A Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany

On this day when western Christians reflect on the Transfiguration, I'm at St. John's in Athol. The readings for today can be found here.

It’s not unusual for God to speak on mountaintops in the Bible. Perhaps it is for the same reason that so many of us feel closer to God when we hike up a mountain and look out over the vista. We speak of “mountaintop experiences” as a metaphor for our own spiritual epiphanies, I think, because the landscape itself very often helps us to open our eyes to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. In such moments we may have the experience of knowing God more fully and of being more fully known by God.

Over the course of these past eight weeks, since the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem, we have been reflecting on a whole bunch of little epiphanies. (Might I even say little transfiguration moments?) At the Jordan River where Jesus (and we) have been claimed as God’s beloved. At Cana in Galilee, where water is “transfigured” into wine. (The good stuff!) In the nets full of fish after a long hard night of work with nothing to show for it. In the sermon that turns the world upside down: blessed are the peacemakers.

Indeed. When we pray, it is always political. We pray for the polis, which is to say we pray for this town of Athol and for cities and towns across this diocese. And for the city of Kyiv, and the cities and towns of Ukraine and for all who are subject to violence and degradation around this fragile earth, our island home. 

To accept the call to be blessed as peacemakers is to accept an active role in the world as those who trust that one day we really will beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and study war no more. And there will be peace on earth and good will to all. We surely are not there yet. So, in the meantime, we come here to imagine, to dream, to pray, to hope and then like St. Francis to ask God to make us instruments of peace. Where there is hatred, may we sow seeds of love.

And so today we reach the top of the mountain. You can go there today; in fact I’ll be there in just two months again. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s this particular one or that mountain over there – we can go up and we can look out and we can imagine that thin place where heaven and earth meet, that thin place where Jesus is revealed in all of his glory, fully human and fully divine.

There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a temptation. Such moments are always fleeting. Yet it is tempting to want to try to hold onto them forever, and maybe even of trying to make them normative. To do that is a form of idolatry. I think this is primarily what is going on in the disciples’ desire to build booths on the Mount of the Transfiguration. In truth, every moment is fleeting. The good times, the hard times, times of pandemic and times of health, times of war and times of peace,: time really is an ever-flowing stream. So those mountaintop moments in our lives are precious and a gift, for sure. But the journey of faith is not one long extended mountaintop experience as today’s gospel reading makes abundantly clear. No sooner do Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain than a world in need confronts them. On top of that mountain, we hear the Voice of God saying: this is my Son, pay attention to him. And at the bottom of that mountain we hear the voice of a desperate parent: this is my son, pay attention to him.

Liturgically, the wisdom of remembering the Transfiguration on this day is that it sums up what these eight weeks since the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem have all been about, even as it prepares us to take the next steps in the journey of faith into Lent which begins this Wednesday. Once again we will remember that we are dust, which is not a threat. Rather, it is code language to those who remember we are creatures and not the Creator; it is simply a reminder that we do not have all the time in the world, and therefore we would be wise to make the most of each day. For Christ’s sake and for our own sakes, we are invited into a holy Lent.

There is one caveat I need to share with all of you. Everything that I have said to you so far today is shaped by the Western Christian liturgical calendar. While there may be differences between Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics and Episcopalians, we all follow this same basic path from Three Kings Day to the Jordan River and ultimately to the Mount of the Transfiguration and from there to Ash Wednesday and ultimately to Easter morning where “cross and Easter day attest, God in [flesh] made manifest.”

While my own experience of the Christian tradition has been quite ecumenical, it has mostly been very western. In May, however, as I already mentioned, I will be heading  on my sixth pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group from our diocese. It is there, especially, that I’ve been reminded of the rich traditions of Orthodoxy that are rooted in the Church’s experience in the east. Especially in the old city of Jerusalem, there are the ever-present reminders that Christianity is, at its roots, an eastern religion that spread to the west, not the other way around. You feel that and you smell it and you see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher! On this day, my heart is feeling close to our Ukrainian Orthodox siblings in Christ, especially, and perhaps as we pray for them today we might remember that in Christ, there is no east or west. 

