In my office I have a plastic Jesus action figure with poseable arms and gliding action.  His feet don’t touch the ground.  It was given to me as a joke, and while I do think it’s funny, it also serves as a frequent reminder that there are many who think about the historical Jesus as kind of extra-terrestrial– bigger than life – and when stories like the one we just heard get told out of the context of the whole Gospel of Mark, it’s easy to imagine why people understand Jesus as a superhero or superhuman with magical powers.  Jesus on a mountain top with other biblical action figures – Moses and Elijah – transformed – metamorphasized, his clothing dazzling.  It’s only a small leap to imagine that super-cool Jesus could fight the bad guys, vanquish the villains and never never die.

      My hunch is that many here distance themselves from that kind of thinking (and I count myself in that group) – defining ourselves and our beliefs in the negative – not this or not that.  Partly that’s our heritage as Anglicans – not Roman Catholic and not Protestant (the list of “nots” is long).  And yet, in my experience, the Golden Mean, the Via Media, is often “the musty middle way” in practice.  You probably have heard me say before the old saying that Episcopalians can believe any number of things, but of course none of us do.  This week I heard one of my clergy friends say that some day she’s going to write a book called “I don’t believe in that God either.” And being the competitive person that I am, I thought, not if I can write that book first!  That’s MY book title! 

      We get caught up in the “what I don’t believe in” and ironically, miss the whole point that this idea of Jesus as an all-powerful super-cool super-hero is actually just the opposite of the story of Jesus that the Gospel of Mark tells.  In Mark’s story, Jesus’ friends get more and more confused and more afraid as the story unfolds.  If Jesus were a superhero, his friends would begin to count on his superpower and would feel less and less afraid, don’t you think?  They’d feel more sure with each passing miracle, sure that with Jesus on their side, nothing bad could happen to them.  But in Mark, just as soon as Jesus’ friends imagine that he is the savior, the Messiah, the Christ of God, he begins to teach them about suffering – preparing them not just for his suffering but for their own if they are going to follow him.  A full half of Mark’s story is devoted to suffering, conflict, and the death of Jesus.  The oldest copies of Mark’s Gospel don’t have any happy resurrection appearance stories – the Gospel ends with this description of the women at the empty tomb:  “trembling and bewildered, they said nothing to anyone.  They were terrified.”  That’s how the earliest version of Mark’s account of the Good News ends!  Emptiness, bewilderment and terror.

      Jesus’ power, according to Mark, was demonstrated in his suffering.  This was surprising in a culture that tended to believe that suffering and conviction as a criminal was evidence that Jesus was not, could not have been God’s beloved Son.  People still site suffering as evidence that God doesn’t love, or that God is punishing, or that God doesn’t exist.  Some wonder why God would permit suffering, if God is so powerful.  A month doesn’t go by without someone who is suffering deeply asking me why God has done something or is letting suffering happen, or where God is if God exists, or telling me of their absolute conviction that God does not exist.

      By contrast, Mark’s Gospel story is that God is with us (Emmanuel as Rabbi Berman preached last week) – right in the suffering.  Indeed, listening deeply and responding to God can even mean more suffering according to Mark.  And this story of the transfiguration, in the middle of the material about how to prepare for suffering and how to live with and through suffering, is a story about the glimpses – the flashes of Easter that we sometimes get to sustain us in the midst of suffering or helplessness.  The suffering that Mark is most focused on the suffering that we experience on behalf of others.

      Thinking about this reminded me of something that happened a few years ago just before Christmas.  Some of you know that for the past 10 years, every Monday night, I’ve gone with some friends to visit with women who are in prison.  It’s my volunteer work.  The women who are in prison are mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters.  The volunteers take in drawings and paper and markers, glue, scissors, stickers – all kinds of art supplies – so that we can all make greeting cards to send to people we love.  Just before Christmas is a pretty stressful time for everybody – but it’s especially hard for women who are in prison who can’t be with their families for the holidays.  And it’s hard because they know how sad their families are – how much they are missing their moms and grandmas, aunts, sisters and daughters.  Sometimes just coloring a Christmas card makes us cry because we are so sad.

      Well, one night just before Christmas, we were working on our cards, and some guards came in and took our scissors away.  They said they didn’t care if we had permission to use the child-safety scissors.   They didn’t care that we were being careful and safe with the scissors.  They didn’t care that no-one had ever gotten hurt with the scissors in many years of this program.  The captain said that the guards couldn’t have scissors in the prison, so we shouldn’t be able to either.  I tried to talk the guards into letting the women finish their pictures, but they told us to pull the scissors right out of the women’s hands – even if they were half-way through cutting something.

      I was very angry.  I thought it was so mean of the guards to take the scissors away like that.  I felt sorry for whatever had made the guards so mean.  I knew there wasn’t anything I could do that night to get the scissors back for the women to finish their cards.  Some of the women tried tearing their pictures instead of cutting.  That didn’t work very well. The scissors were a small thing – but it felt like one more burden on women who are already overloaded with pain and loss who are already overloaded with bad choices and bad luck.  I felt furious and sick and helpless and I was fighting tears that felt very close to spilling out of my eyes. 

      Then one of the women started to sing softly – “our God is an awesome God” – and a couple of women started singing with her, very softly, and one by one everyone in the room began to sing “our God is an awesome God.  He reigns.  He reigns.  Our God is an awesome God,” softly, tenderly, over and over in a bare whisper of a song.  It was song about freedom in the prison.  The eleventh floor of the tower at Suffolk County House of Correction became for me a holy mountain.  A dim, mean-spirited, hopeless situation was transformed – transfigured right before my very eyes – into a holy moment – and I could imagine that I could hear God saying, “these are my Daughters, the Beloved, listen to them” and my small faith grew a little that night.

      I think that’s what this story of the transfiguration is doing here in the middle of a Gospel focused on suffering.  It’s a story Mark tells to help increase faith in the greatness of God in Jesus Christ in the midst of sadness and pain and loss and grief.  One of the great things about the story is that Jesus tells his followers not to tell anyone about the holy moment until after the resurrection.  And of course the story is written after – long after – the resurrection.  So the message is that Jesus’ followers are supposed to tell everyone.  Tell the stories of those moments in our own lives, where in the midst of suffering, we’ve gotten a glimpse of the power of transformation, of redemption, of pure grace, of Love, of God.

      This story is saying don’t stay imprisoned in the suffering.  Name it – suffer it – but don’t wallow or bask in it.  Don’t stop in it.  As Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  In other words, don’t stay there.  And once you’ve gotten a glimpse of the power of God, you’ve got work to do.  Go and tell!