Mark 9:2-9, 2 Kings 2:1-12 (Transfiguration Sunday, Year B)
Now the Lord was going to take Elijah up to heaven in a windstorm, and Elijah and Elisha were leaving Gilgal. Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here, because the Lord has sent me to Bethel.”
But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you live, I won’t leave you.” So they went down to Bethel.
The group of prophets from Bethel came out to Elisha. These prophets said to Elisha, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master away from you today?”
Elisha said, “Yes, I know. Don’t talk about it!”
Elijah said, “Elisha, stay here, because the Lord has sent me to Jericho.”
But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you live, I won’t leave you.” So they went to Jericho.
The group of prophets from Jericho approached Elisha and said to him, “Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master away from you today?”
He said, “Yes, I know. Don’t talk about it!”
Elijah said to Elisha, “Stay here, because the Lord has sent me to the Jordan.”
But Elisha said, “As the Lord lives and as you live, I won’t leave you.” So both of them went on together. Fifty members from the group of prophets also went along, but they stood at a distance. Both Elijah and Elisha stood beside the Jordan River. Elijah then took his coat, rolled it up, and hit the water. Then the water was divided in two! Both of them crossed over on dry ground. When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, “What do you want me to do for you before I’m taken away from you?”
Elisha said, “Let me have twice your spirit.”
Elijah said, “You’ve made a difficult request. If you can see me when I’m taken from you, then it will be yours. If you don’t see me, it won’t happen.”
They were walking along, talking, when suddenly a fiery chariot and fiery horses appeared and separated the two of them. Then Elijah went to heaven in a windstorm.
Elisha was watching, and he cried out, “Oh, my father, my father! Israel’s chariots and its riders!” When he could no longer see him, Elisha took hold of his clothes and ripped them in two.
Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and brought them to the top of a very high mountain where they were alone. He was transformed in front of them, and his clothes were amazingly bright, brighter than if they had been bleached white. Elijah and Moses appeared and were talking with Jesus. Peter reacted to all of this by saying to Jesus, “Rabbi, it’s good that we’re here. Let’s make three shrines—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He said this because he didn’t know how to respond, for the three of them were terrified.
Then a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice spoke from the cloud, “This is my Son, whom I dearly love. Listen to him!” Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them not to tell anyone what they had seen until after the Human One had risen from the dead.
This past week, the current far-right Polish government passed a bill supported by forces on both the right and left side of the political spectrum that would punish those who in anyway blamed the Polish people for their part in the Nazi Holocaust. Now, to be very clear, it is important to recognize that the Holocaust was a German program of mass genocide, despite the fact that many of the camps that facilitated that genocide resided in countries conquered by the Nazis in the early part of World War II. And it must also be acknowledged that there were some in Poland who put their lives in danger to hid or protect Jews from the Germans, something acknowledged by Holocaust museums around the world. But, as with many countries who were occupied by the Germans, there were already strong strains of anti-Semitism within the country, despite the fact that Poland itself was once considered a safe-haven for many Jews in earlier times. There is evidence that some Poles did, in fact, help facilitate the Holocaust – not just by their silence, but, in some cases, they helped the Nazis in the hunting down of Jews, especially in rural areas. There were towns outside of Auschwitz, which is located in Poland, that were literally visible from the camps, who, after the war, denied that they had any idea that genocide was happening in their neighborhood, despite the trains, the smell, the horror that was clearly happening within eyesight. This new Polish law essentially makes it illegal to ascribe any blame to the people of Poland for what happened in their country during the Holocaust, however small or incidental it may have been. It is a denial that Polish anti-Semitism, which was like much of the same kind of anti-Semitism rampant kind all over Europe, was in anyway a contributer to the horror of what happened in those death camps found within Polish borders, ones not built by them, or run by them, but certainly not resisted by most Poles.
