Learning to Float & Be His Hands

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Transfiguration (Transferred), August 9, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration--the moment atop Mt. Tabor where Jesus is unveiled in his divine nature (in his “raiment white and glistening” as our collect has it) to Peter, James, and John. It’s a story of deep spiritual significance and one that speaks to us not just of the fully divine and fully human nature of Jesus as the God-Man, but also of our own potential in Christ to become more and more like him, to become children of the light, bearers of the light and transmitters of that light to all. The story of the Transfiguration is really the story of each one of us. It enacts in just a few deceptively simple lines the basic arc of what it means to be a disciple. A snow globe miniature of the spiritual life.

It starts, of course, on the plain--symbolic of all the usual ways we go about our lives. The plain is the realm of the settled and the stale. It’s the realm of the habitual, mechanical, and reactive ways we move through life unconsciously in a waking dream--pulled from one thing to the next and trying to secure our identity by pursuing strategies of safety/security, affection/esteem, or power/control. Each of us has a particular “style” by which we try to maintain our life on the plain. Some of us are control freaks. Some of us are people pleasers. Some of us are addicted to comfort and security. Whatever our particular style, at some point or other, we bump up against something in our life that we can’t manage according to our usual strategies. Things  no longer work. It might be the loss of a loved one, sudden and serious illness, the loss of a job, a global pandemic that turns our ordinary lives upside down, or living in the midst of momentous social change... but whatever it is, we find ourselves suddenly at sea, unable to get our bearings, or find a way forward.

I recently saw a short little video of the golfer Tiger Woods that detailed his debilitating back injury. He speaks of swinging a golf club as akin to playing bloody knuckles, but a thousand times worse. Eventually, he is reduced to sitting in a lazy boy day and night, unable to stand or walk, and debating whether or not to try to move ten feet to the refrigerator for a drink. His children would bring their toys next to his chair just so he wouldn’t feel left out. And Tiger speaks of this not just as a physical crisis, but a spiritual one as well. The greatest golfer of his generation, and arguably of all time, is unable to even hobble to the kitchen. His idea of himself, and what he is capable of, is shattered to a thousand tiny pieces.

Sometimes it takes a true crisis like this to wake us up from our slumber, but often it’s more subtle. A feeling of things being out of kilter. A sense that we are working against the grain, somehow out of the abundant flow of life and caught in a stagnant eddy. It’s here that we get the next lovely detail in the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus “took with him Peter, and John, and James.” They don’t go it alone. It is Jesus who takes them up from the plain--they surrender their illusory self-sufficiency and allow themselves to be carried up the mountain by a force, or power, greater than themselves. Thomas Greene, a Jesuit teacher of prayer, speaks of this in his classic book When the Well Runs Dry  as, “learning to float.” Up until a certain point we think the spiritual life depends on our efforts. We expend a lot of energy treading water and exhausting ourselves. Eventually, when we’re about spent and don’t think we can keep going much longer, we give up, we lay back and relax and to our great and joyful surprise discover that we float! We discover that we are already floating in an ocean of merciful light. We discover, with Peter, that the morning star is risen in our hearts. We discover that the same God who appeared to our ancestors reveals his loving face to us and buoys us up. Even here. Even now.

So first we have to see the plain for what it is. Then we have to allow ourselves to be led up the mountain, to go apart. And then we get a little glimpse of what reality is really like. Jesus is revealed between Moses and Elijah--symbolic of the the Law and the Prophets--not in some kind of supersessionist way, but as a means of saying that this is the same God who has always been with us through plagues in Egypt and the pursuit by Pharaoh's army, through the desert time in the wilderness, through the exile, through the Babylonian captivity. That same God of mercy and loving-kindness, of protection and abundant provision, has been made flesh in the person of Jesus. Standing between Moses and Elijah we see Jesus for who he really is--no mere healer, no mere prophet, no mere social reformer, but God Incarnate come among us as Savior.

