The Transformer

The message given in the Sunday night worship service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on October 23, 2022.  The Bible verses used are Luke 9:28-36.

            I want each one of us to think of someone we’ve known for a long time.  Maybe they’re in our family, maybe they’re good friends, maybe they’re people we work with.  But whoever they are, we’ve known them for a long time.  We’ve spent a lot of time with them.  

When we do that, when we spend a lot of time with someone and we do that over a long period of time, we start to feel like we know pretty much everything there is to know about that person.  We know what they like and what they don’t like.  We know how they feel about things and how they’re going to react in certain situations.  Sometimes, we even know what they’re thinking, and we know what they’re going to say before they even say it.

Got a person like that in mind?  Okay, now imagine if that person said something totally unexpected.  Imagine if they did something that seemed totally out of character.  How would we react?  We’d be shocked, right?  We would not know what to say.  We would not know what to do.  Here’s this person we thought we knew so well, and they do something so completely out of left field that we feel like we don’t really know them at all.

That’s pretty much how Peter, James, and John felt in our Bible reading tonight.  Remember, they’d been traveling with Jesus for a while at this point.  We don’t really know how long, but it was long enough that they were considered Jesus’ disciples at this point.  They’d heard Jesus speak.  They’d heard him tell parables.  They’d seen him do miracles.  They thought they had a pretty good idea who Jesus was.  In fact, we’re told that just eight days earlier, Jesus had asked them who they thought he was, and Peter had answered, “God’s Messiah”.

And then, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up onto a mountain.  They start praying.  And Jesus transforms.  We’re told the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.  Think how bright that is.  That’s a blinding light.  Peter, James, and John would not even have been able to look directly at Jesus.

Think of how unsettling that would be.  You know, we say that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine.  The disciples knew the human Jesus, and they thought they knew the divine Jesus, but now they really saw the divine Jesus in all his glory.  This guy they thought they knew so well, and now suddenly he’s completely different.  

The three of them were stunned.  Peter starts babbling.  We’re not told that James or John said anything.  Probably they were in shock.  All of them were in shock.  Here was this guy they’d been traveling with, this guy they’d been following, this guy they’d been encouraging others to follow, too.  They thought they knew him so well, and now, suddenly, they felt like they did not know Jesus at all.

Have you ever felt like that?  I think most of us do, at some point in our lives.  We’re going along, living from one day to the next.  Things are going okay--not great, maybe, but not terrible.  We go to church fairly regularly.  We pray sometimes.  Life seems to be going on more or less as it should.  

We’re in kind of a routine.  We figure we know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.  We think we know God, and we think we know what God has planned for our lives.

And then, something happens, and it all transforms.  It can happen in all kinds of ways.  It can happen in good ways:  falling in love, having a baby, getting a new job opportunity.  It can happen in bad ways:  losing a job, having a healthy problem, having a relationship fall apart.  

Either way, it’s really unsettling.  Even when the transformation happens in a good way, it’s still really unsettling.  We thought we knew God, and we thought we knew what God had planned for us, and now, suddenly, everything is completely different.  We thought we knew God so well, and now, suddenly, we feel like we don’t know God at all.

Sometimes, when something like this happens, we don’t know what to make of it.  Peter, James, and John did not know what to make of it.  They kept it to themselves, not telling anyone else.  We’re not told why.  Maybe they did not understand it.  Maybe they thought no one would believe them.  Maybe they did not quite believe it themselves.  Maybe they were not sure what believing it even meant.  Now that they’d seen Jesus in his glory, were they supposed to do something?  If so, what were they supposed to do?

And sometimes, when we feel God wanting to transform our lives, we keep it to ourselves, too.  We don’t tell anyone else.  Maybe we don’t quite understand what God is trying to do.  Maybe we think no one will believe it.  Maybe we don’t quite believe it ourselves.  Maybe we don’t know what we’re supposed to do if we do believe it.

Peter, James, and John came down from the mountain with Jesus.  We’re not told what they did.  Except for one thing.  They kept following Jesus.  Even though they did not really understand, even though they were not quite sure what had actually happened, they kept following Jesus.  They went where Jesus wanted them to go.  They did what Jesus wanted them to do.  And they never forgot what they had seen.  And at some point, at least one of them told it to Luke, so he could record it in the gospel he wrote some thirty years later.

And that’s what we’re supposed to do, too.  Keep following Jesus.  Even if we don’t really understand, even if we’re not quite sure what’s happening, we need to keep following Jesus.  We need to go where Jesus wants us to go.  We need to do what Jesus wants us to do.  And we need to never forget the transformation that’s taken place in our lives.

Transformation is one of the things our faith is all about.  When Jesus was transformed on the mountain, he revealed to Peter, James, and John, who he really was.  When God transforms our lives, God reveals to us who we really are, too.

You see, it does not require a whole lot of faith for us to just keep living our lives the same way we’ve been living them.  It does not require a lot of faith to have tomorrow be pretty much like today.  But a change of life requires faith.

And that’s true whether the change is a good change or a bad change.  It takes faith to leave a comfortable job and take a new one.  It takes faith to let someone know you’ve fallen in love.  It certainly takes faith to have a baby.

And when the change is a bad change, when we do lose a job, or have a health problem, or have a relationship fall apart, that takes faith, too.  It takes faith to believe that God is still there.  It takes faith to believe that God is with us in the bad times just as much as in the good times.  It takes faith to keep trusting God when all the things we counted on, all the people we trusted, all the things we thought were fixed in our lives, are suddenly not there for us any more.  It takes faith to keep believing that God is still in control when it feels like we’ve lost all control ourselves.

When God transforms our lives, we find out whether the faith we claim to have is real.  When God transforms our lives, we find out whether our faith is strong enough to deal with that transformation, no matter what it is.

Because transformation is really what faith in Jesus Christ is all about.  If we say we believe in Jesus Christ, but nothing about us changes–if we say we believe in Jesus Christ and are still the exact same people we were before we believed in Jesus Christ, then Christian faith has really pretty much been lost on us.  We have not truly repented of our sins.  We’re no closer to God, we’re no closer to each other, we’re no closer to being the people God wants us to be, than we were before.

Jesus did not come to tell us to just keep doing what we’ve been doing.  The fully human yet fully divine Jesus lived and died so that our sins could be forgiven.  But our sins can only be forgiven if we repent, if we ask God for forgiveness and resolve to change our lives.

God wants to transform our lives.  Let’s open ourselves up to that transformation.  We may not understand it.  We may not know what we’re supposed to do.  But let’s keep following Jesus anyway.  Let’s go where Jesus wants us to go and do what Jesus wants us to do.  If we truly do our best to do that, our lives will be transformed in ways we will never expect.  And we’ll come to know God in a way we never have before.