Three Booths
Last Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
10 February 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 Sung Eucharist
Trinity Parish Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon
Last Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
10 February 2013 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 Sung Eucharist
Trinity Parish Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon
Dear God, let us not accept that judgment, that this is all we are.
Enlighten
our minds, inflame our hearts with the desire to change—
With
the hope and faith that we all can change.
Take
away our hearts of stone and give us
hearts of flesh. Amen.
(Dorothy
Day Prayer for Change, July-August, 1972)
The Hebrew Scripture lesson today is about Moses going to the Holy Mountain and returning with the brightness of God still on him. In today’s Epistle, Paul uses this story about Moses’ glory to argue for flexible legal and liturgical practice within the Church he planted in Corinth. The Gospel is Luke’s telling of how Jesus is transformed and surrounded by glorious brightness before his close disciples’ eyes.
In the Church’s calendar, today is the
last Sunday before Lent, called Transfiguration Sunday on account of the Gospel
Reading. We are vested in white rather than Ordinary Time Green in honor
of the white brightness that shone from Jesus on Mt. Tabor.
The epiphany to Peter and his companions stretches his mind a bit beyond what he is ready to receive. His reaction reveals his misunderstanding. Seeing the two great icons of the Jewish tradition before him alongside Jesus—Moses for the Law and Elijah for the Prophets, he calls Jesus “Rabbi” and says it is a good thing that these figures have come to endorse the authority of Jesus. He suggests that he build three Succoth—temporary shelters or booths—in their honor.
Succoth (tabernacles, or booths) were set up for the duration of the major harvest festival. They stood for the tents of Israel during the 40 years of wandering in the desert while being fed on the Manna, the bread from Heaven, and symbolized human reliance on God, an appropriate sentiment for a harvest festival.
The prophet Zechariah had said that when the Messiah came, all the nations of the earth would go in pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the Succoth Festival and build such Booths as commanded by Moses. God would punish any nation not doing by withholding the rain and sending drought, the punishment that Elijah had famously brought on King Ahab for three years (Zech 14:16-18; Exod 23:16; 34:22; 2 Kings 17).
Seeing Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, Peter wants to build small shrines commemorating the event that showed that Jesus was yet another great figure in the history of the religion of the Jews, perhaps even the Messiah who would force all Gentiles to become Jews by invoking Elijah’s curse of drought. But the narrator comments, “He didn’t know what he was saying. He was scared witless, after all.”
The glory of God shining forth from the
face of Jesus is a revolutionary fact: it challenges Peter's
assumptions. He confuses things, and thinks somehow that Jesus is getting
his authority or endorsement from the appearance of the ancient
prophets.
“Let’s build three
booths.” This is Peter’s way of saying,
“I know what’s going on here. I
understand.” It tames the untamable. Like Homer Simpson being quietly told a
universally known truism he clearly had not gotten, Peter replies by saying, “I
knew that.”
We are creatures of
habit who embrace our coziness with the familiar. Even here in Ashland where we say we like and desire change, we find ourselves grasping at times for straws from
our past experience to categorize and tame the truly revolutionary we
encounter.
Old vs. new,
stability vs. change--this was the theme of a couple of somewhat contradictory sayings
that Jesus gave when asked about changes he had made in the practices of John
the Baptist:
“No
one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull
away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither
do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst;
the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine
into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” (Matthew 9:16-17)
The point is that new
departures require totally new frameworks, and that Jesus’ ministry had to
follow its own rules, not John the Baptist’s.
The Reign of God is like new wine, still fermenting and bubbling. It needs to be put into freshly made
wineskins that are still flexible and expandable rather than in old, used, and
increasingly brittle ones, which tend to crack and burst under the pressure of
the fermentation.
The Reign of God, as
new and uncontrollable as new wine, when it encounters the old is also like a patch. New things must be accommodated to the context
into which they will be placed, or great damage can be caused. An unshrunk cloth used as a patch would tear
up old, previously shrunk clothing the first time the patched garment is
washed. But as Luke’s version of the
parable tells us (5:36), such accommodation cannot be allowed to destroy the
integrity of the new reality: we cannot tear up the new garment in order to
patch up an old, because then both the old and the new are ruined.
The Transfiguration
totally flummoxes Peter, since he is still in “old think.” But in
a way it is an accommodation to his way of viewing things, and the result is
“three booths.”
But God intervenes,
and sets things straight. A light-filled cloud appears and covers
everything. A voice identifies Jesus as the first thing, the real item. ‘This
is my Son, the Beloved; listen to
what he says!’ The cloud
disappears, and all that remains is Jesus
himself. Moses and Elijah are not longer around. Only new wine in new skin remains, no more old
garment in need of a patch.
