Every one who teaches knows what a mighty struggle it is to teach anybody anything and make it stick.
Students come to school drowsy and distracted. Some are there because they have to be; some because Daddy’s money put them there; and some just because they cannot think of anything else to do. Doing the right thing, maybe, going to school, but for all the wrong reasons.
Other students come to school hungry, tired, cold, ill clothed, and torn up inside by the turmoil of home. Some of you who are public school teachers have told me that it is all you can do to get a few basics across, because the children who come to you are so poorly cared for at home that they are not able to learn. They are not ready to train their minds when their bodies have been so abused. And I can only say that we as a church do want to support you and your efforts to make a difference in the lives of these children. But, for you, teaching is no easy task.
And then for some teaching is a tough task, just because the students are so dull, so pedestrian, so ordinary. They cannot see anything beyond the noses on their faces. They have no imagination, no dreams. They want only to get by and get on with fun and games and TV and trivia. For some of you, the pain of teaching is that you know the world is full of so much treasure, and you want somebody to know it and love it. But those you try to teach want only to know whether if will be on the final exam, and does spelling count? A tough job, teaching.
You see, the great enemy of learning is failure of imagination. The great enemy of learning is that so many of us have gotten satisfied with low-brow, minimal, partial truth. The great enemy of learning is that we are asleep when some new and greater truth is on the horizon.
In a recent film, Robin Williams played a teacher, John Keating. Keating teaches in an upper-crusty boys’ academy, surrounded by desperately dull students. Oh, some of them, to be sure, had some knowledge, and some of them were even studious and bright in their own ways. But this gifted and passionate teacher could not get his students to break out of the conventions and molds they had brought to school. They were not really open to learning anything new, they had long since stopped listening, they were locked up in their dull little worlds of pattern and tradition, and he was enormously frustrated.
And so, as master teachers will do, he worked on ways to get his students to open up, to break out, to learn. He found ways to get them to see truth for themselves. His teaching techniques were brazen and unusual. He would have his students rip pages out of the book if the pages were boring and stupid. And in a classic scene, he forced his students to stand and recite from the tops of their desks. He said it was all to get them to see things from a new vantage point, a new perspective.
Now Keating in his own student days had been a part of a small group of students who called themselves the Dead Poets Society. The Dead Poets Society, with its macabre name, was nothing more than a group of students who got together, out on their own, away from the stifling rules of formal education. They just read poetry, that’s all. But they read it with passion, they read it for meaning, they read it to one another and learned great lessons for life.
Strangely enough, in Keating’s student days, the Dead Poets Society had been an act of defiance and rebellion. And yet because these young clods got caught up in the beauty of language and the flashes of insight offered by the great poets, they learned. They learned something more than materialism and cynicism. It was a glimpse of glory to belong to the Dead Poets Society, and for that Keating longed again. For his students – if only they too could belong to a Dead Poets Society, defiant and yet glorious.
Maybe a desperate move, maybe a futile exercise, maybe just another energy-burner for the teacher. But the dedicated teacher is always willing to try one more way to facilitate somebody’s learning.
I wonder whether something like that was not on the mind of Jesus that day, a week or so after he had tried to teach a very hard lesson. He had spoken with his students about the enormous cost of discipleship. He had brought them face to face with an unwelcome truth, with something that seems to defy logic and certainly goes against what everybody thinks they know about the world and the way it works.
You see, Luke tells us that a week before, Jesus had told them, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life, will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it."
Who can hear that? And what, after all, does that mean? You and I know, don’t we, that the race is to the swift and the devil take the hindmost? You and I know that the way you get ahead is to save your pennies and make your deals and look out for Number One. You and I already know that this is nonsense, this thing of saving your life means losing it and losing your life means saving it. We know better, don’t we?
And so did Peter, James, and John. And I think that’s why the Lord Jesus invited them to join the Dead Prophets Society. Not Dead Poets this time, but the Dead Prophets Society.
Up there on that mountain, a place from which they might just possibly see truth from a new perspective, suddenly three drowsy dunces discover their teacher in a new light, with his appearance changed and his face shining as brilliant as the noonday sun, and with him two others, dead prophets: Moses, whose law they had heard for 1500 years; Elijah, whose teachings they had enshrined for 800 years. Dead Prophets. An extraordinary moment. A powerful moment. The Dead Prophets Society is holding a meeting, and they are talking with their teacher about his departure. The Master is about to join the Dead Prophets Society.
This incident in the life of Jesus, which we call His Transfiguration, is a peculiar one, a mysterious one. What in the world does it mean to you and me to look at this picture of the Jesus, the teacher of the dusty roads of Galilee, now becoming some sort of dazzling figure, clothed in light and calling up prophets long dead? What is the point of this astounding happening?
The Transfiguration means that Jesus the Christ is choosing an extraordinary means to teach something. The Transfiguration means that Jesus is not satisfied that we have learned anything, and so he chooses to take us to a place where we can see from a new perspective, and he invites us to look in on a meeting of the Dead Prophets society so that we can have etched on our memories, once and for all, the truth he is trying to get across -- that if we want to save our lives we are going to lose them, and if we will go ahead and give away our lives, that’s the way we will find them.
