by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, February, 2002
Monthly Reflections from The Pacific ~ News and Events of the NCNC United Church of Christ

GO TRANSFIGURE

Words of encouragement and support for those ministering "in the fields."

Once again we've rumbled into Lent. For many of us it's an ill-defined time on the Church calendar. We older folk who came from the more regimented Christian traditions may connect these forty days before Easter with what seemed like dour and arbitrary edicts to forgo meat, forsake candy, and stay away from public amusements. This was all done to foster a sense of penitence, sorrow for one's sins and shortcomings. The scripture readings for the kick-off events often included the verse from Isaiah 58, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?"

If only I'd listened more closely, or read the passage in its entirety I might have found some comfort, some support, for my niggling suspicion that compulsory vegetarianism, periodic subduing of one's sweet tooth, and missing Disney's "Pinocchio" were not the full rendering of what repentance was all about.

It would have been good to consider the story, to hear about the people of Israel, our spiritual ancestors, the ones who turned to Isaiah for guidance.

They'd been through so much. Returning, after years and years of captivity in Babylon, they find the holy city in ruins, their beloved Jerusalem in wreckage. That devastation hints at a fracturing of the relationship between the Creator and the people.

There is an urgency, an intensity, in their zeal to restore their connection with the Almighty. They approach The Holy One daily; they delight in seeking God's ways yet somehow nothing is working. In frustration they turn to Isaiah, the prophet in their midst, saying, "Look, we're fasting, we're praying, we want to be close to the God who has given us life and delivered us from captivity, but nothing is working. What's wrong here? We're doing all the right stuff and still God pays no attention! Why isn't what we're doing acceptable in the sight of the Almighty?"

And Isaiah searches the prophetic tradition to which he is heir and scans the horizon for what's happening right now and rises to the prophetic occasion. "You say you're seeking God; you say you want to follow the ways of The Holy One, but here you are squabbling over the proper forms for the rituals. Fasting!! Fasting isn't magic. Fasting isn't luxuriating in your self-induced feelings of virtue. Fasting means nothing unless it connects you with all those around you who hunger--for food, for justice, for an end to oppression. The Most High doesn't want some abstract, disembodied experience of spirituality. Fasting means nothing unless in the emptiness of your belly, right in your gut, you are making yourself open to the spirit of the Almighty."

To me, today, this all sounds very much like Archbishop Desmond Tutu's insight that we are summoned to be God's transfiguration: the transformation, permutation, transmogrification of the heavenly into the earthly, of the spirit into flesh, of cosmic love into intimate compassion. Through us God intends to transfigure hate into love, injustice into justice, poverty into wealth, grief into joy, death into life. That is the fast that God chooses.

Remember how, in the Gospel story of the transfiguration of Jesus, Peter really didn't get it at first? Peter wanted to capture and memorialize the event, freeze-frame the vision of a radiant Jesus on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah? In that initial impulse, Peter foreshadowed the church's efforts to wiggle away from the demands of transfiguration. The church cannot be the transfiguration of God when it is tightening its hold on revelation, when it seeks to erect a fire wall around the searing flames of grace, when it covers the words of truth and life with the heavy drapery of jargon, when it tries to tame the Holy One's ravenous howling hunger for justice and compassion.

We who have seen the homeless housed, the injured healed, the dying comforted, the grieving granted courage, the despised embraced, the enemies reconciled have seen God's transfiguration. We have lived it. This is the fast-the hunger-that God desires in us. Go transfigure!

For previous editions of "Pacific Currents", click here.

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