The Transfiguration of Our Lord
Texts: Luke 9:28-43a;
Ex 34:29-35; 2 Cor 3:12-4:2
TRANSFIGURATION AS VISION QUEST:
SEEING THE FACE OF THE OTHER IN THE FACE OF JESUS
I think most of us here have had to undergo a psychological exam as part of seeking a new job. Some more extensive than others. I remember having to go through an entire day of rather intense testing before qualifying for ordination. I was connected to the Indiana-Kentucky Synod at the time, so I had to travel from the seminary in Chicago to Indianapolis for the many hours of testing. That’s more than forty years ago now, and I still have some fleeting memories of how imposing it felt to go through it. I don’t have specific memories of what kind of questions I was asked, but there’s a good bet that I was asked quite simply at one point, “Do you ever hear voices?” Perhaps some of you have more recently had this experience. Were you asked, “Do you hear voices?” The answer’s obvious, right? An emphatic, “No!” In today’s world of psychological testing it is a very bad sign to your mental health if you say you hear voices.
This morning we read an important passage from the Gospel of Luke in which all the important characters hear a voice from heaven in a cloud — while seeing a vision of a transfigured Jesus standing with two long-dead Hebrew prophets, no less, Moses and Elijah. In his book The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, Choctaw elder and priest Steven Charleston writes,
I suspect many, if not most, of us are more than a little shy about admitting we hear “voices.” When I was a postulant for Holy Orders (a person being screened to see if he or she is a suitable candidate for ordination) I remember laughing with my peers about the psychiatric examination required in the process. Part of that examination was a series of written questions that had to be answered yes or no — among them were questions such as, “do you hear voices?” Any sane person, or at least anyone sane enough to understand what it would mean to the psychiatrist if you replied yes, would check off no. But the choice can be an odd one for people who believe they have a call from God to become ordained. Men and women preparing for seminary are usually fairly well versed in the Bible, and in that book there are numerous examples of human beings hearing the voice of God. There are messengers, angels moving back and forth from Earth to heaven, carrying instructions to faithful men and women, people like Samuel who heard the voice call his name, and Mary whose response to the voice became enshrined as The Magnificat. So checking off a no to the question about hearing the voice of God becomes something of a joke. It bows to the conventions of our society where hearing “voices” has a negative meaning, but it also reminds us that we come from a religious culture that historically has expected this kind of an exchange to be possible.
If you come from both a Christian and a Native American background then you are doubly likely to accept the reality of the voice of God being real because Native American tradition is also full of stories of communication between the realm of the divine and the world of humanity. The Native American religious tradition in North America accepts the idea of close contact between God and human beings through the agency of many spirits who carry the divine message with them.1
If we are to understand how seeing visions and hearing voices is a healthy thing in the context of our modern studies of psychology, I think it is helpful to consider a religious tradition that is closer to the older practices which seek seeing visions and hearing voices. As both a Choctaw elder who practices his peoples’ religious traditions and a trained Episcopalian priest, Steven Charleston is an excellent guide. It is his experience of indigenous traditions of vision quests that provided his experience of being able to be true to his people’s traditions and the Christian faith at the same time. He has come to see the Christian faith in the Incarnation of God in Jesus as God’s vision quest to enable all human beings to better experience intimacy with God. And this was accomplished through four vision quests of Jesus. I’ve outlined them for you in the Sermon Notes.
Jesus’ first vision quest began at his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. He hears the voice of God and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove but drives him out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. That is next week’s Gospel Reading, when we begin the season of Lent. Charleston identifies today’s Gospel Reading as Jesus’ second vision quest, the story of his being transfigured with his disciples Peter, James, and John up on a mountain. They see Jesus standing with the great Hebrew prophets, Moses and Elijah, and hear a voice from heaven, singling out Jesus, “Listen to him!” In our Revised Common Lectionary, we have these first two vision quests back-to-back, but in reverse order. I find it interesting, though, that one of the only major differences from our lectionary to the older Roman Catholic lectionary is that Catholics place the Transfiguration story not at the end of the Epiphany Season but on the Second Sunday in Lent. They place Charleston’s first two vision quests of Jesus on the first two Sundays in Lent, in order. The other remarkable part of following Steven Charleston’s four vision quests of Jesus is that the third and fourth close out the season of lent on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. The third vision quest comes with Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper, and the fourth as he dies on the cross on Good Friday.