I
He is etching this on our memories, first of all, by reminding us who He is. He is reminding us that He is not just some itinerant teacher who spouts off lots of wacky ideas and may occasionally hit one that sounds right. He is not a harebrained guru. Who is this Jesus? He is the Lord of Life. He is Son of God and Son of Man. And he is to be heard. It is no accident that as a part of the Transfiguration experience the disciples hear a voice from heaven, proclaiming, "This is my Son, My Chosen, Hear him … listen to Him." This teacher has the words of life, and he will not permit you to blunder blithely through the school of life, only to flunk the final exam! He will do everything he can do to introduce you to life-changing truth, even to dragging you into a meeting of the Dead Prophets society, if that will impress you!
The transfigured Christ reminds us who He is, and therefore His teachings are to be taken seriously. The Christ of glory has authority to teach; He is to be heard.
II
But I want you also to see that on the Mount of Transfiguration there is more than a classroom, there is more than something which will drive home an unwelcome truth. On the Mount of Transfiguration what is being held out to Peter, James, and John, and to you and me, more than anything else -- what is being held out there is the possibility of glory for us. There is the hope that we too might be changed.
Moses was a man, a human being, just as you and I are.
He received the Law of God, he taught it faithfully, and though Moses sinned and sinned greatly, God used him. Moses gave himself away. Moses gave himself to the people of God, Moses put himself in danger, and devoted himself to the cause of God’s people, and now Moses is in glory. Whoever will lose his life for my sake, he will keep it.
Elijah; what do we know about Elijah? We know that Elijah was a man, a human being, just as you and I are. And we know that Elijah stood up to the purveyors of falsehood. We know that he stood up with courage to a weak and vacillating king. We know that he took his life into his hands and championed the cause of justice, when the queen might have killed him. We know that Elijah was a man, a human being, just as you are I are, but that in obedience to a dream, in pursuit of a vision, now Elijah is in glory. Elijah is part of the Dead Prophets Society and is in glory.
And then there is Jesus. And He too is a real human being, genuinely human. Oh, yes, we think of Him as the Christ of majesty, seated in glory at the right hand of the Father. But the disciples knew him as their friend, as their companion. They knew him as a real human being, walking the trails and getting thirsty and tossing in his sleep at night, truly human. And now this Jesus, this thoroughly human Jesus, is talking of death; and yet wonderfully, mysteriously, He is showing that His death is to be a step on the pathway to glory.
Put all of this behind the Master’s teaching, and what do you get? You find that glory is being offered to Peter, James, and John too. You find that glory is being offered to you and to me. And it is all for the price of this triumphant truth, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life, will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it."
I say you and I are being offered glory. And in our dullness we can’t hear it. In our ordinariness it doesn’t sink in. In our conventionality the rightness of this way of life never reaches us: that to die is to live and to live is to die. We cannot hear that on our own. And so it takes the Transfigured Christ, the Christ of glory to teach me that.
To keep something is to lose it and to give it away is to find it again. How can I know that such a thing is true? I know it because in Jesus Christ, transformed and changed from glory into more glory, I see it happening.
My instinct is to protect myself, to build my assets and to feather my nest. But to give and give and keep on giving; to find a way to say "yes" to the needs of others rather than always looking for a way to say "No" – that sounds like a self-defeating business, doesn’t it? Until, that is, you look at the Dead Prophets Society; until you see that we too can join it and be changed from glory into more glory. And all for the price of self-giving.
Today we dedicated a beautiful infant to the Lord, receiving the promises of his family to nurture him in the Christian faith. Already he is glory, he is beauty and wonder and awe and glory. But as we watch him grow, if we can teach him to give himself away -- for after all, as a tiny infant, it IS appropriate for him to be selfish. It IS appropriate for him to raise his young voice and demand whatever he wants. But if we can teach him to give himself away, to others and to Christ, then we will see him change from glory into glory. And it may be that he will become a part of the Dead Prophets Society, full of the glory of God.
Others we baptized, as sign and symbol of the most critical step in their journey. They went down into a watery grave, telling the world and their savior that they had died to the old life, that they were buried by baptism with Christ in a death like his, so that they can rise and walk in a new life. And that is glory. They are changed from glory into glory... more glory ... for they have heard him, they have learned something of this truth. And they are joining the Dead Prophets Society.
For all of us the issue today is whether we, like Peter, James, and John, are so sleepy that we cannot pay attention, so dull that we cannot hear truth, so pedestrian and conventional that the shattering greatness of this truth eludes us. The issue is whether we are at all teachable.
But, thanks be to God, Jesus the Christ stands in the midst of a Dead Prophets Society, offering us the path to glory, authenticating it in his own life, standing on the top of the desk and shouting at us across the centuries, "Listen; listen; whoever wants to grasp his life is going to find it slipping through his fingers, like water through a sieve; but Moses knows … Elijah knows … I know ... and surely now you know that whoever gives up all that he has, his goods, his pride, his possessions, his very life – whoever does that will gain the glory. And will be an honored member of the Dead Prophets Society.
