The Last Sunday after the Epiphany C, March 2, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York

Br. Robert James Magliula

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, 2025

• Exodus 34:29-35
• 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
• Luke 9:28-36

When they encounter something new or different, my young nieces often ask, “Is it real?” Reality is determined by the five senses. If it cannot be seen, tasted, touched, smelled, or heard then it is not real – at least in this world. We tend to live with a veil that separates the exterior world of tangible, rational information from the inner world of mystery and encounter.

There are moments, however, when that veil is parted, and we stand in what the Celtic tradition calls a “thin place” between heaven and earth, the divine and the human, matter and spirit, the eternal and the temporal. In that thin place the duality of those parings disappears, and we stand in union and wholeness.

The difficulty for us is that, like my young nieces, we often limit our world and our experience to that which is understood and explainable. The senses themselves become the veil that separates us from that other world. Thin places invite us to step outside what we can know and enter the tremendous mystery of God’s presence and love. 

Every year on this day, the season of Epiphany culminates in the Transfiguration. The Church sets it before us as the hinge between the end of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent. It reveals what an unveiled life looks like. In the Transfiguration the glory of divinity is united with humanity. Jesus didn’t become something he was not before that night on the mountain. He manifested what he always was, filled with the glory of God, radiating divine light. Jesus didn’t become something new, but the disciples did. They saw and experienced life and the world as God sees it, showing in humanity the archetypal beauty of its image. Christ revealed who we are and who, by grace, we are to become. He showed the theosis, the deification of human nature.

In a thin place we and our whole world stand in a different light. Jesus led Peter, James, and John to a thin place, where human ears would hear God’s voice, human eyes could see divine light, and human life would be enveloped in the cloud of God’s presence. That experience is the great longing of humanity. They beheld the beauty of their own creation in the image and likeness of God.

This is not simply a story about Peter, James, and John. It is descriptive of Christ’s encounter with all humanity. We too are called and invited to step through the parted veil. Transfiguration is all around us. Jesus is always leading us to the thin places of our life. We don’t often talk about these experiences. Like Peter, James, and John, we keep silent, not because those encounters are not real. Rather, because they are too real for words. Words could never describe the experience and would only diminish the mystery of the encounter. Each is distinct and unrepeatable.  They are moments of pure grace. We cannot make them happen. We can only be there when it does happen. It’s a moment of complete presence and union. Everything belongs. Nothing has been lost or left out. 

It’s not so much about what we see but how we see. Transfigured eyes do not deny or ignore the circumstances of our life or world. Sometimes our life is veiled in our failures, our fears, our forgetting. Other times the veil of grief and despair, ignorance, or the choices we have made leave us in darkness. Most of us, I think, seek God in the circumstances of life. We want God to show up and do something. But it’s not about the circumstances of life. It’s about us. 

At some point we must begin to discover the God who is beyond the circumstances. Life on the surface keeps us judging the circumstances. The answer is found in depth, intimacy, and the vulnerability of the interior journey. We do not need to see new things. We need to see the same old things with new eyes. We do not need to escape the circumstances of our life. We need to be more fully present to those circumstances. This transfigured vision, is what allows us to face, endure, and respond to the circumstances of our life and world. It is why we can be unafraid. 

On the mountain Peter wants to build dwelling places, wants to preserve the experience. We often are tempted to do the same, but that would only keep us in the past. To the extent we cling to the past we close ourselves to the future God offers. Jesus, Peter, James, and John came back down the mountain, but they took the vision with them. Transfigured moments change us, sustain us, prepare, encourage, and guide us into the future regardless of the circumstances we face. When you consider recent events in our country and our world it seems our lives and the world are more disfigured than transfigured.

 These events do not negate the glory of God that fills this world. Instead, they reveal that far too often we are a people “weighed down with sleep’ like Peter, John, and James. They struggled between sleep and wakefulness. The spiritual journey is always a battle between falling asleep and staying awake, between absence and presence, darkness and light. Sleepiness is a spiritual condition. It is a form of blindness to the beauty and holiness of the world, other people, and ourselves. It is what allows us to do violence to one another and ourselves.

