Holy Boxes - Transfiguration

Maybe for Peter and James and John it was a memory that they couldn’t ever really put words around. Something they didn’t get at the time. Maybe they never really had the sense that they truly got it. Perhaps it was a moment when all the devils they had made deals with were blown away in the light of grace. Maybe it was a moment like absolutely no other, but also at the same time had a taste of something wonderful they had known their whole lives? I don’t pretend to know what happened on that hillside with Jesus that day. I do see that it was precious to these people, to the early church, and it is strange but important to ages and ages of the faithful. 

Even when we look at it with some distance and modern skepticism, we are not standing in a very different place That Peter and James and John not too sure we get what is going on here either, but we know that the tyranny of the ordinary is troubled - and it feels like the kind of sacred mission to which we respond 'I will with God’s help'. Sometimes I enforce a bit of distance from this Transfiguration by laughing at the story. I think - well - 'Bless their hearts'. Setting up a holy carnival is such a Saturday morning cartoon response to this encounter. Then my humor dissolves as I recall that this Gospel account, it isn’t told in the moment, It is told looking backward in time. And then I remember that there have been moments of peace or belonging or revelation in my life that I do wish I could put in a box and keep safe and sound. There were the Easter vigil baptisms where I tell you the Spirit came rushing through the congregation. A goofy spring day with my classmates playing among bluebonnets in the Texas hill country. Moments that loudly and quietly troubled the tyranny of the ordinary.

Jesus has just told the disciples of the path that lay ahead of him, The hard road to the cross that all who follow him must also walk. Their reaction was as to be expected - anxiety, fear, denial, numbskullness. So much of who Peter and James and John became why we recall them as pillars isn’t their perfections, but their frequently mistaken responses to the challenge of Jesus’ love. These guys are exemplars because of how they continued against adversity. May it be that some of the ability to be wrong and still feel beloved, may it have come from the memory and power of that hillside? A moment of endurance and unknowingness all at once. Our memories seem so frail and misled. So of course, they wish they could go back, to the precious power of that day - and to have it always accessible in a tangible container.

Jesus is both so close and so far and sometimes it can feel like our sense of him as our director pales in the light of all the bold demands of life and society. We think we cannot see him through the crowd, our hands are so full that we drop our grip on his hand. What practice or method do you use to hold on to just a glimmer of memory or moment when we did feel close to God when we felt free in the Spirit when we knew the overwhelming loving presence of the One in Three and Three in One? 

Lent begins on Wednesday this Transfiguration is the prelude. It is a bit of a Mardi Gras, a Shrove Tuesday, a pump up the volume of final meaning and festivity and delight before we turn the taps off and put away the silly to look at our messes and terrors and failures with courage and candor. The Transfiguration is the flickering of the lights before the Lenten story, in a foreshadowing of Easter glory. As you think about what your Lent will look and feel like this year I wonder if you could open yourself to let it be a bit deeper this year. Something from our baptismal promises - Continue more earnestly, return more truly, proclaim more daringly, serve more honestly, strive more dutifully? 

Lent began as a time when the whole Christian community walked alongside people who were preparing for the risk and commitment of Christian baptism. Whatever way you choose as a Lenten commitment - let it be one of realism and bravery and discipleship and possibly, uncomfortable transfiguration. If you have been sitting in the parking lot of the Lenten journey, get out of the car. If you have walked the easier path, consider the longer harder one-up the hilll. If you have overdone it, then perhaps find a way to both be holy and not wear yourself out. 

Whatever mystery of love and trampling of the forces of death that happens at Easter it changes everything. And this moment of our lesson today, this Transfiguration, this sacred revelation on the mountain, it is indistinguishable from that holy and lifegiving mystery of Jesus’ resurrection that we will celebrate in 40 days time. So go forth from Jesus’ brilliance on this hillside today, comfortable in the mystery. 

All the perfect ideas of rational thought will never explain what is going on in the Transfiguration or Easter, but such unknowingness does not eliminate their truthfulness. Whatever mystery of love bursts from the tomb on Easter - it is here in this lesson. The shouting down of death and destruction that rises on Easter morning - it is here today - shining out of our belovedness - and it changes everything.

Last Sunday after the Epiphany

RCL A

February 23, 2020

Christ Church, Ridley Park

Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania