February 22, 2009 Last Sunday after Epiphany, Transfiguration
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Mark 8:34-36, 9:1-9
Transfiguration Sunday is a festival of light, the peak experience of
epiphany, a sneak preview of the world set right and made beautiful by God’s
power of love and life and light. Today we need to fill up with all this brilliance
before heading into the lugubrious spiritual mud season of Lent. In this time of
economic, environmental and international distress, in a week when a cartoon in
a major New York newspaper portrayed our African American president as the
old racist stereotype of a monkey and encouraged that he be assassinated, in a
time when many families in this church are struggling with illness or loss or
transition, we need light more than ever.
I would like to help you find all that light through this sermon, but I am
beginning at a disadvantage. The title hints at it, with its three heavy Latinate
nouns: transformation, transfiguration and transmission. Oooph. That doesn’t
say “light.”
And the title is not nearly as heavy as the scripture that inspired it. In the
illustrated children’s story version of the transfiguration, Jesus and Peter, James
and John take a nice summer hike up to a mountain meadow where suddenly
Jesus is seen to be dressed all in clean white robes and God calls dotingly down
from the clouds, “This is my beloved son.” That is the way we like to remember
it.
As we heard, though, the full story and the context around it are not nearly
as light and airy. Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save
their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake…will save it. For
what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” The
darkness of that death obscures the promise Jesus makes that it may lead to
seeing the realm of God on earth.
Then up on that high mountain apart by themselves, the disciples do see
Jesus transfigured, and they get to see Moses and Elijah and hear the voice of
God. But God seems almost to be scolding them, saying, “This is my son…listen
to him!” And the vision is so overwhelming to them that they are terrified out of
their minds.
Some light!
Then on the way down from the mountain, Jesus orders them, the scripture
says, with all the harshness that implies—orders them not to say a word of it until
the Son of Man rises from the dead. Not comfortable and not comforting, to say
the least. We seem to be much more in the dark than in the light.
So what is the story here? Is Transfiguration Sunday just an advertising
ploy, a spin-doctor’s cooked up doublespeak to make a religion that is one
bummer after another seem like good news? Or does all this heaviness and
darkness somehow add up to light?
To answer that, let’s look at the three distinct movements of the story one
at a time. The first is Christ’s teaching that we must deny ourselves and lose our
life if we are to follow him and save our life. If you put this teaching together
with his two great commandments of loving God with all our heart, mind, soul
and strength and loving our neighbor as our self, you really have summed up
everything that Christ calls us to do.
The first thing to notice is that it could be much worse. For instance, it
could be what we ask of ourselves, or what the idol gods we worship instead of
Christ ask us to do. Our false gods and our false self ask that we be nothing short
of perfect. We must please everyone, or at least please our own avaricious,
insatiable, addicted appetites which crave ever more approval and pleasure and
control. You can hear one of these false gods speaking through the voice of J.D.
Rockefeller, who was asked once when he would stop trying to accumulate more
wealth. He said, “When I have made enough.” “How much is enough,” the
interviewer asked. “Always just a little bit more,” he answered.
There were plenty of other spiritual teachers around when Jesus was alive
who demanded that their followers always do just a little bit more, and fulfill
every jot and tittle of the law, and seek to be ever outdoing others in their
ostentatious piety. The good news is that Jesus is not asking more of us. He is
asking less. He is asking we empty ourselves, starting first of all by throwing out
all those false gods and our false self that demand so much of us. He says his
yoke is easy and his burden is light. He asks that we give up the yoke of our own
self will that drags us down. He asks that we give up the burden of our desires
with their added weight of fear and doubt and rage when they are unfulfilled. He
asks that we lose all that, set it loose, become lightened.
It is like the old story of the samurai lord who set out on a rampage
through the land killing those who dared stand in his way. He came into a village
where all had fled before him to hide in the hills except one Zen monk. The
samurai lord was enraged and affronted by the lack of respect shown by this
monk, so he stormed into his cell with his blade drawn and screamed, “Do you
not know who I am? I am one who could kill you without batting an eye!” And
the monk replied quietly, “And I am one who could let you kill me without
batting an eye.” The samurai lord stood for a minute, then bowed to the ground
before the monk, turned and left the village.
What Jesus is offering is a path to transformation. A way for us to get free
and light. A way for us to have the power of that monk’s detachment. Of course
to some Christ’s way looks more foolish than powerful. A wealthy young Italian
once embraced Christ’s call to deny himself and lose his life. He stripped before
the whole city of Assisi and renounced all his status and power and walked
naked out the gates with everyone laughing and catcalling at him. But of course
Francis became perhaps the greatest saint who ever lived after that, so full of
light that birds and fish and even wolves were drawn to his source of love and
life, and he continues to inspire us today.
The truth is that this self-emptying way of transformation only seems from
this side like a terrifying, endless darkness. When we step through the veil of its
spiritual death we find just on the other side of it epiphany and transfiguration,
the realm of light.
The transformation of self-emptying is work we need to do, but the
transfiguration that fills us is pure gift. The season of Epiphany began with the
wise men following the star to Jesus. They had transformed themselves through
years of attentive watchfulness and study, their own form of self-emptying and
losing themselves. That was their work. The star, though, was pure gift. All they
had to do was be ready to receive it and follow. It led then to the manifestation
of God on earth, gift leading to greater gift, light leading to greater light.
There is a story from the desert fathers and mothers of the early centuries
of Christianity that goes like this: Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to
him, “Abba, as far as I can I chant the psalms, I fast some, I pray and meditate, I
live in peace, and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?”
Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers
became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all
flame.”
If we will, we can become all flame. Transfiguration is a gift of God, but it
is a gift we can open ourselves to receive through our transformation into more
spirit-led rather than self-led people. Only those who follow Christ up the
mountain will be there to see the light and hear the voice of God.
That light changes us, transfigures us in turn. The centering prayer and
wisdom teacher, author and Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault, uses the image
of the sun touching a snowflake. When sun touches snow, the snow is
transfigured. Yesterday morning you may have seen how it sparkled both on the
ground and in the fairy dust floating in the air. Snow becomes radiant when the
light fills its crystals. We see it and become radiant ourselves. Transfiguration is
contagious.
Something else has happened to the snow under a pine on the north side of
our field. The sun has reached in under the lowest branches and created a little
oven there, opening up a patch of bare ground. The snow has melted into water
and dried into air. It is still the same essence of hydrogen and oxygen, but now it
lives in the soil beneath the pine and in the air around it. The light touching it
has empowered it to give life to all around it.
Transformation leads to transfiguration, and transfiguration leads to
transmission. The light we receive we pass on to others. The essences of life and
love that have gone into creating us flow through us. Our mission is to share life
and love and serve them in the world around us, to give all we have to that cause.
As the disciples go down the mountain, Jesus is adamant that they not tell anyone
about the transfiguration until the time is right, but clearly he intends for them to
tell the world after that. We need to be wise also about when and how and with
whom we share our God-given light and life and love. But there is no question
that they are gifts we are meant to share.
Nor is there any question that the world is in deep need of just these
things. The question is this: will we enter into this process of transformation,
transfiguration and transmission, and see it not as something heavy or dark we
must go through, but as the passage from light into ever greater light?
George Bernard Shaw put it this way:
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of
nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and
grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to
making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to
the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to
do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when
I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for
its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a
splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I
want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it
over to future generations.
Let us join together in prayer now, asking God to help us desire the light
and life and love we see in Christ so much that we are willing to let go of
everything else to become all flame. Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 02/22/2009