The Transfiguration of Christ shows us who we are. It reveals our origin, our purpose, and the end to which we must aim. It is not just an event in history, a happening that begins and ends. It is a condition and way of being. The Transfiguration reveals a present reality already within us and the world. 

The disciples experienced the transfiguration because they stayed awake despite the weight of sleep. Regardless of how our life gets veiled the light of divinity is never extinguished but only covered up. This is why we need Lent, the season of unveiling, to discover the ways in which our lives have become veiled. The veils of our life can only be removed when we first know our life to be veiled. If you want to know the ways in which your life has become veiled go to the places of contradiction. Search out the places of struggle and conflict. Look for the ways in which you are living less than who you really want to be. 

Peter, James, and John saw for the first time what has always been. Humanity can never build a dwelling place for God. It is God who makes humanity the dwelling place of divinity. The whole of creation participates in the glory of God. It is there that Christ reveals who we are and who, by grace, we are to become. Transfiguration invites us to wipe the sleep from our eyes, behold what we are, and become what we see. +Amen

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany - February 11, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, February 11, 2024

• 2 Kings 2:1-12
• 2 Corinthians 4:3-6
• Mark 9:2-9

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

In his novel This is Happiness, Niall Williams describes the revolutionary change the coming of electricity brings to a small Irish village in the late 1950s.

“I’m aware […] that it may be hard to imagine the enormity of this moment,” he writes, “the threshold that once crossed would leave behind a world that had endured for centuries, and that this moment was only sixty years ago. Consider this: when the electricity finally did come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for [the little village of] Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in colour to the scruff of his neck, Mick King was an out-and-out and fairly unsubtle cheater at Forty-Five, and Marian McGlynn’s healthy allure was in fact a caked make-up the color of red turf ash. In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-, round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.”

I imagine a similar transformation in human awareness with Christ’s transfiguration on Mount Tabor. Sure, the light has been growing warmer and brighter as Epiphany has progressed. There is the sudden illumination each of the disciples experiences when Jesus looks at them and calls them. Surely, in their first encounter with Jesus, they are each revealed to themselves in ways they could never have imagined. But the illumination dims, at least somewhat, in the growing dailiness of their new lives, and they get on with things, as we all do.

Not so with the Transfiguration. The unveiling of Christ’s light in on the mountain not only reveals his glory—it also transfigures the whole cosmos, revealing the reality of God hidden in plain sight all the time.

As Williams knows, there is something threatening in the revelation of light. Light reveals the dirt that has lain on the surface of our lives, literally and metaphorically, for far too long. Light can be merciless in its unflinching gaze. Remember that Moses had to wear a veil over his face after spending time with God, lest God’s glory, reflected in Moses’ face, should overwhelm the Israelites. Too much light can blind as much as total darkness.

We need our light tempered, perhaps even meted out bit by bit. That’s partly why God comes to us in Jesus, a human person to whom we can relate perhaps more naturally than to the fullness of God the Creator, who is all light and all darkness.

In Jesus, God’s light moderates itself. From time to time, like Peter, James, and John on Mount Tabor, or like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, we get a vision of the full glory of God reflected in Jesus. But most of the time, we get the 40-watt version, enough to see but not enough to blind.

As Christ’s light illuminates our lives, we come to see ourselves and reality more fully as we are. And while at the beginning that illumination may strike us as merciless—as indeed it can be from time to time—Christ’s light is not meant to overwhelm us with our smallness, our dirtiness, or our insufficiency. In that way the light of Christ differs from the artificial light with which we fill our lives.

The light of lamps and televisions and phone screens inverts our attention and encourages our self-absorption. Like the residents of little Faha, we surround ourselves with mirrors so that, in merciless illumination we can obsess over our so-called flaws; implement self-improvement plans; and market ourselves to an indifferent world. The false illumination of the screen has turned us all into modern-day Narcissi, so in love with—or horrified by—our own reflections that we are liable to drown in them.

Instead, the light of Christ is the light of Resurrection. It is the wound that heals. In the light of Christ we are revealed as we truly are. We may be covered in centuries of dirt and dust, but the light of God shines through the cracks in the mud that cakes our skin. We, too, are transfigured on the holy mountain of our ordinary little lives. The light of Christ reveals us as bridge between heaven and earth, the beloved children of God, guilty, yes, but loved beyond and through that guilt.