Sometimes, of course, it is hard to look within the darkness of our own country, or even our own souls, and make peace with what seemingly should never be made peace with – some action, some deed or deeds, that inflicted pain on another, or on another people. And yet, it can be done, people have chosen not to deny reality, and it is, ironically, the German people after the war that have been an example of that terrible reckoning that has to happen if we are to make peace with our souls and with our God for our past. It was not an easy thing for the German people, this acceptance, rather than denial, of Germany’s perpetration of the worst human massacre ever. To be fair, this push for Germans to accept their role in the Holocaust was initiated by those who had defeated Germany, but eventually the “cure” was accepted, the denial was denied. Now, in Germany, there is a Holocaust memorial in almost every major city, as well as many small towns, to the victims of the Holocaust, and school textbooks embrace German responsibility for the war and the Holocaust. They took another road, and I do think that embrace of responsibility has helped Germany become the modern nation that it is, including one that took in the largest group of refugees during the recent refugee crisis in the Middle East. But now, there are far-right political forces in Germany that are pushing back against history and against embracing those in need of help, which is one of those lessons that earlier post-war World War II generations had learned. But Germany, Poland and others within Europe are not the only ones in the denial business – we Americans deny our role in the decimation of Native American people in this country, something I am reminded of this whenever someone on my Twitter feed says that immigrants should get out of this country, and some Native American voices reply that they’ve been saying that same thing about the illegal white “immigrants” who stole their lands hundreds of years earlier. Or you hear people denying the cause of the Civil War by ascribing some political principle like states’ rights as the reason for the war, when in almost every secessionist document from the Confederate states mention that it was the preservation of human slavery within their borders that motivated them to send their young men into the slaughter of war. In my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, they didn’t erect a monument to Robert E. Lee in the 1930’s to celebrate states right – they built it to send a signal to the African-American population that Jim Crow was there to stay. We Americans know denial, we know revisionist history in our country, and our deep unwillingness to acknowledge that truth, the truth that part of America’s early DNA was built on the enslavement of black human beings for hundreds of years is part of our own denial of historical reality.
Of course, it’s not just countries that struggle with denial – it’s you and me, and all of us, we who sometimes just have a hard time dealing with the world as it is, as it really is. I am certainly not immune to it, and I suspect none of us are, at least completely – and I suspect we’re all in denial about different aspects of our lives. It is human nature, and perhaps, at times, and is something our minds sometimes has to do to protect us from what we cannot face, or deal with in any given moment. Our two texts today are good examples of that propensity for denial, and I think we should look at them as a way of both understanding how denial works – and how, eventually, we always have to come terms with reality if we want to begin anew in our lives. As I’ve said before, quoting the self-help guru Byron Katie, we can argue with reality all we want, but we’ll only lose that argument 100% of the time.
First, you have this story of the ending of Elijah’s ministry in a dramatic fashion and his young disciple Elisha who is in a sort of denial of what he knows to be true – that Elijah is going, he is going away to heaven in windstorm. Interestingly, Elijah is only of two people in our Bibles who has said to have never died – the other one being Melchizedek, a king who is briefly noted in the Old Testament, but is brought up later in one of the letters of the New Testament. Despite this coming ending, Elisha is determined to stay with his prophetic master and at every turn, and at every stop they make at all the important historical places in Israel’s history – Gilgal, Bethel, and Jericho – he refuses to leave Elijah. When the other prophets tell him that Elijah will be taken away by God on the very day of his departure, he both acknowledges that truth – and yet wants them to shut up, to not talk about it. When I read those words, it felt so familiar to me, as in those moments when we are sometimes told that a loved one is dying, but we don’t want it mentioned, as if just saying the words seem wrong, that by saying the words we actually bring the specter of that reality into the room. And yet, Elijah won’t let Elisha be in that kind of denial – Elijah as Elisha what he can do for his young prophetic apprentice before he leaves him, and Elisha asks for a double portion of his spirit, which is not him requesting to have double the spirit Elijah has, but simply more than the other prophets who were also were followers of Elijah, a double portion of the estate being the amount often given to the eldest son in the patriarchal system of that time. Elijah says that this is a difficult request because it is not really his to give, his portion to allocate – his spiritual power is the Lord’s and not necessarily his to give away. But Elijah says this – ‘if you see me taken away from you, then it will happen.” “If you watch me be taken away by those chariots of fire,’ Elijah may be saying, “if you don’t look away, and pretend it’s not happening, my departure, my going away, this difficult thing, then a double portion of my spirit will surely be yours.” If you and I can choose to face reality, if we can deny our desire to look away from that which is difficult, we can have more than we had expected, a double portion. Facing the really real, the truth about something, despite the difficulty of that reality, of that truth, does have its eventual rewards, its eventual blessings.