The transfiguration is a moment of
sudden clarity for the disciples that they don’t fully “get” until after the
resurrection: that the “glory of God is shining in the face of Jesus,” that, “Christ
is the image of God” (2 Cor. 3:18), and that, in the words of John’s Gospel,
“Whoever has seen [Jesus] has seen the Father.”
The Transfiguration
in the story wipes away the conflict between old and new. That is what the 2 Corinthians passage is
about: as we look upon the glory of God
shining in the face of Jesus, we ourselves are transformed, and more able to
accept and embrace the new. He rhetorically
contrasts this with the fading glory on the face of Moses coming down from the
Mountain. But we must not read the 2
Corinthians passage in an anti-Semitic or supercessionist way, in which the
whole, complete, and pure Christian revelation is seen as replacing the
partial, benighted, and wrong-headed Jewish one. Paul wrote this passage as a
Jew, and his contrast is not between Judaism and Christianity, but rather two
competing Jewish visions of Law and Grace.
Paul tops his argument by using a very un-Jewish image. To describe the effect of Christ’s glory on Christians, he uses the pagan myth of metamorphosis, or shape changing. Not found in the Hebrew scriptures, it is a standard in the paganism of Paul’s Gentile: Zeus shifting shapes into swans, or bulls, or young men; the Olympian Gods changing human beings in the myths into constellations, flowers, trees, or even just echoes.
Paul ironically transforms the image of transformation by describing a metamorphosis totally at odds with the sudden, in-all-directions shape-shifting of the Olympian myths. His metamorphosis is gradual but marked transfromation that goes toward a single point—the glory surrounding Jesus, the resurrected Lord's own image. He writes, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
Paul tops his argument by using a very un-Jewish image. To describe the effect of Christ’s glory on Christians, he uses the pagan myth of metamorphosis, or shape changing. Not found in the Hebrew scriptures, it is a standard in the paganism of Paul’s Gentile: Zeus shifting shapes into swans, or bulls, or young men; the Olympian Gods changing human beings in the myths into constellations, flowers, trees, or even just echoes.
Paul ironically transforms the image of transformation by describing a metamorphosis totally at odds with the sudden, in-all-directions shape-shifting of the Olympian myths. His metamorphosis is gradual but marked transfromation that goes toward a single point—the glory surrounding Jesus, the resurrected Lord's own image. He writes, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”
What Paul calls the glory around Jesus
is what today’s Gospel reading is about: This steady, unchanging standard
of brightness is what is revealed momentarily in the story. Jesus’
transfiguration is not a metamorphosis or transformation. It is a brief
glimpse of the true hidden state of affairs.
Peter mistook the revelation of Jesus’
true glory as a fading transitory shifting of appearances—that is what the three booths are about. Peter is an old wineskin here, about to
burst under the pressure of this new and unprecedented experience. But seeing the glory and hearing the voice,
he is transformed. He is
transfigured. And by the time the
resurrection comes, he is ready for the astounding realization of who Jesus
actually was.
Sisters and brothers. We do not like change, we don’t like to be
stretched. Even if we tell ourselves we
do like these things, it is only to the point of where our comfort level
lies. And truly new wine in old
wineskins is decidedly not comfortable.
It is easy to lose heart. It is
easy to think “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But the miracle
and mystery of our faith is this—we can change because God can
change us. We can cast aside old ways of thinking, feeling, and
being. We can forget about the three
booths. It is part of our faith--in the
Apostles’ Creed we affirm that we believe in “the Holy Spirit, the Holy
Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the
resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Belief
in any of these things makes no sense at all if you don’t believe that God is
at work transforming us, and that as a result, we shall be changed.
Such change is sometimes hard, so hard that at times we do not know whether we will be able to bear it. At other times it feels like taking off a heavy winter coat in the summer heat. But no matter how hard or easy, it goes on. And it is not a shape-shifting that turns us into something alien, something that is "not us." When Paul says this turns us into "the image of Christ" he is not saying it removes our individuality. It is a transformation into our true selves, the individual people God intended when He created each of us.
As we sang as we entered today, in Charles Wesley’s words--
Finish then, thy new creation,
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see they great salvation perfectly restored in Thee:
Changed from glory into glory,
'Till in heaven we take our place.
'Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see they great salvation perfectly restored in Thee:
Changed from glory into glory,
'Till in heaven we take our place.
'Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
It is not just in heaven when all of
God's creation is done that this happens. As we are transformed here and
now, quickly or slowly, we begin to cast off the three booths. It makes us look around us in amazement of
the tokens of God's love all about us and then gaze all the more, "lost in
wonder, love, and praise," on the author and pioneer of it all.
As we look upon Christ's glory, may God so work with us all and help us to embrace the changes he is bringing about in us.
In the name of God, Amen.
As we look upon Christ's glory, may God so work with us all and help us to embrace the changes he is bringing about in us.
In the name of God, Amen.