Held in this light, we know that we cannot go on the way we have before. That to return to the dark oblivion of self-absorption is no longer tenable. In the words of Rilke’s great poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “there is no place that does not see you. / You must change your life.”

Christ does look on us primarily through the eyes of judgement. Always, always, he sees us through the eyes of mercy and of love. We need not fear or shrink back from the full illumination of our lives in the light of Christ, because that light is love itself and the promise that love always wins.

And when the light fades back to a tolerable brightness, as it inevitably will, we find ourselves once again with the ordinary human Jesus and our ordinary human selves. Yet something has changed in the moment of revelation. Because we know now that these little lives we’ve been given are the summit—the full outpouring—of God’s extraordinary grace to us. Yes, your life, just as it is, right here and now, in this very moment is the tabernacle of God’s glory and the sacrament of God’s love. The only appropriate response is yes.

Last Epiphany - February 19, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Last Epiphany - Sunday, February 19, 2023

 

Exodus 24:12-18

2 Peter 1:16-21 

Matthew 17:1-9

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

 

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

Commentaries on the transfiguration stories inevitably follow a similar theme. After Peter has named Jesus as the Christ, Jesus takes his most trusted disciples up a mountain. There his glory is revealed to them, further confirming that he is the Messiah. While he’s transfigured, he meets with Moses, representing the Law, and Elijah, representing the prophets. These symbols of the law and the prophets confirm that Jesus the Messiah is the apotheosis of all Israelite expectation. He is, indeed, the savior foretold. In fact, some commentators point out that in Mark, the transfiguration story serves as the only resurrection appearance. In Matthew and Luke, it prefigures the resurrection.

Then we have good old bumbling Peter, who, of course, doesn’t get it. In that way, he’s a stand in for you and me. He wants to make three dwellings, presumably to hold on to this moment of revelation and glory. Many preachers will pick up on this impulse to tell us that we shouldn’t try to cling to the mountaintop moment.

Now, none of that is wrong. In fact, it’s a good and most likely correct reading of these narratives. But it’s not complete, and it’s not balanced.

Every time I read and pray with these accounts, I’m struck by the same line: “And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” First the shock and awe, the glory and the revelation. Then the fear and trembling. And then, like the still small voice that Elijah hears from the mouth of the cave, Jesus himself alone.

We begin the season of Epiphany with the revelation that salvation has come to the whole world and not just to the people of Israel. It’s scandalous. God has taken human form in a tiny, powerless child. And that frail little human will be the salvation of the whole world. Today, we end the season of Epiphany with a kind of bookend. Not only is Jesus the promised Messiah. Not only is he God almighty—the creator of everything that is. But he is also still—and scandalously—human. He is both the fullness of the Godhead and simply the human Jesus himself alone, the man who has taught and loved and healed. The man who has laughed with his friends, and danced at weddings, and grumbled when he hadn’t had enough alone time.

When Moses goes up the mountain to meet with God, so powerful is God’s glory that a cloud covers the mountain to shield and protect the people looking on. In another story, we’re told that to look on God’s face is to die. So, God shows only his backside to Moses, providing generations of preachers and congregations a good punchline. The imprint of God’s glory on Moses’ face is itself too much for the Israelites, so Moses covers his face with a veil. God, unrefined and unmitigated, has a power and a glory too strong for us humans to bear.

You can worship such a God. You can certainly fear such a God. You may even be able to love such a God. But it’s hard to foster a tender, loving intimacy with the threat of annihilation looming over you at every moment.

And so God pours Godself out into a human being. God takes on the fragile, dirty, messy stuff of our little lives. And not the life of some powerful king or emperor. Not the life of some great warrior who overthrows the oppressive powers of the world. But the life of a small and powerless baby who will grow into a loving man who dies powerless on a cross.

I think one reason we tend to focus so much on the glorification of Jesus in his transfiguration is that we still, two millennia later, cannot bear God’s humanity.

So enamored of this world are we, that we look for signs of power and success and wealth, not only in others and ourselves, but in God. We crave spiritual consolation. We look for our prayer and our worship and our work in the world to make us into better versions of ourselves. We don’t want to be human. We don’t want to be weak and frail and needy. We don’t want the joy that comes mixed with sorrow or the love that binds itself to death. And, even without realizing it, we often look for a God immune to the things of the earth.

