Sermon — September 3, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In a 2012 book, the writer Anne Lamott described what she calls “The Three Essential Prayers”: “Help,” “Thanks,” and “Wow.” I’ve always loved that. It captures the essence of prayer. Most of our prayers, from the incoherent ones we say while lying awake in the middle of the night to the highly-polished ones we say in church on Sunday mornings, fall into one of those three categories: asking for God’s help when we need it, or someone else does; giving thanks for the good things in our lives; or simply expressing the awe and wonder of existence in this universe.

But I can’t help but think that Anne Lamott missed a fourth, one-word prayer, one that’s often left out, a kind of prayer that many people aren’t even sure they’re really allowed to pray: “Why?” As in, “Why God, why? Why is this happening? Why is it happening to me? Why now?” Just “why?”

Listen to some of Jeremiah’s words in this morning’s reading, taken from a couple different translations. Listen, and think for a minute: Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever prayed this kind of prayer?

“Lord, you know how I suffer. Take thought of me and care for me…” (Jer. 15:15 NET) “Why am I always in pain? Why is my wound incurable, so far beyond healing?” (15:18a CEB) “Will you let me down when I need you like a brook one goes to for water, but that cannot be relied on?” (15:18b NET)

Have you ever prayed this kind of prayer? Have you ever asked God, “Why?” Have you ever been angry at God for letting you down? Have you ever felt like saying, “God, you know I’m suffering,” do something?

Sometimes this form of prayer, this “why, God, why?” is the only one that feels authentic. But people often feel like it’s not a prayer they can say. For some, it’s because they’ve been taught that they’re not allowed to. They’re not supposed to question God’s plans. Their attitude has to be “thy will be done,” no back-talk allowed. They’re supposed to “take up their cross” and bear it without complaint. For others, the kinds of situations that lead to this question drive them away from God. Surely no loving God would allow such situations to occur, and so it’s not worth bringing them to God in prayer. Either they’re too angry with God to be on speaking terms, or they just don’t believe that there’s anyone listening. Still others, I think, have trouble with this kind of prayer because they can’t find the right thing to say. There are no words to express the depth of confusion, or pain, or sorrow. And so they can’t.

But this is the kind of prayer that we find, again and again, throughout the Bible. The Psalms are full of cries to God, demands that God finally act to make things right. The Book of Jonah turns the question into a short story, with Jonah shaking his fist at God’s unfairness; the Book of Job sets it in poetic verse, as Job demands repeatedly and at length that God explain how any of this is okay. And here, we see the prophet Jeremiah’s prayer, the prayer of a man called by God to prophesy unpleasant things to his people, and to bear the brunt of their anger in response. Jeremiah blames God: You did this to me! “Your words were found, and I ate them, and they were my joy…” (Jer. 15:16) But look what’s happened now. Jeremiah looks at his life, in which he’s done everything God has asked, and he asks in response, “Why, God? Why? How is this fair?”

When we ask these questions of one another, we human beings tend to reach for answers that make the senseless make sense. “Everything happens for a reason,” we might say. “God never gives us more than we can handle.” These words can sometimes be comforting—although often not. But in a sense they always minimize. In the face of the many tragic situations in life, the things that simply don’t make sense, they try to make them make sense; and usually fail.

God’s answer to these prayers is different. God doesn’t offer a rationalization. God doesn’t try to make it make sense. God reveals compassion; and God offers hope.

“Compassion” is at the heart of what the life of Jesus reveals about God; com–passion, in its original sense: con- meaning “with,” and passion meaning “suffering,” as in “the Passion of the Christ.” God is a God of compassion, because God has suffered with us. When we cry out to God asking why, God isn’t angry that we’re asking the question. God just answers, “I know it hurts.” I’ve been there too. This is why Jesus tells the disciples that he “must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering.” It’s not an accident. It’s part of the plan. And it’s part of the plan because Jesus is God incarnate, the God who hears our prayers walking on the face of the earth, and to say that Jesus suffers is to say that one of the Trinity suffers, that God suffers; that God knows what it is to be betrayed and to grieve, to suffer pain and to die, not just in the abstract sense that God “knows” everything but because God has experienced it all. Whatever you are going through, whatever you have gone through, whatever you will go through in this life, God knows. God has been there before, and God is with you now. And for what it’s worth, this is why the Christian belief in Jesus’ divinity is so important: if Jesus is not God, then God remains aloof from all our pain and all our suffering; the human experience remains, at best, an academic pursuit.

This is also why Jesus’ response to Peter’s rebuke is so harsh. This is the “stumbling block”: that Peter’s tempting Jesus to stay aloof, to avoid sharing in our pain. And Jesus could choose to do that. He’s a miracle worker, for goodness’ sake. He’s God. He can walk on water, walk through walls. He could simply walk away and live a pleasant life by the sea, multiplying loaves and fishes and turning water into wine. But instead he chooses to walk in the way of the cross, and to transform it into the way of life.

