Cookies and Transfiguration

Last Sunday After the Epiphany, 2005

 

Just this week, I saw the following surprising article from the Associated Press:

 

DURANGO, Colorado (AP) -- Two teenage girls who surprised their neighbors with homemade cookies late one night were ordered to pay nearly $900 in medical bills for a woman who says she was so startled that she had to go to the hospital.

 

Judge Doug Walker declined Thursday to award punitive damages, saying he did not believe the girls acted maliciously.  Taylor Ostergaard, 17, and Lindsey Jo Zellitti, 18, baked the chocolate chip and sugar cookies one night last July.  They made packages with a half-dozen cookies each and added large red or pink construction-paper hearts that carried the message, "Have a great night."  The notes were signed with their first initials: "Love, The T and L Club."  Then they set off to make their deliveries.

 

Wanita Renea Young, 49, said she was at her rural home south of Durango around 10:30 p.m. when she said saw "shadowy figures" outside the house banging repeatedly on her door. She yelled, "Who's there?" but no one answered, and the figures ran away. Frightened, she spent the night at her sister's home, then went to the hospital the next morning because she was still shaking and had an upset stomach.

 

The teenagers' families offered to pay Young's medical bills, but she declined and sued, saying their apologies were not sincere and were not offered in person.  The girls declined comment after the ruling. Taylor's mother said the girl "cried and cried."  "She felt she was being punished for doing something nice," Jill Ostergaard said.

 

Young said the teenagers showed "very poor judgment" "The victory wasn't sweet," Young said. "I'm not gloating about it.  I just hope the girls learned a lesson." The teens said they did not answer when the woman called out because they wanted the treats to be a surprise.

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    On the first impression, I would guess, all our sympathy goes to the misunderstood Teen girls. How dare the older woman sue them for such an act of kindness!  Yet, if we live in the story for a time, and put ourselves in the shoes of the woman who wasn’t sure who the shadowy figures were, we can come to a greater appreciation for the older woman.

 

    The Transfiguration is perhaps the most engaging image in this Gospel. Matthew’s language paints an unforgettable picture: Jesus is up on the mountain, his face shining like the sun, his clothes are—the Gospel tells us—dazzling white.  Jesus is at his most glorious—and the way we would like to keep him.  Moses and Elijah? Surely mere invention?  Not if we recall the God of Jesus is the One who calls worlds into existence with the spoken word.

 

    The term “world mission”, by contrast, conjures up less than happy connotations.  The Gospel must be spread to all nations and we are the chosen instruments. Christ thus becomes something that we have that others do not.  We become the teachers and the world our students, and the more they come out resembling us, we are tempted to believe, the better.  I remember even at seminary, some students looked down on those who wanted to be missionaries—I remember the old adage in Hawaii: the missionaries came, the locals got the Gospel, and the missionaries got the land.  There’s guilt associated with some missionary activity, we must concede.

 

    When World Mission Sunday was established by General Convention in 1997, we were asked to fully engage “God's global mission.”  The “mission” of world mission, we have sometimes thought, is us dispensing our truth to the woefully ignorant. But a much richer understanding is that it is God’s mission. It is us being sent by God in God working out the God’s goals all over the world.

 

    But World Mission is about transfiguration—about the world shining with the glory of God. However, it is not about non-European people becoming European.  Part of the reason American Muslims are reluctant to become Christian is because they believe it means becoming European American.  World mission is about accepting and celebrating the continuing incarnation of the Body of Christ in countless different colors, cultures, tribes, and nations.

 

    World mission is about seeing the transfigured Jesus who is Russian, Ethiopian, or Fijian. And it is not just seeing him as all these nationalities but following him into places that might seem otherworldly to us. World mission is about our recognition that God has been working in all parts of the globe for eons.  It has to do with the recognition that the Gospel is not our prize to award where we will but is the active working of God’s love in ways we often do not recognize readily.  

 

    A number of years ago, I served as a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota.  I struck up a friendship with a young Kuwaiti man. His name was Ra’ed and of course he was Muslim.  We went to a lecture by Anwar Sadat’s wife.  The people there were largely Arabic and mostly Muslim.  About two thousand of them. There was a different feel. I felt as though I was in a lecture hall in Cairo.  And I remember being impressed by how different this culture was and I wondered, “Can we talk at all? Their experience is so different.”

 

    But Jesus did not let his disciples stay on that mountain but led them down off it.  When the disciples “get up” I think the sense of the Gospel of Matthew is that they went out as well.   Jesus instructed his disciples to go into all nations, not to change everything about them. The Gospel was to bring people into the household of God.

 

    Ash Wednesday looms ahead of this week. With this week, we move from Epiphany into Lent—going literally from the mountaintop into the full desert. We all like mountaintops with lots of trees and we like the view from on high; the mountain looks down on the inhospitable desert below.  But the remarkable truth is that the desert is where Jesus leads us, sometimes kicking and screaming. Christ leads us there because that’s where so many of God’s children whom he loves, live. Are we ready to minister to those in the desert?

 

     Sometimes we will get a chilly reception. Sometimes we will feel like those two girls who delivered cookies.  We will be misunderstood and we will sometimes misunderstand. But Jesus gave us fair warning about this  As we enter the desert with Jesus, we have the promise of the transfiguration ahead.  But there will be no transfiguration without full immersion in desert of human experience.  Are we up to the experience of the desert?