Sermon — August 6, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a paradox at the heart of Feast of the Transfiguration, which we celebrate today. On the one hand, it’s one of the most glorious events in Jesus’ life, the moment at which it’s clearer than any other that Jesus truly is the Son of God. Christmas is a baby lying in manger, like billions of other babies have. Epiphany is impressive, but people have been given royal gifts before. Sure, there’s a voice from heaven at the Baptism of Jesus, but no “raiment white and glistening.” In terms of splendor and brilliance and glory, in terms of the raw special-effects “wow factor,” only Easter and the Ascension come close to the Transfiguration, and even then, it’s hard to say. If you’re trying to make a splash, the vision of a man transformed into a beacon of God’s own uncreated light is hard to beat.
And yet the Transfiguration is one of the least celebrated days in our calendar. It’s always on August 6, so six years out of seven, it falls on a weekday. Even when we observed it on a Sunday, it’s a Sunday in August. And the humid air, laidback style, and low attendance numbers of summer worship don’t exactly lend themselves to embodying the awe and wonder the disciples must have felt when they say Jesus transformed in this way.
But this isn’t just a quirk of our climate or our summer lifestyle. In fact, this contrast is part of the Transfiguration itself. These stories we read on Transfiguration Day—of God’s light revealed to Moses, God’s light shining through Jesus—are not big, public, triumphant stories. God doesn’t appear in these stories with a display of power before the whole nation, or the whole world. God appears to one person, or to three. God was perfectly capable of making public appearances. In Moses’ day, God led the Israelites in the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; but God was only fully revealed to Moses, alone. Jesus could preach a sermon to a crowd or feed five thousand people with a few fish and couple loaves of bread. But God’s full presence in Jesus is revealed only now, and only to these three, the closest disciples. And after he was revealed, “they kept silent…and told no one any of the things they had seen.” It’s a big event—the moment in the Gospels in which God’s glory most clearly is revealed—and yet for everyone else in the world, it’s as if it never happened. The Transfiguration was even more sparsely attended two thousand years ago in Galilee than it is this August morning in our small neighborhood church.
But there’s something even stranger about this big event. After the Transfiguration, nothing really seems to change. This is not the moment at which Jesus changes course, beginning the transition from an obscure ministry around his hometown toward a more glorious career in the big city. It’s the very opposite. Jesus leaves Galilee, to be sure, and heads for Jerusalem. But he’s heading toward the cross, not toward glory. This is the “departure” that Jesus, Moses, and Elijah discuss, his exodos, Luke says in Greek; the paradoxical events of Holy Week in which defeat is transformed into victory, and the way of the Cross becomes the way of life, the beginning of a new Exodus leading us to freedom. This moment on the mountain reveals God’s presence in Jesus’ own person, but that makes the events to come even stranger, because Jesus doesn’t take the Marvel-Comic route. He doesn’t use his super-power of divine light to blind Pilate and make his escape from the soldiers. He reveals God’s presence in the midst of human life, in all the good and bad; but he doesn’t change what’s about to happen.
The Transfiguration doesn’t change what’s about to happen. But it does show it in a completely different light.
I’m reminded sometimes of an ad that used to run on the Red Line and buses. I think it was by Hope Fellowship Church, over by Porter Square. I can picture the big orange background of the banner, with the C. S. Lewis quote: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
I think of how important the Transfiguration must have been to these early apostles, to Peter and John and James. They keep silent about what they’ve seen, for now; but they’ve seen it. And after Jesus goes to Jerusalem, and he dies, and their hopes of his glorious kingdom are temporarily dashed, they still remember. And decades later, when Peter writes this letter that we read, after Jesus has gone away again, he still holds onto the memory of that light. And through the long, dark night of life in this world, that light becomes for him “a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19) Peter can believe, not only because he saw Jesus’ glory, but because he sees everything else differently in its light.
I said that the Transfiguration is the least-observed Christian holiday. But that’s only true in the West, in the Catholic and Protestant traditions that grew out of Western Europe. In the Eastern Orthodox churches, it’s very different. If you think about the visual art of churches, you might say that Catholics make pictures of Good Friday, Protestants make pictures of Easter, and the Orthodox make pictures of the Transfiguration: so that there’s no symbol more Catholic than a crucifix; nothing more Protestant than a plain, empty cross; and the background of every Orthodox icon is filled with light reflected off gold.
The Transfiguration is, in fact, at the heart of Orthodox spirituality. The great monks and theologians of the East have taught for centuries that we can see this light, that it can enlighten our hearts and our minds, that by meditating on this light, by paying attention to this light, as Peter says, we can become more like the divine light. Our end, our purpose in life, is not to be saved from hell or to go to heaven; it is to be slowly transfigured ourselves, until we shine almost as gloriously as Christ did. We, too, can slowly be infused with this divine light, until our faces, like Moses’, shine.
So I wonder where you’ve seen that light. I wonder what lamp is shining in the darkness for you. I wonder what experience you’ve had that’s changed the way you see everything else, what person, or place, or relationship is that beacon of light for you. I wonder what memory it is you can turn to when it seems that hope is lost, what it is that reminds you that the night doesn’t last forever. I wonder what habits you have, or you’ve lost, that helped you grow closer to the light of God. It’s probably nothing big. It might be something only you, or you and two friends, saw. It might be something that happened once, years ago, and that you’ve never forgotten. It might be as simple as starting the day with thirty seconds’ silent prayer.
But whatever it is, I wonder what it means to do what Peter says and “be attentive” to that light “as to a lamp.” What would it mean to turn your attention to that memory or that practice or that place, to focus on it? What would it mean to cultivate it, so that its strength could grow, so that you could see even more of your life in its light? What would it mean for your light to grow, so that you might share that same light with the world?
What would it mean for the Transfiguration to be, not just some day in August, but the purpose and the goal of every day, and the lamp shining through every night?