A Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration

This sermon was preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on August 11, 2024, the Feast of the Transfiguration.

In our collect for the Transfiguration we pray to be, “delivered from the disquietude of this world that we might by faith behold the King in his beauty.” And it’s tempting, isn’t it, to think of the spiritual life, church even, as a means of escape, a dissociative moon-shot out of our ordinary everyday life as the place where God meets, feeds, heals, and saves God’s people. But if the life of discipleship–being loved into loving others–isn’t just an escapist, ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand attempt to jettison ourselves out of our life to attain some narcotized fantasy of Union with God–what does it mean to be delivered from disquietude? Are we delivered from disquietude at the expense of hearing our neighbor’s cries? Or is it in the welcomed stranger’s face that we behold our slain and standing king? Simply put: Is the Transfiguration a special experience, or the way things actually are?

Human beings like to divide the world up into neat binary oppositions: good/bad, rich/poor, clean/unlean, God/world, human/divine, insiders/outsiders, sacred/profane. Yet, the entire messy thrust of Holy Scripture is to undo these divisions and help us to see that we always already inhabit a sacramental universe where God is in all things and all things are in God. Holy Scripture is the Spirit’s love song to retrieve, recover, and be reminded (“to refresh your memory,” as Peter writes) of who and whose we are and live from the vulnerably inviolable peace of the love of God that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Grace re-members us, gathers and collects us, shelters us under the pinions of its wings so that we might be that same sheltering grace for our neighbor.

Being freed from disquietude is not a guarantee that there will not be difficulty, hardship, and heartbreak in our lives. Jesus wept. The difference recognzing Jesus makes–”This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”--is that he changes the way we relate to whatever arises in our experience. Most of the time, if we are paying attention– “You will do well to be attentive to this,” says Peter–we discover that instead of simple presence, attending to the light shining in a dark places, listening to Jesus as a constant, companioning, feeding, and healing presence cooing to us our irrevocable belovedness–we listen to bad stories rattling around in our heads inherited from teachers, family, family, nation, church. These stories tell us something is missing, that we’re broken, lacking, that, “This isn’t it,” (played on mantric repeat in Hell I’ve been assured).

Our days are spent grumbling about how our life should be, or (if you’re an Episcopalian of a certain age) how things used to be–a kind of ghoulish nostalgia consisting of wanting what we don’t have and having what we don’t want: restlessly craving for that and impatiently pushing this away, but never receiving our precious life, God’s life in us, as it actually is. Instead of a softened, yielding “Yes,” to our life as it is–even the hard parts–we find ourselves contracted, fixated, identified. Peter’s, “It is good for us to be here,” is the universal, gracious solvent here because it cuts through stale story: keeping company with Jesus reveals to us (whether we are on top of the mountain or busy in the marketplace tending God’s poor) that our life in Presence erupts, geyers forth unbidden and undeserved as waters rising up to eternal life even here even now regardless of circumstance.

The golden thread in both the Exodus account and the Transfiguration is this little word—“not knowing.” Moses doesn’t know his face is shining (the religious equivalent of walking around with toilet paper on your shoe) and Peter doesn’t know what he is saying (the religious equivalent of running for office apparently). But the not-knowing pointed to in Moses and Peter is of a completely different order than a run of the mill stump speech, or me faced with sixth grade math. Not-knowing in a biblical sense is the simple, humble recognition that the Living God is not a mere notion, idea, or concept, to be trimmed down to size and fit into our preconceptions. Not-knowing is sheer intimacy with God, God’s creation, our daily life! Just this. Beholding in the words of our collect. Non-conceptual reverence, awe, and wonder in a profound bow to the mystery of all that is.

The same thing is happening with the reference to the cloud that overshadows the disciples and in which they are enveloped, encompassed. As a symbol of the interior life, the cloud arrives to keep the ego and intellect in chastened perspective. Ego (petty tyrant that it is)–runs on stories like “This isn’t it,” and thinks of things only in terms of means and ends, of I, me, mine, wanting and not-wanting. This mind gets graciously clouded over, or falls asleep, so that a new kind of knowing born of not-knowing, a knowing born of edgeless love might shine like the Morning Star rising in our hearts as Peter says. “This isn’t it,” flips to, “God is in this place and I did not know it!”—"It is good for us to be here!” Sounds exotic, but it’s a simple little letting-be: just like this.

