Unbleachable! God's Gifted Transfigured Glory
A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on January 11, 2024, the Last Sunday after The Epiphany.
On this Last Sunday after the Epiphany, moving into Lent when we will walk again the way of the cross, we hear the account from the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter, James, and John go up the mountain with Jesus, and see him transfigured before them in a dazzling revelation of divine glory. Moses and Elijah appear next to him: Moses, the one who received the law, and Elijah, the quintessential prophet, now frame Jesus from each side as the living embodiment of both law and prophets, now living breathing in a human person, not just recorded in a book but the very image of God, the full revelation of the Father, nothing held back, who illumines us with the light of his countenance. “Lord, in your Light, we see light.”
Moses and Elijah each had their own mountaintop glimpses of God’s glory: Moses saw the Lord pass by in a cloud, catching the briefest glimpse of God’s backside—yes, really, God’s backside—and Elijah, fleeing for his life taking refuge in a mountain cave hears the sound of the earthquake and of the fire and of the whirlwind but the Lord made Godself known to Elijah not in those dramatic manifestations but in the sound of sheer silence, which prompts Elijah to creep to the edge of the cave and listen, listen to the sound of sheer silence, ear cocked, witnessing, listening to God’s self-revelation in this moment where the ordinary is illumined by the extraordinary.
Peter, James and John are awed by what they witness up on this high mountain. They fall into a babbling terror, drop to the ground. It knocks their socks off: Icons of the transfiguration sometimes show the disciples missing their sandals. They find themselves now on holy ground in the presence of the living God who wants liberation for God’s people. Peter suggests constructing three dwelling places—he might be a bit confused but the impulse is good, this earnest desire to make a dwelling place for the divine presence. The Lord wants to find a home in each of our hearts. In fact has already taken up residence there, by virtue of our existing at all, our being created. “It is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” So we don’t have to build it. As St. Augustine prayed, “You are in me deeper than I am in me.” As creatures our connection to our Creator is innate, each one a branch on the vine, a ray of God’s own light. Who you are is already in God because your being is an extension of God’s being. That connection, that relationship doesn’t have to be acquired and can’t be taken away, though coming to know and trust this ever-present faithful with-you-to-the-end-of-the-age love may be the adventure of a lifetime of faith. “The Lord, the God of gods, has spoken, he has called the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. Out of Zion, perfect in its beauty, God reveals himself in glory.”
A cloud descends over the mountaintop, like the Spirit hovering over the deep waters of chaos at creation, like the Spirit that overshadows Mary at the Annunciation. Fog rolls in, their previously dazzlingly clear vision is blocked and the disciples are left unable to see, in their unknowing, left to rely on blind trust, whether they like it or not, and in this cloud, the disciples hear a voice. A voice speaks into the fog, echoing the voice heard at the Jordan when Jesus is baptized: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” When the cloud lifts, the disciples look around; they see no one with them any more, “but only Jesus.” Only Jesus. The image of the invisible God, Jesus, the human being in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, the light of whose countenance gives us the knowledge of the glory of God. Nothing else, no one else, no other name under heaven. No judgmental terrifying God lurking over Jesus’s shoulder: he is the full revelation of the Father to us in human form. Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood, as Johnny Cash put it, and so God comes to us in flesh and blood, in bone, in sinew, in this fragile human life, to show us that “God loves real human beings,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer insists. God loves real human beings, though we tend to hope to escape our humanity, leapfrog over our flesh, make it past escape velocity into some spiritualized realm leaving our real created lives behind for an infinite void. No, God loves this world, God loves creatures, God loves real human beings: flesh and blood.
It’s dangerous, a real temptation, this tendency to escape, to think we need to cut off parts of ourselves to be pure and holy. Jesus’s glory revealed on the mountain is radiant, his clothes become dazzling white, “such as no one on earth could bleach them,” Mark notes. This is a very important note, before we reach for the bleach bottle ourselves. Particularly as we move into Lent, the temptation may be to pretty ourselves up, edit this out, prune that off, the temptation to wield the refiner’s fire with a blowtorch. Pull out the weeds and leave the wheat, or so we think. But this is not our work. In today’s collect we pray with yearning to be “changed into Christ’s likeness.” Changed, yes, but not of our own doing, as we are slowly and steadily soaked in the love of God, saturated by that love as we listen to the one who names us as Beloved and sends us to love our neighbors, too. Don’t touch the bleach bottle. That’s not our job. You are not the gardener of your life. Not the potter who shapes the clay. Not the launderer-in-chief. Be very very cautious of that impulse to white out what God has created and called good. “Do not call unclean what I have made clean!” Ironic that as we move into Lent, good Christians find ourselves tempted to do the one thing Jesus refuses to do in his desert temptations: he refuses to prove himself! He refuses to be a spiritual hero. But he relies on God for simply everything. And he is provided for, angels minister to him and give him the nourishment he needs.
There is an easier way: rather than trying to bleach our own way to a pale emptied-out holiness of our own imagining, we can let God care for us. Yes, the vocation of a Christian is nothing less than to be changed into Christ’s likeness—not by bleaching but by listening! This is my Son, the Beloved: listen to him. Only Jesus. As the spiritual we heard so beautifully says—Give me Jesus. Only Jesus. Whose radiant face illuminates our own and whose holiness will cover us like a shining garment. “All who have been baptized have been clothed with Christ.” The wedding garment is gifted. Only gifted—extravagantly, abundantly, universally gifted. Can’t prune your way there, blowtorch your way there, or bleach your way there. Just let God name you as a Beloved Child.
After the cloud dissipates, Jesus comes and grabs the hands of the terrified disciples, raises them up and together they go back down the mountain, to rejoin the hungry crowds in need of healing. They go back to the work of being faithful to the ordinary. Holiness not by subtraction or redaction, editing out, removing, paring back—but letting God’s radiant fullness shine through each heart into each situation, where the love of God is already poured out. Listened for, watched for, prayed for, it is the disciples’ work and ours to bear witness to the love of God. To let things be plain, rather than make them be pure. Listening as each one is woven into God’s perfect orchestration.
The one who is baptized is clothed in Christ’s shining garments, just as you are. God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.” In whatever darkness you may find yourself, Christ wraps his life around you. In times of grief, in confusion, when caring for struggling family members, or trying to scrape out a living, or unsure what the next step in the path may be—wherever you find yourself, God is there with you. “In your light we see light.” Unbleached, illumined by a radiance that is fullness, not emptiness. The radiant overflow of love and mercy in God’s countenance, the divine face make everything they touch to shine, even places of abandonment and dereliction. Jesus comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration and begins his journey to the cross, to crucifixion, in his witness that God is faithful even there. There, too, he will reveal his glory. The glory of our crucified Lord, is not recognizable as the glory of human triumph but that gruesome scene is glorious because it is divine love pledged to us even in defeat and death and despair. Glorious because here hanging on a tree is unbreakable love, covenant faithfulness at the end of all things, none of which can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Home safe, robed in righteousness, “Marked in baptism and sealed as Christ’s own forever.”
Amen.