Radioactive glow
Commentary
Object:
It was a night to remember! Five school buddies at a friend's home overnight. Pizza and popcorn (more than I had ever before stuffed into myself), a late movie on television, and then the stories. Who could tell the scariest tale? We outdid one another with false bravado.
Was it just my imagination? Sure, it was night outside, but wasn't the darkness creeping closer? What lurked in the shadows just beyond the weakening glimmer of the lamps? Our bodies were tired but our minds raced with fear.
We've all been there: dark nights, ghostly fears, terrifying images. Even when we "grow up," something haunting often lingers at the edges of our brightest days. Francis Bacon said, "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other!"
When the German poet Goethe lay dying, his last words were a terrified shout: "Light! Light! I need more light!" The final fears of short story writer O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) came out this way: "Turn up the lights! I don't want to go home in the dark!" And those who have faced death and loneliness nod silently with F. Scott Fitzgerald's lament: "In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o'clock in the morning."
On this Transfiguration Sunday, all of our lectionary passages juxtapose darkness and light. Elijah and Elisha live in a very ominous time, where all hopes seemed ringed by the brooding challenges of evil rulers. Elijah himself had recently fled the country to find refuge in the old mountain of revelation, Mount Horeb/Mount Sinai, where many generations earlier Moses alone and then with the Israelites had seen the glory of God. In the dark night of his soul, Elijah had shared with us the tales that have kept us awake too: "Why don't my children call or visit anymore?" "How will I cope with this divorce?" "I don't know how I'll make ends meet till my next unemployment check." "Why did God allow this to happen to us?"
Where is God? "Don't hide your face from me!" cries David (v. 9). In the blackness, in the bleakness, we need to sense God's presence. We need to know that he is there, even if, like Job, we don't understand what's happening around us and inside of us. "The restless millions wait for the light," says George Bernanos, "whose dawning maketh all things new."
Paul, wrestling with his challenging relationship with the Corinthians, recently having survived a near-death experience while on a mission trek to Troas, recounts with hesitant voice the many times his faith and hope and love have nearly been snuffed out. But always there has been a glow of divine radioactivity within. Like the voyagers of Narnia, caught in a darkness at sea too terrifying for words, a darkness that crawled and oozed and grabbed and stuck, the children of C.S. Lewis' fantasy world sailed their ship, the Dawn Treader, in circles of fear. "If you've ever loved us at all," cries Lucy to the skies, "send us help now!"
In a growing speck of light that seemed, Lucy thought, to look a lot like a cross, the battle of the powers whirled around them, till darkness and fear melted before his brightness.
"Let light shine out of darkness," said the apostle about God's creative word and no darkness in this world has ever held back his dawning. The radioactive glow of Jesus lingers, even in earthen vessels.
For it all comes back to Jesus. Jesus is the light who brought day and night out of the chaotic darkness at the beginning of time. He is the light coming into our darkened world that had been quarantined too long because of the virus of sin and death and Hades that inflicted it. On the mountain of Transfiguration, while the world itself wrangled depressing ills in the shadows below (see Mark 9:14-32), up above, for a brief moment, the light of life radiated from the body of the One who is light itself.
2 Kings 2:1-12
There is a chain of divinely appointed leadership that snakes its way through the Old Testament. Moses is the first forged link, a mighty loop of titanium overlaid with polished gold. Attached to him is Joshua, the man who served him well as second-in-command and then took up the commission when the Great One died on Mount Nebo. Before Joshua himself went the way of the world, he called together the Elders of the Israelites, mature men from the clans and tribes of the nation and deputized them as a collegial leadership team. After these wise folks, who were among the last to have experienced the great Exodus and wilderness wanderings and amazing conquest of Canaan firsthand, passed on, the nation of Israel fell into disrepair quickly. Only when periodic cries of repentant helplessness ascended to heaven did God provide sporadic leaders who came to be known as Judges. Last among these was the great Samuel, who from an early age was able to hear the voice of Yahweh above the tumult of national bickering. By his agency, God instituted the next series of links in the leadership chain, bringing the successions of kings into being. But as we enter our lectionary passage for today, these welds are weakening and their gleam is tarnished. The kings have turned into enemies of God, as Ahab and Jezebel, currently on the throne in Israel, have proved with far too much contempt. So it is that God in heaven hammers a new set of leadership links in place. These are the prophets and among the first and greatest is Elijah.
