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Showing posts with label robins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robins. Show all posts

Saturday, February 24, 2018

The Tranfiguration: 2nd Sunday of Lent



“…when they looked around, they saw no
one with them anymore but only Jesus.”
--Mark 9:8

Outside my window, the branches of the oak in our front yard are being transfigured –metamorphosing—from stark leafless twiggy things, seemingly lifeless, icons of loss and sorrow, into budding branches almost literally bursting with life.  Images of transfiguration are all around us. But often we either don’t see them or don’t know what to make of them.  We rush on to our next appointment unwilling to stop and stare and really see what is right before our eyes.  The blessing that rises before us.
Looking at the readings for this Sunday, I quickly read the Old Testament passage –Abraham and Isaac and the sacrifice—and rushed past the psalm and the reading from Romans to look at the Gospel. Eager to skip over the side dishes and get to the main course, I guess.  And when I saw that the reading from Mark was the story of the transfiguration, I thought: Oh, that’s why we have the Abraham story! Perfect! Yes. Both stories have mountains and both involve beloved sons and both involve some kind of change or revelation. I got that. Easy. I wonder what’s next week?
I was treating these familiar readings with too much familiarity. I was treating them the way one might treat an old stain on the wall, or your 851st bowl of oatmeal, or your wife’s hair… I wasn’t really looking at it, wasn’t really noticing it. I wasn’t really paying attention. Yeah, it’s fine. Looks nice. Tastes like it always does… I guess.  How would I know? Unless I take the time to actually taste it, notice it, appreciate it.
When I teach poetry (this is definitely an aside) I like to share with students a piece of historical prose written by William Carlos Williams as a kind of introduction. The piece is called something like “The American Background,” and I first came upon it in Williams’s Selected Essays (pg. 134).  It is a brief observation (less than a page) about the early American settlers from England and their misidentification of a bird. Williams tells us that these early settlers saw a bird that looked to them like something they remembered from their homeland and they called the bird a robin. But (according to Williams) what they were looking at was a thrush –a larger bird, a bird of wilder song and that even landed differently. It was a totally different bird with only similar coloring.  But instead of looking at it and seeing that this was something new, something they had never experienced before –they fell back on their past, retreated to what they already knew and missed the actual: Nothing new here. Just a robin –seen one, seen ‘em all.  Let’s go find some gold.
Instead of seeing the truth perched on the branch before us, how often do we rush past not noticing the gift God has set before us? How often do we look at a thrush, but see only what we think is a robin –because that’s what we are expecting to see?  How often do we read a familiar story and hear only what we expect to hear –never really what is on the page, never letting ourselves hear the story fresh, engage it anew?
Beginning to wonder if maybe I’d missed something by seeing only the familiar, I went back to look at the psalm (and possibly I was feeling sorry for it –who pays attention to the psalms?).  I wondered what it might have to say about the theme of transfiguration.
I was first struck by the words:

“I believed, even when I said:
I am greatly afflicted.
Precious in the eyes of the Lord
Is the death of His faithful ones.” (116:10)

And instead of trying to make that mean something about the Gospel or the story of Abraham, I simply heard it and felt the words begin to take root in my soul. Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His faithful ones… In the midst of a culture that measures success and the value of a life by the amount of comfort and pleasure experienced, and by the amount of pain and discomfort avoided it is very troubling to hear of such preciousness. One might even ask: If the faithful one is so precious to God, why doesn’t God save him?
            Next the psalm speaks of being God’s servant, of being set free by God (“you have loosed my bonds…”). And then the psalmist sings:

“To You I will offer sacrifice of thanksgiving,
I will call upon the name of the Lord…” (cf. 116:16-17)

And I began to contemplate –what does this mean to me? How is God speaking something new to me through these ancient words?  And it was in that time of contemplation that I began to understand being transfigured doesn’t just mean a change of appearance.  When Jesus is transfigured, Peter, James & John see Him in a new way. But it isn’t just that Jesus has changed in appearance. In this story, in that moment, the disciples get a glimpse of the Truth… they have the mystical experience of seeing Christ in the fullness of His being.  But Jesus isn’t the only one who is transfigured on that mountain. Peter, James & John come down the mountain changed, metamorphosed by the experience. And then I heard myself asking: What about Abraham? Who is transfigured in that story? On the one hand there is Abraham who is challenged to offer his beloved son as a sacrifice, and in his willingness to do whatever God demands of him, he is transformed from a man who follows God in order to receive a reward (wealth, land, generations of children, and a lasting memory) into a man who “fears the Lord” [not afraid the way someone might be afraid of ghosts or the dark or nuns with yardsticks, but more like awe or a sense of being devoted to God] (cf. Gen 22:12).   Okay, so on one level there is a change in Abraham’s relationship with God, but there is something else; something that reminds me of the changed disciples coming down from the mountain with Jesus.  They now understand Jesus in a new way. They have heard God’s voice from a cloud proclaim “This is My beloved son. Listen to Him.” (Mk 9:7)
Abraham goes up a mountain following a God capable of demanding human sacrifice, but he comes down serving a God who refuses such a sacrifice.  Abraham’s very understanding of God has been transformed –transfigured. God has revealed something new about Himself to Abraham and be so doing He has loosed the bonds of superstition and set Abraham free.  But this freedom is not a freedom to lick the earth, to seek comfort and pleasure wherever you will. It is a freedom to serve God, a freedom to submit to God’s gift of the law. A freedom to offer our brokenness and our sin, our death to our longings and desires, our selfishness, as the sacrifice we place upon the alter, our living sacrifice offered in Thanksgiving.
Open your Bible, climb the mountain (go out in your front yard) and offer God the sacrifice of your attention. Give yourself to God with a thankful heart. And don’t be afraid. Just open your eyes and let yourself see. Really see. And don’t be surprised if what you see is something you have never noticed before; you may just find yourself transfigured.