Today we come to the culmination of what has been a longer-than-usual Epiphany season. Our journey began almost two months ago—on January 6—when we marked the arrival of the magi in Bethlehem, bearing their gifts for the newborn king. Since then we’ve remembered the Baptism of our Lord and we have celebrated the Sacrament of Holy Baptism twice, each time renewing our own commitment to live the core values of the Baptismal Covenant. We listened in on Dr. King’s sermon, “Guidelines for a Constructive Church.” We celebrated Candlemas and held the 307th Annual Meeting of this parish. We also had 76 people fill out the Congregational Assessment Tool – the CAT – and we took time to interpret what it means as we look to the future. Unfortunately got snowed out two weeks in a row.
Today we reach our destination: the Mount of the Transfiguration.
During these weeks of Epiphany our epistle readings have been coming from Paul’s letters to the Church in Corinth. By all accounts they were a profoundly gifted and cosmopolitan faith community. They were also a handful. So when Paul tells them about spiritual gifts he is speaking to people who have lots of them. They have talent coming out of their ears: they are smart and dedicated in so many ways. The challenge they face, however, is that they are going in a hundred different directions. They have high energy but they lack focus and purpose. Paul counsels them to remember that they are one body and then he reminds them that without faith, hope and love—and especially love—their gifts are nothing more than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. Today we heard these words from that same epistle:
…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; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
Did you get that? It’s not
only Jesus who was transfigured on the Mount of the Transfiguration. Paul says
that we are being changed. You and I are being made new. We are being
transfigured. You may recall how earlier St. Paul says something like, “now we
see through the glass darkly; then we shall see face to face.” Today he seems
to be suggesting that when we do see the face of God as in a mirror, we begin
to see ourselves in a new light. We begin to walk as children of light.
This is why we do not lose heart., my friends. No matter what. This is why we have such hope and can act with great boldness even when times are challenging. This is how we are able to love one another: because with unveiled faces we see the glory of the Lord reflected in a mirror, and we know that we are being transformed into the image of Christ. We are growing into the full stature of Christ. These are remarkable words to take with us as we walk the pilgrim way of Lent. They are remarkable words for a congregation in the midst of a pastoral transition. They are remarkable words for a faith community trying to be faithful in challenging times.
During these weeks of Epiphany, we’ve been
praying Eucharistic Prayer C. I love Prayer
C, even if it feels a bit dated, because
it invites us to consider the whole cosmos, space, the final frontier and all
of that. Because in that prayer especially we are aware that science and
religion are not opposites, just different ways of knowing God’s good creation.
And that exploring the mysteries of creation is also to see God’s hand at work
in the world around us. What we have been praying for these past two months is
that God might “open our eyes” to notice. These themes are not merely about
remembering a God who was made manifest once upon a time in a galaxy far away,
but of a God who is, even now, being made manifest in our very midst.
So we pray for eyes to see. And when our eyes behold the face of God, we are
changed.
We speak of “mountaintop experiences” as a
metaphor for our spiritual epiphanies because the landscape itself very often
helps 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. There is a shadow side here, however; or at least a
temptation. Such moments are fleeting; and yet it is tempting to want to try to
hold onto them forever, and maybe even of trying to make them normative. I think
that 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; time is an ever-flowing stream. Mountaintop moments in
our lives are precious and a gift, for sure. But the journey of faith is not
one long extended mountaintop experience. We are called to listen to the Voice
of God in this story, which makes clear that we are called to listen to (and then
follow) Jesus by putting one foot in front of the other. The challenge of faith
is to live each moment; not to stay on a mountaintop in booths. We are a people
of the Way, and specifically a people called to follow Jesus on the Way of the
Cross.
So liturgically, the wisdom of remembering
the Transfiguration today is to prepare us to take the next steps in the
journey of faith into Lent by joining Jesus and resolutely setting our faces
toward Jerusalem.
I want to interrupt this sermon with a
commercial: an invitation to please make time to be here on Wednesday when we
remember together that we are dust, which is simply to say that we do not have
all the time in the world and therefore we need to make the most of it. For
Christ’s sake and our own. Some of us grew up in faith traditions like the
Roman Church where Ash Wednesday was a normative practice. Some of us grew up
in more Protestant traditions where we would not be caught dead with ashes on
our foreheads so as not to be mistaken for being “Roman Catholics.” But I
invite all of us who are here now to journey with me into a holy Lent and begin
again together on Wednesday. We’ll be here at noon for a simple spoken liturgy
and we’ll be here at 7 pm with the choir. Both services will offer imposition
of ashes. If this has not been a part of your experience, I invite you, this
year, to come and see.
Now 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 Epiphany
to the Jordan River and then on to Cana of Galilee 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. Until,
that is, I began taking pilgrimages to the Holy Land. There I am always
reminded of the rich traditions of Orthodoxy that are rooted in the Church’s
experience in the east: Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Ukrainian
Orthodox and others. One of the surprises in the Holy Land is the ever-present
reminder that Christianity is, at its roots,
an eastern religion that spread to the west. You feel that and you smell it
and you see it when you walk into a place like the Church of the Nativity or
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
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. Many years ago an
Orthodox priest friend of mine gave me Schmemman’s book on Orthodox Lenten
practices, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha.
It transformed my life. In Orthodoxy, 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: Desire for God (the
story of Zacchaeus), Humility (the Publican and the Pharisee), Return
from Exile (the parable of the Prodigal Son), Last Judgment, and
then finally, 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, but an invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s abundant love, which then allows us to more fully embrace the Paschal mystery by becoming instruments of God’s peace and ambassadors of reconciliation, as we participate in Christ’s victory over sin and death.
This year, as it happens,
Orthodox Easter and Western Easter fall on the same date- which is unusual. All
Christians, east and west, will celebrate Easter this year on April 20. What
that means is that today is Forgiveness Sunday for the Orthodox, not
Transfiguration, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak a bit about what our
Orthodox friends are doing today.
Schmemman says that “sin is
the experience of division, opposition, separation, and hatred…and the first
chink in the armor of the mighty fortress of sin, is forgiveness… which opens a
pathway to unity, solidarity, and love. It is a breakthrough to a new reality,
to God’s reality.” He writes that “to forgive is to reject the hopeless
dead-ends of human relations and refer them to Christ.” So today in Orthodox
congregations there will be an elaborate 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, St Michael’s. Not today, anyway. But I want you to think about that for a moment: what would it be like today to ask each and every person here for forgiveness? What if the pulpit side of this room got up and began walking down the center aisle at the same time that those of you on the lectern side got up and starting from the back walked down the center aisle so that we made a figure eight, and as you passed each and every person you would say: “forgive me, for I have sinned.”
Now I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to forgive someone who has hurt you 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. So the liturgical response to the one who says, “Forgive me for I have sinned” is not “I forgive you” because, to be honest, that just might not yet be true. So here is the liturgical response: “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.” Maybe that image gives us a connection between east and west! Maybe that is where the Mount of the Transfiguration converges with Forgiveness Sunday, taking us, as Don Henley once put it, to “the heart of the matter”—which is indeed about forgiveness. Forgive me, for I am a sinner. God forgives you, be at peace. May this simple prayer of confession lead you and lead us into a holy Lent, until we once again sing our alleluias on Easter morning.
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