Morning Star Rising

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Transfiguration by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for the apostle Peter. He is just so gosh darn earnest. Peter is not afraid to make a fool of himself. He says what everyone else is thinking but hesitates to say. He asks the supposedly stupid questions. Peter shows up as he is. He’s dependable that way, and Jesus nicknames him “the rock.” Peter is the sort of man who, when he sees Jesus walking on the water and looking a little ghostly, jumps out of the boat into the sea and goes after him.

Today in the second letter of Peter, we hear from Peter as an older man, now established as a leader in the church. Has he mellowed, I wonder? Is he still as impulsive as he always was? Either way, the earnestness and the urgency remain: in this epistle Peter writes with a sense that he is nearing the end of his life, and he speaks here to other Christian believers with a real sense of urgency, urgency that they remember and not forget. “I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to refresh your memory, since I know that my death will come soon, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.” What is it that Peter finds so urgent for us to know? What is so important for us to remember? “I will make every effort so that you may be able at any time to recall these things.”

Peter is speaking as an original eyewitness to Jesus’s life & ministry & death & resurrection. He had a front-row seat, and he feels the world-changing weight of those experiences. Peter urgently wants to impart his eyewitness account of what it was like to be with Jesus to anyone willing to listen. And the touchstone experience he returns to, the experience that refreshes his memory as he seeks to refresh our memory, is the Transfiguration, when Jesus went up the mountain with Peter, James and John to pray. Moses and Elijah appeared to talk with Jesus, light shone from his clothes and face, and as a cloud covered the mountain. a voice from heaven said: “This is my Son, my Beloved, my Chosen, listen to him!” This is the story Peter chooses to tell. “We were with him on the holy mountain” and were “eyewitnesses of his majesty,” he says, as he impresses upon us that he was witness to something remarkable. He wants us to know about it, not just in our heads but deep in our bones—so that we can always recall it, or rather always be recalled by it, called back to the revelation of Jesus’s transfigured beauty.

I wonder if Peter also turns to the story of the Transfiguration because it is an anchoring, touchstone experience that grounds him in what he saw and experienced through all the years he walked with Jesus. It calls him back to how it felt to know this sort of love up close. Now, facing martyrdom, it refreshes Peter’s own memory to revisit this love. The Transfiguration experience comes just before Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, inevitably to his death. That’s critically important, that this most dazzling revelation of Jesus’s identity, rivaled only by his baptism, is set within an arc that moves through struggle and betrayal and suffering and death. This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky fingers-in-your-ears head-in-the-sand moment of elation cut off from reality. The mountain-top revelation is sturdier than that; God is sturdier than that, and the love we see shining through Jesus’s face is stronger than death itself.

Peter also tells us this particular story because he hopes that this story and every scrap we hear of the life of Jesus and every bit of scripture we lay eyes on can become a guide for us. A lamp is the metaphor he uses. The prophetic message has been “more fully confirmed” by the eyewitnesses who saw it, and now they are telling you what they saw, like a lamp in the dark. "You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” Peter’s hope is that hearing these writings—the scriptures, the law, the prophets, the eyewitness accounts of the disciples—will lead each of us who hear to an encounter of our own with the living God—that’s “the day dawning and the morning star rising in your heart.” What you have heard others tell about, you too can experience; you can also witness God’s Majestic Glory.

The purpose of the Christian life is not merely to believe something but to become someone, a human being fully alive living in union with God. The lamp is good, holding an open space to hear these stories is good, believing in faith is good—and—it’s all aimed at the experience of coming to know God in our own flesh. Belief is the arrow, not the target, and it’s aiming us toward the Love that created all things, it’s aiming us toward the Love that we see take human form in Jesus, and toward the Love that animates us every day and works through us out into the world.

When the Transfiguration reveals Jesus in radiant glory on the mountain-top, it’s a demonstration of something that’s always been true of him. He lives from that deeply centered and constant place, in unity with the God he affectionately calls Father. Jesus transfigured is luminous—literally, he’s glowing!—and the disciples can see him as he is—God in human form, the way, the truth, the life, the light of the world, the morning star! But he’s still the same Jesus they knew down on the valley floor. He was just as much at union with God in the day-to-day of things as he was on the mountain: when he gave hungry people bread, when he blessed little children, when he argued with the authorities, when he healed the sick. Even as he hangs on the cross, he was living from the same unceasing embodiment of God’s love and justice. The Mount of Transfiguration makes this dramatically visible, but it’s not new. This is still Jesus being who Jesus is, doing what Jesus does. He is always in the house of the Lord. On the mountain top, down in the valley, even in the valley of the shadow of death, he lives from that place of constant abiding in the love of God.

Well, we might say, that’s great for Jesus, uh, but what about us? The Transfiguration shows us something that can be true of us, too. Jesus opens a way for us—he is the Way. Jesus invites us to be united with him in the Spirit as he is one with the Father. He is drawing us in to the divine life, which is both our beginning and our end. These are what I think of as the Cotton-Eyed Joe questions: Where did you come from? And where do you go? And the remarkable answer Christians give to both is: the very life of God. That’s our Alpha and Omega.

