Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

A Certain Height

Luke 9: 28

Marsh Chapel

March 2, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

         Martin Luther King’s own favorite sermon, “The Dimensions of a Complete Life”, (as Gary Dorrien reminded us (157, The Making of American Liberal Theology), was itself based on a sermon from Boston’s own Phillips Brooks. King preached the sermon in 1954, to candidate at Dexter Avenue, and again at Purdue in 1958 before a national UCC convention, and again in 1964 in Westminster Abbey to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. As you learn, preaching on an old style Methodist circuit, what is good the first time, can often be better preached three times or more. The opposite also may be true. Said our dear friend, of blessed memory, Peter Gomes:  a great sermon is like a great Bach Cantata: you can and should hear it many times.  King, following Boston’s Brooks, compared life to a cube, possessing the three dimensions of length, breadth and height. The good life flourishes when all three interact in something like a great triangle. “At one angle stands the individual person, at the other angle stand other persons, and at the top stands the Supreme Infinite Person, God”. Length means achieving personal goals, breadth comprises the concern for the well-being of others, and height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing…for God. Height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing…for God.

         Today’s Gospel is about the third dimension, about height, and personally asks you whether your life exhibits this, King’s third dimension. Height. Hast Thou Height? Granted your personal achievements. Given your communal engagements. Have you known, or been known by, ‘a certain view’? In Boston, during this winter of 2025, in the speaking and hearing of Luke 9: 28, there could hardly be a more personal, pertinent question. On it hang hope and health, yours and mine. A high, craggy, high view is one of the gifts which the religious communities may offer to support our common hope across the globe, even in this time of mendacity, in this time of wanton harm and hurt.

         Now. The work of a sermon is in the hearing, and the working, astute hearer regular asks A: what is this about? And B: what difference does it make?

A. What Is It About?

         Today we hear Luke’s later version of the Transfiguration. Originally a resurrection appearance account, this legend eventually was placed, first by Mark, in the year 70ce, back into the life of Jesus, as a confirmation of his Messiahship, a portent of Easter, and an affirmation of Peter’s earlier confession. Our lectionary places this passage, given symbolical and other similarities, adjacent to Exodus 34. But the truth is that there are as many reasons to disjoin as to conjoin the two texts, and it is generally better to avoid the inherited usurpation by the Newer Testament of the Older, if at all possible. Rather, the passage as it washes up from Mark on the shoreline of Luke’s persecuted Roman congregation, near the turn of the century, is an ill fit to our current lectionary assembly.

         Mark has brought the trumpets of universals to the occasion. All life longs for height! Hear the resurrection gospel! Light. Shining. Cloud. God. Tradition. Prayer. Silence. Presence. White…white as snow…white as no fuller on earth could bleach…white as light…dazzling white. What arrives to Luke is a High View, a certain height, an announcement of…God. This is my beloved…listen…

         Today’s Gospel is about Luke’s editorial and authorial changes to the Markan Transfiguration. Notice with me a dozen changes Luke makes, working on what he inherits from Mark. Marsh’s pulpit today interprets Luke yesterday, who interprets Mark the day before, who accounts for the Transfiguration.

         First, Luke adds two days to the number of days in the distance from the earlier text, perhaps a more regular 8 day week, than the more resurrectional 6 day account in Mark. Luke’s is a more ordinary account of what a week is. Think of your week: sleep, work, travel, talk, sleep. Sermon. Sleep, work, travel…

         Second, Luke demotes James to the third position, after not before John, perhaps a move to distance himself and his church from the Jewish Christianity which James led. Luke represents more a Roman, regular human, than a Jerusalem, brother of the Lord, religious sentiment.

         Third, Luke depicts all present in prayer. We can identify with prayer. It is something, however weakly, we practice. It is a human word to God, not the other way around. Prayer, worship, giving, journaling, doing.

         Fourth, Luke makes the white ‘dazzling’, to stand out in our human experience.

         Fifth, Luke fills in the detail of the conversation, the tertulia, held among the Law and the Prophets and the Lord. They speak of exodus, of glory, of what is to come. Mark kept them mute, Luke gives them voice, human language.

         Sixth, to be clear, Luke has called these figures ‘men’. Mark gives their names, Luke their genus and species. They are to be seen and heard as humans, real people, not ghosts.

         Seventh, Luke puts the disciples to sleep, a magical sleep, so well-known in all our folk tales, from the Brothers Grimm to Frank Baum. Sleep, sleep…nary a more human activity than slumber.

         Eighth, Luke reveals Peter as even more human than thou, not only not knowing what to say, as in Mark, but not knowing what he had said. My dear friend and colleague, author of three dozen books,  was accused of publishing every thought he ever had, to which he deftly replied, “Oh no, I published much more than that”. Our self-criticism can reveal our ownmost selves.

         Ninth, Luke declares explicitly, what you know best in your nightmares, that the disciples are afraid. You fear, I fear, we fear. Fear in handful of dust. After this past year, we are people drenched in and numbed by fear, by anxiety and worry and ennui.  So: name them, declare them explicitly as did Luke.

