Sermon, Transfiguration Sunday, "Work in the valley"

 

C Transfiguration Pilg 2022

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

February 27, 2022

 

           The transfiguration of Jesus is a weird story, right?  Even with the miraculous nature of the gospels, Jesus is just hanging out with three of his disciples . . . and praying . . . and all of a sudden--he is different.  The same . . . yet different.  The author of Luke says his clothes became “dazzling”—not unlike the clothes of the angel upon the Resurrection of Christ.  Jesus was a sensation, appearing this way right along with the Jewish icons Moses and Elijah.  Some scholars think the transfiguration of Jesus belongs grouped with the resurrection appearances and that, somehow, it got folded back into the middle of the gospels.

But there too, in the resurrected body, Jesus’s essential values don’t change, his mission doesn’t change.  Still, in the transfiguration, Jesus is decidedly different, unique, maybe even hard to put in a box.

           That’s the first thing the disciples want to do, right?  Peter wants to build three shrines for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah.  Let’s try to capture this mountaintop moment.  And Jesus will have none of it.  He comes right out of the mountaintop moment to exorcise a demon from a child, get the disciples ready for the difficult journey to Jerusalem, teach radical discipleship, and then send the disciples out to local communities to teach and heal.  He wants to use the energy of the mountaintop moment to do the necessary work in the valley.

           Transfiguration Sunday should be about using some of those mountaintop experiences, where we see something different and dazzling, as energy for work in the valley.  I know in some of the churches I served, we would use Transfiguration Sunday as a way to talk about the necessary conversation many faith communities need to have around gender and sexuality.  For many churches in the United Church of Christ, they celebrate the transformative moment, that mountaintop moment, when they announce to the world that they are Open and Affirming.  And then they stop there.  They get to the mountaintop.  And Jesus is urging these churches to do work in the valley.  And the church is back there somewhere trying to build shrines to the glory of their romantic past.  We even had such discussions recently in the Southwest Association Clergy Group.  How do we take what it means to be Open and Affirming to the everyday work in the valley.

           I remember how much I was challenged to do my work in the valley on gender and sexuality issues in, of all places, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  Church of the Open Arms in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, began as a United Methodist Church with a United Methodist Church pastor.  When their pastor was brought up on charges for officiating at gay and lesbian weddings, the pastor and church had a decision to make.  Should they stay and fight in a system that required them to pay all of the expenses for the trial?  Or should they find a place elsewhere? 

           Their pastor left for the United Church of Christ.  And the congregation followed. 

I was honored to be asked as a speaker for their work on inclusive and expansive language.  It was a mountaintop experience for me.  I remember being embraced by all these people while I was going through a gut-wrenching divorce, my wife at the time a Conference Minister.  They offered their church and their home as sanctuary for me, sympathized with my pain, and let me know that I, as their visitor, was loved.

           I did less teaching the weekend I was there and more learning, and, hopefully, growing.  Their pastor helped me to understand gender and sexuality as a spectrum rather than as two distinct, binary poles.  Intellectually, I was excited by these new learnings.  I was transformed. 

The real test in the valley came the next day when we greeted members of the congregation.  And a person I can only describe as looking like Abe Vigoda, the actor who played Fish on Barney Miller, came up to me and shook my hand.  She had on high heels and a long, blond wig.  She looked me directly in the eye, thanked me for my presentation, and waited to see if I would maintain eye contact.  I’m not sure that I did. 

           I think there was a hope that I might be different.  I doubt that I was.  Could I look beyond the trappings to see the image of God found in this person?

           It’s hard for me.  Questions about sexuality have haunted me for what feels like my whole life.  Though I learn, I never feel like I arrive.  And my daughter and other young adults are working with me to understand the diversity of gender so much better. Will I get it sometime down the road?  I doubt it.  But as I learn, I believe I am opening up to divine and dazzling gifts I would have never known before.

           On the island in the harbor of Bombay is a cave one enters from a bright sky.  Moving into the darkness, you lose your sight as your eyes adjust.  But you keep on walking and encounter this huge piece of art from around the 8^th Century—19 feet high and 19 feet across.  It is a gigantic mask.  From straight on, one sees only the central head, a head or a mask.

           When looking straight on, one cannot tell whether the mask is male or female or both male and female.  It is the mask of God, the mask of eternity.  Through this mask, we are to learn that eternity is to be experienced as radiance.

