Transfiguring Kodak Moments

 A Sermon Preached on Facebook Live Broadcast

Sirach 26:10 The Headstrong Daughter

Last Sunday in Epiphany (B)

February 14, 2021

 

I clearly remember the day when my father bought an Eastman Kodak flash camera. It was a Brownie Hawkeye Flash camera – a small box of a thing with a pop-up flash bulb that had a blue dot in it but after the flash, the whole bulb had streaks of red and brown, which looked like a bloodshot eye covered in a plastic coating.

 

My father was so proud of that camera. My father loved that camera. I mean, he Really Loved that camera. My mother reminded him – often, as I recall – that the only reason they could afford that camera was because she had gone back to work, the main reason of which (she also often reminded him) was so they could afford to buy a house so we could move out of the second floor apartment in the tenement house my grandparents owned and where they lived. 

 

My father’s argument was that he needed time to practice before we had a home of our own. He was a man in search of the perfect family portrait of my mother’s idea of a perfect family of “four beautiful children”. He would spend hours, when he wasn’t working, of course, stalking his family in our natural habitat.

 

No one was safe. Not my mother stirring a pot of soup or stew over the stove who would be admonished to “C’mon, Lydia,” he’d say, “Make the picture interesting. Lift the spoon out of the pot.” Click. “Now blow on it.” Click. “Now, taste it. Click.”

 

He would also interrupt us kids at play. Or, reading a book. Or, running. Or riding a bike. Well, we couldn’t actually run or ride a bike. We had to pose the various stages of running or ridding a bike as he posed us. “Okay, now put your left foot on the pedal.” Click. “Now lean forward on the bike handle like you’re riding into the wind.” Click.

 

My favorite picture is the one he took of us on a Sunday afternoon outing. We always went on a Sunday afternoon outing. This particular Sunday we went to the Buttonwood Park Zoo on Hathaway Street in the next town of New Bedford, MA.

 

My mother had bought us matching summer outfits, the two older girls in blue shorts with matching sleeveless blue and white polka dot shirts, my baby sister in a blue and white polka dot dress and white and blue polka dot baby hat, sitting in her carriage, and my brother (“The Little Prince”), in blue shorts with a white, short-sleeved shirt and a navy blue, clip on bow tie.

 

All the girls also wore patent leather Mary Jane shoes. Mind you, we wore this to the zoo. Because, well, it was Sunday and it was still The Lord’s Day. Even at the zoo.

 

In the picture, we are all perfectly lined up according to height and age against a chain-link fence, my baby sister in her carriage at the end. Behind us are two bison.

 

There is no mistaking that, to a child, we are hot and tired and crabby.

 

I look like I am on the verge of tears. My sister Madeline looks like she is mentally willing herself to be taken up by alien beings. My brother John looks to be in a trance, like his body and brain have actually been taken over by alien beings, and my baby sister, Diane, has her mouth open, her eyes scrunched, her fists balled near her face, and you can almost hear her shrieking cry all these many decades later.

 

I’m not sure what had happened before that picture was taken. I’m pretty sure we went home shortly after that moment was memorialized on film. At least, I hope so.

 

My father loved that picture. He thought he had captured something perfectly imperfect about his family. It was perfect in its imperfection. And, come to think of it, he had done exactly that.

 

Every now and again, that memory makes its way back into my mind, but especially when I think of Peter and this story of The Transfiguration. Jesus had taken three of his disciples, Peter along with the Sons of Thunder, James and John, up to Mount Tabor, which is in Lower Galilee, at the eastern end of Jezreel Valley. We’re not sure where, exactly, on the mountain that Jesus was transfigured before them, in dazzling white, but we can be pretty certain that it was at the top.

 

Out of nowhere, Elijah and Moses appear. They stand together there, on Mount Tabor, talking with Jesus, who is so white and bright he is dazzling. Scripture says the disciples were terrified. Which is totally understandable. I can’t even begin to imagine what I might do, had I been in the shoes of Peter, James or John.

