I’ve learned a lot about God from walking my dog, Beau. Beau has his own way of approaching a walk, and it’s not the way I usually conceive of it. On most days when I’m in the office, I take Beau for brief walks throughout the day. Well, the walks should be brief. A walk around the block from the retreat house to the rectory shouldn’t take twenty minutes. But Beau has little regard for chronological time.
We start out getting the leash. I announce to Beau that we’re going for a walk, and he becomes very excited. He loves to go outside. For Beau, going on a walk doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for me. I think of the walk as going from A to B. We’re going from my office to the retreat house. But for Beau, going for a walk is an opportunity to revel in and respond to everything nature has to offer.
Every turn of the corner is a moment to stop and sniff the breeze that has brought new smells around the side of a building. Every blade of grass brings news of other canines who’ve perambulated around the neighborhood. Beau makes me cross the street because something beckons from a strip of grass. And since Beau loves people, every person is someone to stop and greet. Walks are pure bliss for Beau.
But for me, they usually end up being stressful. I’m always in a hurry to get from the rectory to my office to answer emails or write a sermon. I’m rushing home for a quick lunch in the middle of the day, but Beau is in no hurry. And what I’ve discovered walking Beau is that he goes where he wants to go. If he doesn’t want to cross the street, he stops and digs in his paws. If he wants to stop and smell something, he does the same. But more importantly, if I tug on the leash to get Beau to do what I want him to do, he moves even more slowly. Paradoxically, trying to rush Beau along slows the walk down even more.
So, I sometimes try a different tactic with Beau, and it’s something that’s very difficult for me to do. I let him take me where he wants to go. Instead of luring him to the parish office with the exciting prospect of seeing Chris, our parish administrator, or Mary, our financial administrator, I let him go where he wants to go, no matter how long or what path it takes. Hey, Beau, where do you want to go? And it’s anybody’s guess where he’ll take me.
And so, I’ve found that walking Beau is a helpful spiritual metaphor for prayer and listening to God. I’m fully aware of my own control needs, but I also know from experience that the more I try to control prayer, the less I get from it. I’ve discovered over the years that praying is like allowing God to take me for a walk.
The problem is that usually I’m the one who’s trying to walk God. I live for plans and structure. I plan my days and weeks carefully. I watch the clock constantly. I try to make informed decisions about the most diplomatic or sound way to go about a course of action. Sometimes it works. But there are many times when my plans evaporate before a greater creative intention that I know only comes from the living God.
The most obvious theme of today’s Feast of the Transfiguration is the revelation of Jesus’s glory and the ensuing clarification of the disciples’ awareness of who Jesus is, fully divine as well as fully human. Like Jesus’s baptism, at Jesus’s transfiguration, God declares that Jesus is his chosen, well-beloved Son. God reaffirms this unique identity of Jesus as the Son of God. The truth is that the disciples have been dense about this fact. By accompanying Jesus throughout his earthly ministry, they have become more and more aware that Jesus is no ordinary human. But even by chapter nine in Luke’s Gospel, they don’t fully appreciate who Jesus is nor do they grasp what it really means to follow him. The disciples still want to go where they want to go rather than being led by Jesus. The mountain of the transfiguration isn’t only where Jesus’s divine nature is made clear. It’s also where the nature of discipleship is revealed. Even as Jesus’s glory is revealed, the descent from the mountain will lead to the cross.
And at the heart of the mountain experience is something seemingly less spectacular than transfigured faces, a numinous cloud, and a voice from heaven. The mountain is where Jesus goes to pray. It’s while Jesus is praying that Peter, James, and John struggle to stay awake, foreshadowing their later drowsiness in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is again praying on the eve of his death. And it occurred to me, while reflecting on this story, that rarely, if at all, in the Gospels do we hear that the disciples are explicitly at prayer.
Many times, we’re told that Jesus goes off by himself to pray, often on a mountain. The disciples frequently see him at prayer. They even ask him how to pray, which causes Jesus to give them the Lord’s Prayer. But do we ever see the disciples at prayer?
The disciples certainly seem comfortable fulfilling their commission to teach and preach in response to Jesus’s commission. They enjoy being busy. But at times, we’re told that they aren’t able to heal in Jesus’s Name, and why is that? Could it be because the disciples, even on the mountain with Jesus, don’t yet know how Jesus is inviting them to pray?
Of course, the disciples prayed. They were faithful Jewish men and observed the law and commandments, but it also seems that in his transfiguration, Jesus is handing to Peter, James, and John the key to unlock the door to the heart of ministry and of their very lives as they have been transformed by his own life.
The disciples will shortly be sent down the mountain to carry out the ministry they have been called to do. But first, they must know how to pray. And it’s only through prayer as Jesus teaches them that they can begin to discern the voice of God leading and guiding them. It’s that same voice that they will later know as the Holy Spirit moving among them, tugging them along.
On that mountain, the disciples are rather like us, I suspect. They aren’t eager to accept suffering and confusion along with the glory of following Christ. They aren’t used to listening to where God wants to go. So, too, with our best-laid plans. So, too with the plans we have for our children’s success, or our hopes for a career path, or our opinion on what ministry God is calling our parish towards. So, too, with planning for retirement or in trying to follow God’s will in our daily lives. We typically decide where we want to go or where we think we should go, and we devise a story to explain how it’s God’s will.
I’m usually like Peter, who can easily associate busyness with faithfulness. Peter wants to build three tents to concretize the moment, and the confusion of the cloud and God’s voice shuts him up, because it’s not about what Peter thinks should be done or even about the most logical thing to do. It's about what Jesus is summoning them to do. On the mountain, while Jesus is praying, passion is inextricably tied up with glory, revelation is mixed with clouds of confusion, and human certainty is tempered by God’s creative freedom. Listen to Jesus, God says. Listen to my Son.
The story of the transfiguration shows us a different, more excellent way, which is God’s way as he gently tugs us along through the power of the Spirit. God doesn’t keep us on a leash, and God certainly doesn’t yank us into pre-fabricated plans. God tugs on the strings of our heart and invites us to ask this question of him: Where do you want to go?
Our freedom as God’s beloved people is manifested in our ability to ask this question of God and listen for God’s response. And in the listening, we will see the disparate strands in our lives—people, places, and things—being woven into a single strand that leads us where God is inviting us to go. For it’s only through letting go and entering the cloud of uncertainty that we can truly listen to Christ’s voice, revealed in the power of the Spirit.
I’ve recently tried a new way of walking Beau. I’ve given myself permission to let go of my plans and set the clock aside when I walk Beau. And when he stands still and I’m tempted to yank on the leash to move him where I want to go, I ask him, where do you want to go?
And he shows me. He shows me flowers blossoming that I’d never before seen. He shows me people patiently waiting in the summer heat at a bus stop. He shows me people whom I might ordinarily never stop to acknowledge. But more than anything else, Beau shows me how to be in the moment and to listen.
The foundation of discipleship is prayer, and prayer’s foundation is listening. And letting go is accepting curveballs as gifts of the Spirit and confusion as its own form of paradoxical clarity. And when we loosen our grip on the leash and ask God, where do you want me to go?, the voice of the risen Christ is always there saying, come and see.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Feast of the Transfiguration
August 6, 2023