Preacher: Dana Cassell

Scripture: Matthew 17:1-9

I spent some time in Western North Carolina this week, a year and a half after Hurricane Helene blew through and changed nearly every aspect of the place. I was down there because my boyfriend, Jay, finally got a call from contractors who were surveying property damage that had potential to be fixed with federal funds. The house he owns right outside of Banner Elk sits directly on the Elk River, and the hurricane-swollen river widened the waterway, flattened the island in the middle of it, and carved out a brand new bank for itself, two feet from the edge of the house’s back deck.

I knew that Jay was waiting on federal programs and funds to come through to repair all this damage, but I had never been to his house or seen how precarious the situation actually was. Two steps past the decking, you’re in for a hard, 20 foot fall into what he calls “frog water,” the unhappy, very rocky marshland created when the water carved a new bank and widened its bed.

Jay’s crawlspace was flooded, but the water didn’t manage to invade any of the living spaces and, despite the wrecked riverbank right outside the door, his house is still standing. That’s not the case for many, many, many other peoples’ homes in the region. If you look just downriver from Jay’s porch, you see half a house. Half of a house: the floodwaters sheared someone’s home in half, and the remaining part is still there, wide open to the elements, a year and a half later. He says when he gets upset about the ongoing struggle to repair and take care of his own property, he just looks across the river and remembers how lucky he got.

I talked with some folks from the area while I was in western NC this week, and I asked them if, a year and a half later, things were starting to feel back to “normal,” whatever that means. Their answers were revealing: “Yes, for people like us who were mostly okay, things are back to being mostly okay. But there are still people in hollers living in tents. There are still people making a go of it in FEMA trailers because they can’t afford to rebuild the house that they inherited from their grandparents’ grandparents.” The effects of that hurricane in those mountains are lasting – people will be wrestling with them for the rest of their lives.

Hurricane Recovery has been lost to the incessant news cycle over the last year, but Jay pointed out so many places where the floodwaters washed out bridges, took out homes, and destroyed businesses. In the park where we ate lunch, newly installed signs showed the Hurricane Helene High Water Marks – up to my nose, on a plateau that sits twenty feet above the river, now.

It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the impact of a hurricane in the Blue Ridge mountains. Those floodwaters changed so much, for so many, and the effects will echo through generations. The rivers changed their courses, moved their banks, ran roughshod over flimsy human settlements, changed the nature of life for creatures of all kinds.

But standing on Jay’s deck looking at the transformed riverbed, I noticed two gigantic boulders on the opposite bank. If you’ve spent any time in mountain streams, you know the kind of boulders I’m talking about: house-sized rocks that got dropped into place millions – maybe even billions – of years ago. These rocks probably got picked up and tumbled down a mountainside during another big flood. They used to be even bigger than they are now – the constant water rushing around them has slowly eroded them. 

At Jay’s house, the flooding from Helene carved a new riverbank and flattened an entire rhododendron grove. It changed a hopping trout habitat into a series of small holes where fish are just starting to return. It cut a house in half and put multiple human homes in peril. But it did not move those giant boulders at all. They still sit, in likely the exact same spot they have been for thousands of years, quiet, unmoving, unmovable.

And those boulders blew my mind. Blew my mind! Because I had been rocked by what I’d seen in those mountains, flabbergasted at the destruction that remained 16 months after the storm. I was still trying to process how big the storm must have been to create the change I was witnessing and here sat two rocks whose lifespan is so much longer than our tiny human ones, whose vantage point on the river and the storm was so much more expansive and long-viewed than ours.

For those boulders, Helene was simply one storm among many, probably not even the most disruptive they’d seen. The river didn’t even move them, this time, and they know what being picked up and thrown down a mountain by water feels like. For those boulders, all the change happening around them must be simply par for the course, what happens in nature, what happens on earth. The rains come down and the floods come up, you know? It’s how life has always gone there on the bank of the Elk River.

The boulders gave me a glimpse into a different reality, a different perspective on how the world works.

And I’m not sure, but I suspect that THAT is how Peter, James and John felt when they witnessed what we call the Transfiguration up on the mountain with Jesus.

Jesus regularly hiked up mountains to be alone with God, but this time, he invites his three friends to join him. As soon as they get to the top of the mountain, Jesus is transfigured before them – his clothes start shimmering and his face, Matthew tells us, shone like the sun. The next thing the disciples know, MOSES and ELIJAH appear, out of nowhere, and start chatting with Jesus.

