transfiguration-2017.md

Sermon: August 6, 2017 – St. Peter’s

On this date In 1978 I was in process of moving to seminary

I was generally aware of Transfiguration Day.

I was aware that it was the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of WW2, largely because of my interests and contacts during college.

It was a Sunday that year, just like this year. I probably went to church, because I was moving my family to seminary. It was a kind of long circuitous route, a little like the one Mary Pat and I followed this summer! In 1978 I drove from Colorado to California to Oregon, seeing aunts and uncles and cousins, a brother and his life-partner, now wife, and my cousin Peter in Salem, Oregon.

The Monday morning paper, Aug. 7, blared in huge letters the headline that Pope Paul VI had died the day before.

More recently I have become aware that August 6 is the date on which President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote and making it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to disenfranchise black voters.

Momentous date. Begging to be remembered.

To be memorialized. To have a monument erected to it. A date whose events we must not forget. A solemn and sacred story.

Moses statue as highlight of last year’s visit to Rome

The first reading for this feast day remembers this ancient event, a day that was evidently evoked for the disciples as they looked on at Jesus’ transformation there on the mountain to which he had gone to pray. The disciples "saw Moses and Elijah.

These are 2 figures from the Hebrew scriptures of enormous importance. Both of them associated with mountains. One mountain was where Moses received from God the Torah which was the basic outline of what defined an Israelite and later a Jew. Elijah went up the mountain of God, in despair, thinking his life was in vain. But the word of God was spoken to him.

Nourished by that meal, he walked forty days and nights, all the way to the mountain of God, to Horeb. When he got there, he crawled into a cave and went to sleep. Then the word of God came to him: “So Elijah, what are you doing here?” (MSG: 1 Kings 19)

Elijah was genuinely a Prophet of God. Prophet: defined as one who hears the word of God and passes it on to the people.

This is indeed a momentous date to be remembered.

Jesus had gone up the mountain to pray

In my Northumbrian Prayer Book for the month of August there are a series of readings about Celtic spirituality, especially Celtic monasticism and its understanding of a monk’s cell – the place where he lived, his abode – as the place where one encountered God.

The cell in the Irish Celtic tradition is the place where we encounter the life of God, the place where God is, where God dwells, the home of God! 'Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?’ Celtic Daily Prayer; Book two

Remembering these momentous events associated with the Transfiguration of Jesus, we are meant to be changed. Jesus was so transformed that he shown, like a bright light, surrounded by a cloud. Like the cloud that surrounded the mountain when Moses went there to talk to God. A cloud like that which surrounded the mountain in which Elijah hid, a storm raging outside.

But God’s voice was not in the cloud, not in the storm, not even in any literal sense on the mountain. God was in the still small voice.

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me. C.S. Lewis

I used to regularly climb a mountain in Hawai’i. By mainland standards it was a pretty small mountain. A volcano actually. It was about 1,300 feet high.

I climbed that mountain to pray. I climbed it to meet and hear God. I climbed it to be changed more and more into what God had made me for. I repeated it week by week because I knew that in my life I will never have arrived, but am always in progress, a pilgrim on the way.

Need is great

The need to devote time and a place to retreat to listen to God’s words.

The need is great to anticipate the unexpected. That’s the way God speaks to us. Not in the storm but in the still small voice. Not in the apparitions of Moses & Elijah but in the affirmation of the voice.

The great need is recognized for myself. It is also recognized by the church at large.

We hear this passage every year on the last Sunday of Epiphany. Every once in a while – as this year – we also hear it on Sunday when the feast of the Transfiguration falls on Sunday.

1. When I was deliberating whether to leave graduate school in order to be ordained. I fasted for 3 days. I prayed throughout the day and at the end of it I sat in a back pew at the basilica at Notre Dame University. I asked God what I should do. I heard a voice. It was indistinguishable from any other voice I heard in my life – although even at the time I knew that probably if there were a person sitting next to me he or she probably wouldn’t have heard it. The voice said, “I don’t care what you do as long as you love me with all your heart, your soul, and your strength.”
2. The nuclear age was ushered in the story of humanity on earth – a story that has lasted for something like a million years. Though without a doubt those who made the decision to bequeath to us the nuclear age were making the best choice they knew how to make – nevertheless one of the greatest threats to our on-going story is the nuclear shadow hanging over all of us. The threats from North Korea even today reminds us that we must change.
3. In 1965 there was a perception that something dramatic needed to be done to move our country past the history of Jim Crow laws that were a natural descendant from our notorious history with slavery. We need to keep praying and keep seeking to change. We see that today more than ever.
4. Like Paul VI the church is in constant need of renewal and reform. No less today than 70 years ago or 700 years ago.

So we need to retell the story over and over again. We need to retreat to our own personal “cell” to listen for God’s voice so that we can be changed.

“My child, you are my chosen, and I love you.”

“I don’t care what you do as long as you love me with all your heart, your soul, and your strength.”

In the words from my Celtic Prayer Book:

One of the first effects of ‘going to the cell’ is an ever greater consciousness of the inner journey and this can give rise to a simultaneous, dual awareness of exposure; both to the love of God and to the sinfulness of the human heart. Exposure to the love of God is experienced as ‘spiritual consolation’. God’s mercy, grace and forgiveness in Christ become real, immediate and personal.

We are pilgrims on the way. Up the mountain with Jesus as his disciples. With the people of Israel greeting Moses on his way down the mountain with “rays of light” emanating from his shining face. With our fellow pilgrims in the Church throughout the world we are pilgrims on the road to transformation. With the people of this nation, struggling for renewal with remorse for the sins of our forebears. With Jesus we put ourselves into the arms of the living God – our Father.