Today is Transfiguration Sunday.
If you’re not familiar with the church calendar, and all it’s myriad holidays and such, don’t worry; I’ll take a second to explain what that’s all about.
Transfiguration Sunday is like a mini-holiday in the church. It’s the last Sunday before we start settling in for the season of Lent (which I’ll talk more about on Wednesday), and it’s the Sunday on which we read about that part in the story of Jesus where, just for a moment, the apostles Peter, James and John were able to see Jesus in his full, awesome, divine glory. For just a moment, they got to see Jesus turn on the brights, and stand in the fullness of God’s glory in direct conversation with the long-dead prophets Moses and Elijah.
It’s a take-your-breath-away moment of pure, overwhelming, awesomeness.
It’s meant to be a little bit celebratory, in a way. After all, it’s so exceedingly rare that, in our own lives, we get to see divinity completely unobstructed; so rare that we get to see not through a glass darkly, but face-to-face. Those brief moments of revelation, of blunt and unexpected epiphany, where God’s majesty and power are on full display…
…is there a cooler moment in the Christian mythos?
Maybe not.
But, and I gotta be honest with you….it kinda makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, coming face-to-face with God like that.
I mean, can you imagine coming face-to-face with that kind of awesomeness? That kind of perfection?
I mean, I feel EXTREMELY self-conscious just watching any of the male Marvel superheroes when they do their obligatory shirtless scenes, and they’re still at least somewhat human!
(Side note; yeah, I still feel self-conscious watching Fat Thor in Avengers:Endgame. Dude knows what he’s rocking, and still has the confidence to walk around with it all hanging out. That’s intimidating, if you ask me!)
I think of meeting God face-to-face like this, of seeing Christ in the fullness of his divine glory…and I start to get awfully nervous. I start remembering every single person I’ve ever pissed off, every awkward thing I’ve ever said or thought, every impious thought, every stupid flippant remark, every gratuitous f-bomb I’ve ever dropped…I just…can’t put myself in the face of that kind of perfection without realizing how damningly imperfect I am.
And I know, in my heart of hearts, that God loves us all for all our imperfects, but in a moment like that I can’t imagine being able to actually connect with that feeling.
But then I realize that this is kinda how it’s supposed to be. Consider these words from Matthew 5:23-24:
“. 23 So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister[i] has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister,[j] and then come and offer your gift.”
This is a big part of what God asks of us; to wrestle with our imperfection, to reckon with our own failures before we try to place ourselves fully in the presence of God.
Of course, if we’re being honest with ourselves, and I would encourage us to do that pretty much always, we have to admit that owning our own imperfection is something that most of us absolutely HATE doing.
We LOVE making ourselves feel and look powerful, as though we’re the ones in control, the ones in the know. It feels AWESOME to craft for ourselves a social, public image that is unshakable, unassailable; perfect in every way.
We want to be the shining ones, transfigured into the image of God, the example for all to follow.
Which, to be honest, today’s passage is often one of the most misused and abused passages in the whole Bible.
When we read this passage, and when we try to apply it, we almost always imagine ourselves as the person who has been sinned against. We cast ourselves IMMEDIATELY as the victims. And once we have cast ourselves thus, the next thing we notice is that we’re give a procedure for escalating a conflict, ostensibly in search of a resolution.
From there, and you may have noticed this yourself in some of the church interactions you’ve experienced over the years, we tend to kinda…pick and choose…which steps we want to follow, and how we choose to follow them.
In fact, between my own negative experiences with conflict in the church and other similar experiences that people have shared with me, I’ve come to notice a pattern I how we, instinctually, as humans respond to a situation where we feel we have been sinned against.
The first thing, of course, is that we notice that a sin has been committed. Once we’ve made this observation of course, our tendency is to immediately rush to conclusions.
“How could this person do something so terrible!”
“What an evil person this is!”
“What kind of person does something like this?”
As humans, we get immediately wrapped up in our own hurt, our own sense of victimization, and we completely forget that the other person is an equally flawed, equally imperfect human, just as deserving of grace and love as we are.