It’s sort of worth asking how Peter and James and John knew exactly what Moses and Elijah, heroes of their faith but dudes who lived thousands of years before them, looked like, but Matthew tells us that the three disciples definitely recognized them. Can you imagine witnessing this scene? Jesus, your teacher and leader, leads you up a mountain and at the top, he starts shining and two of the most famous men to ever live your faith appear there and start chatting with him. The disciples were surely flabbergasted. Peter stutters about and offers to build three houses right then and there, one for Moses, one for Elijah and one for Jesus himself. Who knows what Peter was thinking – maybe he wanted to build a memorial to this out-of-body momenthe was experiencing, or maybe he was thinking about Sukkot, when Jews build moveable huts to remember the Exodus from Egypt. 

It’s a genuine but impractical offer, and before Peter can even finish speaking, a huge, bright cloud overshadows them all and a voice booms out from it: “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

And at that, the disciples fall on their faces to the ground, overcome by fear.

I suspect that the disciples were feeling something like the awe I felt about those boulders being held fast in the Elk River bank, even as chaos reigned all around them. All of us had been given glimpses into a bigger picture, a more real reality, a larger frame of reference, a truer understanding of how the world works than we’d previously understood.

Peter and James and John must have known that their rabbi was particularly special. They had probably heard the rumors about how he was The Messiah, and they’d been traveling around with him long enough to know that his teaching and preaching and healing and exorcising of demons was actually legit. They would have known Jesus well enough to believe the things he was teaching, to have learned to love and trust him. But I suspect that somewhere in their hearts they still harbored doubts about exactly how big a deal Jesus was.

And anyway, there would have been plenty of other, more immediate things for these guys to be thinking about: where they’d find food at the next stop on their journey through the Galilee, whether or not the temple spies were hot on their heels, how many people they’d convinced of their message, how their families were doing back home, what they were going to do if all the things Jesus kept predicting about his imminent arrest and murder actually came true.

Just like us, I bet the disciples didn’t actually spend too much of their time trying to solve the puzzle of who exactly Jesus was and what exactly his presence here on earth meant. They were caught up in the everyday concerns of living. 

And then: this veil-ripping moment where Jesus starts SHINING and holding a conference with MOSES and ELIJAH. And in that moment, witnessing that glow-y conversation, Peter and James and John are let in on the truth of the universe, the reality that Jesus is, in fact, God’s son, God’s beloved, here on earth to shake things up and put things to right. In that moment, the curtains are parted and the disciples get to see a tiny fragment of the cosmic, spiritual, anchoring reality of how reality works. And it terrifies them.

They fall to the ground. It’s too much for tiny human brains to contemplate – that Moses isn’t dead and gone, that Jesus could shine with divine presence, that all of this was happening at the same time as the impending betrayal, arrest and murder of their beloved teacher. It’s too much for these guys to process in the moment – that whatever happens next in their day to day lives, even if it includes serious defeat and trauma, THIS – Jesus shining with divine presence, chatting with Moses and Elijah, the veil of heaven ripped in two, the illusion of human time crushed before their eyes – THIS is what’s real, what’s true, what’s possible.

They fall to the ground, terrified, and Jesus comes over, Matthew tells us, and touched them. I imagine Jesus putting a calming hand on their shoulders. “Get up,” he says, “and do not be afraid.”

It’s a pivotal moment in Matthew’s gospel: up to this point, Jesus has been traveling around teaching and preaching and healing people. After this scene up on the mountain, everything begins to unravel. This Wednesday begins the season of Lent, for us, when we follow the journey of Jesus toward the cross. We get to remember how everything unravels in that story, and be reminded that when everything unravels in our own lives, we are not alone.

Jesus touching his disciples and telling them to get up and not be afraid is pivotal, because he knows what they’ve just seen, and he knows what is about to happen. He knows that somewhere down the line, as things unravel all around them, they will need to remember what they just saw, to remember the truth underneath it all, that there is a reality beyond what we can experience, where Jesus is shining with divinity and cracking jokes with both Moses and Elijah, where God is looking down and waiting for the moment when She can put everything that has unravelled back together, probably in an even better way than it was before.

I wonder if you’ve ever had one of those experiences where the veil lifts and you catch a glimpse of the larger reality behind the everyday one you’re forced to focus on hour after hour, where you see something that expands your consciousness or reminds you of your smallness. The boulders in the Elk River did that for me this week, reminding me that even beyond the scale of Hurricane Helene’s destruction there lies a bigger picture, a longer game, a truer truth about the world we live in, a perspective that is so big and so cosmic that my tiny little human brain can barely comprehend it. But like Peter and James and John, I’m holding on to that moment of truth, to remind myself when things unravel again that some things will not be moved, that some realities cannot be destroyed.

This week, we walk into the season of Lent, a season of repentance and contemplation and remembering the evil powers of this world that are so strong that it murdered God’s own Son. But we walk into this season also holding onto these moments of reassurance, revelation and truth: evil does not win. The unraveling is not the final act. There is more going on than we can see, and we are, all of us, held in the hands of the One who created it all and loves us very much.

Thanks be to God. Amen.