Sermon: Last Sunday After the Epiphany

The Rev. Allan Sandlin, associate rector
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If you were to ask a Harry Potter expert about the meaning of transfiguration, she might quote Professor McGonagall’s introduction to first-year students at Hogwarts:

"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts. Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."

In the world of Harry Potter, we see things and people changed from one thing into another. Students turning pairs of white rabbits into slippers, Hagrid trying to change Dudley into a pig, that sort of thing. Complex and dangerous it may be, Professor McGonagall, but when things get transfigured at Hogwarts, we often laugh. A lot.

In this morning’s gospel, we hear once again the story of The Transfiguration. There’s nothing magical about this moment in Jesus’ life, though it is an awe-inspiring vision.

The Hebrew scriptures add to the splendor of the day with this extraordinary story of the ascension of Elijah taken up into a whirlwind with chariots and horsemen. Even St. Paul gets into the act describing the light of God shining in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus led Peter, James and John up onto a high mountain and he was transfigured before them, his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. Here on the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, we have one more epiphany, the most profound of them all. Some call it a theophany but biblical scholar, Morna Hooker, more accurately calls this moment a christophany, the moment when we recognize “who Jesus Christ really is.”

The transfiguration of Jesus was a brief window for those three disciples to witness the human Jesus become something more divine just for an instant, a glimpse of his divinity bathed in bright light. It’s easy to read this story and be awed by the vision of a dazzling Jesus. It has a beautiful, breath-taking look to it, and some scholars think it points toward the resurrection or maybe it’s even a resurrection story that the author simply inserted into the wrong part of the gospel. It’s surprising and comes totally out of the blue and we want everything to stay this way: triumphant, with bagpipes singing and the world ablaze with the glory of God.

It fits so well with one view of the church: the Church triumphant, the Church that is always right. The Church that is always on the winning side, the side that loves prosperous, successful people. From the mountain-top, transfiguration perspective, it’s not hard to imagine just such a place, just such a way of being church.

But then my sermon-writing time gets interrupted by an e-mail from a good friend in Germany. One month ago, her 51-year-old husband was killed by a speeding car while riding his bicycle to work. She’s asking lots of questions of God these days and she’s really dreading Ash Wednesday. Her faith has always been strong and clear and quite certain about things like heaven and sin. Now, her world is suddenly unsteady and she holds onto her two daughters very tightly.

And then there’s Cynthia, who cuts my hair. On Friday she told me that 3 more of her clients have lost their jobs in the past 2 weeks. In church this morning, sitting close to you, perhaps, are friends who are out of work or are anxious about whether they’ll still have a job next month.

And these days, my prayer list now includes 4 friends who’ve been diagnosed with cancer since the first of the year. All of them are really good people. All of them go to church. They have children and grandchildren who adore them.

How does this transfigured Jesus, this bright and shining image of God, help us make it through the night? We might echo the man with the unclean spirit who earlier in Mark’s gospel asked: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

But pay attention to this: into this vision of transfiguration, which seems to be all about seeing, all about beholding the divine Christ, come these words spoken from the cloud: This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him! God doesn’t tell us to look at Jesus, to marvel at his radiance, soak up some of those rays emanating from his divine being… God tells us to listen.

Listen to what, I wonder? Jesus doesn’t say a single word while up on the mountain. He’s silent. Maybe, just maybe the disciples had the words Jesus said to them in chapter 8 still ringing in their ears. Just 6 days ago at Caesarea Philippi, this is what he told them:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lost it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it…

Or maybe they were supposed to remember to pay attention to what Jesus said the next time they were talking with him. On their way down the mountain that day, Jesus returned to the theme of suffering, reminding them of what he’d already told them once before about the Messiah who would suffer. Listen to him. Listen to Jesus and know that he comes among us as one who suffers, one for whom life was not easy, one who knows what it’s like to be human. Wholly and completely human.

Maybe the transfiguration does make us think of Easter, maybe it does point toward the resurrection. But when we listen to the story in context, we begin to sense that the cross stands behind it and on either side of it and runs right through the middle of this glorious transfiguration. So we hold the two together somehow knowing that the cross is the place where we might begin to make sense of our suffering or at least, the place where our suffering is joined with Jesus’.

Up on the mountain we can open our ears to listen to what Jesus wants to tell us. Up on the mountain we begin to sense that the church God dreams of is a place where people who are hurting, who are worried about their children and grandchildren’s future, people who are addicted to alcohol or drugs, people whose lives are falling apart…God dreams that people like this, people who can see themselves for real, will come together and listen to what Jesus has to say.

In Mark’s community, that early Christian church he was writing for, people were experiencing all kinds of doubt and failure. Down in the valley, it was hard to keep going, hard to have much of a vision for an abundant life, a growing church, a spiritually healthy life. But when they see things from the mountain top, when they see Jesus just for a moment from the inside out, they remember God’s promise to them at baptism, how they were marked as belonging to Christ forever. And all of a sudden, Jesus isn’t the only one called Beloved. Those who follow Jesus begin to recognize that whatever happens, whatever hardships and loss and sorrow they will encounter, God will continue to call them Beloved.

According to the church calendar, we leave our Epiphany mountaintops after today and begin the descent into the desert of Lent. We move from Transfiguration splendor and glory to Wednesday ashes on our foreheads and litanies of repentance. From being comfortable with who we are to being discomforted by who God might be calling us to become and the places where God might be leading us…

That astounding moment of transfiguration didn’t last long. Jesus didn’t stay up on the mountain. He came back down into the desert. We still encounter Jesus in the desert as well as the mountain-tops of our lives. Wherever people are hurting, where people are struggling just to make ends meet worried about making the mortgage payment, where people are broken, lonely and wounded, where they are going through a divorce, mourning the loss of a spouse, enduring chemotherapy, that’s where Jesus is. And that’s where he leads us…

From up on transfiguration mountain, Jesus was indeed already looking beyond the desert to another hill. Jesus was headed to the hill of Calvary. The cross on that mountain was his destination and that cross is the intersection of our life and his life. That is where we meet him, where our mortal life comes into contact with his mortal/immortal life.

Jesus invites us to journey with him toward the cross and bids us listen and watch for Christ in each other as we walk that road together. And Jesus longs for us to hear him calling us Beloved in all those life-changing, transfiguring moments that surprise us on mountain-tops and in desert valleys. Amen.