We were in San Francisco for a few days, and from the Alcatraz Lighthouse found myself staring out across the whitecap-scuffed bay at the city draped in a gauzy, rippling muslin light. I dashed inside to grab the girls and upon our return couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of us! Fog, wind, a belch of ferry horn, and the cries of a few ghostly gulls were all that remained. I couldn’t see the view or get the nostalgic snapshot, but we were living in a cloud! A cloud was living in us! 

In the world of Holy Scripture not-knowing and being enveloped by a cloud are simply metaphors and images used to induct us into a new way of seeing and being in the world. Moses doesn’t know his face is shining because he’s self-forgetfully present with the Lord. Peter doesn’t know what he’s saying because something other than his usual fools rush in impetuousness is tempered, and the Goodness, and Beauty of the Lord shines forth not as we often hear as the desire to clutch, grab, preserve or hold on to this experience, but as an joyfully ecstatic expression of the basic okness of the universe in God: “It is good for us to be here!”

 What if our life, with its mountaintops and marketplaces, delights and devastations could be met with–“It is good for us to be here”? Not because we happen to particularly like what’s going on (as if life were about fulfilling our preferences, getting what we like and avoiding what we don’t), but as a joyful expression of simple, child-like willingness to open to our life as it is and discover there Jesus, the Beautiful One, whose beauty makes us beautiful and whose beauty fathers-forth in all places and all times for the delight of it. “It is good for us to be here!”

Instead of chopping the world up into sacred and mundane, holy and profane, mountain tops and marketplaces, stuff we happen to like and stuff we happen to not like, our life in Christ invites us to take life as a seamless whole. The Gospel asks us to let our stale stories be overshadowed and wake up to this life where there is no clean and unclean, insider and outsider, holy mountains and unholy marketplaces. Artists get this. And it’s why so much theology in Anglicanism is done through poetry. Poets know not-knowing and are well-acquainted with loafing, and cloud-watching! Poets open us onto a placeless place of awe, wonder, and appreciation–not how we are, or where we are, or even who we are, but that we are, that there is anything at all, something rather than nothing. “It is good for us to be here!”

The Japanese haiku poet Santoka Taneda (1882-1940) gives us a remarkable enactment of what this cloudy, wondrous, not-knowing appreciation of life looks like in literal sandals on the ground fashion. Santoka was the last of the wandering monk-poets of Japan. His life and work is a perfect expression of, “It is good for us to be here,” regardless of circumstance. Traveling on foot–staying only a night here or there at a roadside inn where he could get a little rice and a bottle of his beloved sake–Santoka had only a robe, hat, straw sandals, a begging bowl (he ate only what was given to him), and his notebook and brush to his name. And yet, he brushed some of the most  beautiful little three liners you ever heard. They are poems of transfigured perception born of utter simplicity and surrender: It is good for us to be here…

His most famous: “Hailstones too/entering my begging bowl.” Whatever is offered–a rotten sweet potato, a lettuce leaf, some rice, these hailstones–welcomed into the bowl. What would it be like for us to embody in some small way this acceptance of whatever happens to show up in the begging bowl of our daily life? Or these two: 

If there’s nothing to eat

the calm

cool water.

The light of the moon

deeply penetrating

my empty stomach.

How remarkable! The hardships never denied, but placed in their proper context of appreciating God’s abundant provision and care even when there’s nothing to eat: calm cool water, moonlight penetrating an empty stomach, even gratitude for unexpected companeros met along the way as in this one:

Giving a lift 

to the dragonfly

My bamboo hat

What kind of freedom from disquietude is this? Do you need to climb a mountain to find it? Does it dissipate when we follow Jesus down the mountain and into the marketplace? Can we see his raiment white and glistening in these hailstones rattling Santoka’s bowl, in moonlight penetrating an empty stomach, a hitchhiking dragonfly? What’s your hailstone, your empty stomach this morning? What needs to be gently welcomed, tended? And when we wake from the self-centered dream… what new friends do we meet like that dragonfly hitching a lift?

The only thing keeping us from freedom from disquietude ends up being the thought that we should get rid of disquietude, or that even there is anything wrong with a bit of disquietude. No, we are directed to something far more sturdy and durable–that regardless of circumstance it is good for us to be here however here happens to be today because we’re keeping company with one who keeps company with us in the Boundless Presence. We don’t bark at disquietude any more than the begging bowl barks at the hailstone. Here’s Santoka upon finding out there is no room at the little inn he stopped at and being turned out into the night:

They won’t let me stay

Just then, the moon

Straight ahead

Straight ahead indeed… Beholding the face of the king in the welcomed stranger. It is good for us to be here…

Amen.