Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
Luke 9:28b-43a
Political nerds and policy wonks always meant the District of Columbia when they used the letters D.C. but the rest of us are there as well these days, obsessively watching or studiously avoiding the news of the latest horror to come out of Washington. It takes some work to top our Maine state author, Stephen King, but they somehow manage to produce a fresh hell in almost every 24-hour news cycle.
For electricians and science nerds, DC means direct current, as opposed to alternating current, or AC, with a rather contentious if surprising history, electricity wars if you will, involving partisans, propaganda, and personalities, characters like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The two together, of course, form a rock band… AC/DC that is, not Edison and Tesla.
In the Venn diagram of Nerdom, some of those political and science nerds would overlap with those who understand DC to stand for Detective Comics, one of the two great comic book universes still standing.
Though they originate within a year of each other just before the Second World War, Marvel is the better known comic book universe these days. The late Stan Lee was a singular personality who was at the helm of an amazing team beginning in 1961. A recent series of blockbuster films have turned Marvel into a juggernaut franchise, now part of the Disney corporation.
DC Comics had dominated the industry for decades with iconic characters like Superman and Batman, but has stumbled with some truly awful films and lackluster creativity. Still, Wonder Woman performed well at the box office, and the television series Gotham, based on Batman, has decent ratings, one hundred episodes in and counting. We have to believe these all-American brands, capturing in the two leading characters our national ideals and our collective id can be rejuvenated.
The DC Universe has had continuity problems almost from the start, as the company bought up other publishers, then created re-imagined versions of classic characters while keeping the older versions around. There was a Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, from before and during the Second World War, and a Silver Age version named Wally West, from the Cold War on, a Golden Age Green Lantern in Alan Scott and the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. If this wasn’t confusing enough, there were different version of Superman and Batman in the Golden and Silver Ages, still Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, but with very different biographies. Then someone decided to start doing crossovers where Golden Age superheroes interacted with their Silver Age counterparts. They did this by imagining a multiverse of alternate realities, something quantum physicists theorize but that we have not experienced as far as we know.
The Golden Age heroes lived on what was designated Earth 2 and the Silver Age on Earth 1, though readers would discover other Earths, other alternative timelines and histories in the various titles, crossovers, and special events. It was no big deal for Alan Scott and Hal Jordan to meet in a multiverse-busting crossover, but people seriously wondered what would happen if Bruce Wayne ran into Bruce Wayne.
All was chaos until 1984, when DC undertook a year-long event called Crisis on Infinite Earths that allowed it to clean-up the timeline, creating one continuity, literarily destroying worlds. This coincided with a surge in interest in print comic books, both as a form of graphic literature, an emerging art form, and as an investment, comics like baseball cards, coins, and stamps, graded and sold based on rarity and condition. Comic books, the actual paper and ink product, became nerd-cool.
By late 1985, DC Comics had a single, mostly organized, universe and Marvel had a messier but separate universe. And geeks did what geeks always do, wherever they focus their obsession, they speculate. Could today’s Red Sox beat Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees? I have no doubt that there is someone who has given great thought to how the cult art historian Sister Wendy would analyze Bob Ross’ happy little trees, may they both rest in peace. In comics, we have eternal questions like who would win, Superman or Wolverine, the latter from Marvel’s X-Men franchise.
There have been a few crossovers between the publishers over the years, X-Men and Justice League on the same pages, though the publishers and writers are always careful to avoid these questions, for why would either franchise go on record as having inferior characters?
I have my theories. Superman does die at one point, as least sort of, and there is kryptonite, so we know he has a weakness. But Wolverine dies too, despite his ability to heal and regenerate. I suspect the two would be locked in epic battle that threatened cataclysmic destruction, something Superman would realize and simply choose to fly away. A thoroughly unsatisfying answer to the geek kids with their Big Gulps and Funyuns in front of the 7-11.
For the record, Wolverine would totally kick Batman’s butt, though the two are comparable in that they are both complex and not particularly likable characters, while Superman is too squeaky clean to be much of a role model.
