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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
This moment altered the lens by which the disciples saw Jesus. Where once they'd seen an ordinary man with some good bible knowledge and extraordinary crowd presence, there was something of the divine now. It was awe inspiring, it was arresting and it was stupefying. They had seen as Karl Barth once wrote, the reality of the other side. Still a few weeks till September and that means we are in summer mode.
Speaker 1:I want to get you to repeat it after me, summer mode. Last Sunday, we began the second of our related summer series. During July, during the first series, we reflected on the spaces and the experiences that have formed our sense of home in the world. You should definitely look up those messages if you happen to miss any of them. In this second series we're in, we're casting our eyes, hearts, our minds outward.
Speaker 1:This is an experiment in naming and honoring the spaces beyond the familiar, the domestic, beyond the internal world that shapes our experience. And each week stems from a one word prompt. And Bobby got things started last week with a consideration of play through the lens of children and youth outside the boundaries of family and household. And for me, the most provocative image he shared was that of Jesus' playful framing of children as the catalysts for the kingdom and world that he was revealing. Where romping and dancing and sensitivity and compassion and how children are fascinated with gross things and how they are dependent on us.
Speaker 1:These things show us who God is, Bobby contended. And it might not be the God of greatness and dominance that we are so prone to seek in the world, but it certainly is a God whose imminent presence presses up against us in bodies and whispers and giggling and awkwardness and the energy of children and youth. They are all precious gifts. We are so fortunate to have many of them in our community here. Today, we are going to take the word awe as our compass through summer space.
Speaker 1:But first, before we jump into that, why don't we take a moment? Pray with me. Yes. Loving God, we settle here. To you, our hearts are open.
Speaker 1:We are seen and known. And we choose to trust that this openness is for our good. That in this moment, we can be as we are. There is no need to pretend. So where we are distracted and worn down, bring us your peace.
Speaker 1:Where we are weighed down and anxious for every anxious heart today, come loving God with gentleness and care. And as we take up ancient story and ancient word, we do encounter you as God of cosmos and also God of microcosm in our lives. You're present to us through the text that we turn to now, but you're also present to us in the texture of a week, maybe we feel we just barely survived. Be light and guide. Now, we pray in the name of Christ, our hope.
Speaker 1:Amen. Alright. We are talking about awe today, About particular, about theophany and epiphany, about the temporary and all that is transformed. And I wanna start with a bit of a thought experiment, if you'll join me. I wanna ask you, when is the last time you were stunned into rapturous silence?
Speaker 1:You were stopped in your tracks. You felt like you were frozen in time. You were captivated by something or someone or some occurrence. Maybe there was some laughter, perhaps there were tears in your eyes, maybe there's goosebumps on your neck. While you're thinking about that, I wanna share an instance from my life.
Speaker 1:Couple of years ago, our family went on this epic road trip, took us through a number of American national parks and then up the West Coast and made lots of memories. But for me, personally, something different happened. The day we rode the shuttle up to the Mariposa Grove Of Sequoias just outside Yosemite. And I had been there before. I actually did some of my undergrad in California just a couple miles away a couple miles, a couple hours away from this location.
Speaker 1:But this day, in taking my family back to a place that was familiar to me, we did our best to avoid the clusters of other tourists and I had what felt like a spiritual experience as we walked through the trees. You can see there in the one photo my family for perspective. It could have been the fact that it was actually quiet there and I knew I was going to Disney in a couple days and I was dreading it. But it was certainly the sense of timelessness that enveloped me like a cloud almost as I placed my hands on trees that had been saplings twenty seven hundred years ago. Centuries before Socrates would write a word in Athens.
Speaker 1:Centuries before Jesus walked in Galilee. And I tried to conceptualize the fact that they had been standing for so long. And then simultaneously, I did this thing where I then realized that they would continue to stand long after I was no longer conscious. And how they had survived just a few weeks before violent forest fires that had swept through that region. And the truth is that I spent most of that day with my neck craned and my imagination stretched.
Speaker 1:And it was stretched to the degree that since then I found and read several books on the emerging science of trees, nerd that I am. But just a few weeks ago, that same stretching got me up early on vacation to find my way up to a cluster of old growth trees near Kokanee Glacier in BC. These are some of the only trees left in this area that's been marked by logging and mining for the last hundred years. And I'm so fascinated by such places in the world. But I'm also drawn to the kind of hallowedness that fills the air under the canopy of trees like this and I had to place to myself so I walked and I sat and I even figured out how to prop up my phone for a selfie and I listened and I let light effortless tears fill my eyes as my leafy siblings pulled my gaze upward and outward.
