Last Epiphany
February 10, 2013
Trinity Parish
Wethersfield
Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
Jesus on the mountaintop, glowing dazzlingly white, keeping company with Moses and Elijah, both of them long dead -- for centuries. His friends Peter, James and John startled, confounded, astounded, not know what to make of it all. It is confounding to us too, isn't it. What is going on? What happened? What difference does it make?
What is going on is that Jesus’s friends see him as he really is. For just a moment the veil is lifted, the curtain is turned back ever so slightly so that we can catch a glimpse of what is really real. There he is, Jesus the Child of God, radiant, glorious, splendid, so bright, so real – almost too real to look at.
The trouble is that such a moment may seem to us like a once and for all, never to be repeated happening. An event peculiar to Jesus and to him alone. As if he alone is the dazzling Child of God; as if he alone is worthy to converse with Moses, the giver of the Law and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets. If that is so, then this is just some supernatural event far from the experience and understanding of mere mortals like us. If THAT is the case, then this Transfiguration, as it is called, is only a curious event in the curious life of Jesus of Nazareth. Interesting; fascinating; demonstrating – proving, perhaps – that he is especially special; and offering us nothing more than that.
But that is not all it is, at least not according to the Apostle Paul from whom we hear this morning in a letter written to the church in Corinth.
Paul says, “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” Paul says that we, that you and I, if we know how to look at ourselves, if we know how to look into a mirror and see who we really are, will see that we are being transformed, that we are being transfigured into what Jesus is. If we allow ourselves, we are and are always in the process of becoming what Jesus is – the beloved Child of God, "little lower than the angels," says the Letter to the Hebrews, "little lower than God" say the psalms.
Even Joni Mitchell knows about this when she wrote in her song about Woodstock, “We are stardust, we are golden . . . “
This is the idea behind the saying of Third Century Rabbi Joshua ben Levi who said: "A procession of angels pass before each person, and the heralds go before them, saying, 'Make way, [make way, make way] for the image of God!' (Deut.Rabbah, 4:4)
All this should be familiar to the members of our congregation who studied for three or four years in the Adult Formational Curriculum called Education for Ministry. Each week we engaged in what is called theological reflection, the point of which was to become more and more aware of the presence of God in our ordinary lives (though, if God is present in them, how can the really be called ordinary after all?).
EFM leaders, mentors they are called, are required to attend a training event every 18 months. I remember once participating in such an event at which we were asked “How is theological reflection going for your group?” “Not working at all well,” said one of my fellow trainees, “not well at all.” And indeed it was not working well as her group understood the assignment. Part of the process of theological reflection is for a member of the group to bring to the group a story from their own experience about which they wanted to learn more or of which to discover the deeper meaning. In our own group we had stories of seeing a squirrel fall from a tree and look stunned and at a loss to comprehend what had happened; and a story of the panic that ensued when the oil light came on during a long drive home; a story of what happened when a rag-tag, disheveled stranger appeared offering to lend a hand – ordinary stories, remarkable only because they seemed to have deeper meaning lying behind the mere and obvious facts.
In my fellow mentor's group, they had understood the requirement to be to bring in an account of a miracle. They had the notion that the only place to look for God was in the singular and the unique, in otherwise impossible violations of the natural order, in the supernatural that defied explanation. Needless to say, trying to find one of those every week was a fool’s errand and doomed to failure from the start. Not every week holds a miracle healing, a stroll on the top of the water, water turning into wine. But that wasn’t the task. The task was to find God in the events of our regular hours and days. That other group had not yet appreciated what the poet Gerrard Manley Hopkins knew when he wrote, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
You know that this is true. Do you recall looking through the eyes of love at a newborn son or daughter, of a newborn grandchild? Do you remember seeing someone you love through the eyes of all they mean to you? Do you recall a time when you looked at yourself in a mirror with kindness and forgave yourself of all that you had done amiss, accepted yourself for all the good you have done or want to do. Do you recall looking through the eyes of gratitude at someone who had come to you in a time of need and lent you a hand simply because you needed one? Do you recall a morning, an evening, a sunset, sunrise, thunderstorm or sunny day when you knew, you just knew it was true that “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world”?
The Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop is an invitation for us to see Jesus as he really is – beloved, glorious, dazzling in his beauty and magnificence – and then to see ourselves as being the same in the eyes of God.
The veil is lifted, the curtain is pulled back so that we can look into the mirror of Jesus’s face and see ourselves as who we really are.