But the work of leadership has crippled Elijah almost beyond recognition. In his earlier years there was none who could stand up to his righteous gaze or thundering condemnation. Recently, however, Queen Jezebel's threats nearly did him in, sending him whimpering in fear and hopelessness to the caves of Mount Horeb, where God had once revealed divine power to Moses and Israel. Elijah came back from the Sinai deserts with more strength in his steps, but he still limped from the criminal injustices he had endured, the loneliness of his vocation, and the scars of wounded weariness. God had graciously provided Elisha as his confidant, companion, and encourager. Now Elijah's holy pilgrimage in this realm was at an end. Befitting his unique and arduous tasks in life (like Frodo at the end of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy), Elijah is given a unique passage into the next realm. God sends a personal limousine and escort to gather him home.
George MacDonald wrote a story about "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" that echoes this wondrous event. The girl had been raised in a dark cave by a witch and never was allowed to see the light of day. The boy, on the other hand, was raised by the same witch to live, breathe, and romp during the daylight. Never was he allowed to sleep during the day. Never was he put in dark spaces. He went to bed before the sun went down, and his room was brightly lit by candles and torches.
So, says MacDonald, these two roamed their separate worlds. The Night Girl managed to find her way out of the cave but only during nocturnal darkness. And the Day Boy spread his flights of fancy further abroad, always making sure to be home before sunset.
Of course, destiny draws this pair together. On one day's hunt, the Day Boy strays too far and is too late to avoid the onset of twilight. Falling asleep in bewilderment at the growing gloom, he's later awakened by the Night Girl, who is searching for friends.
"You are a creature of the darkness and love the night," he told her reproachfully. "I may be a creature of the darkness," she replied. "But I do not love the night. I love the day -- with all my heart...."
But she's never had a guide to the light, nor he a teacher of the night. So they become fast friends, playing out the same youthful delight on either side of dawn and dusk. When they come to marry, this is the Day Boy's prayer: "She has got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look after her until she can bear the heat of the sun and he helps her to see, instead of blinding her."
Perhaps the marriage of heaven and earth, experienced by Elijah, is something like that. I have a feeling that on the day of that ceremony, portrayed in festive terms in the book of Revelation, Psalm 148 will be a fitting selection for the choir to sing.
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
William Beebe, the naturalist, used to visit fellow nature-lover Theodore Roosevelt. Often, after an evening of good conversation at Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill home, they would walk across the lawn in the darkness. They would look up at the stars, point out the constellations and carry on a conversation something like this: "There's the spiral galaxy of Andromeda! Did you know it was as large as our own Milky Way? Over a hundred billion stars. And every one of them is larger than the sun. 750,000 light-years away. And there are a hundred million more galaxies like it out there!"
The numbers would get larger, the facts and figures more spectacular and eventually they would shuffle on in silence, lost in wonder. Finally Teddy Roosevelt would say, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed!"
"Creation was the greatest of all revolutions," said Chesterton. When young Anne Frank was hidden in an Amsterdam attic during World War II, fearful of the dreaded Nazi revolution and longing for a day in the park with her friends, she wrote this note in her diary: "The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be."
Even in the harshest of storms, as Paul notes in his letter to the Corinthians, the magnificent power of God is displayed. After Sir Ernest Shackleton returned from one of his Antarctic expeditions, he told of the intense suffering he and his two partners had endured: extreme pain, numbing cold, haunting starvation, consuming exhaustion. When rescued, barely alive, all they had left were two axes and a logbook. "But in memories we were rich," said Shackleton. "We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We have seen God in His glory!"
There are only a handful of truly great words in the English language, says one scholar. They are words without synonyms, words that can't be explained, words that sound like what they mean. And one of those words is glory. Only the hushed whisper of that word can describe God. Only the thundering roar of that term can tell what happens when God passes by and only the shout of that cry fits the emotions that erupt in God's presence. As David would put it in Psalm 29: "In his temple all cry Glory! Glory!"
However, bright lights can dim eyesight and the constant bombardment of God's glory can turn our timid spirits toward the dark places. This is certainly the context that Paul brings to the wonder of God living within weak earthen vessels. We have been trampled, discouraged, left for dead, rejected, abused, lonely, and wandering. Yet the glory of God somehow remains.
One person has put it this way. Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano. Music filled their piano-world, swelling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was someone close to them -- though invisible to them -- who made the music. They loved to think of the great player whom they could not see. Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths that trembled and vibrated. The mice had to revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the unseen player.
Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Now the secret was hammers, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, and it showed that the mice lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. The unseen player came to be thought of by the mice as a myth.
But the pianist continued to play. And those who hear the music cry, "Glory!"
Mark 9:2-9
The famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembers a day when he felt the way Peter, James, and John must have felt on the mountain of the Transfiguration. It was during World War II. Frankl was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler's infamous death camp at Dachau. "We were at work in a trench," writes Frankl. "The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces."
Frankl tells how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in "living," if indeed he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, no past -- only the clutching grayness of this miserable moment.
Suddenly, to his surprise, Frankl felt "a last violent protest" surging within himself. He sensed that even though his body had given up and his mind had accepted defeat, his inner spirit was taking flight. It was searching. It was looking. It was scanning the eternal horizons for the faintest glimmer that said his fleeting life had some divine purpose. It was looking for God.
In a single instant two things happened, says Frankl, that simply could not be mere coincidence. Within, he heard a powerful cry, piercing the gloom and tearing at the icy claws of death. The voice shouted "yes!" against the "no" of defeat and the gray "I don't know" of the moment.
At that exact second, "a light was lit in a distant farmhouse." Like a beacon it called attention to itself. It spoke of life and warmth and family and love. Frankl said that in that moment he began to believe. And in that moment he began to live again.
Our world has the same need. The grayness of our bleak days is stifling. The loneliness of the moment overwhelms us. Is there a reason to carry on? Is there meaning beyond the drudgery of today's repetitive struggles? Is there hope and is there God?
Don't leave us alone! Give us some sign! Light a candle in the window and take me home! This is what they saw on the mountain as Jesus' eternal glory radiated for a time through his earthly form. John Greenleaf Whittier puts it this way:
A tender child of summers three,
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly,
"O Mother! take my hand," said she,
"And then the dark will all be light."
We older children grope our way,
From dark behind to dark before:
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in Thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
Reach downward to the sunless days,
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays:
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of Thee.
The end of the story in today's lectionary reading mixes despair with hope. Peter wants to stay on the mountain, but Jesus says no and the brilliance of heaven fades from his face. Then, as the four of them make their way back down into the misty murkiness of the world we know and fear, a father runs to Jesus begging for his son's deliverance from the evil that daily plagues him. Even the other disciples do not have the power to make this evil go away. In that moment Jesus will show that God never denies us the light we need. As Joyce Kilmer wrote:
Because the way was steep and long,
and through a strange and lonely land,
God placed upon my lips a song
and put a lantern in my hand.
And suddenly we know the way home.
Application
Ian Maclaren tells the story of a young woman in his book Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush. She's raised in a Christian home but leaves it behind in search of a better life, a freer self. She finds the kind of life she thinks is free, and she gets for herself all that she's ever desired. But it's never enough and what she possesses begins to possess her. Finally she doesn't even know what it means to be free.
One day she decides to go home. When she gets near the cottage of her birth, she wants to turn around. Her footsteps falter. She begins to turn her body. But then the dogs in the yard catch scent of her. They haven't forgotten her, even though it's been so long.
Then the light comes on at the door. The door opens. All she can see is her father, bathed in the light. He calls out her name, even though he can't see her face. He calls out her name, even though he doesn't have a reason to expect her. He calls out her name, and suddenly her feet come running to him. Then he takes her into his arms. He sobs out blessings on her head.
Later, when she tells her neighbor of that night, she says, "It's a pity, Margaret, that you don't know Gaelic. That's the best of all languages for loving. There are fifty words for 'darling,' and my father called me every one of them that night I came home."
Maybe, when we pray for God's glory to be revealed to us on this Transfiguration Sunday, that's a good picture to have in mind.
An Alternative Application
2 Corinthians 4:3-6. There was a new song written while I was in high school. It was one of the first that spoke to us teens about the things that Paul ruminates on in the New Testament lesson. We used to sing it around campfires at night, and I remember the light going on in some eyes when the singers "saw" and "tasted" and "felt" the love of God for the first time. The song went like this:
It only takes a spark to get a fire going,
But soon all those around are warmed up in its glowing.
That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it:
You spread his love to everyone. You want to pass it on!
I remember one fellow was in tears. He looked at the friend who brought him along. "Thanks for inviting me," he said.
Has anyone said that to you recently?