Peter gets at this, in his Peter way, when he sees Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus. He blurts out, “‘Master it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah!’—not knowing what he said.” Peter seems to sort of be babbling here, grasping for something, anything to do in the face of an overwhelming mystical experience. There’s some accidental wisdom here. "It is good for us to be here,” he says on behalf of James and John; “let the three of us make three dwellings.” Each of them are to become a dwelling place for God, a tabernacle, a sanctuary, a Holy of Holies, and so are each of us.

I want to tell you about a nun I met while walking the Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James is a 500-mile pilgrimage path that crosses the Pyrenees Mountains and runs through northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. My first days as a pilgrim were hard. Walking 15 or 20 miles a day pushed me to my limits, and physical fatigue and long quiet afternoons in the sun left me emotionally wrung out too, with old hurts close to the surface.

So by the time I arrived at this hostel run by Augustinian nuns, two weeks in, I was running pretty ragged. And from the moment I stumbled through the door, they offered such pure and gracious hospitality, giving us blessedly cold tea and cookies even while we signed in. They got us settled with utmost care. These were young nuns, from Madrid—nuns with guitars! Some sisters in their order had felt the call to move to the Camino and open a hostel for pilgrims. And they played guitar and sang to us weary, gathered pilgrims, in Spanish and French and English, and they made us sing with them, too. They told us God loved us, and fed us dinner, and gave us a special blessing after mass in the church the hostel was attached to.

There was one older nun with white hair and sparkling eyes. I never got her name. But she was German and spoke English well and acted as the translator for the much younger head of the order. Her presence was arresting; in my journal I wrote that she radiated divine love and it was clear that she had let it change her over years and year, because now it shone through her so transparently. The younger sister would go on in earnest paragraphs of Castilian Spanish, and when she finally paused for the interpretation, the German nun would wait and listen (as if she had not already been listening), and then utter a distilled sentence or two. Once, she summed up several minutes’ worth with the slow, soft, very deliberate pronouncement: “We can not live in darkness.”

My short stay there was such a refuge. This woman’s witness—both with words and in the way she enacted attentive love and hospitality—was a lamp for me. It was a witness that led me from hearing the story to living in the story, from belief to encounter. At the end of mass, the nuns called us up, blessed us, and gave us all little paper stars they had colored and cut out with crayons. I still have mine. Somehow, this token pressed into my hand was the most precious thing in the world, and their songs seemed less cheesy, and by the grace of God, I got it. The lights went on, the day dawned, and for a moment, I was on the holy mountain, dusty sneakers and all. I knew not just as an idea but in my weary, sunburnt body that God loved me exactly as I am. For me it was a profoundly radiant moment, and one that has been a touchstone for me since.

When I say this memory is a touchstone, I don’t mean that I’m trying to recreate that moment or return to that particular emotional-spiritual state. Memory can trip us up, trap us in the past and launch us into fantasies about the future. Held lightly, though, memory can be a help to us. Recalling the Majestic Beauty we have witnessed refreshes us and brings us back to the present. That encounter while staying with the nuns on the Camino refreshes my memory and calls me back when I forget that I am Beloved by God.

And I forget a lot. For all us here who are not Jesus (everyone, last I checked) we aren’t always living from that place of unity and alignment with divine love. We’re human beings, and so we are inconstant. We get distracted by our many fears, especially the fundamental fear that at the base of things we are no good, unlovable and unwanted. Then we get busy distracting ourselves from our fears. We are suffering and in pain, moving through exhaustion, perhaps, or oppression, isolation, despair, or just trying to keep food on the table.

What is it that pulls you out of alignment with God’s unbreakable love for you?

And, what are the habitual ways you respond to those fears?

What experience of radiant love have you felt that might become a touchstone for you, a smooth pebble in your pocket, reminding you that this Love is here now, too, and fills all things?

We are distracted different ways, but we all flicker in and out. The stars come up and they go down. Dark to dawn and then dark again. Remember Peter, James and John almost fell asleep with the glorious spectacle of Jesus’s shining face right in front of them! Luke says they were “weighed down with sleep—but since they had staked awake they saw his glory.” We too are weighed down. But we will do well to be attentive! We can always, always come back. Think of a planetarium, where resetting the sun sends it speeding forward across the night sky. It can always be dawn again, and look, here comes the morning star.

Returning, refreshing our memory, is the work of a moment, and the “work” here, if you call it work, is just to surrender to this moment. The experience of really knowing that God loves you is available now. You don’t have to summit mountains or go to Spain or become a nun. God wants to show you how Beloved you are, wants to refresh your memory so you may be able at any time to recall how much you are loved, and then, grounded in that knowledge, live in freedom to love others as you have first been loved.

So, it is good for us to be here. Let us let God make each of us a dwelling place; may we meet Jesus as our companion on the way; and may the morning star rise in your heart and in mine. Amen.