What is the church? Is it a building or
something more? A people or something more? And does it really matter?
These are particularly appropriate
questions when our sanctuary is under repair, because the nature of being
“under construction” begs us to consider what it is that is sacred about this
space. What is it that makes this
space special, and how big a deal is a sacred space a church? Of course, this
is temporary, and, when it’s done, will that mean the space is improved—not
just structurally but spiritually? Or is it actually better to be “under
construction?” Is the worst thing for our church when nothing is under construction?
The Transfiguration doesn’t start
out as a story about church, but very quickly Peter makes it that way. Here
stands Jesus alongside Moses and Elijah—this incredible meeting of the stars of
the faith—and Peter’s response is, simply, “Hey, let’s make a monument to this
occasion! Let’s build a few houses for them to live in up on the mountain! And
then when the occasion is over tourists will flock here and people can worship
on the mountain. It’ll be great!”
What Peter is talking about is
building a church—or, rather, three churches. The moment of the Transfiguration
is fleeting and he wants to remember it, dedicate it, preserve it. I think
that’s not so different from what we do as church today. We’re remembering,
dedicating, preserving. But, as it turns out, that isn’t always what we’re
being called to do. God’s interruption of Peter begs us to consider: in our
rush to remember, dedicate, and preserve, are we listening for Jesus?
When Peter goes on this aside about
building three dwellings, God’s voice blasts through his ideas, calling out, “This
is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” And the
disciples cower in fear. What matters is not the dedication, or even the
remembering, what matters is Jesus—standing right before them.
It’s maybe a little difficult to see
how this applies to us today. I mean, we do
need to remember because Jesus isn’t literally standing in front of us in the
flesh. So we take communion, we speak the words Jesus taught us in prayer and
in song, we read scripture. We remember. And we do so in a building that we
sometimes off-handedly call a house of
God. It’s awfully important that we do those things, and, yet, it’s still
more important that we have an encounter with the real Christ, the risen
Christ, and sometimes that means leaving the remembering behind and listening
for God’s voice in the midst of the ordinary.
One of the simple lessons we can
learn from Peter’s mistake is that we cannot re-create the past. It is the
surest sign of turning in on one’s self. You can remember, dedicate, and—in
some cases—preserve, but you cannot re-create. I see this with the old and
young alike. For every time I hear about the good old days and how the church
needs to return to its principles, I also hear from youth about how great
summer camp was that one year, or how fantastic that one mission trip was. If only we could go back and do it again. Peter’s
idea of creating permanent dwellings is fraught with the idea of trying to
re-create. It’s not that God doesn’t want Peter to remember and even to share
it with others, but more important than all of that is how this moment impacts
their faith in the living God standing in front of them.
There’s a reason Jesus is always running
around telling people to be quiet about his miracles. The important point is
not the miracle itself; the important point is the cross. Everything leads
there. And now, after the Transfiguration, we run headlong into Lent with the
cross right in front of us. Forty days leading up to the crucifixion.
Everything that matters about our faith, and therefore our church, exists in
relationship with that defining moment of Jesus’ death and the great, big
miracle of the resurrection. The reason Peter’s idea is wrong is because it is
a church ordered toward something other than cross, death, and resurrection. It
is a church ordered toward happy memories and based, literally, on a mountain
top experience. Peter needed to listen to Jesus, to hear where this all was
heading, but the disciples didn’t—they never did—even when Jesus was telling
them plainly that he would die and rise again.
This is where this becomes a message
for our church today. What is the most important thing? And if it’s not the
cross, Jesus’ death and resurrection, then we’re just like Peter, building
houses on mountains. We remember and dedicate so that we may tell the world
about Jesus, but not the Jesus of the Transfiguration; instead, we tell about
the Jesus at Golgotha and the Jesus who
appeared to Mary Magdalene.
And we do it here, but we also do it
in our homes and in the way we carry ourselves in public. We don’t need to say
it; we don’t even need to wear a cross around our neck or a t-shirt that says
it for us. All those things are fine, but you can also share the Gospel in your
actions and the way you carry yourself. You can even tell the world about Jesus
through your scars. Christians can be hypocritical and judgmental and too quiet
and too loud—and all sorts of things that show how truly broken we are. But all
of those faults only testify to a God who is more perfect than we can be, a God
who sent his son to die for us. We are cross-people, not
transfiguration-people. Peter got it wrong, and so do we when we put our trust
in memories of times gone-by, structures, and whatnot.
God is a God of now, because now is when
we encounter Jesus. We die and rise again with Christ every day. This is why we
confess, because all of us are Peter, building monuments to things that have
passed us by. And it is why we are forgiven, because the Transfiguration is
only a stepping stone to the cross, where true terror and joy converge. It
comes down to this: The church today is fine when it preaches Jesus Christ,
crucified and risen. It can do that in this building or in the streets or in
the homes, and really is should be doing it in all those places. But the church
is not fine when it preaches anything else. The irony is that this Jesus, dying
on the cross and rising again, is the one thing we always need to get back
to—the one thing worth memorializing and dedicating again and again—and it’s
the one thing we lose first when we memorialize and dedicate other things.
After all, what is the church?
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