           Now in turning to the left, one other figure emerges.  And slightly to the right another figure emerges.  This slight turn to the left or right moves the onlooker out of the perspective of transcendence to the field of opposites.  One mask is clearly made to represent the female.  The turn in the other direction is clearly made to represent the male.  Moving out of the field of transcendence takes us out of our eternal unity to differences that too often are found to be against one another:  male and female, light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong.[1]

           In a movie produced and promoted by the United Church of Christ about the life and struggles of a transgendered young man, "Call Me Malcolm," Pastor Emily relates her Biblical understanding of what it means to be transgendered.  She recalls the first creation story to talk about humanity being created both male and female, in the image of God.  "So," she summarizes, "if you are looking for someone who incarnates the most clear and whole vision of who God, well-based on our Scriptural tradition, that it has to be a transgendered person who has experienced both male and female.  That is the most whole vision of the sacred that we are going to get."2

           Indeed, while the second story of creation in Genesis 2 has God creating Adam and Eve.  In Genesis, chapter 1, Adam alone is created as “male and female.”  Adam is created in the image of God, an androgyne.  Found both in the Jewish and Christian mythology is this understanding that Eden, Paradise, would only return when gender was transcended or disappeared.  That culminates in the earliest baptismal formula of the church from Paul’s letter to the political associations in Galatia:  “In Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female.”  In other words, the newly baptized person returns to the primordial perfection found in the first creation story.[3]

           It is one of the reasons we use inclusive and expansive language for the Divine.  We say that God is both this and that.  We say that God transcends both this and that.  In that understanding, we recognize the spectrum, the diversity through which God operates in the world in our sexuality and gender.

           In the passage from 2 Corinthians today, Paul, a Jew, is speaking to other Jews who use law and order to punish rather than enliven.  Paul is really speaking to any group of people who have so long used any law, rule, idea, or standard that has calcified over time such that it is now used as a weapon against your enemies.  Biblical scholar, Stephen J. Patterson, writes about this passage, sympathizing with Paul.  “Reading the Bible can harden your mind.  Sad but true, Paul, sad but true.”[4]  In each age, as Paul did, we are trying to figure out what new thing God is doing, how we break open our hardened minds and hearts.

           In the passage, Christ removes the veil so that everyone, not just Christ, might know themselves as reflecting, mirroring the image of God.  We may present as male or female but two somethings deeper there is the image of God that is created both male and female.

           Native American theology contemplates something similar with a recognition that there are more than two genders.  “Two Spirit” people became a term coined to united the LGBTQ+ Native community.  “Many two spirit, historically, were keepers of traditions, tellers of the stories of creation, and healers.  Many of the great visionaries, dreamers, shamans, or medicine givers were two-spirit people.”[5]

           Among the Crow, Woman Jim was not only known as a prolific warrior in the 1870s, but Woman Jim also made large tipis and leather goods intricately decorated with quill and beadwork.[6]

           One of my very best friends in Billings, Montana, was Ann Hanson, the person who had been the Minister for Sexuality and Justice in the United Church of Christ in Cleveland for several years.  But Billings was home for her.  She had spent so much time in Cleveland that she became a huge LeBron James fan but when she retired she came home to Billings where I was blessed to meet and know her.  And that woman loved to cuss.  And laugh.  Both requirements for someone I call friend.  Oh, she loved to cause trouble and push edges.

           Her kids would have her take the grandkids for a weekend to teach them sexual health.  While they were too embarrassed or nervous to cover these topics, they knew Grandma Ann might help them to better accept themselves, as not either/or but as gloriously divine wherever they were on the spectrum.  They could then also accept others with the matter-of-fact way she engaged them in discussions about sexuality.

           I remember going to the seminar she taught across town about the newly-minted module for sexuality and older adults.  The room was packed.  People could not stop asking questions—some were clearly out of curiosity, some others felt like questions that were about hanging on for dear life, hoping that God saw them too. 

           She loved being an educator for the award-winning United Church of Christ Our Whole Lives curriculum.  This curriculum not only helps children, young people, their parents, and now older adults to become aware of how God may be moving in ways that transcend gender and sexuality, but also in ways that reflect God’s profound love for our sexual and gender diversity.  I am sure Ann saved so many lives.  She saved lives of someone struggling at school, in their workplace, or in their wider community.  Such welcome could bring incredible gifts to the fore that may very well save us.  Ann Hanson knew how to work in the valley.

