Every year, right before we head into the "dust and ashes" of Lent, the Lectionary gives us the Transfiguration. It’s that wild story where Jesus takes his inner circle—Peter, James, and John—up a mountain and suddenly starts glowing like a literal supernova.
And then, just to make it weirder, two "celebrity guests" from the Hebrew Bible, Moses and Elijah, just... show up.
Now, Peter—who is basically all of us on our best and worst days—is so blown away by the "God-ness" of it all that he does the most human thing possible:
He tries to manage it. He offers to build three booths. He wants to bottle the magic, codify the moment, and turn a mystical experience into a real estate project.
He’s trying to institutionalize the Divine before the glow even fades.
And how does God respond? Not with a "Thanks, Peter!" but with a voice so terrifyingly loud it knocks them all flat on their faces. They’re paralyzed by the weight of it all until Jesus walks over, touches them, and tells them to get up.
See our churches? They’re often just our modern-day attempts to "build a booth" on that mountain. We get so obsessed with the "tent"—the traditions, the buildings, the "way we’ve always done it"—that we forget to look at the Person the tent was supposed to house.
This is the tension between religion and spirituality. Spirituality is that raw, desperate hunger for the Divine. Religion is the infrastructure we build to try and hold onto it.
The problem isn't the tent; the problem is when we start worshiping the canvas instead of the Christ.
So here is the lesson for the week: Don’t get so focused on the window that you forget to look at the view. Pay more attention to that spiritual self of yours - and don't get caught up in the trappings of hollow tradition, empty ritual, and stale sentimentality.
The rose blooming outside your window lasts much longer when you don't put it in a vase.
0 comments:
Post a Comment