David Orendorff      Mark 9:2-9        March 8, 2009

To be a disciple of Jesus means, as Jesus told his disciples last week, to pick up your cross and follow Jesus; follow him in a radical trust that God’s kingdom is present with power; follow him by using the power of the Holy Spirit in you for teaching and healing.  Just as Jesus was transfigured by being in the presence of God so are Jesus’ disciples transfigured by God’s presence.

I know there are those among us whose eyes cross when I begin a word study.  I think I can justify why it is important but that would be another sermon and even more tedious than just doing it.  Besides, I can’t seem to help myself.  So forgive and indulge me.

Some life forms undergo metamorphosis.  Behind the word we translate as transfigured is the Greek metamorfomai.  Metamorfomai is composed of the root morf, meaning “form, shape or figure” and the prefix meta meaning “new, higher and overarching.” So metamorfomai is the process of being changed from one form of being into another, higher form.

Dictionary.com[1] offers the following as the first definition of metamorphosis: “A profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism, as from the caterpillar to the pupa and from the pupa to the adult butterfly.”  Apparently, born into the caterpillar are both the possibility and the desire to be a butterfly.  The caterpillar must spin its own tomb, a chrysalis, to enter the pupa phase of its transformation.  In the pupa phase it dies as a caterpillar and is reborn as a butterfly.

The verb form of metamorphosis is metamorphose. Jesus is metamorphosed.  The movement from the form of a man to the form of Christ begins at his baptism and won’t be complete until his resurrection.  A long the way he has metamorphic experiences.  Today’s lesson is one of the big ones.  The word we translate “transfigured” is metamorphosed.

Jesus stands in a long tradition of those metamorphosed by God and Mark has two of the most important appear on the mountain with Jesus; Moses and Elijah.  Moses went from being an orphan to being the one who led his people to their own land, nation and freedom.  Elijah went from being a Tishbite of Gilead (wherever that is) to become the greatest of prophets and miracle workers.

A Reader’s Digest version of the best known metamorphosis of Moses goes like this: “Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.  Moses entered the cloud, and went up on the mountain.  Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights (remember 40 in the Bible is the number that means “as long as it takes to be completed”).[2]

“When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.[3]

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely… They have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshiped it and sacrifice to it … Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.

“But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people (notice that God says they are Moses’ people and Moses says they are God’s people), whom you brought out of Egypt (God said Moses brought them out of Egypt and Moses reminds God that it was God who brought them out).”

Moses argues that it would be bad for God’s reputation if He saved His people only to destroy them and then we read, “The Lord repented (changed his mind) about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

“Moses came down from Mount Sinai.  As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” [4]

Elijah also went up mountains to spend time with God.  One of those times he was hiding for fear of his life.  Elijah was the only prophet of God at the time and challenged all 450 of Baal’s priests to build an altar and to place on it a bull, and then to call upon their god Baal to ignite the altar.  Likewise Elijah would build an altar. Elijah said to the people, “The god who answers by fire is indeed God.”[5] The priests of Baal built their altar, piled it with wood and the slaughter bull, and called upon Baal all morning to answer them but Baal (if he existed) was silent.

Elijah had the people dig a trench around the altar he built.  And then three times he had them bring four jars of water and dump it over the altar so that the wood and bull were drenched and the trench was full.  Then Elijah prayed, “‘O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding.  Answer me, O Lord; answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.’  Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench.”[6]

Elijah had the people seize the 450 priests of Baal and then took the priests down to the Wadi Kishon and killed them.  When Ahab, then king of Israel, told his wife Jezebel what Elijah had done she swore she would kill Elijah that day.  So Elijah went into hiding.

“(God) said (to Elijah), ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’  Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.  When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.”[7]

On the mountain God spoke to Elijah and told him to choose Elisha to be a disciple to carry on His work.  His encounter with God changed Elijah from the lone prophet to a prophet seeking to pass his knowledge to another generation.  And so Elijah came down the mountain, found Elisha and made him his disciple, the next prophet of the Lord.

There is another reason that Mark mentions Elijah’s presence.  Malachi 4:1-6 says that on the last day of this world before the first day of God’s complete reign Elijah will return and prepare the people. Still today, at its Seder meal remembering how Moses led God’s people to freedom, a place is set for Elijah and at a certain point in the ritual Malachi is read and a door is open for Elijah’s coming in hopes that this day will be the day of the Lord’s coming.

And Mark draws another parallel.  In all the history of Judaism only two persons are said not to have died, but to have ascended to God, they are Enoch and Elijah.[8] And in Jesus time some had inferred from Deuteronomy 34:6 (Moses was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Bethpeor, but no one knows his burial place to this day)that Moses did not die, but also ascended directly to God.

One more thing, there are only two places in Mark’s gospel that God’s direct voice is heard.  The first time, you remember, Jesus heard God say to him at his baptism, “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased.”  This time God addresses all those present saying, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

Jesus’ metamorphosis which began at his baptism has now almost come to its fullness.  Coming down from the mountain he brings the new covenant or law and he prepares his disciples to continue his work.  Now he is the pupa ready to die in order to rise as God’s butterfly, Jesus the Christ.

When we come to worship we are coming to the mountain seeking to be in the presence of God.  Mark is letting us know that to meet God is to be metamorphosed.  When we “pick up our cross and follow Jesus” we will be changed just as Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  And every time we encounter God anew a new metamorphosis occurs in us.  The David that first said yes to God in 1968 is not the same David now.  There are some similarities and many features which are similar, but I have moved from caterpillar to pupa to butterfly so many times I have lost count.  And someday I fully expect to enter full butterflyness.

Those of you who have been hanging out with God these last so many years will testify to the same thing.  When we accept the Holy Spirit into our lives our metamorphosis begins.  First we are like the caterpillar who has all the potential of being a butterfly but who must die as a caterpillar, enter the tomb of being a pupa before emerging in all the beauty of the butterfly God designed us to be.

As Paul advises the church in Rome, so he advises us, “Do not be conformed to this world (that is; do not let this world shape you), but be metamorphosed (transformed) by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect.”[9]

If we come to worship, study and service hoping to remain the same as we are, we are not in the presence of God. From the day we are conceived we are designed to be butterflies.  When we say yes to the Holy Spirit of God in our souls the work of moving us from potential butterflies to actual butterflies begins.  Over a life time of following Jesus we become, thanks be to the mysterious metamorphosis worked in us, more like Christ in faith and action.  We will die many times along the way as we move through each pupa stage.  But remember and trust that every dying, including our final death, is followed by a resurrection in which we become more fully the person God has designed us to be, people metamorphosed into the image of Christ.

Shalom and amen.

[2] Exodus 24:17-18

[3] Exodus 31:18

[4] Exodus 32:7, 8b, 10a, 11; 34:29

[5] I Kings 18:24

[6] I Kings 18:36b-38

[7] I Kings 19:11-13

[8] 2 Esdras 6:26

[9] Romans 12:2