Was it just my imagination? Sure, it was night outside, but wasn't the darkness creeping closer? What lurked in the shadows just beyond the weakening glimmer of the lamps? Our bodies were tired but our minds raced with fear.
We've all been there: dark nights, ghostly fears, terrifying images. Even when we "grow up," something haunting often lingers at the edges of our brightest days. Francis Bacon said, "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other!"
When the German poet Goethe lay dying, his last words were a terrified shout: "Light! Light! I need more light!" The final fears of short story writer O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) came out this way: "Turn up the lights! I don't want to go home in the dark!" And those who have faced death and loneliness nod silently with F. Scott Fitzgerald's lament: "In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o'clock in the morning."
On this Transfiguration Sunday, all of our lectionary passages juxtapose darkness and light. Elijah and Elisha live in a very ominous time, where all hopes seemed ringed by the brooding challenges of evil rulers. Elijah himself had recently fled the country to find refuge in the old mountain of revelation, Mount Horeb/Mount Sinai, where many generations earlier Moses alone and then with the Israelites had seen the glory of God. In the dark night of his soul, Elijah had shared with us the tales that have kept us awake too: "Why don't my children call or visit anymore?" "How will I cope with this divorce?" "I don't know how I'll make ends meet till my next unemployment check." "Why did God allow this to happen to us?"
Where is God? "Don't hide your face from me!" cries David (v. 9). In the blackness, in the bleakness, we need to sense God's presence. We need to know that he is there, even if, like Job, we don't understand what's happening around us and inside of us. "The restless millions wait for the light," says George Bernanos, "whose dawning maketh all things new."
Paul, wrestling with his challenging relationship with the Corinthians, recently having survived a near-death experience while on a mission trek to Troas, recounts with hesitant voice the many times his faith and hope and love have nearly been snuffed out. But always there has been a glow of divine radioactivity within. Like the voyagers of Narnia, caught in a darkness at sea too terrifying for words, a darkness that crawled and oozed and grabbed and stuck, the children of C.S. Lewis' fantasy world sailed their ship, the Dawn Treader, in circles of fear. "If you've ever loved us at all," cries Lucy to the skies, "send us help now!"
In a growing speck of light that seemed, Lucy thought, to look a lot like a cross, the battle of the powers whirled around them, till darkness and fear melted before his brightness.
"Let light shine out of darkness," said the apostle about God's creative word and no darkness in this world has ever held back his dawning. The radioactive glow of Jesus lingers, even in earthen vessels.
For it all comes back to Jesus. Jesus is the light who brought day and night out of the chaotic darkness at the beginning of time. He is the light coming into our darkened world that had been quarantined too long because of the virus of sin and death and Hades that inflicted it. On the mountain of Transfiguration, while the world itself wrangled depressing ills in the shadows below (see Mark 9:14-32), up above, for a brief moment, the light of life radiated from the body of the One who is light itself.
2 Kings 2:1-12
There is a chain of divinely appointed leadership that snakes its way through the Old Testament. Moses is the first forged link, a mighty loop of titanium overlaid with polished gold. Attached to him is Joshua, the man who served him well as second-in-command and then took up the commission when the Great One died on Mount Nebo. Before Joshua himself went the way of the world, he called together the Elders of the Israelites, mature men from the clans and tribes of the nation and deputized them as a collegial leadership team. After these wise folks, who were among the last to have experienced the great Exodus and wilderness wanderings and amazing conquest of Canaan firsthand, passed on, the nation of Israel fell into disrepair quickly. Only when periodic cries of repentant helplessness ascended to heaven did God provide sporadic leaders who came to be known as Judges. Last among these was the great Samuel, who from an early age was able to hear the voice of Yahweh above the tumult of national bickering. By his agency, God instituted the next series of links in the leadership chain, bringing the successions of kings into being. But as we enter our lectionary passage for today, these welds are weakening and their gleam is tarnished. The kings have turned into enemies of God, as Ahab and Jezebel, currently on the throne in Israel, have proved with far too much contempt. So it is that God in heaven hammers a new set of leadership links in place. These are the prophets and among the first and greatest is Elijah.
