Down in the Dust

Text: Luke 9:23-36 February 22, 2004

[Editor's note: Pastor Stein did not preach this week. This is a sermon on the same Gospel passage, preached in 2004.]

In the classic movie Buckaroo Bonzai, Peter Weller plays the title character. Buckaroo is a surgeon, a physicist, a comic book hero, and a rock star. Actor Lewis Smith plays his partner, lieutenant, and fellow musician. His name is Perfect Tommy. He is perfect. Able, cool under pressure, good looking, brave, decisive. There is something especially appealing about the notion of this man who is able to avoid the imperfections that otherwise put sand in the works of the lives of normal people like us. But of course it is fantasy; the man is made up. As in action-adventure movies of every era, he is the projection of our enthusiasm at the possible and our frustration with the actual.

Christians have a complicated relationship with perfection. The Kingdom of God is the promise of a perfect world on earth, a place in which all things go as God intends, without friction or misalignment. Heaven has been portrayed in our tradition as a place of perfection, and though images of it in the arts and in our imaginations vary, it is a place of perfect peace and contentment. Throughout Christian history people have vainly tried to make themselves perfect through prayer, self-inflicted suffering, and deprivation. As perfect as Jesus, they say they hope to be. Yet, especially as Lutherans, we know such effortful works cannot lead to perfection, since we are all sinners. That is, we are all imperfect.

These urges for the perfect self and world come as much from our hearts as from scripture. When we look at Adam and Eve and their fall in Eden, we grieve at not only what we have lost but what has yet to be restored.

On the mountain, Luke reports, there is a meeting between Jesus and his two greatest prophetic ancestors, Moses and Elijah. This is like a subcommittee of the Prophetic Mountain Club. They have three things in common. They all like mountains (Moses received the law on Mount Sinai, Elijah heard God’s still, small voice on Mount Horeb); they all come to listen for God’s guidance; and the third thing I’ll talk about in a moment. At this meeting Jesus becomes cloaked in dazzling white (as bright as a flash of lightning, another translation has it). The disciples see them in glory, a kind of technical term that means a shining divine presence. Not just glorious, their glory and Jesus’ are something that you could see.

For Peter, it is a perfect moment. That is, untouched by the hunger of the 5000, the feeding of whom Peter has just seen, and untouched by Jesus’ prediction of his impending execution, which Peter has just heard. It is a heavenly moment. In this moment, the usual messy platform of history is dust-free. This gathering of God’s special buddies takes place in a divine clean-room, unpolluted by real life.

Peter wants to keep it that way. Let’s build little huts, he says. In this way, perhaps, he can preserve that perfect moment forever. He can encapsulate, contain, and package it. He can keep this experience separate from the world of difficulties he inhabits.

We are subject to epiphanies, moments that reveal in an often dramatic surprise that God is here, that God is with us at this moment right now in this place. They happen to some of us in dreams. They happen to others in places where nature is thick. When sitting in a quiet grove, or a park at the end of the day, or on the rocks as the waves of the oceans shatter at our feet. They happen in moments of great happiness, at births and at the restoration of long-neglected friendships. They happen in times of sorrow, at bedside hospitals, in bottomless sadness.

They come in visions, in unexpected or impossible sightings, in voices we hear or seem to overhear. They come in moments of sudden clarity, where it seems to us that we somehow know the whole truth.

These epiphanies reveal something to us about God, and about God and us, and about God and the world. They are important experiences in our relationship with God. They give us important information. They deepen and enrich our understanding about God. It is dangerous and wasteful to dismiss them, as we modern people might tend to do. Unlike in other centuries, direct revelation of God has in our time been demoted as no longer authoritative or even useful. At worst, people consider it delusional. At best, wishful thinking. But to discount these experiences or to ignore them as random firing of synapses is denial. Like putting our hands over our ears and singing la la-la la-la. We should not drown them out.

They are not trivial. But neither are they the substance of our Christian life. They are enrichers, signifiers, pointers, but not the main thing. Had Peter succeeded in domesticating what happened on the mountain he would have confined and distorted both Christ’s character and his mission. Jesus cannot abide on this mountain for long.

As God did Moses and Elijah, God sends Jesus and his disciples back to the imperfect world. It is the third thing the three have in common. Sent back from the world of dazzling glory to the world of dust. Moses with his tablets and to more wandering and arguments with his people and with God. And Elijah—much to his dismay—to his prophecies. Jesus, to his teachings, his healings, his organizing of sometimes clueless followers, to his trial and death and then his resurrection and ascension. And Peter and John and James to a hard, and I’m sure, amazing, life of action in the world.

Listen to him! The voice of God directs the disciples. Listen to him. What does he say? If any want to become my followers, he says, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and continue to follow me. Continue to follow me. It is an ongoing and continuing day-to-day life of hard and nourishing and disappointing and fulfilling and aggravating and joyful work led by Christ.

The mountain of Moses and Elijah and Jesus is a meeting of heaven and earth. Perfection and dust. This story is in the middle of the Gospel of Luke. This is not the climax. This meeting is not the point of the story. The story continues. And continues not with us humans being hauled up onto the heavenly mountain. But with Jesus, chosen son, walking down to the dust, walking down to this imperfect world, walking down to be with us.

Jesus is not a sample of or a call to perfection. In our theology, we do not say: Jesus, perfect in every way. We say instead: Jesus, human in every way. We cannot make ourselves perfect. And we cannot make the world perfect. We are not called to. We are not called to be Perfect Tommys. We are followers of Jesus Christ. We are called to listen! Listen to him!