Under the Bright Cloud
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Last Sunday After Epiphany, February 19, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.
The Transfiguration is such a radiant scene. It’s a fitting end to this season of Epiphany the season of light, which tracks the revelation of Jesus as the light of the world. The Magi follow the new star to Bethlehem to worship the baby in wondering awe. Simeon and Anna recognize the infant Jesus as the light of the nations, the glory of God’s people, the true light that enlightens everyone coming into the world. The heavens open at Jesus’s baptism and belovedness shines forth, on Jesus who enters into our human nature to fill it with his glory and on each of us who are baptized into his death and his rising. Jesus’s ministry and teaching illumine us, too, as he shows us what love looks like in human form, the radiance of a life lived in constant attunement with divine love. We hear of the disciples answering the call to come and see this radiant light, to know Jesus not merely as an idea but as a living flesh and blood person, love shining through his face, and then, seeing through his eyes, to know the world transfigured in light of this love.
On this final Sunday of this season of light, we hear together the account of the Transfiguration, where the disciples see Christ’s glory definitively revealed in splendor of light on the mountaintop. Over and over in the gospels Jesus withdraws to desert places to be with his Father in silence. This time he takes Peter, James, and John with him, and before their eyes they see Jesus transfigured: the glorious reality of who he is is made visible. and they see God incarnate in a human person. The true light, simply shining.
Luke’s version of the Transfiguration says the disciples almost fell asleep, so I like to imagine this as a night scene, Jesus’s face and clothing shining out in the dark. As the vision unfolds, Peter, James and John see Moses and Elijah talking with him. Moses is of course the ancestor who received the law and glimpsed God passing by from behind on another holy mountain, and Elijah is the greatest of the prophets, who also encountered God on the mountain, not in the fire, not in the whirlwind, not in the earthquake, but in the sound of sheer silence.
Peter cries out, glorying in this moment: it is good for us to be here! Beautiful. And then, he immediately sets to packaging up this moment bursting with divine glory into something he can manage: I can make three dwelling places, I’ll build three tents, I can put you all in little boxes: one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus. Can we recognize that impulse to get a handle on God in ourselves? Wanting to control the infinite love that is God through our limited knowing? Peter is blessedly interrupted—just as he’s trying to impose his own order and sense onto it all, the disciples see a cloud—a bright cloud—descend on and overshadow them. The voice of God echoes from the Jordan, pronouncing the same words as at Jesus’s baptism: This is my Son the Beloved, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!
“When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.” Let’s zero in on this moment when the disciples have fallen to the ground in fear. Icons of the Transfiguration—I believe there’s one in your bulletin somewhere—show Peter, James and John not in rapture before Moses and Elijah but in this moment after the cloud has rolled in, when they’ve fallen in fear. They’re depicted almost turned upside down. Their sight which had been oh so clear, oh so convicting, oh so glorious, is covered over. They are overshadowed and afraid. Oh thank goodness. I was starting to worry we’d lost dear blundering Peter and company to an impossible bunch of saintly impersonators. No, these are still the disciples we recognize, the disciples we can see ourselves in. Their story is still our story. And they are learning the lesson we are learning as well: to receive our life from God’s hands, looking to Jesus in trust. That is the essence of holiness and the wellspring of sanctity. Visions and mountains and robes that glow-in-the-dark are all well and good, but they do not disciples make. Faith is not to see clearly or know perfectly, it’s the loving trust that holds us when the eyes of our seeing go dim. And this trust is itself a gift, not our doing but something God wants to give us, if we’re open to receive it. While the shaking disciples are still fallen to the ground, overshadowed and overcome, Jesus comes to them and touches them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” God is seeking us. Love takes the initiative and comes to us, touches us in our fear and stands us up. “When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.” Moses and Elijah, in the icon shown bowing to Jesus on either side, blink out of scene leaving Jesus himself alone, touching the disciples in their fear and distress and paralysis and reaching down to them, pulling them up, reassuring them.
To see only Jesus, himself, alone: this is I think the true vision on the mountain, after the fireworks are over. There is no one to look to except Jesus. Jesus embodies all the law and the prophets, as only love can fulfill the law. He is the face of God for us, the image of the invisible God. Faith is to trust Jesus to show us who God is and to show us who we are. And, trusting Jesus, we can let all our ideas about God be overshadowed by the cloud, and let all our ideas about holiness as something special to be attained or achieved go under the cloud, too.
To see only Jesus, to see him in everything and everything in him, is a vision available to each one of us. This holiness which is essentially trust is for us, too, in the exact particulars of our imperfect lives as we find them. To trust and reflect the divine light even under the cloud is not reserved for the saintly greats who we imagine must be so different than ourselves. That self-deprecation downplays the hope of our calling and is also a convenient way of letting ourselves off the hook. No, every Christian, every human being is called to holiness, and the only real holiness is the holiness of Jesus, which he will give us freely if we trust him. It can’t be earned by heroic achievement, only received with empty hands.
Many of you know I spent the last ten days away at a silent retreat at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado. The chapel where we sat for prayer looked out onto Mt. Soprus, the stunningly beautiful mountain towering over the valley, right now dazzling in snow. Stunningly beautiful, but far away. If we always think we have to trek up the mountain to meet God, we are going to miss the myriad ways God is meeting us here, now, in the absolutely ordinary, on the valley floor.
You don’t have to go up the mountain. Yes, there’s value and nourishment to be had in times of retreat and I certainly felt it as a great gift. But solitude in whatever place, a few hours at a Quiet Day like the one we had right here yesterday is enough to make a little space and a little space is enough. Allow just a little space to release your grip on everything you think you know and a bright cloud will descend to gently overshadow the running mental commentary that runs so much of your life and mine, revealing Jesus shining at the center of it all. That radiant light revealed on the mountaintop was true long before Peter and the rest went up, and it was still true after they came down. The holy mountain is everywhere, nearer than near. Opening is the key. God won’t force you. Love doesn’t coerce; love invites. The single and essential thing to offer is your consent, your desire to be open to God, the “mustard seed of your yes” as Fr. Tyler says. Wherever you are, in any situation, that’s the map up the mountain: nothing but yes.
The woman who led the retreat has been practicing yes a long time. Leading is admittedly a loose term here, because it was really God’s silent presence that held everything as steadily as the valley held its many occupants, elk and rabbit, magpie and coyote, pine tree, fence post, and two dozen strangely muted humans. This woman leading the conferences turned out to be the same person who’d exchanged registration emails, the same person who collected medical forms, arranged airport rides for various attendees, and hey, also ran the monks’ fairly elaborate Sunday livestream on the side. So you know she’s a person of deep prayer, to do all that so simply and gracefully, attending to what’s needed with an ungrudging heart. On the last day of the retreat she talked about the time a number of years ago when she was discerning whether to take this job and move to Snowmass. She spent a long time in quiet, under that bright cloud. And she got an answer: YES. But the yes wasn’t in answer to her question, particularly. Yes to what? she asked. Just YES. Yes not to anything in particular, but a wide open, spacious, trusting yes. She said she has come to think of faith as trust in what she cannot know. Now, as the number of brothers at St. Benedict’s dwindles and it seems the monastery will be closing in the near future, the retreat center’s future is uncertain. That’s just more of what she cannot know, she said. And, she says, she’s still got a YES. Yes to what? That’s not the question. Just yes.
There is so much of what we cannot know, so much to go under that bright cloud. Jesus himself stands alone, showing us a human life seamlessly trusting itself to the divine life, saying YES to whatever his Father gives. He comes to us in our fear, encourages us, stands us up again. May we, trusting him, be transfigured, too.
Amen.