“Shock and Awe” - Sermon by Senior Minister Deborah K. Stevens, Feb. 3, 2008, at North Broadway United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio

Scripture: Exodus 24:12-18, Matthew 17:1-9

You may recall, as I do, seeing the banner “Shock and Awe” running across CNN’s broadcasts five years ago this coming March when the military strategy against Baghdad called “shock and awe” was launched. This consisted of a barrage of precision-guided weapons.

At the time, I initially thought that CNN had made up “Shock and Awe” and then I heard it referred to that way by the Pentagon and the President. I’ve since learned that “shock and awe” is a term for a specific military strategy that was devised at the National Defense University in 1996. Technically known as Rapid Dominance, “shock and awe” is intended to paralyze an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight. After a few days of “shock and awe,” the infrastructure of the target is destroyed and the enemy is “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted.”

As you hear me comment on “shock and awe” in this sermon, please know that my comments are not intended in any way as a criticism or to express lack of support for our men and women in the military. They are intended to help us see that we are lost in a world of violence and that God is trying to redeem us from it. My criticisms, if any, are directed at the people who make decisions to send our men and women in the armed forces into harm’s way and not at those men and women themselves.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “awe” as “a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity or might.” “Shock” is defined as “something that jars the mind or emotions, as if with a violent unexpected blow.” Interestingly, the English word “shock” is derived from the French from a word meaning “collision.”

So given these definitions and the example of the usage of these words together to describe a military doctrine of Rapid Dominance, you might be wondering, why is this preacher using these words to talk about the transfiguration of Jesus? Well, for one reason, the text itself describes the experience of awe. The disciples in attendance with Jesus on the mountaintop are said to have fallen to the ground, overcome by fear, which can appropriately be called awe. Their awe is in response to having heard a voice from heaven saying that “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” and commanding them, “Listen to him.” And shock is not an inappropriate word to describe this experience. I expect that the emotions and minds of these disciples were a little out of equilibrium after they had heard the voice of the living God and seen Moses and Elijah.

Matthew and the other gospel writers set this experience on a mountaintop; mountaintop in the biblical tradition being less a physical place than a symbolic representational place. The mountaintop is where one experiences clarity, where one is given the ability to see behind and before and all around them with greater clarity. In effect, the mountaintop is a time when those who go there are given the gift of seeing the power and presence of God in such a way that their eyes see anew and their point of view is transformed.

When Martin Luther King said that he had been to the mountaintop, he did not mean that he had been vacationing in the Rockies. He meant that he had been given a vision from God through the prophetic imagination of what God’s world ought to look like. And in the biblical tradition, the mountaintop is where Moses encounters God.

In the biblical text, as in the world, there is always a contrast between what is happening on the mountaintop and what is happening, so to speak, beneath the mountaintop in the world of human sin. When Moses is on the mountaintop in the company of Yahweh receiving the law that will guide and shape the people of Israel for centuries to come, the people of Israel themselves are busy down on the ground casting idols. While Jesus is on the mountaintop with Peter, James and John, if we read ahead in Matthew we will discover that the disciples who have been left behind have been approached by a family needing healing for an epileptic child and the disciples are unable to cure the child.

The artist Raphael has vividly portrayed this contrast between the mountaintop experience and the world below in his artistic interpretation of The Transfiguration. If you haven’t seen Raphael’s rendering of The Transfiguration recently, you can find it on the Internet. In this painting, Jesus hovers in light above the mountaintop, flanked on either side by Moses and Elijah, and the three disciples are fallen to the ground face-down. While at the bottom of the painting below, a crowd is gathered, their desperation evident in the way the artist renders their body language and their facial expressions. The epileptic child’s arm is thrown up as if reaching for the mountaintop.

We know that Peter, James and John at first are tempted to stay right there on the mountaintop. “Oh let us build shelters for you,” Peter offers. It must have been a temptation for Jesus, too, except he had already dealt with that temptation in the wilderness. But Jesus could have ascended to his home with Moses and Elijah and been done with it. But there was an epileptic child waiting for him beneath that mountain. Martin King could have returned to the pulpit and preached comfort to his congregation. He could have obtained an academic position at any theological school or university. But there were garbage collectors in need of better wages and better working conditions in Memphis waiting for him. Mahatma Gandhi could have lived quietly in his ashram community praying and spinning thread. But the oppressed people of India suffering under the dominance of the British Empire were waiting for him.