No, we have identified an opponent. And from there out, every step we’re inclined to take extends from this basic, root assumption:
I am the victim, and they are the enemy.
Having identified our enemy, the next thing we church folk tend to do is to talk to other people about it. Maybe it’s our best friend, or our best friends (plural); maybe it’s our Bible study group, our our friends on the church consistory, council, or leadership team. Whoever it is, our first instinct is often to try to get more people on our side.
“Hey, can you believe this person did this totally evil thing?”
“I never imagined that this person could be so malicious, so cruel as to say and/or do this thing!”
And, before you know it, this has evolved from an interpersonal offense into a full-blown, communal thing.
Next, of course, we tend to be inclined to look for solutions. And…in our victim mindset, fully embracing all the imperfections that our humanity grants us, the solutions we seek tend to be…retributive.
When asked how to fix the problem of whatever sin we feel has been committed against us, our first instinct is to look towards punishment, towards retribution; to vengeance.
“They hurt me, so they need to be hurt back in the same way.”
“There need to be consequences for their behavior!”
“They can’t just get away with this!”
And in our community settings, whether it’s church or something else, that quest for consequences often takes the form of conversations with the leadership of the community. You take it to the consistory or the council, take it to the Elders or the Pastor, coming with a proposal, a suggestion, a request that they do something about this other person.
Of course, this other person, this indistinct someone who has done you such great and terrible wrong…they’re not at these meetings, of course. It just wouldn’t be efficient for them to be present until we’ve all come together to decide what we’re gonna do about their terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad behavior! We have to have decided what the consequences ought to be, before we tell this person what they’re up against, after all.
It’s only…logical.
And when those consequences have been decided, and everyone is in agreement, we’re always surprised when the offending party feels attacked, when they’re finally presented with all this. We read passages like today’s expecting that when we come with the confirmation of witnesses, or even the whole church behind us, that the other party will repent of their evil, and make whatever recompense we demand of them.
It’s only fair…right?
And it’s such a shame, such a sad, disappointing shame, that the other person never seems to see it that way.
So, we treat them like the Gentiles and tax collectors, and get them way the hell as far away from us as possible, severing the relationship and relegating them to that status of “outsider;” “exile” or “pariah.”
Because if they won’t repent of their sin…what can you do?
But by now I hope you’ve started to realize that, while this way of handling confrontation feels distressingly familiar, it is also strikingly different from what we’re given in those red-letter lines from Jesus himself.
Jesus’ way of handling conflict is radically, fundamentally different from what we’re naturally, logically inclined to do.
Where our first step is often to connect with support, to find others to back us up against this person who has sinned against us, Jesus calls to a different approach. Jesus says “ go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” Now, it’s important to recognize that what we hear in English as “go and point out the fault” comes from the Greek word elegchō, which means “by conviction to bring to light; to expose.”
Think about that, for a second. The first step in Jesus’ approach isn’t to seek support or defend, but to bring that imperfection to light, and to expose it.
And take note too that this shedding of light, this exposing…isn’t a public thing. It’s private, one-on-one with the person that you THINK has sinned against you.
No support, no community social pressuring. No triangulation. Nothing but what you feel, and what they feel, in a conversation whose whole purpose is to shed light.
And when we have that honest and open conversation with our sibling in Christ, we often discover that this great and terrible sin we felt had been committed on us…this unforgivable, unbelievable offense…was just an artifact of this other person’s imperfections.
This first step that Jesus gives us is meant to push us to expose our imperfections to each other in honesty and vulnerability, rather than doing what we would do normally, which is to dig ourselves into a pit of our own wounded self-righteousness, fixating on our hurt and our victimization and building up the other as a criminal in our hearts.
When the truth is that the person who offended us is just as much a broken, imperfect, child of God as we are.
Jesus’ methodology escalates from here tough, in the event that the other person doesn’t listen to you. Of course, it’s good to know that “not listened to” in verse 16comes from the word akouō, which doesn’t just mean “to allow information to penetrate your ear holes in the form of words,” but “to hear as listens to a teacher; to allow information in and to learn, and thereby grow.”
Authenticity of the listening experience, is important!