But that God is not Jesus. That God is an idol.

Jesus tells us, in his very person, that the God who made all that is is intimately, perhaps painfully and gloriously, interested in the smallness and the weakness and the wonder of our human lives. Our lives that, as the psalmist says, wither like the grass. Jesus shows us that our salvation does not lie in greatness or power or wealth or strength, but in drinking these lives we have to the dregs.

Perhaps we’re most afraid, though, that God’s voice will ring out around us calling us beloved. We, who are so small and afraid. Could we possibly be that beloved, just as we are?

I’m reminded of George Herbert’s extraordinary poem, Love (III):

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
            Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
            If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
            Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
            I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
            "Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
            Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
            "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
            So I did sit and eat.

In Jesus, the fullness of God and the fullness of our humanity meet, in the face of one who calls us beloved and who loves us into fullness of life. The banquet is laid. We must sit down and eat.
.

 

Epiphany Last C - February 27, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Epiphany Last C - Sunday, February 27, 2022

Exodus 34:29-35

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

On September 1,1939, under the orders of Adolf Hitler, the armies of the Third Reich invaded Poland, a neighboring independent, democratic state. The result of that military action was, of course, the Second World War in which somewhere between 70 and 85 million people perished, either directly in military action or its attendant upheavals. The war itself did not come to its conclusion until shortly after the dropping of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945, which by a cruel irony was also the Feast of the Transfiguration.

On February 24, 2022, under the orders of Vladimir Putin, the armies of Russia invaded Ukraine, a neighboring independent, democratic state. Already we know that hundreds have lost their lives in this evil act of aggression, but where it leads, not only for the people of Ukraine but for the entire world, is still an open question. Threats of the use of nuclear arms have been made in recent days and the possibility of this war spreading into a worldwide conflict is not unimaginable. And this morning, by perhaps another cruel irony—or is it a consolation?—we are asked to consider these events in the light of the Christ’s Transfiguration, in the light of the divine glory revealed on the holy mountain to the chosen witnesses.

I'm not sure that this is a wise undertaking or even a possible one. I would much rather speak this morning about faces that are shining with God's love, such as Thomas Merton famously glimpsed at the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville KY and that you and I may have experienced in our own lives. Or I would speak of the conversation reported in today's gospel in which Jesus discusses his departure, that is his exodus, with Moses and Elijah, connecting it with the pivotal reading that we will hear seven weeks from this very morning at the Great Vigil of Easter, the story of the liberation of the children of the Hebrews out of slavery into freedom and their deliverance at the Red Sea. 

Unfortunately, these past weeks and the days leading up to Thursday have changed my focus and perhaps the focus of all of us. I seem to have become obsessed by the events unfolding in Ukraine: reacting with grief, outrage, sadness, even at times despair and frustrated by the inability or unwillingness of a wider world to intervene in ways that can effectively stop the violence and the brutality of warfare. Part of my obsession is due to my own personal, if distant, connection to Ukraine. At least three of my grandparents were born in areas of what is now Ukraine. My mother and her family were members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as were other relatives through marriage. Even my father and brother were officers in various Ukrainian-American social organizations in Northeastern Pennsylvania. This language, this culture, doesn't feel entirely foreign to me, even if I do not personally know anyone who is endangered.

But beyond this personal connection is the real and frightening reality of a profound change of our world order as we have known it at least since the end of the Second World War. In my lifetime not Korea, not the Cuban Missile Crisis, not the Vietnam War, or even the events of 9/11 seemed to hold the potential of such a toxic shift. I hope I'm not being alarmist, but no one in 1939 would have predicted the scale or the cost of the war that resulted from the invasion of Poland. Nor can we predict where this current incursion might lead.  Nor can we any longer simply dismiss this as posturing on the part of a troubled nationalist leader.

It is complicated, I know. I realize that no nation is going to send troops to aid Ukraine on the ground. No foreign nationals are likely to fly there to take up arms along with the civilian population, as writers and artists and others did in the Spanish Civil War. And even in our interconnected world, and maybe because of this very interconnection, countries are reluctant to do more than impose sanctions and perhaps provide arms. There is so much being written and broadcast now on this conundrum and the current situation that I feel I need say no more. But I would like this morning to venture some ‘faith based’ responses to this tragedy.

