Something else is working on me

Transfiguration Sunday

2.15.15

Going to church is not cool.  In 21st century North America, what we do here every Sunday is considered by many to be outdated, superstitious and misguided.  Going to church, believing in God, and trying our best to follow in the way of Jesus–all these things have become increasingly dismissed in our culture.

Pew Researchers recently studied religious opinions and found that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of folks that claim to be “nones”, or religiously unaffiliated.  This category of folks have increased from 4% in the 1950s to 23% in recent years.

Sociologist Vern Bergston studied religious and family life and found that there were high levels of family and youth cohesiveness in families who came from non-religious backgrounds.  These families also possess strong ethical and moral standards.  These morals were based on one important concept: Empathetic Reciprocity, otherwise known as the Golden Rule.  “Do unto others as you would have do unto you.”  Treat others the way you want to be treated.

These non-religious folks, besides having strong ethical and moral standards, are also more likely to believe in climate change, rights for queer persons, and gender equality.

I have to say–I found these studies very discouraging, though not unsurprising.  I am delighted to have so many caring, ethical, non-religious folks in my life.  But I have based my life on the belief that faith and religious communities have a positive impact on people’s lives.  I guess it’s my job to say that, but I do believe it.  I believe that faith and religion impact us in transformative ways.  I believe that it has the ability to transform us, to cause us to act more justly and faithfully, and to love each other more deeply.

So what do we do with the data that tells us that more and more folks are ethical and moral without the church?  Do we believe then that there’s a place for our religious beliefs?  Do we believe that they make us better people?

In our text today, we hear the story of Jesus transfiguration.  Jesus brought three disciples on a walk up the mountain.  Jesus didn’t tell John, James and Peter why they were going, but as they travelled up the mountain something happened to Jesus.  Jesus changed right in front of them.  In addition to becoming dazzling white, Elijah and Moses showed up.  Elijah the prophet, and Moses the leader of the people of Israel.  Elijah and Moses, who lived hundreds and thousands of years before, were on the mountain, shining brightly like Jesus.

This was obviously not a casual hike Jesus was taking with the disciples. This was an abrupt and startling transformation of Jesus right in front of them.  And the disciples did not know what to make of it.

Something happened to Jesus in this story, but something happened to the three disciples too.  They saw Jesus in a new way.  They were transformed by that strange, inexplicable encounter with glowing Jesus and the glowing Elijah and Moses.  That transformation–while not explicit to the text–seems rather obvious to the rest of us.  When we see and experience something spectacular–good or bad–it transforms us. Witnessing the transfiguration transformed their understanding of Jesus.

Something happened to those disciples on the mountain that changed them.  But, it didn’t make them perfect people.  It didn’t make them the most honest or ethical people either.  They were still very human, prone to conflict and deceit, prone to…being human!  But, they were imperfect humans who were changed by what they had seen and experienced.

Which brings me back to the Pew research and the research of Bergston.  It’s impossible to quantify the spiritual in these studies.  Because faith is about more than being ethical, or good or following the golden rule.  Faith is about following Jesus–up mountains sometimes, and down other times, seeing transfiguration, and sometimes experiencing it ourselves.  It’s about taking this journey with others, though it is fraught with questions and doubts.  It’s about learning to love more deeply than just the love of treating others as you want to be treated.

This week, New York Times journalist, David Carr, died.  I didn’t know much about Carr or his work, but I was moved to read an article this week where he described his fraught relationship with religion:

I’m a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of, it’s good to stand with my family. It’s good that I didn’t have to come up with my own creation myth for my children. It’s a wonderful … community. It’s not really where I find God. The accommodation I’ve reached is a very jerry-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in recovery, I’ve been helped without getting into specifics of names, by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. Not only is that not a general human impulse, but it’s not an impulse of mine. And yet, I found myself doing that over and over again. Am I, underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good?

That’s sort of as far as I’ve gotten with the higher-power thing. I’m kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I’ve done terrible things, and yet I’m for the most part able to be a decent person. … I think something else is working on me.

This is what I hear in this quote.  Carr is part of a church because he likes the community, and the creation myths of scripture are easier to tell his children than to make one up.  But there’s something deeper that he’s learned in recovery and in church.  You help those who need it.  It’s not about reciprocity.  It’s not about whether we deserve it or others deserve it.  It goes deeper than the golden rule.  That act of helping–whether it is  deserved it or not–has been transformative for Carr.  And while Carr doesn’t know what it is, he admits, “Something else is working on me.”

In many ways, Carr went to church for many of the reasons we show up on Sunday.  We like the people, the stories seem valuable.  We might also add the singing and the potlucks to our list. But there’s something else to this.  There’s something besides the quantifiable things, like being a better person, or the golden rule.  Something happens in following Jesus.  It changes us.  And we have seen it change others too.

We come here because we believe in peace, but we learn here together that peace isn’t simply an absence of war, it is a struggle toward wholeness for all people and for God’s creation.  We learn that it’s easier said than done–we know that because we constantly fail to live into the peace we believe.

We come here because we believe that we do not walk alone–this journey of discipleship is a group effort.  We learn that discipleship also means hard work, because we will disagree about what it looks like and how to practice it.

We come here because so many of us have been hurt by the church before.  We learn that even in the best of what church has to offer, we hurt each other.  But, hopefully we learn that there is grace here, opportunities to screw up, be human, and make things right.

If church is only about coming together to be better people, we are doing church wrong.  There are 23% of our population doing a pretty good job of being ethical and moral people without religion.  Church is about gathering together to witness to the resurrections and transformation we see in each other’s lives.  It’s about going beyond the ethical and moral niceties, to really try to practice peace, practice justice, and practice love.  Sometimes its about failing tremendously and being given a love and grace we don’t deserve.

Ultimately, it’s about taking risks.  For Anabaptists, following Jesus has always been a risky, dangerous thing.  In the 16th century, our spiritual ancestors were killed because they followed in the way of Jesus.  In the 17th century, the first Mennonites in North America stood up against the slave trade and were ignored, rendered irrelevant. Today, following the the way of Jesus has meant an end to some of our relationships outside of this church.

For those of us who have seen an end to relationships because of who we are and what stands we have taken, it can be difficult and lonely.  But there is another side to that–we are also transformed.  That transformation is not quantifiable, but it is real.  Because we have seen it and experienced it for ourselves.  AMEN.