Bearing the Glow

A sermon by the Rev. David Denoon for Boy Scout Sunday, February 10, 2013
An audio version of this sermon is available.
A video about our Boy Scout Sunday by Wade Smith of Channel 2 News is available.

SCRIPTURES FOR TRANSFIGURATION SUNDAY

Exodus 34:29-35

Luke 9:28-43

I can’t tell you the number of ministers I knew in 2009 and 2010 who used Susan Boyle as a comparison for transfiguration, when she sang her way to the top of the competition in the television contest, Britain’s Got Talent.  Homely in appearance when she took the stage, Ms. Boyle had a clarity of vocal tone and timbre that absolutely stunned her judges and a worldwide audience.  She shone with a glory few would have imagined, based on appearance.

The story was heartwarming, but versions of it happen quite a lot.  The question is, sometimes, whether the Glowing One will be able to bear shining for long.  We all have our encumbrances.  But there is such potential!

One imagines that Jesus’ disciples had their high moments and their low ones.  In the story earlier in Luke, when Jesus makes apostles of seventy of them and sends them abroad into Galilee, they return with exciting tales of their successes, cures, and blessings (Luke 10).  But when Jesus descends Mount Hermon, he finds them impotent before the challenge of a poor, raving boy.

"The Transfiguration"
from the Jesus Mafa series

All Christians stand in the glorious light of Christ’s transfiguration, the brilliance of Jesus’ glowing from the mountaintop. We emulate as well humility similar to that of the apostles, as they try to figure out what to do about it... because we like them have found ourselves glowing too, have known our shining moments, just like them.  And we therefore also have found ourselves commissioned with a powerful and power-filled message.  And (surprise! surprise!) we can be intimidated by the message that we have to carry forward, however – a message of peace and justice and wholeness and life.

What? Little ol’ me?

If we are puzzled by what we ought to do next, or just what we ought to do, then my advice would be simply for us to consider what Jesus’ first action was after the Transfiguration: he healed a boy.  He found his disciples intimidated or overwhelmed by the task of providing care so he jumped in and did it.  And this, like all of Christ’s works, may seem as though they were accomplished fairly quickly and completely, all at once.

The temptation in our modern world always seems to be to rush things, to expect immediate results.  We have gotten too used to pushing a button and having an outcome immediately.  We have grown too accustomed to waiting thirty minutes, at the most three hours if it’s a sporting event, and to be able at the end of that relatively brief span of time to know who emerges victorious or at least to witness how everything plays out.

It’s important to remember in our day and age that, there on the top of Mt. Hermon, or wherever this hill is near Caesarea Philippi in the Galilee, God through Christ had been putting things in place for at least a year and perhaps for almost three years. (That estimate of time comes if you read Mark’s version of the Transfiguration; if you read Matthew’s or Luke’s it’s been more like a thirty-year wait, since Jesus’ birth. And if you read John, which has no Transfiguration story but definitely bears an opinion about God had been stirring the pot and preparing the world for the Messiah since the beginning of time.  For John, as for most Christians since John was written, the dark day on another hill near Jerusalem would have as part of it not only the cross of Calvary but the crux of history.)

Moses was on Mt. Sinai for eighty days and nights before his face began glowing... and didn’t stop.  For God, a Psalmist once said, “a thousand years are like ... yesterday.”  So, some things will take time.  And for earthly forms to show forth the glory of God, time will be taken.

Last Monday, there was word all over about some changes that the Boy Scouts might be making to their rules regarding membership and leadership.  The announcement came welcome to the ears of our congregation.  We place few restrictions on membership and leadership in our church, and we want Scouting to be on the same page with us, because it’s part of our programming and therefore part of us.

The First Congregational Church of Webster Groves has had Scouting as part of our regular programming, ever since converting our first-west-of-the-Mississippi Boys Brigade into a Boy Scout Troop.  Boys Brigade was an innovation to many Sunday Schools across the United States in the last decade or so of the 1800s, espousing the idea of ushering boys toward "Christian manliness."  It originated in Britain, however, and remained something of a British vehicle; our own charter was granted by the Boys Brigade Canadian office.

Even though Lord Baden-Powell who founded the Boy Scouts was British, there was something about the slightly-less-sectarian and much-more-outdoorsy orientation of the Scouts, undoubtedly, that appealed to us as a church.  And the fact that our Scouts could be chartered by an U.S.-based organization didn’t hurt.