The non-violent ethic of Jesus, subsequently followed by Gandhi and then by King, reveals the folly and futility of any strategy that depends on violence. Jesus will come down from that mountain to face violence. He will respond to it and resist it, not with more violence but with love. Here is “shock and awe”: Sacrificing love provides not exhaustion. Sacrificing love gives the gift of physical, emotional and psychological energy for overcoming the world’s love of dominance and power. Violence begets violence. Or, as Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Transfiguration has been described as an experience that causes us to see in a familiar object, person or experience a reality of another order. The familiar becomes infused with a kind of radiance so that in the ordinary human form of Jesus the reality of the living God is suddenly and thoroughly revealed to the disciples. The familiar human form of an itinerant prophet, healer and teacher from Nazareth is infused with divine light.

So what does this all mean for us? Let’s assume for a moment that worship in the sanctuary here at North Broadway is a weekly mountaintop experience. Let’s assume that worship here provides us a glimpse of the power and presence of God so that we see the ordinary infused with light. We must, of course, open ourselves to the possibility of such a way of seeing lest we be left below with the disciples struggling to heal a child and finding little power to do so. But let’s assume we are open to the transcendent presence of God and so we see in the faces of our familiar friends and our new visitors the face of Christ.

Let’s assume that we are open to the transcendent presence of God so that we see in the texture of a piece of bread the luminous light of God’s creative power at work. Let’s assume that we are open to the transcendent presence of God so that we taste in a sip of grape juice the sweet life of Jesus Christ. Let’s assume that we are open to the transcendent presence of God so that when we bow for prayer we’re not distracted by the sound of a child’s voice but hear it for the affirmation of life that it is.

Let’s assume that we are open to the transcendent presence of God so that when the word of the scriptures is read aloud we hear as consonants are sounded and vowels are formed that the word takes on a living presence. Let’s assume that we’re open to the transcendent presence of God so that when we walk into this space we are awed by its beauty and we sense how the space is infused with all the prayers of all the people from all the Sundays in all the years of worshiping at this place.

Let’s assume that we are open to the transcendent presence of God and so in the sound of music and the words of the hymns we see the creative presence of God in the composers’ genius, the poets’ word choices, the giftedness of the musicians who give life to the music in our midst. Let’s just assume that worship awes us until we realize that we are looking at Jesus, just Jesus.

This is our mountaintop – this place, this experience. The question is, having come here, having had all the transcendence of God before our very eyes if only we had eyes to see, what will we do outside the doors of this sacred place? What will we do when we go back down the mountain as we must? Jesus would not permit the building of a shelter on the mountaintop. Jesus does not permit the church to be safe space only. Jesus brings us to awe in worship to give us courage for living beyond this place. Jesus went down. He took the disciples down with him. He went with courage into the hands of the religious authorities who condemned him to death and carried out the sentence. I don’t imagine that Jesus went without fear, any more than Gandhi or King or we experience fear when we confront the world with love. But as so many have said, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is doing the right thing even though you are afraid. It takes courage to face down the violence woven into the world with nothing but love. But that is what Jesus does. And the gospel truth is, in the end violence always fails. In the end, love triumphs.

Friends, we cannot be faithful to Jesus Christ if we seek the comfort and presence and power of God in this place and ignore the world outside our doors. We must take from our encounter with God and Jesus Christ the courage we need to transform the world by loving and serving our neighbors. We are about to enter into the season of Lent, the season in the Christian year which gives us the opportunity to walk with Jesus on the road that takes him to the cross. But we know that on the other side of the cross, there is “shock and awe” that has never been equaled – life from death, resurrected life.

Our Lenten discipline study opportunities and practices for this year are designed for us to encounter Christ – to encounter Christ in worship, to encounter a deeper understanding of the meaning of Christ’s life, death and resurrection in our Wednesday evening studies, and to display the love of Christ to our neighbors through the work of ministry that we have planned for Saturday mornings during Lent. I hope that in some way each of us will be able to participate at least a little bit in all of these ways of encountering Christ.

Our Saturday morning experiences are designed to take us into our community to pray for our neighbors. They are designed to take us into our community to commit acts of unconditional kindness, to be kind to our neighbors in an unexpected way just because God loves everybody. They are programs that are designed to help us understand the importance of treating our neighbors well by paying attention to how we nourish our own bodies. There is an experience designed to teach our neighborhood children about Easter in an Easter egg hunt.

The world is outside our doors. We cannot come and be awed by God and then just put ourselves on hold until we come back next Sunday. We must be faithful and that means loving and serving our neighbors.

“Shock and awe.” I’m telling you, that’s what people feel when they are loved unconditionally. Nothing is more awesome. God offers Jesus Christ and there is no doubt in the disciples’ minds on resurrection day that the one on the mountaintop who was called ‘the beloved son’ is all that God is. That’s the one we’ve come to worship today. There is never anything ordinary about the power and presence of the living Christ. So let us be shocked and awed that in community here, in a piece of bread, in a glass of juice and a prayer read with one voice we see the risen Christ, we know the love of God and we are given courage to transform the world with love.

Amen.