Time to Get Real

Transfiguration A-26
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus and the disciples have walked six days, nearly a week. They are moving south from Galilee, through soft, shallow hills that mark the beginning of the slow, steady climb to Jerusalem and the cross. One morning before breakfast, Jesus took with him Peter, and the two brothers, James, and John, and led them up a nearby mountain. Tradition says it was Mt. Tabor in lower Galilee. There, on the summit, Jesus lit up like the sun and became midwife to the birth of a new humanity.

500 years before Christ, Rabbis called Mount Tabor “the navel of the world.” The peak rises from the plain like the belly of a pregnant woman. It is modest, covered in pine, about 11 miles west of the Sea of Galilee. It rises almost 2,000 feet above the plain. Today, a modest hiking trail winds its way three miles to the top—about an hour’s walk. It would have been an obvious and inviting choice for an early-morning climb.

There, on top of the world’s navel, Jesus revealed the radical immanence of the Divine which God has hidden deep within everyone. He showed them what they were made of. The life within all life, the soul within all souls, shown forth from him. To be made of God is to be made of a wildness which cannot be domesticated or tamed. He showed us that we are children of light and called us carry this light with him into the world of shadow and death.

But somehow, Peter didn’t get the memo. Rather than transcendence, Peter was thinking more mundane thoughts. Perhaps Peter speaks for all of us when he suggested they build someplace nice to linger in comfort. Wouldn’t that be the perfect end to the Jesus story? Popular religious imagination dictates that the faith journey leads us upwards. We strive toward the mountaintop of glory to sit around and shoot the breeze with Moses, Elijah, and all the other saints in light. Peter’s instinct was to hoard their spiritual high. He is mid-sentence when a terrifying cloud overshadowed them. They are seized with fear and knocked to the ground. A heavenly interrupts him saying, “This is my Son, my chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9: 28-30; 34-35)

In other words, God says, ‘shut up Peter,’ your pious sounding words completely miss the point. You WILL make temples but not here. They will be built with living stones and made with human hands. You will build circles of solidarity and communities of welcome and hospitality. I desire cathedrals of compassion and justice any place that the light in all people is being crushed and dominated by the power of death and darkness. In Christ Jesus, you will be my living sanctuary.

The way of Jesus leads down the mountain of transfiguration and to the cross. For reasons only love can explain, though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but came down, was born of human flesh, and lived among us, full of grace and truth. (Philippians 2:6 & John 1:14).

St. Paul quotes the words of an ancient Christian hymn and urges us to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). This is the living sanctuary in which we live and move and have our being. This is the only kind of sanctuary that can enable us to do the work Jesus calls us to do that doesn’t burn us and our little light out. From within the sanctuary of peace and shalom that travels in us, with us, and among us—we follow Jesus to the cross to confront the powers and principalities of death and shadow. With Jesus we throw our bodies like a wrench into the gears of empire, colonization, and exploitation grinding human and non-human life for profit.

We stand on the threshold of Lent, the season of death, a time of resisting temptation, fasting, prayer, and repentance. “Lent fosters an awareness of mortality that brings with it something more than self-denial…For death reminds us that we are vulnerable, thus calling us to discover the beauty of humility. Death insists that human power and greed are folly and so directs our efforts toward compassion and generosity. …Ultimately, death can unite us with our truest selves. Lent is for realists” (Diana Butler Bass, A Beautiful Year, p. 113).

One of the most important theologians of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, coined the political philosophy he called, ‘Christian Realism.’ Christian Realism, is a theological and political perspective that emphasizes human sinfulness, the inevitability of conflict, and the need for a balance of power. In the shadow of WWII Niebuhr wrote a book in 1944 called, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.

The “children of light,” he said, were the naive idealists—liberals, progressives, and democrats who believed that the conflict between self-interest and the general interest can be resolved through reason, education, or good-faith dialogue. Niebuhr called them “stupid” or “foolish,” not because they lacked intelligence, but because they chronically underestimated the power of self-interest and collective egotism. They could not see that human groups never willingly give up their interests to the general good.

The “children of darkness,” by contrast, were the moral cynics who knew no law beyond their own will or the will of their community. Niebuhr called them “wise in their generation” because they understood the reality of self-interest and the operations of power. But they were “evil” because they recognized no moral law beyond themselves which ultimately becomes the seed of their downfall.
Jesus taught us to get real about the God-light within us. Niebuhr gets real about what is at stake in walking Jesus’ way of the cross. The struggle for justice is obligatory precisely because it is never complete. Democracy is worth defending not because it is destined to triumph but because it is good—the form of political organization most consistent with human dignity and most capable of checking human sin. One fights without guarantee of victory, hopes without certainty of fulfillment, and perseveres because the alternative is capitulation to evil.

To do this, Jesus said, the children of light must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16). The children of light must become wise without becoming evil. They must get real and see clearly without losing hope. They must fight without surrendering their souls. You are light and salt, Jesus said. The children of darkness have no taste, no flavor but cruelty.
Niebuhr did not counsel despair. He counseled realism. ‘The human…capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but the human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,’ he said. Democracy is necessary—not because humans are good, but because they are not.

The children of darkness thrive when the children of light fail to deliver justice. Democracy without economic democracy generates its own gravediggers. When large portions of the population experience economic vulnerability, social dislocation, and cultural humiliation—while elites prosper and preach about diversity—the ground is prepared for demagogues.

This means that defeating the powers and principalities requires more than winning elections. “It requires addressing the material conditions that make people susceptible to the appeal of the children of darkness. It requires economic policies that deliver tangible benefits to working people. It requires rebuilding the civic institutions—unions, churches, community organizations—that once provided meaning and solidarity outside the marketplace.” (Tripp Fuller, “Steve Bannon is Not an Idiot,” Process This, 2/11/26)

“For contemporary politics, this teaching has concrete implications. Labor organizing, which builds the countervailing power of workers against capital. Coalition politics, which assembles diverse groups into alliances capable of winning elections. Institutional fortification, which strengthens the agencies and procedures that check executive overreach. Voter mobilization, which translates demographic potential into electoral power.”

On the mountain of Jesus’ transfiguration, the barrier between the visible and invisible was broken. Now we see the two are woven of the same fabric. Standing on the threshold of Lent, it is time once again to get real. Get real about the depth of human dignity planted in you by grace. Get real about the challenges we face as a people and as a nation. Get real and know that God is in you, with you, and among you. Get real and know the loving mercy of God.