February 23:
The Last Sunday After the Epiphany – Monroe
Opening
We come to the last Sunday in Epiphany. It’s a season in the church year that begins with, of course the feast of epiphany, which is the 12th day after Christmas. So a season in the church year that lasts for a variable number of weeks is devoted to the manifestation of Christ. For that’s what the word epiphany means, manifestation. To reveal. To unveil. To see what couldn’t be seen before.
We are so confident that we’ve seen it all. It’s tough to surprise us. We’ve been to church over and over again, perhaps all our lives.
Is it possible for this season of epiphany to surprise us? To catch us looking in one direction while the prince approaches us from our blindspot?
The trip up the mountain for what we call the transfiguration was such a place for John and James and Peter. Glory was manifest to them and they had not expected it.
This then is the text that the church gives us to hear as we turn our attention from looking back at Christmas to looking towards Easter. Dare we expect to see the glory? What would glory look like anyway?
Glory
What was my earliest awareness of something like glory?
I was taken aback when the first thought that came to mind was a song. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
It seemed strange at first and I thought I shouldn’t say that out loud in North Carolina. It was, after all, a Union army song. But I felt encouraged to go ahead and share it with you when I learned that the tune and part of the chorus, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah …” was originally a folk song developed in the oral hymn tradition of camp meetings in the southern U.S., dating from the early 1800’s. link
I can remember at some early age singing that song, or hearing it sung, and having goosebumps travel across my body. In Hawaii that’s called having chicken skin. Something of glory crept into me through that song.
Is glory something you hear? Is it something you see? Is it something you feel?
I don’t know the answer to that. Perhaps it’s any or all of the above. But I’m quite convinced that it creeps up on you, that it is something you don’t expect, and that that is what those three disciples experienced that day on the mountaintop.
In Morning Prayer this past week, I read this from someone reflecting on the readings:
I have a friend who is in the habit of saying, when he’s considering a baffling situation, “I wonder what God is up to here.” He’s cultivated the habit of expecting God to show himself precisely in odd, unsettling moments. He makes a practice of readiness for God to reveal himself. “I wonder what the Lord is up to here” means “I assume the Lord is present and at work—I just have to watch and wait, and I’ll see him.” 1
What is God up to? Here in the account of the Transfiguration? Today in my life? In your life? Glory, I am convinced, is waiting to burst in and be manifest.
“Glory” as it used in the Hebrew Scriptures is both something that we offer to God and also a description of something that is saturated with God’s presence – as praise and as substance. link
Words made cheap
Glory is one of those words that at one time meant something weighty, something you didn’t say lightly. But that now is cheap from our use or over familiarity.
There are a number of things like that in the life of the church. Christmas becomes family tradition when at one time it referred to the incarnation, the manifestation of God himself in human form. Easter becomes a time of children’s activities and new clothes. Hallelujah. Praise God. Bless you. We so easily say the words; do we have any idea of what it is we speak?
Annie Dillard wrote in an essay many years ago of the contrast between what she called high Church and low church. In the high churches she said we go through the motions, say the words, follow the ritual, and we have “long forgotten the danger,” she says. “If God were to blast such a congregation to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute.”
I don’t think it’s exclusive to one kind of church and not another. I think that we can all become like those disciples, sauntering up the mountain, confusing the glory of God’s presence with a familiar religious ceremony, and only late in the experience falling on our faces as the chicken skin engulfs us.
Glory is our all too human perception of the Divine Presence – something we are simply not accustomed to.
This week I thought to myself that at the very beginning of my career in the Episcopal Church I listened to Archbishop Michael Ramsey give a week long lecture series on Glory in the gospel of John. I was certain that he was able to see something I couldn’t – and I wanted in. He carried himself with a modesty that belied his importance in the international church. He spoke directly to us gathered in St. Mary’s Chapel, even as we felt that he was a channel speaking with the very voice of God. Glory is about bringing the presence of God into the humble existence in which we live. I can’t tell you the joy and peace I felt as a year later I was privileged to have him and his wife Lady Jane Ramsey for dinner in our humble student housing.
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He is important in all kinds of ways in the history of the Renaissance and of painting in general. But I was captivated to learn this past week that one of the things he was known for – as he painted religious scenes from the life of Christ – was to place contemporary figures into the scene. People would recognize contemporary church leaders, cultural figures, in the scenes of the life of Christ. 2
It may not seem so original a thought to us, but in the 1400’s it had an impact. People could feel it. Perhaps it produced chicken skin.
So I wonder where we place ourselves in this scene of the transfiguration, where the glory of Jesus is revealed? Where do we place ourselves?
Who is God doing this for? For Jesus? For the disciples’ benefit?
I remember for the longest time it seemed to me the disciples were just kind of not very bright. Building the booths was a foolish kind of mistake.
I now think it is about Jesus knowing he’s on his way to death.
This is one of those watershed moments in Jesus’ life.
Conclusion
Whether we place ourselves as distant disciples, or as close friends and companions of Jesus, in that scene we are experiencing the glory of God and it is a watershed moment in our life.
The voice tells us, just as it told Jesus, “You are chosen. You are loved.”
It is a time to bow down to glory; to expect glory.
Don’t let this moment be cheapened. Recognize the watershed moment for what it is. God is with us. Emmanuel. And he is risen, Alleluia.
Then you will come down from the mountain. You will adjust your eyes and ears to hear the mundane. But like Jesus then, like his disciples then, you will be changed now.
Notes
- O God, who before the passion of your only begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain
- Then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai
- We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven
- Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain
February 23:Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr of Smyrna, 156
February 24:Saint Matthias the Apostle
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