Transfiguration Sunday 2023

This week we wrap up our journey through Diana Butler Bass’ book Freeing Jesus by exploring our experience of Jesus as Presence, as God with us.  There is within the Christian tradition a kind of pull between the ideas of God’s immanence, or the idea that God is close by, and God’s transcendence, or the idea that God is far off, distant.  And as Bass notes, some traditions emphasize one over the other.  We Methodists certainly believe that God is God, God is something more than us, there is some holy distance between us and God. And yet, we also cling to the affirmation, grounded in the incarnation, that God is nearby, that God is with us, as close as our very skin.  God’s immanence is expressed in the Methodist lexicon with words and phrases like grace and strangely warmed hearts.  I believe that Bass is correct in asserting that the institutional Church has preferred and emphasized God’s transcendence.  Perhaps a God who creates order from a distance and who is encountered mostly in the realm of theology and church polity and structure is more easily controlled.  We can keep a transcendent God at bay, connecting only when it is beneficial for us.  But a God “…who is present in and with us, is known where two or three are gathered, is at home in the muck and mess of our lives, a God in our flesh, breathing our breath and living our life, is, well, wild, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.  Jesus, as presence, is quite close to home.”  And, yet, that is the very heart of our faith - in Jesus, God is present.  “That is what Christianity proclaims – that beyond our wildest imagination, the ever-creating Love of the cosmos made its way into our small, hurting world, living and dying with us and for us, and promises never, never, never to leave us alone.”