Feast of the Transfiguration - August 6, 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Transfiguration August 6, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

Father John A. Siemes, professor of modern philosophy at Tokyo’s Catholic University, wrote this about August 6th, 1945.

Suddenly--the time is approximately 8:14--the whole valley is filled by a garish light which resembles the magnesium light used in photography, and I am conscious of a wave of heat. I jump to the window to find out the cause of this remarkable phenomenon, but I see nothing more than that brilliant yellow light. As I make for the door, it doesn't occur to me that the light might have something to do with enemy planes. On the way from the window, I hear a moderately loud explosion which seems to come from a distance and, at the same time, the windows are broken in with a loud crash. There has been an interval of perhaps ten seconds since the flash of light. I am sprayed by fragments of glass. The entire window frame has been forced into the room. I realize now that a bomb has burst and I am under the impression that it exploded directly over our house or in the immediate vicinity.

Eerie, strange, discomfitting that on this 58th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we also celebrate a very different kind of light radiating forth from the person of Christ Jesus, the God-Man in raiment white and shining. Hold those two lights together this morning in your heart–the garish, magnesium light of August 6, 1945, and the beautiful blinding light of Tabor. Which light will we let shine before the nations?

On the Feast of the Transfiguration, which we celebrate today, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of thinking this story about the disciples seeing Jesus’ face changed and his clothes dazzling white bracketed by Moses (the Law) and Elijah (the Prophets) atop Mt. Tabor as conveying information primarily about Jesus. And, of course, it is that. Leaving the disquietude of this world, the disciples ascend with Jesus to the place of prayer where Jesus’s divine-human nature (fully human and fully divine) is disclosed to their asleep/awake eyes. It’s all properly trinitarian, as you would expect. Jesus the Son is there, the God the Father speaks those words of belovedness as at the Baptism of Our Lord, and the Spirit—in the form of an overshadowing cloud—permeates and enfolds the entire encounter.

What we miss, if we stay at this level of interpretation of the Transfiguration as a description of an event that happened to Jesus two thousand years ago, is that Mt. Tabor is simultaneously a disclosure of what a truly human human life is called to be. From the earliest patristic witnesses we hear phrases like this one from St. Athanasius—“God became human so that humans beings might become God.” That is, through the incarnation in the person of Jesus, God has united us to Godself that we might become by grace what Jesus is by nature. What Irenaeus calls the “wonderful exchange” of incarnation-deification. We are created, as St. Peter writes a few verses earlier than our reading for this morning, to be “partakers of divine nature.” We are created that the recognition of our Morning Star Hearts might rise; that the Love of God for each and every one of us created in God’s image and likeness, might come to be the ground from which we live, move, sing, and serve. Or as Vincent Pizzuto puts it so well,

The vocation of Christian, then, is not to be “good” but to become God…. To realize oneself as ‘another Christ’ [alteri Christi]… to awaken in Christ’s body, to live fully as partakers of his divine nature so to become for others extensions of his ongoing presence in the world.

Compare that to what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas was told in his Methodist Sunday School in Texas growing up—“Jesus was nice and he wants us to be nice too!”—and you get a good picture of how the grand scope of Christian life has been effectively cut off at the knees.

Becoming God has been drearily whittled down to being good. Participation in the life of Christ, participation in the on-going process of “deep incarnation” as “other Christs” or “little Christs” (as Augustine calls them) has been reduced to what Pizzuto calls, “a set of external rules and observances that we can fastidiously perform, all the while convincing ourselves of our righteousness before God without ever entering into an interior relationship with the risen and indwelling Christ.” And we wonder why the Church of the Holy Comforter holds more appeal for most folks on Sunday morning!

Karl Rahner writes that, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or [s]he will not exist at all.” It’s vital that the Church recover this mystical dimension of its life, witness, and work. This means, in part, recovering the “ever ancient ever new” way of reading scripture not simply as information about God, but as an invitation to encounter with God. “I hear the word, I chew the word, I digest the word, I become the word,” is how the Desert Ammas and Abbas of the 4th and 5th century referred to their prayerful reading of scripture—often confined to dwelling deeply on a single word or phrase for days, weeks, months, even years at a time. Information about God—those sermons, God forgive us, replete with detailed accounts of the exact dimensions of the wine jugs at the Wedding Feast of Cana, or forays into ancient practices of animal husbandry on Good Shepherd Sunday—have the effect of keeping us always at arm’s length to the God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

The point, of course, is that the water jug of our lives, touched by love, by Christ’s presence in, with, and for us, turns to wine we pour out freely, prodigally, to the immense delight of our thirsty neighbor. The point, of course, is not that we should try our darndest not to get lost, or deny that we’re lost, but that being lost already we welcome with great rejoicing the Christ who runs out to find us and meet us and lavish us and ravish us just as we are.

Does this mean we can’t learn what’s from historical-critical scholarship? Of course not. But we should be very careful of confusing the menu for the meal, of confusing knowledge about God with participation in God’s very life, “an interior relationship with the risen and indwelling Christ.” The Bible speaks not of someone’s else’s experience of God, but is an invitation to, a passageway into, the very same encounter in the life of each one of us. In our case today, it is a call to deeper, more intimate, relationship with Christ who shows us not just who he is, but who we are called to be through participation in Him.

But there is more. The Transfiguration—as the outflow of “the unqualified union between Christ and humanity”—reveals, unveils, discloses to us that all creation is shot through with divine presence. It is not just Jesus’ face that shines, but his clothing as well after all. As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes,

Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries

Indeed, every bush is a burning bush. All ground is holy ground. All water is holy water and all bread is Eucharistic. We inhabit and participate in a sacramental universe in which all life, not just human life, is sacred. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb to which we are all already invited (at which we are all already seated) has been in full swing since before the foundation of the world—and yet we content ourselves with a grumpy-faced, distant Christ who we’re convinced cares more about what goes on between the sheets than loving us into loving others as his very hands and feet.

“The incarnation,” writes Pizzuto, “has made mystics of us all,” and our inability to embody and manifest the reality of the sacramental tapestry in which we live and move and have our being represents for him, “a radical failure of the church to communicate to the modern world its greatest spiritual treasure.” Not only has human life been reduced to a process of getting and spending, but the sacrament of nature itself has been “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” as Hopkins writes in “God’s Grandeur.” “Nor can foot feel, being shod,” he continues. A sleepy, dull, distracted, gorged-on-blackberries numbness has taken hold and it’s the witness of the Church, of each and every one of us, to show the world that there is another way to do this thing we call being human, being fully alive. One worthy of the liberty of children of God. Who know Him from the inside-out. Who have read the menu, sure, but who more importantly have tasted the meal and seen that it is good, good, very good.

It is for each and every one of us to know Christ and make him known. To take off our shoes. To feel the good earth between our toes. To know that the place we are standing is holy ground, that surely God is in this place, and that despite it all, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” The miracle is not to walk on water, but to truly walk—alive, Christ-freshened, awake, free, easy—on earth. The Kingdom of God, in this sense, is now or never.

There’s a certain safety and security to the spectator life that keeps us always at arm’s length. “It is good for us to be here.” In our tents. One for you and you and you. Buttoned down and sewed up tight. It’s good for us to be here… sure. Until it’s not. Until the winds of the spirit call us out of our tents, call us out of our heads, out of our addiction to strategies of management, predictability, and control, call us out of our selves into relational encounter with Him and Him alone who is all in all. For He, Jesus, is our peace, our refreshment, “our” very life itself. And we must come, like little children, to depend on Him for everything, simply everything. “Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent…” Amen.