Early in my priesthood I served a small parish in Northern New Jersey. It was a struggling church in a New York City suburb. It had been founded by members of an affluent City parish who wanted a summer chapel in the cool suburban woods. That Manhattan Church on East 29th Street was Church of the Transfiguration and those folks who went out to the countryside of New Jersey and set up their summer chapel named it for their year round church so it, too, was named Church of the Transfiguration.
When I got to Transfiguration in 1989 the Bishop of the Diocese of Newark was just about to close it. There were only about thirty people at worship on a Sunday morning, members, primarily of three or four extended families. I called it scruffy – a slightly nicer word than rundown.
There was an old weathered, hard-to-read sign and an unmowed, weed filled lawn out front. And, coincidentally the sign listed an incorrect time for Sunday worship. Worst of all the red front doors to the main church entrance were nailed shut. You had to know that to get into the church you had to drive around back to a narrow alley that ran alongside the building and come in through the kitchen.
It was sad; I thought about leaving but I had no where to go, so I stayed. There was a tiny Sunday School program, an altar guild, and an E.C.W., all three staffed by the same members of those three primary families. They were totally self-absorbed and content with their private chapel, yet they wondered why the church wasn’t growing and had fallen on such hard times. And, by the way, they were not thrilled about having a woman priest either. This was thirty years ago. None-the-less, they kept me. And we began.
Like Peter up on that mountain with Jesus in the Transfiguration story we heard this morning, they wanted things to stay just the way they were. Eugene Peterson in his biblical translation called The Message says that Peter, without thinking “blurt[s] out ‘Master, this is a great moment! Let’s build three memorials ….’” But, in the next moment a cloud (signifying God’s presence) envelopes them, Jesus is found to be alone, and while Peter is “babbling on” God thunders from the cloud, “This is my Son, the Chosen! Listen to him.” Peterson says “they became deeply aware of God.”
“They became deeply aware of God.” And the story doesn’t end there. “When they came down off the mountain the next day, a big crowd was there to meet them. The disciples are offerd an opportunity to heal a sick boy. They can’t do it. Maybe mentally they are still on the mountain. Sometimes we walk through a world that is sick and in need of help, but mentally we’re not there. We’re still in church. We’re still thinking about our own spiritual lives and what our own personal needs are or the next committee meeting on our schedules. But if becoming deeply aware of God” doesn’t produce righteousness, justice, healing, and freedom beyond ourselves, what good are they? What good is our healing if the people around us stay sick? A man calls from the crowd, ‘Please, please, Teacher, take a look at my son. … Often a spirit seizes him.’ Jesus steps in, orders the vile spirit gone, heals the boy, and hands him back to his father.” That’s always what Jesus does. Jesus heals, liberates, clothes, shelters, visits, and changes everyone he touches and everyone we touch in his name.
At COTT as we began to call Church of the Transfiguration in Northern New Jersey, we began by unnailing those red front church doors and we got a new church sign (with the correct time of worship). Once we opened the church doors we could look out and when we did we saw that the world outside the church had needs we could fill. We cleaned up the litter around our building, we volunteered to serve meals at the Morristown soup kitchen, we welcomed a new couple, Bill and James, we sponsored Tanya for ordination, we hired a seminarian from General Seminary and we built a handicap ramp.
The story of the transfiguration of Jesus loses its power if it does not include that moment when Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain. The transfigured Jesus is changed, not in essence but in the way he is seen; he acts in and for the world. Seeing Jesus differently means seeing ourselves and others differently too. The congregation at COTT began to understand, living high up in the rarefied air isn’t the point of transfiguration … it was never meant as a private moment of a spiritual high removed from the public square. It was a vision to carry us down, a glimpse of unimagined possibility at ground level.