           May that salvation become wider and broader so that all people created in the image of God, male and female, know love and justice.  And be seen for who they really are—on the mountaintop or when we come down to do our necessary work in the valley.  Amen. 

---

[1] “Ep 1:  Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth—‘The Message of the Myth’ in Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,” Moyers and Company, May 30, 1988.  http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-2-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-the-message-of-the-myth/.

[2] “Call Me Malcolm,” United Church of Christ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh4Pv10IFyc.

[3] Stephen J. Patterson, “it’s Trans Sunday,” http://www.stephenpatterson.org/posts/2015/2/13/its-trans-sunday: Galatians 3:26-28.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Zachary Pullin, “Two Spirit:  The Story of a Movement Unfolds,” Native Peoples Magazine, May-June 2014, https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/two-spirit-the-story-of-a-movement-unfolds/

[6] Ibid.

A Transfiguration/Our Whole Lives, "Our Whole Lives for Older Adult," February 23, 2020

A Transfiguration/Our Whole Lives BFC 2020

Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-9

February 23, 2020

          I am not sure why, but as public schools in my neck of the woods tried to teach some basic sexual education, they tried to do so in what was called “Health” class and use immature P.E. teachers or one of the high school football coaches.  This did not seem reasonable or rational to me as my classmates readily left Coach Vogelsang or P.E. teacher Paul Kleeman disconcerted, faces turning red, by asking the most absurd or embarrassing questions.   Our “health” teachers would try to honestly answer the questions, readily show their frustration, only to shortly give up and distribute the word search puzzle they had hoped to pass out at the end of class.  My dad was tasked with the birds and the bees speech, and though Al Mulberry tried, we got the basics followed by a quick, “Any questions?  Ok.  Let mom and me know if you think of anything.”  My father, the P.E. teacher, and the football coach each communicated that they wanted my sexual education to be over as quickly as possible, please be over, please no questions, and that this is the most embarrassing topic you could ever make me teach you. 

          I remember in 6^th grade the junior high girls all being brought together in a classroom that excluded every 6^th grade guy.  I had no idea what was going on there but my friend, David Singley, looked at me and said, “Well, you know what they’re getting together to talk about!”  So as to not look stupid, I said, with a dumb smile on my face, “Yeah, yep.”  In my head I was screaming, “No, what are they getting together to talk about and why are we being excluded?”  I was destined to be a P.E. teacher or a high school football coach teaching the next round of health classes. 

          My sexual education happened in weird and twisting ways, taught shame all too well by a wider church narrative that also couldn’t talk about sex but didn’t even want me thinking about it. 

I vowed that the same would not be true for my kids as they grew up. When Abe started dating Kathryn in high school, I knew that Kathryn was being raised by her strict Catholic grandmother.  I made the fateful decision to not only sit down with Abe but also with Kathryn.  This began with Abe saying, “Dad, what are you doing?  Dad, please stop.  Dad, this is not a good time.  Dad, this is crazy, why are you doing this?”  Abe could not believe I would deliver all of this good information now, with his girlfriend present.  See, I had dreams that Abe might be uncomfortable in the moment but might later say to me, “Thank you, father.  I had no idea how useful and helpful the information you shared might become.”  No.  Whenever a stray conversation references that day, Abe will say something like, “I have no idea what you were doing.”  Because I have no idea about balance when it comes to these things, I have no idea whether I did a good thing or just an uncomfortable thing. 

In both the Scriptural stories for today, featuring Moses and Jesus on the mountaintop, there are times when their bodies are wholly changed by an experience with the Divine.  But they then must come down from the mountain to live life in the real world.  And that’s where most of us are, trying to figure out these bodies, our own sexuality, living in the real world.  We may have moments of intense sexual bliss or pleasure, moments of divine transfiguration, but many of us are fumbling through private embarrassment about how we might express ourselves sexually when we come down from the mountain.  Quite frankly, I am always more surprised by the people who exhibit a sexual confidence. 

A few weeks ago I attended the introduction to the Our Whole Lives Older Adult sexuality curriculum at Mayflower Congregational facilitated by Kim Harris and Ann Hanson.  I sat next to a nearly 90 year-old woman who, in a mutual exchange of sharing sexual histories, related to me the glories of masturbation.  I remember thinking, in panic, “Where are the exits?  Is there any way I can get out of here?  Should I really be hearing this?”  I was, well, I was surprised and learned more about her sexual joy and delight than I ever imagined I would from someone I mistakenly did not recognize as an incredible sexual human being. 

