Have you ever thought how nice it would be to be a bear, a female bear that is?   I mean God must really favor these creatures…  In the first place, if you’re a bear, you get to hibernate.  You do nothing but sleep for six months.  I could handle that.  And before you hibernate you get to stuff yourself with food.  What could be better?    As a female bear, you birth your babies—who are the size of walnuts—while you’re sleeping and then awake to partially grown, really cute and cuddly cubs!    There’s no question I could deal with that. 

On top of that, if you’re a mama bear, everybody knows you mean business.  You simply swat anyone who bothers your cubs, and, if those cubs get out of line, you just swat them, too.   Piece of cake!   To top it off, if you’re a bear, your mate expects you to wake up growling—and he expects that you will have hairy legs and excess body fat.  Yep—I want to be a bear!

 There are times I could get even more serious about wanting to be a bear when I think about the things people do!    Our friend Clair Mitchell shared the results of a magazine’s recent “Dilbert Quotes” contest.   You all know inept Dilbert from the comic strips, and here are some of the finalists from all too real Dilbert-type managers (I am not going to name the companies they represent):

            “This project is so important, we can’t let things that are more             important interfere with it.”

            “What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will             encounter.”

            Quote from the boss:  “Teamwork is a lot of people doing what             say.”

            “We know that communication is a problem, but the company             is not going to discuss it with the employees.”

            “As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the             building using individual security cards.  Pictures will be taken
            next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two             weeks.”

And, here’s kind of the ultimate one, “My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday.  When I told my boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year.  He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday.  He said, ”That would be better for me.”

This leads me to a question for each of us here,  “How were you first killed?” We all have our own stories of put-downs, public embarrassments, experiences of being harshly judged… disrespect—the situations that lead us to ask, “What am I?  Chopped liver?”   Situations that cause us to limit ourselves as feelings of inadequacy surface, causing anxiety and pain, and self-imposed limitations.   I’m reminded of the painting “Man With A Muckrake,” from Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the man looks down, always focusing on his rake and the ground, never to see the wonderful crown that is being offered to him from above, simply because he never looks up!

Maybe we should do a little more self-evaluation.  How much do we truly “look up?”  In the greatest sense, how open are we to truly allowing Jesus, the Christ, to have full reign in our lives?   How open to accepting the grace that He has to offer to us, that it might lift us up, remove us from our pain and cause us to contribute to His kingdom here on earth?  How do we limit ourselves in becoming agents of that grace for God’s people, that they, in turn, might know the same blessing we have received? 

In our scripture today, we have an opportunity to view Jesus as more than simply just part of the furniture and maybe not really for us.  Annie Dillard in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, describes our life as “a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” and today’s scripture, friends, takes us deep into that mystery.    

Can we even imagine what those three disciples—Peter, James and John—those three very ordinary people,  like you and me, people who had been “killed” just like all of us kill each other as we do hurtful or perhaps just not helpful things to each other—can we imagine what they must have thought when Jesus led them to the top of the mountain where he was transformed into this being shining with inner light—a dazzling white--alongside those great prophets Elijah and Moses, who the disciples knew had died so long ago?   Yet men who the disciples knew as great prophets, the highest regarded people known at that time?  Can we just imagine the disciples reaction?  They had never experienced anything like this in their lives before, let alone even considered the possibility of it happening.    In much of what they had done the disciples had failed up until this point, so something needed to happen to change things…     

Inept Peter did not know what to say, in his amazement, so he mumbled something about wanting to build a home for Jesus and the others—but all he really knew was that this moment was so awesome that he wanted it to last and last, and maybe building homes (dwellings) was one way to keep Jesus with them.  Well, how could they possibly understand?    It was like they were suddenly seeing—really seeing—for the first time, but they could only guess at how to interpret it! 

They didn’t  have any concept of Jesus as the Son of God at this point—this was a totally new thought—yet that’s the message that came to them, and that message had only happened to them once before, we are told.   The other time was at Jesus baptism.  “This is my son…”     

There’s an old admonition that says “Never write up a diary on the day itself, it needs longer than that to know what happened.” The disciples saw Jesus transfigured—changed—and were only in total awe, with no idea of how to interpret what they had seen and heard. 

And yet, in the great mystery of it all, they became changed beings themselves because of their experience!  While Jesus had gained a new, if mysterious, dimension for them, they, too, became different in the impact.  They were suddenly seeing a whole new world of possibilities for themselves and their leader.   It was a world of wonder, little understood, but somehow perceptibly marvelous and new.   Socrates had once said, “Wisdom begins in wonder.”   

Does it sound like a miracle?   Is Jesus a miracle?  Walt Whitman once said, “As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles.”  Like the disciples, we, too, can have momentary flashes of understanding, our glimpses of insight, and yet we have all the benefit of these disciples’ experience on that mountain, to enrich our lives. 

The well-known evangelist of the last century, D.L. Moody, shared his story, “I remember the morning on which I came out of my room after I had first trusted Christ.  I thought the old sun shone a good deal brighter than it ever had before…  as I walked out upon Boston Common and heard the birds singing in the trees, I thought they were singing a song to me…  it seemed to me that I was in love with all creation.”    I had a related experience after our oldest son died, almost 10 years ago.   When I would walk out of our house, I would see birds like never before and it seemed they were joined together in a chorus of greeting just for me.   Beautiful flowers popped out of the ground, in the most  unlikely places, but always close to my path, as if specially placed—and in great bunches like bouquets that I had never seen before, and especially on days like Mother’s Day.  Music that had meaning to me came from unlikely places, and even the clouds overhead formed  a perfect white cross in an otherwise clear sky one day, right after I had a thought that we should place a cross by our son’s grave.  The same cloud cross appeared again in the sky that evening as I shared the earlier story with my family at a gathering.   

I was suddenly seeing the world in a new way in my time of deep pain; a message of God’s love and grace came through, and that I was being held in the hands of Jesus.   Full of wonder?  Yes, and wonderful!  But was it the world—or me—that had changed?  I do know I am not the same, because of this gift…   and I do know the disciples were never the same after their experience.  But I also believe that, because of the disciples’ experience, my world has never been the same.   

There’s a great Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy are lying on the grass, looking up at the sky.  Lucy says, “If you use your imagination, you see lots of things in cloud formation.  What do you see, Linus?  “Well,” says Linus, “those clouds up there look like the map of British Honduras in the Caribbean.  That cloud there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor… and that group gives one the impression of the stoning of Stephen—there’s the apostle Paul standing on one side…”  Lucy says, “Mm.  Very good.  And what do you see, Charlie Brown?”  Charlie pauses and then says, ”Well, I was going to say I see a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.” 

 We want to keep Christ human, reachable and touchable… yet we do know that a seed can grow into a tree…  that we can only see the tip of an iceberg… and an elephant can be in the middle of a room and we might only see its toenail.   Our God is calling us to be in relationship with Him, and Christ has come as God’s son that we might know this is possible.  Our world is becoming a changed place as we respond to Christ’s message and experience the reality of the Son of God in our lives.   Our worship service offers the transcendence of the transfiguration, and, each time we share in holy communion, we have an opportunity to experience Christ in our midst.  The invitation is extended to all who would respond.   May we have a vision of a new world, our earth covered with His glory.    Please join me now.