Only 60% of You Will Read (or Listen to) this Sermon

Mark 9:2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

It’s the Transfiguration, Church. It’s Mark’s proof that Jesus is truly the Messiah. It’s Jesus, alongside a heavenly Moses and Elijah, in a dazzling display, showing who and what Jesus truly is; it’s God’s voice coming out of the clouds like in the epic Hebrew Bible stories, making it known that Jesus is God’s beloved child. It’s unbelievable, it’s miraculous, and it’s a preview of the Jesus’ coming death and resurrection that will fulfill all the prophesies, that will bring hope and love to a broken world. It’s a lot. It’s a lot of wonder and spectacle that would make anyone’s head spin. And so it makes perfect sense that Jesus’ disciple Peter doesn’t know what to say after witnessing something so awesome; so panicky and fumbling, he exclaims, “This is great! Let’s umm… make some shrines for you guys!” I’m paraphrasing there, but Peter has just seen something so out of this world that he can’t think of what else to do but memorialize this moment, he feels the need to do something that very second.

I think this is one of both the funnier, and more relatable scenes in the Bible. When faced with something we’re totally overwhelmed by, I think we often either feel the need to do something, or we find ourselves unable to do anything. Maybe this doing something is some sort of avoidance—when my husband, for instance is overwhelmed by work, he procrastinates by compulsively cleaning. Some of us just freeze in the moment, paralyzed with awe or fear. Some of us have a compulsive need to “fix” things, or to explain something that may be unexplainable, at least in the moment; some of the external processors among us may feel the need to immediately get something off their chest, to yell or vent about something highly emotional or overwhelming that just happened. We’re all wired differently, and these are all valid reactions to experiencing something overwhelming and remarkable. But valid though they may be, they are not always the best reactions. Often times, the best and hardest thing to do is to sit and contemplate and process what we have just experienced and work out with intention what our next steps might be.

If only we had Jesus physically with us to temper these frantic and frenzied reactions. In the passage we just heard, Jesus presumably stops Peter, James, and John from building the dwellings that Peter suggested, and then tells them to tell no one what they had seen, “until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead.” To put this whole scene in a little more context, it should be said that immediately before this, Jesus tells all his disciples that the Son of Man must be rejected, undergo great suffering, be killed and then raised from the dead. So the disciples already have a lot of process here. They were just told that the person they’ve given up their entire lives for will soon be killed and then resurrected. So then about a week later, three of those disciples witness something so incredibly profound—something truly divine; after which, Jesus sternly tells them not to tell a soul. It’s not entirely clear why Jesus doesn’t want these three trusted friends to tell anyone what they saw, but there are some clues. A big one is that Peter refers to Jesus as “Rabbi.” Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, Rabbi, or teacher, is indeed a title that Jesus holds. But In the passage before this, this I just described, Peter says confidently that Jesus is the Messiah. And so this seems to be a strange demotion, of sorts in Peter’s mind. It’s as if Peter just saw something so incomprehensible that his brain broke, and he’s only thinking of earthly things; as if he can’t take that next step and recognize that what he just witness was indeed divine, was truly something of another world—like when something tragic or unthinkable happens to us, we find ourselves in denial and are looking for ways to understand it as something different than what it actually is.

And so I wonder if Jesus ordered them to tell no one because they weren’t yet able to understand what they saw. They weren’t yet able to accurately articulate that they just witnessed something truly holy. Jesus explains that they will be able to speak about this event once the cycle of his life, suffering, death, and resurrection is complete, but not until then. I imagine telling the story of the transfiguration alone would have led to several problems for Peter, James, and John—perhaps Jesus was protecting them, knowing that people would simply think them crazy, or that knowing that the insecure and threatened powers the be would have imprisoned or even killed them, as they did to John the Baptist, to stop them from spreading the news of the Messiah any further; but it also seems, since Jesus gave them a point in time in which they would be allowed to tell their story, that it was only after all this occurs, that they would really be able to understand what it means to have Jesus as the Messiah. Simply put, they didn’t yet have the whole picture.

This made me think of a statistic I read a while back—that 60% of links to articles shared on social media, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… 60% of those shared articles were never even clicked on by the person who shared them. This means that 60% of people who share links haven’t bothered to read the article—they just saw an outrageous headline, panicked, and, without thinking, clicked and shared the article with their hundreds or thousands of friends and followers, when, for all they know, the article they shared thinking they were spreading accurate and motivating information could be completely lacking actual references, citations, or statistics, it could be riddled with inaccuracies, false claims, lies; for all they know, the article could be about something completely different than a potentially misleading headline claimed. This sharing of links and articles without even trying to understand the information is clearly contributing to the environment of paranoia and distrust that is rampant in our country. But in this world, clicks mean money, so the more outrageous the headline, the more clicks and shares, the more money that goes into CEOs and advertisers’ pockets.