         Tenth, Luke radically changes God’s statement about Jesus. Mark has “this is my beloved Son”, a repetition of Jesus’ baptism. Luke uses a strange word, a perfect passive participle, for Jesus whose perfection, passive reception and earthly participation, Luke names this way: “This is my Son, my Chosen”. Actually, the word means, “picked out from”. Love is a great word, but vague. Choices clarify. We are known in our choices, we choosing humans. Thank you for love. Now, what choices does that imply? What loving choices?

         Eleventh, Luke implicates the disciples in the keeping of silence. Mark has Jesus keep the secret, Luke the disciples. Secrets, open or otherwise, are the stuff of human community, and tragedy. A family or institutional system is dysfunctional at the point of its secrets, and its fingerprints are in its secrets. What is not said is what is loudest.  In family systems, what is not said is loudest.

         Twelfth, Luke emphasizes the prophetic dimension of this tale, as the Apocalypse of Peter will do later in the century (Apoc. Pet. 6). Prophecy is what keeps biblical narrative human.

         So. What is all this about? Just this. At twelve points, Luke has not so subtly re-written an inherited account of epiphany, of a certain heightened view, at every point to make it more human.Luke smashes home his Transfiguration sermon: this holy event is human, accessible to human beings, grounded in human experience, open to all the human frailties and weaknesses we so painfully know, human, human, human, human! Homo sum: humani nil a mi alienum puto. I am human, nothing human is foreign to me.  Luke has rewritten the Gospel, in order to be faithful to the Gospel.  As we try to do every Sunday.

         In the main, the Transfiguration ill suits Luke’s general gospel purpose, to present the human face of God in Jesus, or so it would seem. But look! Luke has brought you something profoundly hopeful and healthy. Good life has height, as well as length and breadth. Good life has height that is a part of human experience. For Luke, unlike for Mark, the Transfiguration is not about divine but about human experience, not about a divine voice but about human ears. Luke’s passage is about heightened human experience. Your experience.  Sometimes in order to protect traditions, we have to re-interpret them.

B. What Difference Does it Make?

         So, what difference does this make? If any?

         On each and every Sunday we may ask this of the text of the day: what is it about and what difference does it make?

         It is striking that Luke, facing similar fright as do we in this our own time of national and cultural turmoil, Luke, during the terror of Domitian, wrote otherwise, here. (May his courage, and the courage of the other biblical writers, ever infect us.) As if to say, there is more than one witness, the persecution of Christians under Domitian, he heightens human experience, making even transfiguration fully human. As if to say to us, there is more than one witness, the trauma of the last year, and that more than one witness is making even our life open to height.  As if to say to us, there is more than one witness, that life is open to a saving height.

         Given the mendacity and cruelty in the last 48 hours of the current national Republican leadership, so utterly reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy, another Republican from another era, we may perhaps benefit from a little more height—in personhood, in voice, in presentation, in language, in heart.  McCarthy rode high on his own generation of cruelty and mendacity.  For a time.  But then along came a lawyer from Boston, Mr. Welch, to challenge him and, ultimately, to bring him down. After scenes highly reminiscent of the tawdry Oval Office disgusts of Friday, at long last along came a Boston lawyer, who shouted into the Republican evils of Joseph McCarthy, then highly popular, ‘Have you no decency?  Have you no decency?’  Have you no decency?  Have you no decency?’ He was supported by a graduate of Boston University School of Theology, later to become a Methodist Bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam, a meticulous record keeper as it happened, who could contradict by print record, what the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, proffered as true, which it was not. 

         That is. As dark as these days are.  As low as these moments are.  It may be that there will arise, in these days, as with that Boston lawyer, Mr. Welch, and that Methodist Bishop, Mr. Oxnam, a calling to account.  I listen for the voices of the Senator from Maine, of the former governor from New Hampshire, of the Senators from Utah, Alaska, and Kentucky.  It must be my hearing is fading, because I don’t quite hear anything.  Yet.  It may be that this past weekend, as with Joe McCarthy in the year of my birth 1954, is the Transfiguration moment, the certain view, the height dimension.  When people realize, as they at last did with Joe McCarthy, what we are dealing with.

         At least ask yourself, as this sermon comes around third base to head on home, whether your life has height? Human height? Has it?

         Luke 9: 28 offers a sacred, a heightened, sacred message. Your life, in its struggle upward may open up, at points, to a humanly accessible heightened view!

         In fact, if life does not retain a height dimension, life becomes a kind of death. Without the mountain, Transfiguration presence, the absence of the valley becomes the valley of death. Luke has smashed home his sermon, already, so in like fashion we may want to ask ourselves, I may ask you, a question. Does your life have height? Is the spiritual ceiling in your weekly house of sufficient stature? How high is heaven, day to day? Is there any place for a cloud, for brilliance, for presence, for the numinous? Is there a room with a view? Is there a place for special experience, even ‘special revelation’?  As the parishioner said to her pastor, looking up from the kitchen sink, in front of a cold hard wall, I just wish this kitchen had a window over the sink.

Closing