Speaker 1:And listen, your response to that thought experiment might have a very different locale, a very different sound, very different experience attached to it. You might have been to a transcendent concert recently. You could have watched someone take their first steps or being been with somebody while they took their last breath. You might have had to pull the car over to watch the sunrise. You might have stayed up late to watch the stars fall.
Speaker 1:You could have recently brewed the best pour over of your life you could promise. Perhaps you've learned some new fact that still astounds you. The point is that awe is rarely if ever something that comes to us vicariously. Oh, you you might experience awe with other people or you might experience something that has odd others and in this way, awe is generally available but you and I can't afford to neglect how we gain access to this life giving force through the particulars of our lives. And how how do I know this?
Speaker 1:Well, both the scripture and modern science attest to it. So let's turn first to the scripture, to a familiar story from Mark's gospel. The story goes like this, after six days Jesus took Peter, James, John with him. He led them up to a high mountain where they were all alone and there he was transfigured before them. His clothes got dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.
Speaker 1:And there appeared with them Elijah and Moses. They were talking with Jesus. This is, I'm sure some of you are aware, this is a story about Christ's transfiguration. Three of the gospels we have, they record this moment and in doing so, they include some of the particulars of the Jewish disciples who lived through it and of those who may have been the first to hear about and then memorialize the experience. First, in terms of particulars, it's crucial to realize that only Peter, James and John are present for the moment.
Speaker 1:In episodes right before this one and right after, all the disciples are there, but this awe filled experience, only a select few, Christ's closest friends had tickets. Which is to say that the splendor of the moment and its lasting impact would have been constrained and limited to those three individuals capacity to recall it. And we all know what this is like, right? Trying trying to tell someone how amazing a view was or how that spontaneous encounter felt or how that brush with wonder had changed everything only to find that our language fails and pales in comparison with the memory locked up in the cells and neurons of our body. Right?
Speaker 1:And I think this is why there are several layers of meaning implied in the narrative. These are layers that were added during the years in which this experience was remembered and rehearsed and these are layers that we have access to if we use the particulars of a Jewish imagination and its relationship to the Hebrew scripture. See, there's this obvious allusion to how Jesus and his friends, they were up at a high elevation as they met Elijah and Moses. And Elijah and Moses, of course, were both ancient prophets who had encountered divine presence and voice up on a mountaintop. This is an important signifier given that there are numerous references to theophanies, I.
Speaker 1:E. Visible appearances of the divine. There's lots of these stories in the Hebrew Bible And they include many of the same elements and characteristics. Things like staggering elevation and blinding light and stifling mist. All of these elements and memories and meanings employed in this story, they hint at how Christ's first friends and followers, they strained to see and explain how in his life and ministry, there was a realization of long held expectation going all the way back to the ancients.
Speaker 1:They could they could sense it, they could see it, but only just hints of it or glimpses of it because it was too brilliant and tender a hope to put your finger on. Which sounds so much like what recent studies have uncovered about how we experience awe. How there are so many pathways to how we might see more beauty in the world. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has collated and called these the eight wonders of life. And the eighth one that him and his team have identified, they call it epiphany.
Speaker 1:Those times when we suddenly understand essential truths about life. Which is what I think happened at least in part for these disciples on the mountain that day and in the many moments that they spent thinking about it over the subsequent years, they saw Jesus in light of all their nation had hoped for and they also saw their lives and their futures in the light of who Jesus was and also his vision of how the world could be and in that moment something came into focus. In a way, everything came into focus and I wonder if that doesn't sound familiar, How awe approaches us in those moments when the particulars of our lives bring a holy clarity that we could not have conjured. Like when you realize that your faith has changed, It's grown deeper and it's intensified and yet it's somehow a lighter, gentler force in your life. It's there when you notice that you've been grieving and how grief has altered you over time and it informs this compassion that you offer to others.
Speaker 1:It's there in every hard won realization we come to that we are worthy of love and that there are forms of love worth sacrificing for. It's there in the moments. I think some of us feel this sometimes in our work and in our vocation when we sense that we are right where we're supposed to be. Those moments when, dare we say, theophany and epiphany approach in the details of our lives. Now, the gospel stories of this transfiguration all record version of what happened next.