But the work of leadership has crippled Elijah almost beyond recognition. In his earlier years there was none who could stand up to his righteous gaze or thundering condemnation. Recently, however, Queen Jezebel's threats nearly did him in, sending him whimpering in fear and hopelessness to the caves of Mount Horeb, where God had once revealed divine power to Moses and Israel. Elijah came back from the Sinai deserts with more strength in his steps, but he still limped from the criminal injustices he had endured, the loneliness of his vocation, and the scars of wounded weariness. God had graciously provided Elisha as his confidant, companion, and encourager. Now Elijah's holy pilgrimage in this realm was at an end. Befitting his unique and arduous tasks in life (like Frodo at the end of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy), Elijah is given a unique passage into the next realm. God sends a personal limousine and escort to gather him home.
George MacDonald wrote a story about "The Day Boy and the Night Girl" that echoes this wondrous event. The girl had been raised in a dark cave by a witch and never was allowed to see the light of day. The boy, on the other hand, was raised by the same witch to live, breathe, and romp during the daylight. Never was he allowed to sleep during the day. Never was he put in dark spaces. He went to bed before the sun went down, and his room was brightly lit by candles and torches.
So, says MacDonald, these two roamed their separate worlds. The Night Girl managed to find her way out of the cave but only during nocturnal darkness. And the Day Boy spread his flights of fancy further abroad, always making sure to be home before sunset.
Of course, destiny draws this pair together. On one day's hunt, the Day Boy strays too far and is too late to avoid the onset of twilight. Falling asleep in bewilderment at the growing gloom, he's later awakened by the Night Girl, who is searching for friends.
"You are a creature of the darkness and love the night," he told her reproachfully. "I may be a creature of the darkness," she replied. "But I do not love the night. I love the day -- with all my heart...."
But she's never had a guide to the light, nor he a teacher of the night. So they become fast friends, playing out the same youthful delight on either side of dawn and dusk. When they come to marry, this is the Day Boy's prayer: "She has got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look after her until she can bear the heat of the sun and he helps her to see, instead of blinding her."
Perhaps the marriage of heaven and earth, experienced by Elijah, is something like that. I have a feeling that on the day of that ceremony, portrayed in festive terms in the book of Revelation, Psalm 148 will be a fitting selection for the choir to sing.
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
William Beebe, the naturalist, used to visit fellow nature-lover Theodore Roosevelt. Often, after an evening of good conversation at Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill home, they would walk across the lawn in the darkness. They would look up at the stars, point out the constellations and carry on a conversation something like this: "There's the spiral galaxy of Andromeda! Did you know it was as large as our own Milky Way? Over a hundred billion stars. And every one of them is larger than the sun. 750,000 light-years away. And there are a hundred million more galaxies like it out there!"
The numbers would get larger, the facts and figures more spectacular and eventually they would shuffle on in silence, lost in wonder. Finally Teddy Roosevelt would say, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed!"
"Creation was the greatest of all revolutions," said Chesterton. When young Anne Frank was hidden in an Amsterdam attic during World War II, fearful of the dreaded Nazi revolution and longing for a day in the park with her friends, she wrote this note in her diary: "The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be."
Even in the harshest of storms, as Paul notes in his letter to the Corinthians, the magnificent power of God is displayed. After Sir Ernest Shackleton returned from one of his Antarctic expeditions, he told of the intense suffering he and his two partners had endured: extreme pain, numbing cold, haunting starvation, consuming exhaustion. When rescued, barely alive, all they had left were two axes and a logbook. "But in memories we were rich," said Shackleton. "We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We have seen God in His glory!"
There are only a handful of truly great words in the English language, says one scholar. They are words without synonyms, words that can't be explained, words that sound like what they mean. And one of those words is glory. Only the hushed whisper of that word can describe God. Only the thundering roar of that term can tell what happens when God passes by and only the shout of that cry fits the emotions that erupt in God's presence. As David would put it in Psalm 29: "In his temple all cry Glory! Glory!"
However, bright lights can dim eyesight and the constant bombardment of God's glory can turn our timid spirits toward the dark places. This is certainly the context that Paul brings to the wonder of God living within weak earthen vessels. We have been trampled, discouraged, left for dead, rejected, abused, lonely, and wandering. Yet the glory of God somehow remains.
One person has put it this way. Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano. Music filled their piano-world, swelling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was someone close to them -- though invisible to them -- who made the music. They loved to think of the great player whom they could not see. Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found out how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths that trembled and vibrated. The mice had to revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the unseen player.
Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Now the secret was hammers, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, and it showed that the mice lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. The unseen player came to be thought of by the mice as a myth.
But the pianist continued to play. And those who hear the music cry, "Glory!"