First, whatever our nationality or political stance, we are called to witness to what is going on. We cannot close our eyes to this evil action and its effects. This may be the first war where millions of civilians carry with them in their smart phones the possibility of documenting the most egregious and outrageous actions and sharing them with the world. And as painful as it is, we have some obligation to join in witness to what is going on. Witnessing is a profoundly spiritual act. 

Second, we are called to express solidarity with those who have been displaced, distressed, or destroyed…which is to say, to stand with those who have been attacked as well as with those who, for whatever reason, have been forced into the role of oppressor or who have paid the price for raising their voices in protest. That solidarity can be public or social. It can happen via some charitable outreach, which may be quite private or hidden but which addresses both human needs and human rights. Our solidarity must be felt and perhaps ‘telt.’ But above all it must be real.  Which is to say, we must take a stand in whatever way we can. 

Thirdly, we must face the enigma of war in all its horror through the eyes of our faith.  And this is no easy or simple thing to wrap our heads or hearts around. I share three quotes which may serve as a starting point. 

The first is from the Buddha as recorded in the Dhammapada (verse 5, trans. Eknath Easwaran): “Hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can.  This is an unalterable law.”

Second, listen to Jesus as he speaks to his disciples on the eve of his own death: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matt 25:52) And again: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” (Matt 5:9)

Third, listen to conclusion of the lecture that Jimmy Carter gave on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002: “Ladies and gentlemen: war may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children. The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes—and we must.”

War…sometimes necessary, but always an evil, a tragedy, and never, ever a good in and of itself.  There we are.

So, what do we do?  Well, we pray. We pray because that’s what people of faith do.  And I firmly believe that somehow, in its mysterious way, our prayer opens for God ways to act in this world and in our hearts—including in the heart of our brother, Vladimir Putin—that might not otherwise have been possible had we not prayed.  I think our world is praying…with sighs too deep for words and tears too numerous to count; with moral resolve; in faith that the future is not closed, and that change can happen. And in the hope that transfiguration remains a real possibility for all of us. All of us. 

On Wednesday we begin our observance of Lent. As is so often the case, we don't get the Lent we think we want or need, one that's nicely prearranged by us with devotional readings for each day or with plans to give something up or take on something new that we've chosen, perhaps in consultation with a pastor or spiritual director.  No.  At least for this year, we get a different kind of Lent, one scarred by violence and the threat of large-scale destruction, marked by an uncertainty that rivals, or even surpasses, the fears of the pandemic that started two years ago, and that even at its outset elicits a sense of exhaustion, of weariness, perhaps even more than a hint of despair. 

None of this should surprise us of course. Today's gospel reading of the Transfiguration continues immediately with Jesus coming down from the mountain and being faced with human suffering in the person of a young boy possessed of a demon and in unbelief on the part of his disciples. Jesus’ mountain top experience didn't last very long. Neither does ours. But the story is not over. It's not over by a longshot.  

The Archbishop of Canterbury has invited churches in the Anglican Communion to devote themselves today to prayer for Ukraine and for peace and justice there. Pope Francis and other church leaders have asked that this intention be the focus of Ash Wednesday observances. And I think it likely that we will be praying about this for a long time. So let us begin now with the prayer which Archbishop Welby, along with Archbishop Cottrell, have supplied us.  Let us pray:

God of peace and justice, we pray for the people of Ukraine today. We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons. We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow, that your spirit of comfort would draw near to them. We pray for those with power over war and peace, for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions. Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear, that you would hold and protect them. We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of peace. Amen. 

May it be so.

Epiphany Last - February 14, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC

Last Sunday after Epiphany  - Sunday, February 14, 2021

2 Kings 2:1-12

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

NB from Br. Bernard: I apologize. I consistentely but erroneously said Elishah for Elijah in the audio version. Jesus appears in conversation with Moses and Elijah. Oops! In my native French, their names differ by a whole syllable. They're easier to differentiate. Oh well...

In the Name of God, the Lover, the Beloved and the Love. Amen.

