Transfiguration B: There Is No Plan
Dear Partner in Preaching,
Oddly enough, there’s a scene from AMC’s record-breaking TV program The Walking Dead that popped into my head when reading this passage. No, no one turns brilliantly white. And there are no offers to build three booths. Rather, it’s a simple exchange between Rick Grimes, the sheriff who leads a band of survivors through a zombie-infested landscape and Herschel Greene, an older man who functions as something of a father-figure and mentor to Rick. They are discussing the horrors of their post-apocalyptic world when Herschel affirms that he still believes there is a plan to all this, that God has something in mind. Rick is, if not downright skeptical, at least unconvinced.
The tie to this week’s reading about the transfiguration? It’s just this: I am regularly amazed at the human capacity to draw meaning from almost any and all circumstances. What drives our desire to find meaning, I think, is that meaning provides stability. It offers us the assurance that the world is intelligible, orderly, and has value. Apart from this, the world seems not simply meaningless or chaotic, but hostile and even uninhabitable. And so we are born “meaning-makers,” always seeking to lay some imaginative order on the various events and circumstances of our lives, often by fitting those events into a larger and meaningful plan.
Sometimes this inclination is incredibly helpful, as when we see critical transitions in our life – whether positive or negative – as an invitation to grasp new possibilities. And so perhaps the ending of a significant relationship opens us up to the possibility of new experiences. And we claim in that difficult transition some level of meaning, something, in other words, that matters and that has moved us forward along life’s journey.
Sometimes, however, this desire to find meaning isn’t helpful, particularly when we impose our meaning on someone else’s circumstances or struggles. Each of us has probably cringed when we heard the story of a parishioner who lost a child only to be told by another parishioner that God needed another angel in the heavenly choir. This kind of meaning-making can feel like an escape or, worse, like making someone who is already suffering pay for another person’s desire for meaning, order, and stability.
All of which brings me to this week’s reading about the Transfiguration. Because if there’s any scene – short of the crucifixion – that defies easy interpretation and serves to rock the world of those who witness it, it’s this one. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain with him, and there he is changed – transfigured – dramatically before their eyes. Mark seems to struggle to find vocabulary to do justice to what happens. Jesus’ clothes, he reports, became dazzling white, adding, “like no one on earth could make them.” It’s as if Mark’s saying, “No, you don’t understand, it’s whiter than white, more dazzling than dazzling, like nothing you’ve ever seen.” And if this isn’t enough, Jesus is then joined by two figures from the past, Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets and, in this sense, the heart and essence of Israel’s history.
What do you do with a moment like this? Peter doesn’t know. But his offer to build booths isn’t quite as odd or misplaced as it may initially seem. For elements of the Jewish tradition associated the “Day of the Lord” – that time when God would draw history to its climax and defeat Israel’s enemies – with the Feast of Booths (see Zech. 16). And so Peter, taking the appearance of Moses and Elijah as the cue for this event, offers to build them booths. Peter, you see, has taken this momentous encounter with God’s prophets and fitted it into a pre-existing narrative and religious framework that helps him make sense of this otherwise inexplicable and somewhat terrifying event.
Yet by doing so he comes perilously close to missing an encounter with God. For just after he stops speaking, almost interrupting him, in fact, a voice from heaven both announces and commands, “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!” Peter wants to fit what is happening into a plan. God invites him instead to experience the wonder and mystery of Jesus.
I wonder how often we do the same. We desperately want an encounter with God – some sense that we are not alone, that there is something More than what we can see and touch – and yet in those very moments that God draws near we find ourselves afraid, unsure, and feeling suddenly very out of control and so we try to domesticate our experience of the Holy by fitting it into a plan.
Why? I suspect that as much as we want an encounter with God, we simultaneously fear the presence of God because we fear being changed, being transformed. What we have, who we are, may not be everything we want, but at least we know it, are used to it, have built a relatively orderly life around it. And so when God comes – perhaps not in a transfiguration as dramatic as Mark describes but in the ordinary hopes, encounters, and tragedies of our everyday life – when God comes and unsettles the orderly lives we’ve constructed we try to put those disruptive experiences back into line by cramming them into a plan.
But maybe, just maybe, there is no plan. Maybe there’s only love. And perhaps our job as preachers and leaders isn’t to fit our experience – let alone everyone else’s – into some kind of “divine plan,” but rather to create space for people to experience the wonder and mystery of God. Not a “safe space” necessarily – how could any experience with the God of the Bible be considered entirely “safe”? – but a space into which we will accompany them, neither building booths to make it neat and tidy nor abandoning them, but standing together in the mystery of God and God’s love. The number one complaint I hear about church is that it’s boring. And I wonder if we’ve unintentionally made it so by substituting religious tradition for spiritual encounter.
Well, Dear Partner, I don’t know if all this will be helpful or not. But it’s all I’ve got just now – just some sense that church should not be the place we look for order and stability but rather the place we meet up to share our stories of wonder and worry and hope and disappointment and stand with each other as the God of Moses and Elijah and Jesus draws near once again to unsettle our plans and meet us in the mystery of God’s love.
I don’t know what kind of sermon this will make. But I do know that I am grateful for your struggle to draw from this passage and day a word of hope, courage, and love. Blessings on your proclamation.
Yours in Christ,
David
Post image: Mosaic of the Transfiguration from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, 565-6, the earliest version of the Eastern iconography that has remained to the present day.
Dear David, I find this particular theme of your teaching (re: PLAN vs Promise) so helpful. As a Vocational Counselor (in the secular labor market) I meet a fair number of Christians (young and old) agonizing over God’s plan for their lives. Sometimes it is expressed as, “I believe everything happens for a reason,” or “God only gives you as much as you can handle.” Thank you for a new phrase “…maybe there is no plan. Maybe there’s only love.” It truly opens new possibilities. Peace, t
I find this very helpful and insightful. Many preaching possibilities here. Thank you!
There’s an excellent book on the subject of God’s plan (or lack thereof) for our individual lives called “Decision Making and the Will of God: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View,” by Garry Friesen. It uses solid biblical teaching to deconstruct the (pseudo-biblical) idea that God has a ‘blueprint’ for our lives that it’s our job to discover. Well worth the read!
“Decision Making and the Will of God: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View” by Garry Friesen is an excellent book on the subject of God’s plan (or lack thereof) for our individual lives. Based on solid biblical teaching, it deconstructs the (pseudo-biblical?) idea that God has a ‘blueprint’ for our lives that it’s our job to discover by hook or crook. Well worth the read for those interested in preaching on this subject.
Thanks David for this excellent commentary. I’m happy to have it early as I plan to use it in our sermon guild and invite members to respond and help shape the sermon. Hopefully, listening to their response will help shape a word for Sunday that speaks in dialogue with the people. John
Thank you for your thoughts. As I think about what you had to say about living with one another in the mist of the mystery and untidiness of it all, I think also about Jesus coming down the mountain with the disciples. He didn’t stay on the mountain but went down with them.
God didn’t desire to have David build a temple and likewise Peter didn’t need to build booths. Jesus walked down the mountain with them, into the messiness of life and into the unplanned plan. We have one another in the Church but we also have Christ.
The best part is…God is with us.
Hi David — could you refer me to someone who could delete a duplicate comment of mine above? Posted one where I didn’t mean to use my full name. Thanks!
A question that may be worth asking our Congregations: What matters more – That God has a plan for you or that God loves you? How does that shape our response to the world? How does that shape our response to God?