And yet you see another attempt to deny reality in our second text today, the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, this moment when Jesus shines like the sun itself, high upon that mountain, with Elijah and Moses visiting with Jesus. The disciples are obviously dumbstruck in this moment, surely experiencing a mixture of fear and wonderment, though fear seems to dominant the story. But Peter, always Peter, he offers to literally create dwelling places, shrines for Jesus, Elijah and Moses on that mountain – Peter offers them permanency on that mountain. But it was surely clear that this wasn’t permanent, this amazing moment on that high mountain, because literally just right before this Transfiguration, Jesus predicts his own death (Mark 8:27-33) and Peter tells him that such a thing could not happen, he denies his Master’s words and prediction. We so often see what we want to see, see what we hope to see, and Peter, along with the other disciples are doing the same – not wanting to face reality, the reality that the story of Jesus will end in Jesus’ death. In the end, you and I, and countries and communities, have to choose to face the really true, the very real, the unwanted truth. In this case, creating shrines to the present will not protect us from the future, from the reality of a sometimes difficult future.
I’ve shared this story with you before, but back in 2016 I was visiting my sister and nephew who now live outside Jackson, Mississippi, and during that time we decided to go back to Meridian so that we could see what happened to the house, what became of the house that had once been a home for us, more for my sister, but still a place I can’t ever remember not visiting my grandmother or parents within. My sister hadn’t been back to the house since we left after my mother’s death in 2014, and neither had I – and so we drove there, and I did so without the GPS, Meridian being one of the few places I know how to get to and around without much help. And so we drove up to our grandmother’s house, which became my parent’s eventual home, and it had a FOR SALE sign in the front yard, one of those signs you find at the local hardware store. It became clear that someone had bought the place and spent a bit of money so they could flip it. It was clear no one was living there, not yet anyway, so we parked in a driveway that both of us had parked in a thousand times before, and we walked around the place, noting as we got closer that they had painted the bricks, and put new shudders around the windows. Inside they had rehabbed the place, lightning it up, painting walls that had too many years of cigarette smoke stains on them from my parents, both heavy smokers, and they had put carpeting down where there had been none. And the flippers finally did what my parents should have done decades ago – they put in central air and heat! The place was so familiar, and yet so different, this house that had once been a home of sort to me, but was especially one for my younger sister. There was the living room where my mother drew her last breath only a few years earlier – and my father and grandmother died in bedrooms in that house – that place was about as sacred as it gets for my sister Allison and me. And then, then it dawned on us that this place was going to be a new home for someone else, for another family, a small family, for sure, and this house wasn’t finished being a home just yet, the last chapter of love hadn’t been written when we left the place: the story would go on, life would go on again in these walls. Going back to 3714 Highland Ave in Meridian, Mississippi helped us face the reality of a life without my mother, and all those that had once inhabited those walls. I don’t think Allison and I were ever in full-scale denial about my mother’s death – but it brought it all home to us, so to speak, and I think it did help us to move forward, seeing the painful truth that this house was no longer our home, or my mother’s home, but it would soon be someone else’s home, where a new chapter, a new beginning would take place. Facing that reality and not denying it helped us to move on, while still acknowledging our grief about how much love and loss we had experienced in that tiny little house on Highland Ave.
You know, the denial of a traumatic event is actually sometimes a good thing, at least for a while, a gift from God, really, because sometimes we simply cannot process or make peace with the really real, or the truest truth at a particular moment. We can’t rush ourselves or others into embracing the truth about a moment, though, eventually the un-faceable must be faced, the un-lookable must be looked upon. You and I can’t set up laws within ourselves like Poland has done within its borders, denying what has happened, forever. Like Elijah, the only way into the better future, into a new beginning is to face the difficult, the painful, the hard thing, and like Jesus and the disciples, eventually we must leave that high mountain, and go back into the valleys below to face what awaits us and them in our own Jerusalem. In denying the past forever, the bad, and sometime even the good, we enact another form of denial – we close the door to a better future, we say no to a new beginning, a different and sometimes better future. We begin the season of Lent next week, which is the church’s attempt to show us the valleys and the depth found within us, the shadowy valleys and dark depths found within us, and in the larger world. In the end, though, to not face the darkness is also to not notice the true brilliance of the light when it arises upon us and within the world in the future in our and the world’s inevitable moments of resurrection. There are no beginnings without endings, and no endings without beginnings, and so, as we begin Lent, may we embrace the difficult truths so that we can eventually embrace the new beginnings, so we can embrace the fullness, the goodness, the marvel of all of our Easter mornings. Amen.