*****

Jesus often sought silence and solitude to pray. Last week, we heard of how he snuck away in the early morning to pray in lonely and quiet places. On this day, he decides to go up a mountain with only three of his apostles. 

It was probably easier to escape the crowds’ attention in a small committee than when he moved with his whole band of disciples. When he did the latter, the crowds followed him or even preceded him where they thought he was headed next. Solitude from the crowds was a necessary but challenging gift to claim.

Jesus, Peter, James and John manage to slip away undetected. And they choose to go up a nearby mountain. It takes effort and concentration to hike up a mountain. I imagine a relative silence settling amongst the four walkers as they pay attention to their footfall and take in the beauty of the landscape.

Eventually, they reach a high point on the mountain. The vista opens up and they can see for miles over the Galilean country. They settle down to rest a while and pray. And as prayer absorbs them, they eventually become aware of Jesus’ transfiguration.

He appears to them as he has never appeared before. He appears glorified. It is even hard to keep your gaze on him so dazzling he appears. And he is in conversation with Elijah, the most prominent of Prophets, and with Moses, the giver of the Law. The company Jesus keeps here assigns the next-to-highest level of honor to him.

Peter feels the moment couldn’t get more solemn and glorious. And he feels compelled to say something rather than stay enraptured in contemplation. But there is really nothing one can say that could meet the occasion.

As it is, Peter wants to capture the moment and perpetuate it. I understand his desire but the event keeps developing. Does God ever allow us to put God in the box of our own making? God doesn’t in this case.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

The One even more glorious than Elijah and Moses interrupts the scene and overrules whatever the disciples might have concluded from the earlier events. God godself speaks to the apostles. Now Jesus is assigned the very highest level of honor. He is the Son of God. This goes well beyond the Messiah, the Anointed One, that Peter confessed only six days ago. Yes Jesus is the Messiah, and he is also God’s very Son.

The teachings of Moses and Elijah are important, no doubt. But even they simply confer with Jesus. For even more important than the Law and the Prophets is to listen to Jesus, proclaimed the Son of God. 

Mark doesn’t bother to tell us what Moses, Elijah and Jesus talked about because the more important content comes directly from God: “listen to him.” Listen to Jesus.

*****

Six days before, the disciples had heard things from Jesus that they found difficult to listen to and accept, if not understand. Jesus told them about his upcoming passion, death and resurrection. 

And Jesus had told them that “... those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Those are hard words to listen to and to take in, not to mention hard to live by.

It would be so tempting to accept the mountaintop glory without accepting the harder messages that Jesus conveys. Peter would like to bask in the glory that God projects. But instead, God charges the disciples with the mission to do as Jesus tells them. And that isn’t easy and it often will not look glorious in the eyes of the world. 

God’s love will prevail in ways that are not the ways of the world. The disciples will prevail if they follow the way of Jesus not the way of the prevailing domination system. Jesus will die an ignominious death, and he will be resurrected. The disciples will lose their lives for His sake. And they will gain true life in so doing.

*****

But it is time for our mountaintop experience to come to a close. And “Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” The Jesus they have always known, the very human Jesus, the One they are to listen to. Jesus is enough. Listen to him.

Some of us receive mountaintop experiences. Thanks be to God. But not to all of us. Most of the disciples did not come up that mountain. Yet all of us, whether we stayed in the valley or came back down from the mountain, have to listen to God. What is God’s will for the work to be done in the humdrum valley of everyday life?

We are to listen to Jesus in our very normal and ordinary lives. That’s where God’s work of Love awaits us. And if we were fueled with energy by our mountaintop experiences, lucky us. But we shouldn’t attempt to become spiritual bounty hunters. We shouldn’t keep looking for spiritual highs instead of doing the daily work of Love.

As our Brother Roy calligraphed so beautifully, “Pray often, pray early.” But then step into the rest of your life, feel the holy ground under your feet, and do the loving that God wants us to do. 

And as St Benedict wrote in his rule, always, “Listen carefully, my child, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” (Rule of St Benedict - Prologue).

Amen.