Mark 9:2-9
The famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembers a day when he felt the way Peter, James, and John must have felt on the mountain of the Transfiguration. It was during World War II. Frankl was on a work gang, just outside the fences that hid the horrors of Hitler's infamous death camp at Dachau. "We were at work in a trench," writes Frankl. "The dawn was gray around us; gray was the sky above; gray the snow in the pale light of dawn; gray rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and gray their faces."
Frankl tells how he was ready to die. It was as if the gray bleakness had claws and each moment they dug deeper and colder into his soul. Why go on? What could be the purpose in "living," if indeed he was even still alive at this moment? There was no heaven, no hell, no future, no past -- only the clutching grayness of this miserable moment.
Suddenly, to his surprise, Frankl felt "a last violent protest" surging within himself. He sensed that even though his body had given up and his mind had accepted defeat, his inner spirit was taking flight. It was searching. It was looking. It was scanning the eternal horizons for the faintest glimmer that said his fleeting life had some divine purpose. It was looking for God.
In a single instant two things happened, says Frankl, that simply could not be mere coincidence. Within, he heard a powerful cry, piercing the gloom and tearing at the icy claws of death. The voice shouted "yes!" against the "no" of defeat and the gray "I don't know" of the moment.
At that exact second, "a light was lit in a distant farmhouse." Like a beacon it called attention to itself. It spoke of life and warmth and family and love. Frankl said that in that moment he began to believe. And in that moment he began to live again.
Our world has the same need. The grayness of our bleak days is stifling. The loneliness of the moment overwhelms us. Is there a reason to carry on? Is there meaning beyond the drudgery of today's repetitive struggles? Is there hope and is there God?
Don't leave us alone! Give us some sign! Light a candle in the window and take me home! This is what they saw on the mountain as Jesus' eternal glory radiated for a time through his earthly form. John Greenleaf Whittier puts it this way:
A tender child of summers three,
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly,
"O Mother! take my hand," said she,
"And then the dark will all be light."
We older children grope our way,
From dark behind to dark before:
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in Thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
Reach downward to the sunless days,
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays:
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of Thee.
The end of the story in today's lectionary reading mixes despair with hope. Peter wants to stay on the mountain, but Jesus says no and the brilliance of heaven fades from his face. Then, as the four of them make their way back down into the misty murkiness of the world we know and fear, a father runs to Jesus begging for his son's deliverance from the evil that daily plagues him. Even the other disciples do not have the power to make this evil go away. In that moment Jesus will show that God never denies us the light we need. As Joyce Kilmer wrote:
Because the way was steep and long,
and through a strange and lonely land,
God placed upon my lips a song
and put a lantern in my hand.
And suddenly we know the way home.
Application
Ian Maclaren tells the story of a young woman in his book Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush. She's raised in a Christian home but leaves it behind in search of a better life, a freer self. She finds the kind of life she thinks is free, and she gets for herself all that she's ever desired. But it's never enough and what she possesses begins to possess her. Finally she doesn't even know what it means to be free.
One day she decides to go home. When she gets near the cottage of her birth, she wants to turn around. Her footsteps falter. She begins to turn her body. But then the dogs in the yard catch scent of her. They haven't forgotten her, even though it's been so long.
Then the light comes on at the door. The door opens. All she can see is her father, bathed in the light. He calls out her name, even though he can't see her face. He calls out her name, even though he doesn't have a reason to expect her. He calls out her name, and suddenly her feet come running to him. Then he takes her into his arms. He sobs out blessings on her head.
Later, when she tells her neighbor of that night, she says, "It's a pity, Margaret, that you don't know Gaelic. That's the best of all languages for loving. There are fifty words for 'darling,' and my father called me every one of them that night I came home."
Maybe, when we pray for God's glory to be revealed to us on this Transfiguration Sunday, that's a good picture to have in mind.
An Alternative Application
2 Corinthians 4:3-6. There was a new song written while I was in high school. It was one of the first that spoke to us teens about the things that Paul ruminates on in the New Testament lesson. We used to sing it around campfires at night, and I remember the light going on in some eyes when the singers "saw" and "tasted" and "felt" the love of God for the first time. The song went like this:
It only takes a spark to get a fire going,
But soon all those around are warmed up in its glowing.
That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it:
You spread his love to everyone. You want to pass it on!
I remember one fellow was in tears. He looked at the friend who brought him along. "Thanks for inviting me," he said.
Has anyone said that to you recently?
