Change

Last Epiphany 2/26/ 2017

     Listen again to the pivotal line in this morning’s collect: “Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness . . . .”
      Changed.  The Buddha taught that it is change and our resistance to it, that is at the heart of all human suffering.  I heard Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once start a dharma talk by describing the process of change we are all undergoing all of the time—aging. Men sometimes lose hair on the top of their heads only to find it sprouting vigorously from their ears as they age. Women tend to gain weight and develop saggy, wrinkled skin in places hard to disguise.  Many years ago, one day as we were driving around town running errands, youngest step-daughter Kirsten---who was about 6 or 7 —looking at me in profile at the steering wheel as we chatted about stuff--suddenly with all good will and love, reached over and grabbed me under the chin and said, “You have such a cute little wattle!”   I think of that and have to agree with Jack Kornfield who ended his bit on aging saying, “Friends, it ain’t pretty!”   We have no choice but to change.
     Today we pray to be changed into his likeness. What can that mean?  What is Jesus’ “likeness?”  If you take all four gospels and shift through looking words or ways in which Jesus refers to himself, the one that comes up most often is as the “Son of Man.”  Which is kind of puzzling until you know where the reference comes from.  Theologian and scripture scholar Walter Wink directs us to the first chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, where Ezekiel struggles to describe his mystical vision of the Chariot-Throne of God.  “Above the dome of their heads there was something like a throne,” says Ezekiel, “in appearance like a sapphire; and seated above the likeness of the throne was something that seemed like a human form . . . I saw something that looked like fire, and there was splendor all around.”
     “Like the bow in a cloud of a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around.  This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of someone speaking. He said to me, “O son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.”
     It’s clear that Ezekiel is trying hard not to exaggerate, stressing that he is doing his best to describe the indescribable, and he qualifies almost every word of his report.  He says, there was something like a throne . . . and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form.”  “And this is the revelation,” writes Wink, “God is HUMAN.” X2
      The conclusion Wink draws is that we have had it wrong all this time thinking that mankind or humanity human.  We aren’t there yet.  We are incomplete. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human.
      He writes, “We see glimpses of our humanness/we can dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like/but we have not yet arrived at true humanness.
Only God is human, and we are made in God’s image and likeness—which is to say, we are all at least capable of becoming human.”  We look to Jesus to show us what it looks like, to live a fully human life.   And we cannot do it alone, it will only happen in community with others who also struggling to become fully human too.  But we aren’t there yet, none of us are.  As one remarkable line of scripture puts it, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when it is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
     This good to think about as we leave the season of revelation and epiphany about the divinity of Christ, and begin Lent which brings us to his humanity
Jesus, Peter, James and John go up the mountain are dazzled by what they see and hear, and realize how very near God is---and for the moment, everything is wonderful—and the instinct is to conserve it.  Don’t change a thing.
     They see Jesus, if only momentarily, just as he is fully human and whole. Peter offers to put up tents/dwellings so they can all just pitch camp right there.  Then the voice of God tells them who Jesus really is, and commands them to listen to him.  And what is the first thing Jesus tells them, that they are commanded by God to do?  They are to “get up and do not be afraid.”  They are to keep on going, stay on the journey—especially when it is difficult or they are struggling with fear, struggling, as Walter Wink puts it, “to be human.”

Mother To Son  by Langston Hughes

 Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.//
It's had tacks in it,
and splinters,
and boards torn up,
and places with no carpet on the floor—
bare.
But all the time
I've been a-climbin' on,
and reaching landings,
and turnin' corners,
and sometimes goin' in the dark//
where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinda hard.
Don't you fall now—
for I'm still goin', honey,
I'm still climbin',
and life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

     This week I’ve run across the stories of two people who refused to quit, to just “set down on the steps” because the transformation into being fully human is hard and often painful. One of them is a guy named Aaron Donne.  He tells a story about himself and how when he was a little boy, he wanted to jump off the roof of his house and he was convinced that if he totally believed he would fly, he would. But if he doubted at all, he would fall.
     Still intrigued with flying, he entered the Air Force Academy and learned how to parachute.
Raised in an Evangelical Christian home, he had the sense the this was God’s calling for him in the battle between good and evil.  He jumped more than a thousand times before he graduated. In his senior year at the academy, he and his roommate came up with an idea for freshman initiation.
To haze them they would play the part of “hippies” who aggressively challenged their military commitment.   This is how Aaron tells it, “For inspiration I wrote to a vocal antiwar professor at Colorado College and asked for his perspective.  One of his views was entirely new to me: What if Jesus really meant what he’d said about forgiveness and expected us to live according to his gospel even if it threatened our comfortable lives?  If we truly loved our enemies, how could we kill them?
     “The experience of arguing this point of view stayed with me over the next few years as I left the academy and went on to train as a pilot.  I began to question how my Christianity fit with my patriotism and the violence inherent in the military.                       By the end of pilot training, I’d become a conscientious objector.  To nearly all my friends and family this was a dishonorable departure from the correct path,” but Aaron concludes, “but to me it was the sort of leap I knew I always wanted to take.”
     The other is an African-American musician, Daryl Davis, who has made a hobby out of befriending members of the Klu Klux Klan---many whom he has come to learn had never known a black person.  His story is told in a film, titled “Accidental Courtesy” and is available for free viewing on PBS Independent Lens until Tuesday.  As a musician, he has played with greats like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry and it is through creating music that black and white musicians would find themselves together.  One day he struck up a conversation with a white guy who told him that he was an officer in the KKK, and they began a conversation.  Davis starts with saying, “How can you hate me if you don’t know me?”  He says the key is just sitting down to talk and listen, if the other is willing.
     At some point his KKK musician friend quit the Klan and his whole family, and to prove it, gave his robes to Davis.  That was the beginning.  At this point, he has over 3 dozen sets of KKK robes, of people who have quit the KKK and many of them now work for equal rights---and is happening one brave and uncomfortble conversation at a time.  I recommend, if you can, to watch the documentary on PBS.  It is one of the best I’ve seen on the struggle to stop dehumanizing those regarded as enemies in order for all to become fully human.
     It is the project of a lifetime.  Let me close with some advice for us from French theologian Teilhard de Chardin on this work of being changed into the likeness of Christ.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God./
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay./
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.”
“Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete."

(from Hearts on Fire)