Transfiguring hate into love

The seasons of the church year change abruptly.  We ricochet off the mountaintop of the Transfiguration and find ourselves sprawled on the gravelly canyon floor of Lent three days later.  We lurch from the radiance of the Divine presence to the hollowness of abandonment. And there, in the desolation of Ash Wednesday we hear God haranguing Isaiah, “Shout out, do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a trumpet!”  Tell My people that they have cut themselves off from Me!  Do it!!  [Isaiah 58: 1, NRSV and paraphrase]

They’d been through so much-the people of Israel, our spiritual ancestors.  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 desire 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-having been enflamed by the goading of the Most High-rises to the prophetic occasion.  He speaks for God and says, in effect, "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.  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, unless you are willing to be swept up in the Creator’s roaring clamoring ravenous hunger for compassion and mercy.  “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?”[58: 6]

This brings to mind a word spoken by Archbishop Desmond Tutu about the Transfiguration.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that we are put here as God’s transfiguration.  Through us God intends to transfigure hate into love, injustice into justice, poverty into wealth, grief into joy, death into life.

We, as church, are to be the transfiguration of the Almighty: the transformation, permutation, transmogrification of the heavenly into the earthly.  Of the spirit into flesh.  The cosmic love into intimate compassion.

Do you remember the story of Jesus’ transfiguration?  How he ascended to the high peak with his friends and suddenly his face shone like the sun and Moses and Elijah appeared, talking with Jesus, and how Peter-dazzled  by the visuals, beyond the pull of gravitational forces, on a new spiritual plane-wanted to freeze-frame the moment and set up a kind of Mt. Rushmore commemorative site?  In that initial impulse to memorialize the event rather than transform the rest of his life, Peter foreshadowed the church’s efforts to wiggle away from the demands of the 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 howling thirst for justice and compassion.

There’s an echo. A reverb.  A theme that rebounds and resounds from the summit to the depths, arching over the rifts, linking the seasons: Live out justice. Abide with compassion.  Move with the rhythm of abundance.