Speaker 1:So we got Jesus, got Moses, got Elijah, they are center stage and then we read that Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it is so good for us to be here. Let's put up three shelters. One for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah. And then the narrator inserts in parenthesis, Peter didn't know what to say because they were so afraid. There's something comedic or at least there is for me in this.
Speaker 1:Peter is inserting himself into a conversation between celestial characters by stating the obvious. Hey Jesus, great vibe up here. I'm gonna get us a table. That's kind of what he's saying and my favorite part is that Jesus doesn't respond. In fact, it seems that Jesus doesn't even register that Peter said anything and why not?
Speaker 1:Because or why would he have? He's living through his own moment of awe. It's the narrator that informs us that Peter's statement is somehow offline. And he does so with an air that there's a kind of shared understanding. Peter, he never knows what to say.
Speaker 1:And, in this case, I think it's actually quite understandable. The narrator informs us that there was something of this encounter that was terrifying, that was awful. The scholars debate just what it was that Peter was suggesting with his attempt to build three shelters. Is this an allusion to the Jewish notion that paradise itself in the afterlife was located on a mountaintop? And in this light, Peter's interjection is just an expression akin to, this is it.
Speaker 1:We made we made it. We are safe. Alternatively, there are scholars that think that Peter's response is actually an echo of some other ancient cultures in which there was an appearance of the deity and around that appearance, cultic festival practices of that deity would emerge. And in this way, Peter simply suggesting that this moment, this thing they're living through, that it be memorialized. And I think in a way that this is what's happened given that after all Mount Tabor in Northern Israel now houses a Christian shrine because tradition holds that that's where this event took place.
Speaker 1:Whether or not that's true, it's debatable but also the global church still commemorates this event annually in the feast of the transfiguration on August 6. Whatever it is for me, what Peter's nervous self assertion does is name something about our relationship to awe that needs to be highlighted today. It's the fact that such moments and such experiences, they're temporary. Those enrapturing and yet strikingly brief interruptions of the ordinary, the mundane, and the usual. And Peter's not wrong.
Speaker 1:It is so good to be in those moments. I don't think it's wrong to as he does consider, don't you do this? Don't you just wanna stay there a little longer? But what must be said is how even if we are dedicated in our cultivation of awe, in our fostering of receptiveness to it, and in our effort to be wide eyed and curious about the surprising places that awe might show up, Life demands and extracts more of you than awe. Jesus had to come off that mountain so that he could get to Jerusalem.
Speaker 1:And you have to move on from the amazing time with loved ones and the incredible things you're reading and the awe inspiring food and drink you found to get something done. I had to pry myself out of those trees. I was an hour late getting home. I had to come down and somehow get my family's belongings back into the car so that we could come home. And maybe what you and I need from this story and from Peter's initial reaction to the glory of God in Christ's face and his robe is to let it open the summer space in us for the awe that is fleeting, that is fading, that is finite.
Speaker 1:Isn't that what gives awe? It's a resting piercing character in our lives. Isn't that what makes summer glow? The fact that we know it passes into cooler more demanding days. See, I think this is what the poet Christian Wyman means for us to grasp when he contends that moments of awe can bring us an intense awareness.
Speaker 1:That right here in the incorrigibly plural swirl of life, there abides some singularity of being, however fleeting its presence. And it's fleeting alright, as it was for Peter, James, and John. Mark tells us that then this cloud appeared, they covered all of them and a voice came from that cloud and said this is my son speaking of Jesus whom I love, listen to him. And suddenly, they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. There's wonder, there's thrill, there's even a little trepidation, and then nothing.
Speaker 1:Just Jesus as they had always known him. Or was he? I think that's the point. Many theologians contend this, of course, but there is an assertion in this scene. See up to this point in Mark's gospel, the author has described Jesus as a servant, as a humble carpenter teacher, as the mythical son of man that had been predicted in Hebrew prophecy.
Speaker 1:We see him tell his followers in the preceding verses that he is going to have to die and he assures them that his mission requires that he is going to confront the systems and powers of his day and then bear their violent response And while Peter may have just verses, just days before in the narrative, confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, it's entirely plausible that the imagination of Christ's closest friends was still confined to the material. They still held out hope that Rome would be removed. They still had this sense that Jesus' words and his message were those of an ethical and a moral savant. And all of that disappeared in the light of this trans figuring and awe filled moment. Like, was it Jesus's face?
