with her circumstances.  The loneliness and boredom of small farm life are getting to her.  She’s restless, wanting something more or something different.  Perhaps if she were somewhere else, somewhere, say, over the rainbow then all would be well and her dreams really would come true.   

But Dorothy's not the only one who longs for change when the current situation isn’t what one would hope for.  So often we look at the circumstances of our lives and judge them.  If they all add up to what we like and find pleasing then we say God is good and life is at as it should be.  However, when we don't like what we see, when life isn’t so satisfying in one way or another we may blame God and be desperate to seek something new.  Maybe a change of scenery, or some other kind of change - a new car, a new job, a new relationship, a new something might solve the problem.   Sometimes that works.  But more often than not that restless desire for something different or the longing for something more isn't so much about the circumstances of life that are happening around us, but the depth of life that exists within us. 

It’s a bit ironic that when we seek to nurture the life within us, our spiritual lives, we often look on the outside to our circumstances in order to find God.   We seek to know God through our blessings - an amazing job opportunity, the long-awaited birth of a child,  a doctor’s report of good news from a test result, or in my case just a few days ago not slamming into the car that stopped right in front of me when I was going 50 miles an hour.  When good things like that happen, we thank God and feel like all is right in the world.  And when our outside world is good then our inside world is good as well. 

That must have been how the disciples felt as they witnessed Jesus doing all this amazing stuff.  Casting out demons, healing the sick, feeding the 5,000 and calming the storm.  In Jesus they were seeing God show up and doing marvelous things - a God who does.  And who, no doubt, would have gotten plenty of likes and shares on Facebook if had been around during the day!  

However, there comes a time in most of our lives when we are called to know God more fully and more deeply.  To know not only the God who does, but the God who is.  The God who is - regardless of circumstances.   This is who Peter, James, and John are invited to know when Jesus leads them up on a high mountain apart, by themselves, to experience the Transfiguration.  Mark’s gospel explains that Jesus’ “clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.”  The gospel of Matthew says that in addition to his clothes Jesus’ face shone like the sun.  In this transformation Jesus didn’t just reveal a God who does, but the glory of God who is - a God who is light, who is love, who is life - no matter what.

Yet as amazing as that experience must have been, nothing really changed.  It’s not like Jesus suddenly lit up and became someone new or different.  The disciples were given a glimpse of what was true all along that whether Jesus was literally shining or not he always embodied God’s glory.  And just as quickly as all of this happened it suddenly disappeared and everything seemed to go back to the way things were -  all except for those three disciples, Peter, James, and John.  Their eyes were now open to a new way of seeing Jesus, a new way of experiencing the ordinary world, a new way of knowing God as ever present and near.   

But let’s remember Peter, James, and John were real people.  Yes, they’d seen God’s glory in Jesus.  They knew it was real.  But still, as Jesus heads down the mountain and begins his journey to the cross, it becomes more and more difficult to hold onto this new vision.  No longer does Jesus wow the crowds with big, bold miracles.  Instead he submits to the people and forces that seek his bodily destruction.  And when the time comes when Jesus is arrested Mark records that all the disciples flee - including Peter, James, and John.  Yet even in the brutal reality of Jesus on the cross, even then, though not apparent to the natural eye, the glory of God - the God who is light and love and life regardless of circumstances - still shone in and through Jesus.  Now it took a while, but eventually the disciples were able to see this glory as well.   

We are invited each and every day to know more fully our God who is, to connect with the Holy One who fills the world with divine light and love that brings life to all situations.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the God who does.  I love when prayers are answered in ways that we can see God’s goodness at work in obvious ways.  But what the Transfiguration offers us is the promise that in all things there is so much more going on than what our human eyes can see - the glory of God is truly everywhere.   

As you may recall, towards the end of The Wizard of Oz Dorothy has a change of heart.  She now sees Kansas with new eyes and she longs to go home, but her chances seem lost.  Lost until Gilda, the Good Witch of the North, appears and explains to Dorothy that she has always had the power to go back home.  “Then why didn’t you tell her?” asks the scarecrow.  “Because,” Gilda answers, “she wouldn’t have believed me.  She had to learn it for herself.”  We, like Dorothy, often must follow our own paths, experience our own journeys in order to gain new vision and learn for ourselves over and over again more deeply and fully each time the reality of the Transfiguration in our own lives  - that no matter what our circumstances look like, God’s light, God’s love, God’s life is always present, always with us.  So take a close, hard look and see the glory of God shining right in front of you in your life today.