Alexander Schmemman was the Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York, a leading liturgical scholar in Orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century. More than a decade ago, I read his book on Orthodox Lenten practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha.  As much as I love the Epiphany season and find this journey we have been on is familiar to my western mind, reading Schmemman’s book challenged the way I thought about preparing for Lent.  For Orthodox Christians, the weeks leading up to “Great Lent” are very different from what I have been describing to you. In the five weeks before Lent, the Orthodox focus on five themes:

1. Desire for God (the story of Zacchaeus)
2. Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee)
3. Return from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son)
4. Last Judgment, and then finally... 
5. Forgiveness Sunday. 

The Orthodox are clearer than we have been in the west that Lent is not a time to wallow in guilt or shame. Rather it is an invitation to enter more deeply into the paschal mystery which is always about the depth and breadth of God’s love. Empowered and emboldened by that love, we are freed tp embrace our vocation to become instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation as we participate in Christ’s victory over sin and death. God became human so that we might be changed for good.

Sin is the experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred. We experience those things in deeply personal ways and sadly, even sometimes in the most intimate of relationships. And we also experience them on a global stage. The first chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, Schmemman says, is forgiveness, which opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality, to God’s reality. “To forgive,” Schmemman writes, “is to reject the hopeless dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.”

Orthodox Easter will fall a week later than our western Easter this year. We will celebrate on April 17 and our Orthodox siblings will do so on April 24. So next weekend (March 6) will be Forgiveness Sunday (also called Cheesefare Sunday) for eastern Christians.  On that last Sunday before Lent begins, there will be an elaborate kind of dance where each person in worship says to every other person there, “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

Now I am not going to ask you to dance today, St. John’s. But I want you to think about what it would look like for just a moment. What it would be like today for you to ask each person in this room to forgive you? And for them to ask you to do the same? And to imagine that dance extending beyond this room to all whom you have hurt, and all who have hurt you. I’ll pause there, for just a moment.

I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to forgive someone who has hurt us very badly. But at the very least, even when we aren’t yet able to forgive someone, we can remember that God forgives all who confess their sins and are truly penitent. On this point, there is no east or west in Christ: we all agree that it is God forgives sins and cleanses us from all unrighteousness. So the correct liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because (let’s be honest) that just might not yet be true. The correct liturgical response is: “God has forgiven you.” 

Forgive me, for I have sinned. God has forgiven you. The spirit of Lent, Schmemman says, is an invitation to experience that mysterious liberation that makes us “light and peaceful” by illuminating an inner beauty that he compares to “an early ray of the sun which, while it is still dark in the valley, begins to lighten up the top of the mountain.” 

I have come to believe that this image brings us full circle and back to the Mount of the Transfiguration. Back to the face of Jesus, in whom there is no east or west, in him no south or north. I have come to believe that while we get there by different paths, eastern and western Christians return to this mystical experience before we dare to remember again that we are dust. In that place where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday, we are taken once more to what that theologian, Don Henley once called “the heart of the matter” which is always about forgiveness. Because forgiveness “opens a pathway to unity, solidarity, and love…[and] breaks through to a new reality, to God’s reality.”

Imagine yourself both saying those words to someone whom you have hurt, and then imagine someone whom you have hurt saying these words to you. Maybe this Lent you will find you need to go say them for real and in person or in writing to someone. But for today, let’s just practice: forgive me, for I am a sinner. Listen even now for good news even if you are not yet ready for it: God forgives you, be at peace. Listen even now for the Easter alleluias that we’ll sing again on Easter morning.  

The work of Lent is this work of forgiveness; the work of healing and reconciliation and of finding ways to bring peace on earth, and good will to all people. Pray today for this nation. Pray this day for the people of the Ukraine. Pray this day for the people of Russia. Forgive us, for we are all sinners. God forgives us, be at peace, Cure us, O God, of our warring madness and grant us wisdom and courage for the living of these days!

In the meantime: be gentle with each other. Be patient and kind; not arrogant or rude. For now, pray this simple prayer of confession, that it will lead us into a holy Lent, until we once again sing those alleluias and embrace the new and liberating life that is ours in Jesus Christ: the new life characterized by hope, boldness, freedom and abundant life; the new life that breaks us open to a new reality: God’s reality.