Musings

Aug

05

Radiant Reality

A sermon preached at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco on Sunday, August 4th, 2019 (Feast of the Transfiguration, transferred)

Readings: Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99:5-9; 2 Peter 1:13-21; Luke 9:28-36

Audio here

You’d never guess it by looking at me now, but I did not grow up in the Church. I was raised by two thoroughly non-religious parents, who were suspicious of organized religion and never really mentioned God. My introduction to Christianity happened by accident when I was ten: my best friend, who was Roman Catholic, invited me on a playdate on a Sunday. For logistical reasons that I no longer remember, it was easier for her parents to pick me up before church. I had no idea what church entailed, but I gamely went along. In an unexpected twist that surprised me as much as anyone else, I had what can only be described as an epiphany. God happened to me. I fell in love with what I saw, and heard, and felt in that sanctuary. I came home from my playdate and astounded my mother with the announcement that I wanted to be baptized immediately.

And my mother made me wait. With wisdom that I didn’t appreciate at the time, she told me I couldn’t be baptized until I was 16. I think she hoped I’d lose interest. But I didn’t. And so, 6 years later, I was baptized into Christ’s Body at the Easter Vigil. The service was glorious. Transcendent. And afterwards, I had no idea what to do with myself. I had been living for that moment for so long, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. My baptism was a mountaintop experience, much like the one we just heard about in Luke’s Gospel. But, like the disciples in today’s reading, I had to leave behind the glorious, the holy, the once in a lifetime, and do the hard work of figuring out what in the world it had to do with my ordinary life. 

All of us have mountaintop experiences, memories of days or hours or fleeting seconds when everything seemed to go perfectly, when we understood something with perfect clarity, or felt radiantly happy. Often, our instinct is to preserve those memories in amber, to immortalize them and stash them away, so that we can bring them out and remind ourselves of them when things start going badly. 

That is what I hear in Peter’s exclamation on the mountaintop, when he sees his Teacher, mysteriously changed in appearance, flanked by Biblical celebrities who have come back from the dead. “Quick! Maybe if we set up some tents, you’ll all stay here forever!” Peter is trying to preserve the moment. He is trying to hold on to the glory. And, of course, as he does so, the glory slips through his fingers like sand. The Glory of God is not something we can hold on to, it is not a resource to be squirrelled away for our future benefit. The Glory of God lives in the here and now as pure gift. We can open ourselves to it, but we can never manage it. 

The problem is, we like shiny things. We like holy things. And we easily forget these moments of glory cannot last forever. After this dazzling moment of Transfiguration, Jesus and the disciples then have to trudge back down the mountain. They return to their daily lives. And it seems, at first glance, like this moment has changed very little: the disciples are as obtuse as ever. The religious authorities remain suspicious of Jesus. There are still miles to be walked and too many demons to be exorcised. Nothing has changed… 

Or has it? These mountaintop experiences, these moments in which we are blessed with near perfect – albeit very short-lived – clear-sightedness are about removing the veil from our faces. It’s easy to behold God’s glory on the mountaintop. It’s much harder to keep our eyes open as we climb back down the mountain into our daily reality. But we need to keep lifting the veil from our eyes so that we can clearly see the brokenness that surrounds us and discern how we must address it. We need to rip off the blindfolds of apathy and fear so that we can bring the divine love and justice we have glimpsed into a world that continues to be racked with violence and hate. In a weekend where our newsfeeds have brought us word of two mass shootings within 24 hours, it is more important than ever that we keep our eyes – and our hearts – open. Once we have seen God’s radiance with our own eyes, there is no going back to the way things were before. 

Today, in the midst of our collective grief, we also have the joy of welcoming 19 people into the Body of Christ in the sacrament of baptism. For Christians, baptism is the ultimate expression of transfiguration, of the ordinary becoming charged with God’s glory. Water becomes a flood of God’s grace, oil becomes a mark of royal priesthood, human beings are set aside as Christ’s own forever. We speak of rebirth, of new life in the midst of death, and, in stark contrast to the voices that surround us, a bond of divine love that no force on earth has the power to undo. For many of us, this is a mountaintop experience. It will not last forever. And that’s okay. 

These moments of transfiguration, these mountaintop experiences are meant to give us strength for the journey. They are a reminder of the presence of God that is always with us, that we are always God’s beloved, no matter what. We read this story of the Transfiguration and we deliberately renew our own baptismal vows (whether or not we remember our baptisms) to remind us that God is always transfiguring us, even when we don’t see it. Transfiguration doesn’t always look like a transcendent, mountaintop experience. The transformation of our hearts happens in all kinds of humble ways that are easy to miss. The moments of dazzling glory are there to remind us to open our eyes to see God at work in us and in the world, and then to keep them open, even and especially when we are walking in darkness. 

The journey of transfiguration does not end on the mountaintop. And the journey of baptized life does not end at the font. These pivotal moments are only the beginning of a life full of wonder, full of grace, and full of God. They are touchstones that we can keep coming back to, not to keep us trapped in the past, but to remind ourselves that God is always with us – if only we have eyes to see Her. So open your eyes. Keep them open. And carry the joy of this moment out into this world as a testament to our belief that nothing is beyond God’s power to transfigure. Amen.