Boys Brigades to this day are always attached to Christian faith communities, and those Scout troops such as ours with a legacy stretching to the days of the Boys Brigades retain that association in most cases.  Scouting is a program of this church.  We don’t acknowledge it much, and haven’t since, somewhere a long time ago, we just started taking it for granted.

First, we took for granted that it was part of us; then we sort of lost track of that fact.  For many years, we have said that we sponsored a Boy Scout troop, and in the past decade or so that is what it has seemed like, since few to none of our boys or adults have been involved with the program which has carried on, sometimes maybe despite us.  The charter you will see represented, later, is the annual permission given to us by the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America to call our boys program, Boy Scouts.  We have met their exacting standards.

It was last September or so, after discussions began among frustrated church members who had been involved with Scouting that I discovered that I had the relationship backwards, and it was therefore only then I began to understand just why my church members were so upset as to want to send a letter or stage a protest or cut ties altogether...

The Scouts’ stated restrictions about members and leaders – even for all the assurances of an at-least-implicit don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy – is problematic for a church which started a Boys Brigade in 1908 because we thought it would help our own boys negotiate the challenging waters of boyhood and adolescence, helping them focus on Christian values of faithfulness, reverence, discipline, and self-respect.  What isn’t right about that, even today, one hundred five years later?

But our concepts of faithfulness, reverence, discipline, and self-respect have changed, as from generation to generation in generations before us perspectives changed and therefore the interpretation of God’s word and will.  I am assured by some that our fairly progressive stance on who ought to be able to join or lead our own Scout troop, or any program of our church, differs from that of the National Council of the Boy Scouts only by the sum of time it will take for Scouting to catch up.  (Remember how long it took Jesus to get to that hilltop and be transfigured - a year, three years, a lifetime, or an eternity!)

This past week, we thought that it might not be decades in the sum but perhaps only years before our tension is resolved.  After all, we only took our Open and Affirming stance, five short years ago, and its process took quite a while of self-examination and education.

Our Boys Brigade was retooled in 1910 from the stance it began with in 1908.  The Scouts are focused on the outdoors and education while the Boys Brigade made no bones about training Christian spiritual soldiers.  Well, the change in perspective we would like to see come about is not much different.  And remember how long it took Jesus to get to that hilltop and be transfigured – one year, three years, thirty years, since the beginning of time!

Bearing the glow is one thing, we know, but getting to the glow is not a speedy process, ever, it seems.

There's something else that requires much time for a change in perspective or practice (glowing or abiding the shine):

Today, our local church is planning with the denomination for an Eastertide focus on environmentalism and stewardship.  In fact, if today had not been Boy Scout Sunday and the recent events in our congregation and rumoring round Scouting’s National Council had not been so timely, I probably would have been part of the national Preach-In led by Interfaith Power and Light.  This is, however, as close as I am coming to that observance – encouraging you in the tradition of our own scouts to plan to be part of the Green Team Lynda Morrison is trying to build up next Sunday with some new and motivated members.

But I was talking about glowing and what to do about it.  I have been saying, and Tracey with the kids has been saying, for the past many weeks through our innovative Sunday School curriculum, We are the body of Christ.  And that is the case, whether you assume the metaphor that we are each individually a different body part, or else the extension of the story we have heard today – that by faith you are being transfigured as Christ was, two thousand years ago on a hilltop in Galilee.

When Jesus came down off the mountaintop, unlike Moses he was no longer glowing; he looked himself again... and yet Peter, John, and James said that they had witnessed his transfigured reality. However momentarily it may have been, it was permanent in their eyes. They knew now what he was capable of.

The first act he performed after coming down off that hilltop was to heal a boy that no one else could heal.  And he insisted that all they required was a measure greater of faith, for them to do the same.  But that faith, as always in Jesus’ statements, was theirs to cultivate, theirs to believe in.

We know, don’t we, that the emanation of Christ is here and among us.  We know that we are the body of Christ, transfigured and refigured so that we may operate in the world without having to disguise who we really are.  We can provide the safe sanctuary for people who may not be harbored anywhere else safely and unconditionally.  We can provide the extravagant welcome and the beloved community that is lacking in so many other places in our world, even Christian places.  We can come down from our Galilean hilltop, our Palestinian peak, our high place in Webster Groves, and all our lofty locations and, whether inside our outside, ensure a healing environment for boys to become... what is it..?

"physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight"