Last Epiphany 2021
St. Paul’s Monroe, NC
Opening
Today we mark the end of a church season, the season of epiphany. Many images and memories pass by me as I reflect on scripture passages for this day. Perhaps most of all I reflect on how these things seem more important to clergy types then to ordinary real people. Seasons come and go. I first really thought about seasons when I moved to Hawaii and early on learned that everything I had known about seasons did not apply.
We come to the end of a church season. Our altered life in the time of pandemic and in the time of wounded leaders has gone on for many seasons now. The seasons come and go and still we are here. Yes we are here.
No question that today’s scripture readings confront us with vivid images.
Slideshow asking, “How do we picture this? Imagine this?”
My earliest memory as an Episcopalian is of the candles being lit on the feast of the presentation, Candlemas. Just a few short weeks after that comes the last Sunday of Epiphany. In our tradition we hear of Jesus transfiguration on the mountain. Today we have heard from two vivid passages in the Bible. One comes from the book of second kings and features Elijah and his disciple Elisha. The mantle of authority as a profit is passed from one generation to the next as Elijah mounds of fiery chariot into heaven. In our gospel passage we hear of Jesus disciples, his favored disciples, looking on as Moses and Elijah stand beside Him in a light filled vision.
As a child the vision of Jesus with Moses and Elijah made a deep impression on me. I understood it literally. Our imaginations often want a vivid and literal picture. So we have a literal image of Elijah and Elisha. A literal image of Peter James and John looking on at a phantasm, light overpowering.
I remember that for many years I wanted somehow to have that kind of over powering vision. I could only think in those literal terms. Gradually the literal visions began to seem to dimensional. They began to lose some of the imagined weight of reality that I had given them.
Inadequacy
Literal images and literal meanings came to be inadequate to express for me the power and the life of the God being revealed to me.
One inkling of the changes coming over me I experienced on my drive to the church that I served as vicar for several years. When I first started supplying there it took a 2 1/2 hour drive every Sunday to get there. I spent a lot of that time driving in prayer. In a moment, almost in a flash, a time that I can still remember as it were seen before me, I saw before me an angel. The angel had a message for me and it was something on the order of the message to Juliana of Norwich, all shall be well.
The thing is that even as I was experiencing the message from the angel I knew that if there were someone sitting next to me in the car the only thing that they would see was a cloud in the sunny blue sky.
A literal image was no longer adequate to express the reality of what God had for me.
Many years later one of my daughters thought that she had seen God appearing as the sun shone through clouds over the Waianae mountains on O’ahu. It looks something like this picture.
Increasingly as the seasons pass in my life I recognize that the old images are no longer adequate. Something dazzling. Something with light. But literally doesn’t do it justice. Something like this.
No less significant are the words which frame the season of Epiphany:
Season framed with “You are my beloved.”
Mark 1, at the baptism of Jesus:
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
The Message
But God doesn’t just communicate with us through our eyes. There is a message for us. Words. Words that are in adequate just as the literal images are in adequate.
The season of epiphany for us is marked on either end with words spoken from the cloud, from on high, addressed to Jesus, saying you are my beloved son!
At the beginning of Jesus ministry, at his baptism, these words put a stamp of approval on his upcoming ministry. As if to say this one speaks for God, has the authority of God. Listen to him.
At the transfiguration Jesus has come to the conclusion of his ministry of preaching and teaching and healing, miracle works and all kinds of signs, and has turned his face toward Jerusalem and the coming end of his ministry which occurs on the cross. It is as if the words say no matter what happens now, and it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be pleasant, and it’s going to seem counterintuitive, no matter what happens now — all shall be well.
The seasons come and go. The generations come and go. There are highs and there are lows. We are excited about the prospects ahead. And then we are panicked with anxiety over what lies ahead. But the message of God is consistent. All manner of thing shall be well.
We may rely on images. We may remember the words. But again and again, season after season, what is required of us is a change of heart, a repentance, turning again.
Transformation
Tillich: You are accepted.1
Possibly the most vivid expression of this that I have known I only learned about late in life. It was expressed by the theologian Paul Tillich in a sermon on sin and grace. He was convinced that all the expressions he had known were inadequate.
He describes how we are estranged from ourselves, estranged from God, estranged from all that matters to us.
Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and
it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are
accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name
of which you do not know.
He found his moment of graceful truth in an image of Jesus – an old image that had become inadequate and now transformed.
In the picture of Jesus as the Christ, which appeared to him at the
moment of his greatest separation from other men, from himself and
God, he found himself accepted in spite of his being rejected. And
when he found that he was accepted, he was able to accept himself and
to be reconciled to others. The moment in which grace struck him and
overwhelmed him, he was reunited with that to which he belonged, and
from which he was estranged in utter strangeness.
I have witnessed over and over again the conversion / repentance that takes place when a person is able to hear “You are beloved. You are accepted.” down to the depths of their being.
I have witnessed it in the despair turned to hope of a gay pastor. I have witnessed it in a dying hospice patient. I have witnessed it in the tranforming power of love in a father whose daughter’s death, some 40 years earlier, had taken him down a road of depression.
So today, as we anticipate entering Lent in a few short days, we carry with us the most powerful images of transfiguration and of acceptance, No matter the regrets of missed opportunities nor the apprehension we face ahead of us can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Thanks be to God.
Notes
2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
Psalm 50:1-6 (last-epiphany-homily.md)