This morning we will focus on the second vision quest for a few minutes to anticipate our Lenten journey to the cross, and to climax the season of the Epiphany. One of the great epiphanies for me of the past year came at our Synod Assembly. Crucial to the planning of the Assembly were the people of Lutheran Church of the Great Spirit in Milwaukee, a congregation that brings together our Christian faith with the traditions of indigenous Americans. The opening worship service included an extremely moving Litany of the Four Directions, in which we prayed for the unity of the human race four times, physically facing North, South, East, West. And our keynote speaker was Vance Blackfox, an elder of the Cherokee Nation, who is Director of the ELCA’s Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations. I related in my sermon back late last Spring (Proper 4B) how Vance Blackfox closed his address by saying, “I’m so thrilled to be here tonight to proclaim to you how we have all been saved by an Indigenous Man.
When we see the face of Jesus, do we see the face of an Indigenous Man at the margins of the Roman Empire in the First Century? The face of an Indigenous Man whose people had been oppressed by other people’s empires for eight centuries? One thing that’s different about Luke’s telling of the story of the Transfiguration story is that he doesn’t use the word “transfigure,” metamorph in the Greek. Metamorphosis, transfiguration, is what Mark and Matthew describe. Luke simply uses the word “Other,” heteros. Jesus’ face became the face of the Other. In other words, when they looked on Jesus’s face it represented the face of the Other to human empires. It was the face of indigenous peoples of all times and places who are oppressed by imperialism, or what we’ve been calling nationalism. This second vision quest of Jesus is about what I experienced at this past year’s Synod Assembly, the quest to unite all human beings into one family by seeing in Jesus’ face the face of the Other, the face of those oppressed by our human politics of divide-and-conquer.
The other thing I think we can glean by seeing the story of the Transfiguration as a vision quest is the singling out of Jesus from Moses and Elijah, with the voice from heaven saying, “Listen to him!” One of the things Steven Charleston emphasizes is that the aftermath of a vision quest most often leads to healing. When the vision quest of God in Jesus the Messiah is seen in terms of uniting the human family against its nationalistic tendencies, by learning to see the face of the Other as our own faces, then it leads to healing.
What do nationalistic quests generally lead to? Violent attempts to conquer the Other. Let’s consider, for a moment, what came next when Moses and Elijah came off mountains of vision quests. Moses went up Mt. Sinai to receive the precious covenant from Yahweh that gives the Hebrew people the mission of uniting the human family (Exodus 24:15-18ff). A wondrous thing. But when he came down the mountain to find the people of Israel lapsing into worship of a Golden calf, he did lash out in violence to kill the idolaters (Ex 32:28). Elijah is most famous for winning a battle against 450 priests of Ba’al on Mount Carmel. But when they came off the mountain, Elijah had those 450 priests killed (1 Kings 18:20-40). Do you see why the voice in the cloud says to listen to Jesus?
Conversely, what do we see from Jesus when he comes down the mountain of Transfiguration, leaving Moses and Elijah behind? He heals a child contorted by the oppression of Empire. In his healing of the child, we begin to see the face of the Other transformed by the healing power of compassion and justice.
Whose are the usual faces of oppression and violence in any time and place? Do we see the face of Jesus today in the faces of the children of Gaza, or Ukraine, or South Sudan? Do we see the face of Jesus in the faces of children whose parents are being deported without them in America right now? Do we see the face of Jesus in the faces of children living in great poverty in any time and place? The poverty created by our nationalistic economics that elevate one group of people over the Other? This is the climax of the Epiphany. To learn to see the face of Jesus in the face of the Other. Especially in the faces of the children, the most vulnerable to the effects of Nationalism. And when we follow Jesus off the mountain of a transfiguring vision quest, we are called to the same mission, a mission of healing the human family, beginning with the children. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 2, 2025
Note
1. Steven Charleston, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (Morehouse Publishing, 2015), 45-46.