Speaker 1:Was it the impeccably laundered and bleached robes that Mark emphasizes? Was it just the fact that they were up on top of a mountain and that mist was passing over them? Was it the appearance of the faces of sages from centuries long past? Whatever it was. This moment altered the lens by which the disciples saw Jesus.
Speaker 1:Where once they'd seen an ordinary man with some good bible knowledge and extraordinary crowd presence, a local guy, one of their own who had a big vision, there was something of the divine now. It was awe inspiring, it was arresting and it was stupefying. They had seen as Karl Barth once wrote, the reality of the other side. Which is to say that to some degree, awe is what happens when we undergo a kind of realization. When we see clearly.
Speaker 1:When we see both beyond and yet somehow more concretely in the world. And that's something that scientists have found is happening all over the world when people report on their evidence or the experience of awe. I've already mentioned Dacher Keltner and his studies that have been identifying the ways that we experience awe. It happens when we're in groups like this, or when we're in the trees like I was, When we hear good music, when we see startling landscape, when we are awed by architecture, when we participate in a ritual or we meditate, when we witness new life or we watch life pass. But do you wanna know what people in Keltner's research name most frequently as awe inspiring?
Speaker 1:They describe moral beauty or put simply, ordinary people doing amazing things. When asked to describe an instance when they had been in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends their current understanding of the world, People who speak 20 different languages answered most often that it was exceptional virtue, character, and ability in others that odd them. And that strikes me as a clarifying way to read this story. Could it be that the reason this experience ended up being remembered by Peter, James and John and then ultimately incorporated into sacred text and tradition is because the disciples that day seemed to have been struck by the magnitude of what Jesus was trying to do in the face of such immeasurable odds. He was just a guy they knew.
Speaker 1:This person they talked with and laughed with and eaten with and served with and could it be that it was in this moment that they realized the magnitude of what he was becoming. The Greek term metamorphe used to describe Jesus here in Mark nine hints as it hints at this. That verb just means literally to be between forms or to be moving through forms. Jesus literally was appearing in the world. Divinity was being revealed and the disciples couldn't look away.
Speaker 1:And you and I know a measure of this I think, to be struck and dumbfounded by someone's actions in the world, good or bad. To see their charity toward others, to encounter their humor. It happens all the time. When you watch someone you love live with illness and pain and exude grace and tenacity and dignity. Or when you watch a friend take an opportunity that you know terrifies them but it's one that they feel really is gonna define who they want to be.
Speaker 1:It's there when you watch your children against all odds choose the right thing or or attempt something new and adventurous. And it's there when you hear an incredible story in a podcast or when you're reading a biography and you have to stop and you have to register how beyond and how vast and how startling human effort is. It's in these moments what we're seeing right there, what we're sensing is the transformation, the transfiguration of human life itself. Little glimpses of the other divinely lit side that resides in every single one of us. Glimpses that will guide you down a path on which you will find that to be Christian in any quantifiable measurable sense is to be in awe of and curious about any God that could show up looking like Jesus and simultaneously to be struck by how that same brilliance and humility, that same divinely daring ingenuity keeps showing up in the world right out there in and through those around us.
Speaker 1:So, I'm gonna ask you again, when was the last time you were stunned into rapturous silence? You were stopped in your tracks, You felt like you were frozen in time, captivated by some things, some event, someone. I pray that you'll go out this week into every off field summer space and recognize that transfiguration is still happening. Let's pray. Loving God, here we are in the particulars of our lives.
Speaker 1:Where we are invited to believe the witness of the gospel authors, to believe what scientists contend is happening all around us, That the whole world is full of glory. Glory that astounds, that hushes, that emboldens, that comforts. And maybe maybe we feel like we can sense that a little bit. Maybe we feel like we are a step removed. And from wherever we are, we take a moment right now and we tune our senses, our eyes, our ears, our hands, our hearts all with this expectation, tender though it might be that your goodness sustains and renews all things and with a hope that it would pass through us and fill us with wonder.
Speaker 1:Wonder that will pull us out deeper and further and somehow yet closer to who you are. These things we pray in the name of Christ who gives us hope for all that can be transformed. Amen.
Speaker 2:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 2:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.