Superman can only meet Wolverine when universes collide, when characters that shouldn’t be in the same place and time are, like Moses and Elijah, from completely different moments in biblical history, joining Jesus on a mountain.
There are a couple of translation notes when it comes to Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. While the New Revised Standard Version gives us Jesus’ pending “departure†at Jerusalem, that obscures the connection the author is trying to make with Moses, so I have restored to the reading the word found in the text, exodus. Most translations have the three disciples that have accompanied Jesus during his time of prayer awake when Moses and Elijah appear, but the Greek text clearly says they had fallen asleep, just as they would later in the Garden before his arrest. Those deeply engaged with scripture might want to know if Peter, James, and John heard the whole conversation.
The incident comes hard on the heels of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, the long-promised messiah, and Jesus telling his disciples that he would be killed but would rise on the third day, something that confused and angered the disciples.
If you’ve never known exactly how to feel about this story of Transfiguration, you are not alone. The problem is the appearance of Moses and Elijah. Angels show up in scripture all the time, but not dead people. The only story that comes close is Jesus appearing to Paul on the road to Damascus. Following the counsel of the biblical theologian John Shelby Spong, we might abandon the question “Is it true?†and focus instead on the story as midrash, asking what we are meant to learn from it.
Preaching often approaches the text from one of two angles. The first is to note that this mountain top experience is followed immediately by the healing of the epileptic boy, with service in the messy streets of human life, nothing shiny about it. The preacher notes the temptation to focus on creating shiny moments, manufacturing transcendence, to focus on fanciful worship, and urges us to remember that Christ continually calls us to service in the real world.
The second approach to the text, one I’ve often favored, is to note Peter’s impulse to build something, to institutionalize the moment. Peter has human plans, while God’s plan will send them down the mountain, to that moment of healing, and on to Jerusalem and the terrible events that follow, to Jesus’ personal exodus. We are challenged to ask if, like Peter, we are tempted by our religious impulse to obstruct God’s plan. Both of these are valuable and uncomfortable lessons for those of us who have inherited institutionalized church.
But I’d like to go back to the comic multiverse, to comic book crossovers, and suggest that what we have here is an illustration, however incredible, of one of the core messages of Jesus, that there is a reality that coexists with our own that the Nazarene rabbi refers to as “the kingdom of God†that crosses-over into our reality. It is a place where there is something more powerful than human power, a law that is more important than the laws we create to control and contain, an as-if place where the story of liberation is still true, still real, where the warnings of Elijah about false gods still matter. It is a world where Jesus is still with us, something we affirm as a core belief of our faith, even if we can’t quite nail it down with dogma, can’t quite contain it in the sort of dwelling Peter wanted to construct.
It is a world we glimpse, at odd moments, that catches us off guard. Frederick Buechner describes just such a moment, experienced while sitting in traffic outside Manhattan:
For a moment it was not the world as it is that I saw but the world as it might be, as something deep within the world that wants to be and is preparing to be, the way in darkness a seed prepares for growth, the way leaven works in bread.
This is a tough time we live in, yet we are called to be a believing people. Brian McLaren talks about belief in his book “Everything Must Change†He writes:
If the word believing is too soft a strategy for confronting global crises, I would reply that believing seems like a soft or weak thing only when it is domesticated belief. Tame believing for and within the dominant system may be easy, but wild believing against and beyond it turns normal people into heroes and history changers.
It would be easy to despair, to stay at home, our lives becoming smaller and angrier. We are called to live in a multiverse where all of the bad things are real, but so are good things and love, where heroes and courage do still exist, where the light shines and God makes claims on our lives, where there is still a kid down there in that village at the base of the mountain who is afraid and needs healing, where Superman and Wolverine don’t fight each other, but fight evil together, for there is evil aplenty, where they fight for justice and love with Jesus at their side, with us at their side.
Maybe I’m crazy, but an as-if life in that multiverse seems well worth living. Kingdom come.
Amen.