The Last Sunday after Epiphany - February 23, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis, OHC
The Last Sunday after Epiphany - February 23, 2020

Exodus 24:12-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

My preaching to you for this particular Sunday, the Transfiguration, reminds me of a passage from Isaiah 6:8. God asks, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” He might as well be asking who will go up to Mount Tabor for us. And my brothers answer, “Here he is. Send him.” That’s not entirely fair. I just happened to draw the straw for this Sunday. I suppose fate is more to blame.

Peter, James and John are certainly braver than I am. Matthew does not mention the disciples cowering in fear until after Jesus’ blinds them with dazzling white and a face that shines like the Sun. They cower at God’s interruption of Peter’s offer of hospitality. Their teacher’s metamorphosis into white light, and the appearance of Moses and Elijah weren’t scary enough?

I could almost imagine Moses and Elijah taking one look at Jesus and saying, Oh yeah, been there, done that.

Peter, James, John, Jesus, Moses and Elijah are all experiencing a literal mountaintop experience. No wonder Peter wants to build three tents. He wants the experience to last. This summit, a dizzying altitude, would represent for me a pinnacle of spiritual and human experience. Although Peter will build only if Jesus wishes.

Then, God interjects here, interrupts Peter’s proposition as he is speaking with an expression of delight for God’s beloved Son and a command to listen to Jesus. Now is the time to cower, if not before!

Maybe the disciples finally get who Jesus really is, like nothing they understood before even when God says practically the same thing at his Baptism. His proximity to God finally dawns on them. God’s proximity to them dawns on them as well. In the Hebrew Scriptures, that position could be cause for death.

What finally dawns on me is that there’s obviously no accident that at the beginning of the Epiphany season and the end we hear God’s confirmation of Jesus, when he needs it most: at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and near the end. Jesus is not only divine and human in one person, but he is God’s beloved Son. Then, he reaches out and glorifies his disciples with a human touch. Moses and Elijah have left him. Alone, he calms their fears. “Do not be afraid”, a familiar phrase we’ve heard so much over the last few months.

Now, human, he is resolute. He and the disciples can no longer linger on this summit. They must rise and begin a long climb up another mountain to Jerusalem. As he tells his disciples on the way down Mount Tabor, the Son of Man will be raised from the dead. He still is as they know him, as real as his touch and consolation. His death will be that real. But his Resurrection is just as real. God’s love really is stronger than death.

As we map their journey, we are called to make that climb as well. His disciples are with him. We are with them as a human community, but we each have our personal journeys from Baptism through Transfiguration, up and over one mountain and on to our own personal Jerusalem. Yet, even then, we aren’t completely alone.

Some of you may know that our beloved Brother Roy Parker died just a few days ago after battling the devastating disease of ALS. He was a physically active man, a runner. He was an artist, a gifted calligrapher. He was quiet, unassuming and holy in many ways. We looked up to him. One class of novices called him a “super-monk” they would want to emulate.

In the last weeks of his life, we loved him even more. Silenced by his disease, we and he knew he was dying. This journey was his own personal Jerusalem. He had to travel it alone. We couldn’t imagine what he was feeling. But he followed Jesus and brought us with him to go as far as we could. When all we knew to do was to keep him comfortable and offer physical touches, embraces and hugs he smiled hugely while his face would light up. In good health, I think he would possibly have been embarrassed by such shows of affection. But we saw humility, acceptance, courage and genuine gratitude for the care and love we gave him. We felt his love back to us as well. We were seeing a Transfiguration. I believe we were going through our own Transfiguration as a community and as individuals as witnesses to this process.

He has helped me to have faith that God called his Son the Beloved. But it’s so much larger than that. We are included in that pronouncement. We are gathered, swept up into God’s love to our last heartbeat, our last breath, beyond to our own Resurrection. It’s a daunting inheritance, perhaps a responsibility to cower from. But a human touch and a beloved voice confirms our identity. He tells us to rise and become transfigured.

Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, “When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” That’s what I saw Brother Roy do in his life and in his death.

Imagine ourselves entering Lent with a dazzling revelation of being God’s own. Imagine it emanating from us. Imagine if we could confirm, affirm and enliven each other’s true divine identities as witnessed by God and God's Beloved.

A Desert Father story describes Abba Lot coming to Abba Joseph and presenting a litany of what could be considered Lenten accomplishments. “Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do?” The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: "Why not become fire?"

Indeed!!!

Amen.

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.