At the same time, we get a glimpse of who it is that we are called to be. Christianity is no spectator sport as I always say. The life we see revealed and embodied in the person of Jesus is the very same life to which we are called. As it says in 2 Peter, we are called to be “partakers of divine nature.” We are called to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” We are called to surrender ourselves in self-forgetful, sacrificial love so that it is “no longer I, but Christ Himself who lives in me.” In Jesus, we have once-and-for-all the revelation not just of God for, with, and ahead of us, but what it means to be a truly human human being. He is who I AM.

Then we come to this curious detail about the disciples being “weighted down with sleep…” but also somehow “awake.” What’s going on here? Are they awake or are they sleep? Which one is it? I think what’s being pointed to here is a disposition of alert receptiveness characterized by the unselfconscious attention of a gardener, a person in deep prayer, or an athlete in a “state of flow,” or “the zone.” What’s gone to sleep, or what has been let go of, or surrendered, is the normal, rational, linear and discursive way of seeing and being in the world with our usual strategies for seeking apparent fulfillment at the center. The world of the plain, the world of what Wordsworth calls the habit of “getting and spending,” has loosened its tyrannical hold, and the disciples see the world without a veil--they see things just as they are in all their radiant, awesome, splendor. That’s why we have Peter, in overflowing exuberance exclaiming “...[I]t is good for us to be here… not knowing what he was saying.” Sure, Peter often says the first thing that pops into his mind a lot of the time, but here the “not knowing” is of a different order. It’s a not-knowing that actually gives birth to true knowledge. It’s a forgetting in order to remember. It’s a holding in abeyance business as usual to make room for something new to emerge, for Truth to be unmasked, uncovered, unconcealed.

And that’s why we have that image of the cloud as well. This is no mere meteorological event! The cloud is simultaneously a symbol of God’s presence (think of the pillar of cloud and the fire by night in Exodus), and a symbol of the uncontainable mystery God. Our usual ways of making sense of things gets clouded over, forgotten, and something new is revealed in its place: Jesus the beloved, the Chosen, the one to whom we are to listen. It was Albert Einstein who said somewhere that, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." I wonder if perhaps this is what the Transfiguration also gestures towards:  a way of beholding that is not merely confined to the plain, but is open to the intuitive dimension, the realm of mystery, wonder, and the gift. 

Listening to that voice, recollecting ourselves and reminding ourselves of who and whose we are, is what allows us to navigate the competing voices of the plain (voices of division, exclusion, competition, profit, and greed) with a measure of grace. It’s not that those voices will ever go away (though we pray they will), but that they are put in their proper perspective. The voices of the plain in Einstein’s terms are the servants whom we all too often serve in forgetfulness of the sacred gift that is Jesus. Listening to Him, means being willing to go apart and asking ourselves, in every moment of our lives the question: “What does love look like in this situation?” and to have the patience and the perseverance to wait upon the Lord for an answer not of our own devising.

When it’s all over, we learn that the disciples find Jesus alone. I suppose we might consider this as indicating that Moses and Elijah have hotfooted it out of there and taken refuge in the angelic realms. But there’s a more subtle sense in which the disciples find Jesus alone, and that is that now they see him everywhere. Everywhere they look, there is only Jesus--a Christ-saturated, sacramental vision of the world where all is in God and God is in all. The veil of separation, the trance-state of the mercantilist plain, has been torn back, ripped in two, and there is only love serving love in love: Jesus in the stranger, Jesus in the homeless person, Jesus in the boss we can’t stand, Jesus in the sprig of grass the mower missed gone to seed, Jesus in the fear, the loneliness, the hurt. Jesus alone. Jesus all one.

With the disciples we disidentify from the grinding futility of life lived merely on the plain. With the disciples we’re led up the mountain to a place apart. With the disciples, we allow grace to remove the veils from our eyes that we might see the world as it truly is. And with the disciples, we keep following Jesus back down the other side of the mountain, our perception changed through transformative encounter with the living God, as we enter the market place: back where we started on the same old plain, but this time as God’s very hands and feet in the world.  Nothing has changed and everything has changed. May it be so.