14 February 2010

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12–4:2
Luke 9:28-36

I was confronted recently by someone who didn’t like  my business card.  Namely that snarky little quote at the bottom  which says House for All Sinners and Saints “We’re religious, but not spiritual” .  In a place like Colorado especially Denver and Boulder,  it’s kinda the worst thing you can say about yourself.  It’s only one of the unique challenges of being a pastor in a place like Colorado. another being people saying to me things like “Oh, I don’t need to go to church to experience God, you know, when the mountains are a 45 minute drive away”.

And I get where they are coming from.  Seeing, as they must, very little evidence for how religion has ever made anyone a better person.  What with the rules and judgments and total preoccupation with who is in and who is out.   There’s a lot not to like.  I get it.  I get the move toward wanting something personal and not so … institutional.  So we go to the mountains to hopefully experience God and transcend the pain of being human just a little bit. We seek personal spiritual experiences hoping we might overcome or at least escape our flaws and weaknesses and become better people.

But if we think that this seeking of a personal spirituality will make us better people then we might go back and read today’s gospel lesson again.   See, Peter James and John had the ultimate mountain top experience.  You can’t really beat being on top of a mountain with Jesus Moses and Elijah, , and then entering a cloud from which God speaks.  Now that’s a spiritual experience! I mean…that’s better than a soy latte with Thich Nhat Hanh.  No one before or since has had this supreme of a personal spiritual experience.  And so if our theory is that personal spiritual experiences make us better people we might keep reading because you know what results from this spectacular spiritual experience for Peter James and John? Stupidity, fear and ineptitude.  In that order, actually.  When they see Jesus transfigured Peter says “boy, good thing we’re here cause we can build a shed” so there’s the stupid part, then when the cloud over came them they were terrified…though in the Greek it’s more like “scared out of their wits”. And just so we don’t miss the point, the very first thing they accomplish after their mountain top experience is to completely fail to cast out a demon …and there we have ineptitude.  Don’t get me wrong, personal spiritual experiences are important and beautiful…I’m just saying that here in Luke we can’t make a great case for them making us particularly better people.

And honestly I always had this very clear idea of what it would look like if I was really “spiritual”  I’d be patient and soft spoken and not the least bit neurotic and I’d never offend people and above all I’d have a super-duper positive attitude.  In other words, I’d have what amounts to a complete personality transplant.  I thought spirituality was a way to transcend or overcome my flaws.  But here in Luke’s transfiguration story we see that the disciples didn’t overcome their personality flaws.  Not at all.  God just made up for them – that’s different.

Recently when I was lamenting the fact that I have just about the worst personality for being  pastor…I’m a recovering alcoholic, I swear like a truck driver, I have sleeve tattoos and I’m not this overly nurturing touchy feely batik wearing earth mama type…you know, well when I was lamenting this my friend reminded me that maybe God is glorified in using such an unlikely person to be a pastor.