First, let me say, that I was a little miffed that “Older Adult” is a title referencing all adults 55 and older.  When I shared my shock with Ann Hanson, she, quite expectedly, told me to “Deal with it.”  I think, in so many words, Ann Hanson has rightfully told me to grow up more than anyone else in my life.

The Older Adult version of Our Whole Lives is a necessary and new addition to the already award-winning curriculum that teaches and asks participants to reflect on healthy sexuality.  Kim and Ann were putting it before us in hope that we all would recognize that although our sexual self may not be all of our life, our sexual self touches every part of our life.  The body image portions of Our Whole Lives taught to children now comes full circle as we begin to experience menopause, incontinence, and prostate cancer.  How do we understand the changes and many times the failings in our older adult bodies in light of a loving God who wants to share in our joy and grief?

Kim shared the reflection of a woman lying in bed, as the sun cascaded into her bedroom, as he softly licked her nipple, his mouth closing around it, bringing her a sense of contentment and pleasure.  As Kim went on with the reflection, we realized we were not hearing the story of two sexual partners but of a child nursing at his mother’s breast.  It was a reminder that our sexual selves begin at an early age and with the most basic and mundane life experiences.  But our sexual selves continue on into older adulthood.

Karen and Ann led us through a variety of learning experiences and one was to go through a sexual history meditation, asking ourselves where and when we learned about sexuality and gender, what were the tapes we had regularly playing in our heads, and to think and reflect on who, for good and ill, have been  our sexual teachers throughout our lives.[1]  Who taught us about body image?  When did we first learn about what our gender was and what it meant?  Who has taught us, most profoundly, about who we are as a sexual being? 

Who regularly tells you that you are beautiful?  Handsome?  Attractive?  And do you hear God calling you those things?  Telling you in your sleep that you are beautiful, handsome, and attractive?  Shining in your sleep?  Letting you know that you have been crafted by Creator as, “Mmmmm, you are fearfully and wonderfully made?”

Throughout our time together, we learned just how much is changing in the language of gender and sexuality.  And for the first time in a long time, I heard people asking real questions, like they really wanted to know questions, about their own sexuality and gender.  In particular, guys who I would have always imagined would want to appear “in the know” or uncomfortable asking questions, asked questions with a little bit of a giggle so as not to reveal how vulnerable they felt.  And Ann and Kim would answer with what they knew but would sometimes say they did not know or ask what we thought.  I was grateful for an atmosphere that brought forward questions, that heard every question as important, and saw everyone as a resource for answers.  In the short morning and afternoon session, I believe all of us walked away with a powerful understanding of what it might be like to have a great resource like Our Whole Lives, great teachers like Kim and Ann, and a hunger all of us had on that day to be more reflective, more responsible, and more faithful about what it means to be healthy sexually. 

Nina, Lisa, and I have had long discussions about how we invite parents, children, and youth to the deep commitment required of Our Whole Lives.  I hope you will seek out extended family and friends to commit to it when it will be offered in the next year so that children and youth recognize their own boundaries, are able to make sexual choices in age-appropriate, healthy, and mature ways, and are able to say “yes” at the appropriate times as well as saying “no” for their own protection and well-being, that they learn to love their own bodies and how to identify themselves in the wider world.  But now, also, I hope older adults (ahem), like me, will have the opportunity to learn from this new curriculum, that also requires a great commitment, just how powerful it is to see ourselves as sexual beings worthy of joy, delight, pleasure, and health as we walk in the faithful path Creator is walking with us.  Wouldn’t it be a wonderful, fabulous thing to not only have sexual mountaintop experiences at each age but also learn what it means to come down from the mountain and live sexually healthy lives in the everyday?  That opportunity will be before us.  And I pray all of us will take advantage of it as Our Whole Lives is offered for every age group. 

P.E. teachers and football coaches and clumsy fathers like me don’t always learn the necessary training or the best information to pass along to their students.  But the extensive training done for Our Whole Lives Facilitators promises to transform into a more joyful and healthy people.  May it be so.  Amen. 

---

[1] I learned that a treasured word of mine, “boundary,” can actually be a trigger word for the homeless population and this expanded my understanding of language and the need for me to evolve.