But, if that doesn’t happen we escalate by trying again, with witnesses this time. And again, by bringing it before the whole community.
Of course, you’ve noticed that our term for “not listen” seems to be mutating as things go on. This is because, in a system based on open and honest communication, to get to the point where the whole community is involved in holding one person accountable, that person has to have chosen to deliberately neglect the hurt and pain of the other person.
And at the end of it all, if that person has rebuffed all efforts to have this open, honest, communication; turned away every attempt at reconciliation and forgiveness….well…there isn’t a judiciary attached here. There’s no list of crimes and consequences here, no list of appropriate retribution for given offenses. Verse 17 doesn’t say “…and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, well…*gun cocking sound* GET’EM!”
No!
It says, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You may remember that Gentiles and Tax Collectors were regular recipients of Jesus teachings, healings, and mercies. Jesus spoke the truth to them unashamedly, but did not send them away or condemn them; instead, he focused on them, sometimes to the exclusion of his disciples.
A person never stops having value to us just because we are in conflict with them.
Last week, we talked about the importance of recognizing when our leaders have gone astray; of holding them accountable when they show the works of the flesh, rather than the fruits of the spirit, as the apostle Paul put it. And, if we are to be a community of God’s righteousness, we have to hold our leaders accountable in the same way that we hold each other accountable.
The part that sucks about this is that holding our leaders accountable in this way takes just as much deliberation, just as much work, as it does to practice it in our own personal lives.
It’s easy, when we have highlighted a leader who doesn’t belong, to paint them as an enemy, as a threat. It’s easy to consider them deranged, mentally unwell, or psychotic. It’s easy to paint them as an “other,” and to show them the consequences for their abuse of authority.
It’s much…much harder to approach them with humility and vulnerability, open and honest as Jesus commands us to be here.
But, whether we like it or not, whether it’s easier or not, when our leaders run astray, or when we think they run astray, we don’t convene secret tribunals, rile up the Elders or convene the council to deal with the problem. We don’t meet in secret to force them out, to scheme and make plans without them. We don’t talk to other people about our problems, spread gossip, or anything like that.
We talk to them, directly, looking for them to hear our cries, but also listening to their reasoning as well, so that we can learn from each other, recognize how two well-meaning members of God’s community might have bumped into each other and, recognizing the godly intent in each other, move forward together as servants of Christ. We don’t triangulate, we don’t insist on our offense as the root of retribution, utilizing social pressure to force capitulation from this other person, having decided them to be a villain in our eyes rather than a sibling in Christ.
Accountability is a necessary part of existing as a community working to advance God’s kingdom here on earth. There’s no getting around that.
But can you imagine, for just a moment, the kind of world we could have if our churches, our communities, and even our own social circles, were the sort of places where you could feel safe being authentically broken?
Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your imperfections will be understood and accepted, and that when your imperfections hurt or offend another (as ours always do) that you can expect to be spoken to about it without gossip, without accusation, and without the screaming self-righteousness of weaponized victimhood?
Can you imagine, a community of broken people reconciling with each other constantly, forgiving each other seventy-seven times, a million times, an infinite number of times because we all know, every one of us, that God calls us to journey with each other in ways that are honest, authentic, and real?
What wondrous love that would be!
In the end, that’s why I think that transfiguration Sunday makes me a bit uncomfortable. Sure, the idea of God in all God’s perfect glory sounds cool, but I know I”m not perfect, and dwelling in that comparison is only gonna make me feel terrible.
Let me see God’s love as expressed by God’s community of faithful, loving, terribly imperfect servants.
Let me experience God’s mercy as expressed by a family of the broken, constantly tripping over each other as we stumble forwards in love together.
Let me experience God’s unbounded grace as expressed by a home where I can be my authentic, imperfect self, held accountable to God’s ministry not by a standard of unattainable perfection, but by the undeserved grace of a God who wants me to succeed, who wants us ALL to succeed because our brokenness doesn’t make us unwelcome.
It makes us God’s beloved people.
It makes YOU one of God’s wonderful, unique, and beloved people.
Yeah. Let’s do that instead.
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