Last Sunday after Epiphany - Sunday, March 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Last Sunday after Epiphany - Sunday, March 3, 2019

Exodus 34:29-35
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus appears twice every year—on the last Sunday before Lent and on the Feast itself, August 6—more than almost any other single narrative in the current Gospel table of readings.

And the classic question always arises: did something 'real' happen to Jesus on that mountain? Was he transfigured, metamorphosed, changed in some substantial way?  Or  was it the eyes, the vision, the spiritual perception of those three disciples that changed, allowing them to see what was in fact hidden there and obscured all along:  Jesus in all his natural glory? 

There is no absolute answer to this except to say like a good Anglican that it's probably both, though I myself tend toward the second option: that the veil was pulled aside for just a brief moment and the awe-ful glory of Holiness Itself was glimpsed, just as Moses glimpsed it in the Burning Bush and on the mountain of that conversation that we call Sinai so many centuries earlier.  Moses glimpsed it...and his face glowed. 

I am fascinated by the conditions under which such 'glimpses' as these occur. 

They can happen, of course, at almost any ordinary time:  sitting on a riverbank, walking down a city street, folding the laundry. The can even happen in church. As a woman I was once met said:  “Suddenly the world was bathed in light.”  Or we are overcome with a deep, profound and unanticipated (even uninvited) but persistent awareness that it all makes sense or that, as yet another woman you may be acquainted with once said: “All shall be well.”

My experience is that many—not all but many—people have such experiences, such glimpses, and that they are rarely shared  beyond perhaps one or two confidants or close friends.  Part of the problem is, of course, that words fail us.  And part of the problem  is that we have been taught to be somewhat suspicious of such experiences.  Our faith in Christ does not, does not depend on them.  But if or when they come to us, what a wonderful gift! 

In addition to the ordinary events of life, there are certain times where such experiences seem to occur more regularly.  The first is when we are relaxed and satisfied and feeling safe—emotionally, physically, sensually, relationally.  Our guard is down, as it were, and God can sneak up on us without our usual defenses coming into play.  Consider the disciples in today's reading.  They went with Jesus to a mountain to pray—generally good company—and  they were weighed down with sleep.

 But such breakthroughs can happen too when we are stressed out and perhaps near or at the end of our strength or wit or emotional reserves. It is then that we may be particularly open to see things in a new and more realistic light.  The situation itself needn't be dramatic—though it can—but it is often life-changing. 

This past week the household here has been under some stress.  We were exiled from our church for almost two weeks and then faced with a sudden move back. And during this time we were struck with an epidemic of respiratory disease:  one brother down with pneumonia, maybe eight others sick with bronchitis or viral chest/sinus infections, almost all of us on antibiotics and everybody just plain exhausted. This seems to happen every few years in the monastic community...kind of like being in kindergarten.  I was/am one of the stricken.  But in the midst of this, admittedly modest crisis, lying in my bed, unable to do much of anything, I heard something in a new way and felt a small shift in my thinking. It was captured in a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that we say from time to time at compline and that rose spontaneously to my consciousness:

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Grant that we may never forget that our common life—our lives together—depend upon each other's toil.   How true:  when I can't be there to do my assigned work, someone else rises to the task, just as I hope I might do when the tables are turned.  I got to thinking: what if this this mutual dependence is true not just for my monastery, or a family or a community, but for a nation, a people, for the whole world?  What if this is the great truth of gift-giving and reciprocity that we are now urged to expand beyond family or kin or neighborhood to all peoples, indeed to all the created order? 

I don't think I heard that prayer before in quite that way.  And I hope I shall not pray it in the future without hearing this again.

So it is, I think, with the experience of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  In it, the disciples caught a glimpse of  the deepest structure of the created order.  They saw, if only briefly, that the deep state, if you will, does not consist of those whom our culture reckons powerful, but in the profound and abiding presence of  Holy Love in eternal dialog with the Law and the Prophets, with Truth and Right.  And though the disciples told no one about it in those days, it was a vision which sustained them and guided them through dark days into a bright hope of which we today are the heirs. 

The church holds out to us this “luminous mystery” of the Transfiguration—this mystery of light as Pope John Paul II called it—as among the greatest of the epiphanies or manifestations of Christ.  It is thus a suitable conclusion of our Epiphany season.  And as we prepare to enter the Lenten fast once more, it offers us as it did to the disciples courage, confident that what is true of Christ is also true of each of us: we too will be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. That's the promise and the goal Christian of life.  And it is the work of Lent.  May the journey be blessed.  May we together reach the joy of Holy Easter with eyes wide open and hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.