Shrine Builders, Inc. (Festival of the Transfiguration; Luke 9:28-36; February 26, 2017)

Shrine Builders, Inc.

Festival of the Transfiguration

Luke 9:28-36

February 26, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

I like Peter. He was the sort of fellow who never knows what he's going to say until after he's said it. He speaks before he thinks; he leaps before he looks. He can be counted on to give his opinion unfiltered, unvarnished, sometimes even unsolicited.

This time he unasked opinion is a doozy. Not only didn't he know what he was going to say before he said it, but I'm not sure he knew what he had said after he had said it. "It's good that we're here. We should construct three shrines."

Really? Three shrines? Why? Just before Peter blurted this out, our text says that Moses and Elijah who had appeared with Jesus "were about to leave." Is Peter suggesting that building shrines is a way of keeping them from leaving?

Our translation calls them shrines, but the word refers to a tent or temporary shelter. The same word is used to describe the large tent that served as a portable temple. It's also used to describe a sukkah, the shelter that Jews make from leafy branches to celebrate the Festival of Booths that remembers Israel's wandering in the desert.

So Peter proposes to build shelters or pitch tents so that Moses and Elijah will stay and this experience can be prolonged. That is one of the things that shrines do. We build shrines not only mark a place but also to preserve something, a presence or a memory.

The shrines I see most often take the form of roadside crosses, often with flowers and sometimes a plaque that names the spot as the place where someone loved had remembered lost their life in a needless and violent tragedy. As long as the shrine is there and there are people who remember when they see it, a kind of presence persists and the abyss of grief does not seem so deep.

So maybe that's what Peter means. Three shrines even if not permanently occupied will point to the three brilliant figures that the disciples saw. As long as the shelter/shrines are there, a little of that overwhelming experience will remain as well. To see the shelters, perhaps even to sit in them, is to place oneself within this event once again. So, in a sense, Peter wants this to go on and on, to be with Jesus and Moses and Elijah up on the mountaintop.

But the mountain reminds us that the presence of God in Israel's experience is not a simple delight. God is more than a bit overwhelming. Read the mountaintop experiences in Israel's story and we find that these events were important, but we don't find any great desire to repeat them.

The shelters/shrines/tents that Peter wants to build also take us back to the mountain in the desert when Moses met God in the cloud and came down with the covenant etched in stone and carved on his heart. The people were to fashion a tabernacle, a tent that would serve as a place for God to stay when the people were encamped during their wilderness wandering. But this tent was less for God's comfort and convenience than for Israel's safety. The living God is not an object that can be handled or kept, like a sheep or goat that can be domesticated and bent to Israel's use. God has a tent in the wilderness for the same reason that transformer sub-stations in the power grid have high fences around them and signs that warn: "Keep out! Danger of death from electrocution!" In Israel's witness God is loving, yes, and compassionate, but also dangerous to human carelessness.

Maybe Peter wants to build shrines so that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah--with their frighteningly changed faces--can be safely tucked away where no one especially Peter, John, and James will be exposed to so much holiness and divine glory.

That's how shrines work. They both preserve an experience, and protect the shrine-builders from a too-direct exposure. The roadside shrine does both of these things: it preserves the sacred memory of someone loved and lost and substitutes a cross and flowers for the ugliness of an accident scene. This is not a criticism, by the way. Who could tolerate a relentless exposure to the scene of a fatal crash? So we build a shrine to do the work of substitution.

A shrine represents an encounter with God, the sight of a transfigured Jesus, a person much-loved but now no longer with us. There is nothing wrong with representing. It's what we do. But we have to remember the double nature of representation. The first side is the representation re-presents something, makes something present again, connects us with the reality it points us to. The bread and wine of the Lord's Table re-present the body and blood of Christ--they present it again.

But there is another side of representation. It re-presents something by presenting something else. We must remember this whenever someone offers to be our representative. They may be interested in our opinions or they may do their best to avoid getting our opinions, but in any event they will be in Washington or Des Moines and we will not.

While at the Lord's Table the bread and wine re-present the body of Christ, make the body of Christ present again, but all the same they are bread and wine, not human flesh and blood.

This is obvious in a way, but we forget it nonetheless. Perhaps you have seen the painting by René Magritte. It's entitled "The Treachery of Images." It features a very realistic image of a drop-stem pipe with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," that is, "This is not a pipe." My first reaction is always, "That's absurd! Of course it's a pipe!" But then, I remember, "Ah, it isn't a pipe, is it? It's a painted image of a pipe." Magritte's painting reminds us that the treachery of images is that they make a subtle claim to be what they represent.

Of course, we know that we can't stuff a painting of a pipe with tobacco and smoke it, anymore than we can live in the house in a pre-schooler's drawing.

But shrines are, if anything, even more treacherous than images. How many people who quickly get Magritte's joke nonetheless believe that God lives in a church or who react with visceral horror when the Annual Conference announces the closing of a church camp. "But I met Jesus there!" they sputter, mistaking a painting of a pipe for the pipe itself.

It's not that we haven't built some mighty fine shrines, including this one. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've been trying to tease apart what Peter meant when he offered to go into the shrine-building business, forced into it in part because Peter himself didn't know what he meant. I'd almost forgotten that, if Peter didn't know what he was saying and offered no commentary, the same cannot be said of God.

A cloud covered the hilltop and a voice spoke from the cloud: "This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!" And there was Jesus alone, the cloud vanished, the voice silent. It was as if it had never happened. And so Jesus and his disciples walked back down the hill. They left behind no shrines but this text which is dangerous enough. Shrines don't have to be made of leafy branches or bricks and mortar. Texts can be shrines and so can ideas, traditional practices, and religious systems.

We can imagine an alternative ending in which Peter, John, and James built the shrines. When they were done, they were proud of their work and of the finished products. The shrines were in fact both beautiful and functional. Peter looked at his shrine and said, "I think I'll call it Christianity." John looked at his shrine and said, "I'll call mine Judaism." Not to be outdone, James said, "And I'll call mine Islam." Out of jealousy they began to find fault with each other's shrines. They made bigger and bigger claims for their own.

But how did God respond? God wept and said, "This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him!" Awakening as if from a dream, Peter, James, and John left behind their shrines on the hilltop and walked back down the hill as brothers.

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