It doesn’t help that the last few years, and especially this past year, the news and information overload has just been too much. It doesn’t help that people yell FAKE NEWS whenever they don’t agree with something, and it doesn’t help that it’s truly hard to tell sometimes whether a story on the internet is a lie, is truth, or if it’s not technically a lie, if the article maybe omitted some stats, some facts that would be everything in a different light. If we don’t know the facts, if we don’t know the roots of an issue, if we don’t have the whole story, we can’t truly understand. If we jump to our own conclusions based on a headline, a brief video, a photo, we aren’t acting in good conscience, we’re not acting with intention. We’re acting on feelings of overwhelm, or anger, or outrage. And while those feelings and be productive catalysts to ultimately doing the right thing, in the end we don’t get anywhere without understanding the circumstances that led to something outrageous or unjust. And we don’t get anywhere without understanding each other.

So when Jesus told his three friends, “tell no on one what you have seen until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead,” it seems to me that Jesus was telling them, don’t go blabbing until you process everything you just saw, in the context in which it is meant to be understood. Surely these three wanted to tell the world about the unbelievable event they had just witnessed. Surely they were full of joy and wonder and adrenaline. But Jesus knew that it wasn’t the right time. Jesus knew that telling the world about what they had seen in that moment was dangerous, and that world was not yet ready.

I wonder about timing and social change, in relation to this passage. I wonder about people who worry about “rocking the boat” too much, people who are afraid of systemic change too fast too soon. I wonder if some people would take the message of this passage as support to theories of incrementalism and “playing it safe.” I’m sure some would, it would be relatively easy to interpret the passage this way. But how I read it, is that it’s never too soon for real change, but we must understand what and why we are fighting—we have to be spreading the Good News by working for radical change and bettering the lives of those who need it most, but we have to be learning and listening along the way. We have to leave as little room as possible for misunderstandings and miscommunications. Charging full speed ahead without understanding, or without helping others to understand is what creates confusion and distrust.

With everything moving so fast these days, it’s so hard to stop to listen and learn. It’s so hard to stop and just be. Like Peter, when we read or experience something that we either don’t understand or that totally overwhelms us with emotion, we jump to the first thing that seems right, without even thinking. Though Peter saw something completely unprecedented, something that required explanation, time, and deep understanding, Peter fell back on the safe  traditions of old, referring to Jesus as a mere Rabbi and offering to build a few shrines to commemorate a moment that was so much bigger than a couple man-made monuments.

And today, as we seem to live through something unprecedented, something historical, something once-in-a-lifetime, just constantly, I wonder why? Why do these things keep happening? Dear God, we need a break. But we won’t get that break until we stop and learn and listen. We won’t get that break until we discover and work to fix the deep roots of systemic inequity in this country. As these exhausting momentous events keep happening, and keep hurting the those who are already hurting the most, instead of learning and realizing that we need a new start, that we need to change the way we see the world, and change the way we see other people, we fall back on old and tired excuses and narratives, and claim there’s nothing to be done, or we slap a band-aid on it and hope and pray it holds. Now right now, for instance, there’s a moratorium on evictions, thank God, but what happens when the moratorium ends? What then happens to those people, those families who have been out of work for months, as thousands and thousands of dollars have compounded to a completely untenable amount of back-rent? That’s band-aid that’s fast losing its grip. We do these things without bothering to understand the whole picture, without bothering to figure out how we got here, or what may come after. We panic and we look for quick fixes and then we move onto the next thing. We see a headline that horrifies us, we share it on Facebook to horrify other people, and then we go on with our lives.

Church, we need to look at the whole picture. We need to figure out how we got here, to a place where millions teeter on the brink of homelessness. We need to figure out how we got to a place that leaves the most vulnerable forgotten and disregarded. This did not happen overnight. This pandemic sped things up, sure, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been growing for decades. And we won’t fix the problem by building monuments or harvesting outrage on social media. Jesus guided his friends to find the right time to spread the word and do the work, so we have to listen for what Jesus is telling us today—to listen to others so we can understand how we got here, and so we can understand where we go from here.

Lent is fast-approaching and what a good time it is to learn and to listen. What a good time it is to have our own mountaintop experiences and to then sit with it, to be. What a good time to find our place in this time, to figure out what our next steps are to make this world what it should be. What a perfect time to read, to explore, communicate, to try to understand. What a perfect time to dig deep and think outside ourselves, and to learn and understand how we got to this place. What a perfect time then, to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. Amen.