 

But, I know what my father would have done. He would have taken out his trusty Eastman Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash Camera and then he would have organized the whole scene so there would be a perfect picture of event.

 

Peter, of course, didn’t have a camera, so he did the next best thing: He offered to organize the whole event and build three booths, one for each of them. How perfect!

 

But, it was not to be. Almost as soon as the vision of the three prophets appeared, a dark cloud covered and overshadowed them and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

 

I think I understand, now, all these many decades later, why my father wanted to take all those perfect pictures of his wife’s idea of a perfect family. It wasn’t just a gentle, loving yet teasing jab at my mother’s part of the Great American Dream – the perfect family of four. Although, to be sure, it was undoubtedly that. It was something my father seemed to know about perfection in general and perfect moments in particular.

 

It is this: perfect moments are not meant to be frozen in time. Perfect moments, when they come in this imperfect life, are meant to be lived in the moment because they usually don’t last more than a moment and then a cloud comes and overshadows them and they are gone.

 

Ironically, if you try to capture the moment, you will miss it and it will be gone, only to live on in your memory. Which, I think, it’s supposed to be in the first place.

 

I always chuckle when I go to a school event or a kid’s sports event and every parent and grandparent has the camera in their phone up and they are not watching their child in the moment but they are watching them through their camera so they can relive the moment they totally missed because they were busing filming it.

 

I remember a line in a JacqueBrel song, Alone. The lyrics are: “We forget how to cry; we save photosinstead.”

 

It is the memory of those moments – those perfectly imperfect moments – which we don’t fully understand at the time but come to visit us over time, revealing little pieces of truth – other facets of truth – with every visit, until one day, we are transformed and dazzled by the insight and understanding they bring to us.

 

I think the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor was one of those moments when all the facets of the truth Jesus was facing about himself came all together and he understood with not just his head but in his heart and deep in his soul and in every fiber of his being, what it was he was called to do and to take his place in the long line of prophets sent by God as heralds of the Realm of God.

 

There is a teaching among the Franciscan friars that Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

 

Let me say that again and let it sink in: Jesus did not come to change God's mind about humanity. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.

 

And, in the midst of that perfectly imperfect revelation, the revolution of Jesus began in earnest. Jesus understood that, in that moment, just as he had been baptized in the River Jordan by John, now he was being ordained by the Light of God to fulfill God’s mission on earth. And that truth, that Kairos moment of stop-the-world truth, was absolutely dazzling in its clarity.

 

I suspect that’s part of what my father chased with his Brownie Hawkeye Flash Camera. I suspect that’s part of the reason why Mr. Kodak invented the camera and Mr. Eastman invented the film – to help us try and catch those divine, perfectly imperfect moments of what it means to be human – of what it means to love.

 

In just three days, on Ash Wednesday, we will begin the Season of forty days and forty nights of Lent. We will have that time to examine our imperfections as well as the times when, through our own fault or neglect or in a moment of bad judgment, we missed the mark and have fallen into sin.

 

I hope you come to know, as you go through Lent and sort through the memory of all the Kodak moments in your life, that our lives are made up of millions and billions and trillions of perfectly imperfect moments; that no matter how you try to order them, those moments will find their way to their own dazzling order of truth.

 

When we acknowledge and step into the truth about ourselves – that, no matter what,  we are beloved of God – we will then be willing to love fully, lavishly, wastefully – just as Jesus did.

 

To give our lives over to something bigger than ourselves; a love that was love at the beginning, is now, and will be forever. 

 

A love that will change and transform us by making us more of the truth of who we really are and are meant to be.

 

And that love, in turn, is the only thing that can change and transform the world.

 

It’s the only thing that ever has. It’s the only thing that ever will.

 

Amen.

PS: A shout out to my dad in heaven on his 102nd birthday yesterday, 2/13/19