And he invites the disciples to do the same. If they want to follow him, he says, they should follow him; follow him in the way of the cross. They shouldn’t try to insulate themselves, or stay aloof from the suffering of the world; it’s going to come, one way or another. But the way of the cross is the way of life, because the way of love inevitably brings up closer to suffering. When he says that “those who want to save their life will lose it,” but “those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” (Matt. 16:25) the word he uses here for “life” is psyche. It’s a word we often translate as “soul.” If you want to do as Peter suggests—if you want protect yourself from pain and spare yourself from any kind of suffering—you can only do it by risking your own soul, by giving up on love, by shutting off the compassion you feel for the people around you or by pretending that no one else is worth thinking about. We ask “why is this happening?” and God almost never answers the question. God listens with compassion, and God invites us to treat one another with compassion.

But that’s never the end of the story. God isn’t just there to comfort us in the face of suffering. God promises something more. God promises salvation: new hope, new life, a better future world, an actual solution to the problems that face us. Jeremiah asks God why, and God doesn’t only answer, “I am with you,” but “I will deliver you,” “I will redeem you.” (Jer. 15:21) Likewise, after Jesus tells his disciples that if they’re going to follow him, they’re going to need to take up their crosses, he offers them hope: those who are willing to be vulnerable, those who are willing to risk compassion and love, will be redeemed. “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels,” Jesus says, “and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.” (Matt. 16:26) And it’s this same hope for God’s future that animates Paul’s exhortation to the Romans: they can be patient now, because God’s justice is coming.

Again and again in life, we ask God “why?” And I’m sorry to say, there is no easy answer. But an answer isn’t really what we need. We need compassion. We need comfort. And we need hope: the hope that the story doesn’t end here, that there is a future in which all the wounds of this world will be healed.

So “let love be genuine,” Paul says. “Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection… Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:9-10, 12, 21) “For I am with you,” God says to Jeremiah, “I am with you to save you and deliver you.” (Jeremiah 15:20)

Amen.

Sermon — August 20, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“She came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’
He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
(Matthew 15:22)

Jesus’ words to the unnamed Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel reading can be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to understand. She comes to him, seeking healing for her daughter. She kneels before him in a posture of humility. At first, he refuses to answer her, and when she persists in asking, his response seems to be somewhere between indifferent and insulting. Matthew’s narration gives no hint of sympathy or compassion. “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus says, as if this weren’t a matter of life and death; as if she and her daughter weren’t children of God of at all, not human beings at all, but “dogs.”

It’s a baffling story, and it’s generated plenty of interpretations.

Some see the woman as the hero of the story, and Jesus’ actions as proof that God can change; that here, unlike most of the Gospels, it’s the Canaanite woman who converts Jesus, and not the other way around. Jesus’ words, in this understanding of the story, aren’t cool or indifferent; they’re angry, disdainful, an ethnic slur, and sexist, to boot. But the Canaanite woman’s persistence in confronting him opens his eyes to see her as she really is, and he leaves the story a changed man. So goes one interpretation.

Another school of thought starts from the other end. Jesus can’t, by definition, they say, be any of these things; Jesus can’t be bigoted, or sexist, Jesus wouldn’t be cold or lack compassion; Jesus doesn’t learn, or change, or grow. He’s testing her. Clearly. And when he discovers her great faith, he grants her her reward: “Let it be done for you as you wish,” he says, and her daughter is healed “instantly.” (Matthew 14:28) She’s passed the test, so the demon can get lost.

Others lean on the old Christian method of making Jesus look good through vicious anti-Semitism. You can’t imagine how many commentaries on this text make off-handed remarks like “Jews frequently insulted Gentiles by calling them dogs” (citing no examples),^[1] or “[Jesus] reacts to the woman’s request as they would expect of a rabbi in those days.”[2] (I beg your pardon?) Given the thousands of years of Christian violence against our Jewish neighbors, I’d think people would want to be a bit more careful about this kind of slander, but alas. It’s tempting for Christians to make Jesus look good, especially in his harsher moments, by making the culture around him look bad. But it just doesn’t work. The story of the people of Israel isn’t a story of exclusion or ethnic supremacism. It’s a story in which God chooses one people, not to the exclusion of all others, but to be the instrument through which God will call all the others. And we need to understand what Jesus says and does in this story as a part of that much larger story.

The story of the Bible is a story of false starts in God’s relationship with us. God starts out by creating humankind in a Garden, by giving Adam and Eve just one simple rule. What could go wrong? Well, things go wrong. Very wrong. But humankind continues to grow outside the Garden, and things go even worse, until it’s so bad that God has to wipe it all out with a Flood, and chooses one family, the family of Noah, through whom to rebuild.

It doesn’t quite work out. After the Flood, we return to our usual ways, trying to build a tower up to heaven so that we can become like gods. God won’t destroy us again, but God scatters us, confusing our languages and dividing us into different nations and peoples. And later, God chooses one family from among one people, the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and promises them that through them and their offspring, all the nations of the world will be blessed. (Gen. 22:18)

The story follows the descendants of Jacob, the people of Israel, as they go into slavery in Egypt and come back out of it; as they enter the Promised Land and struggle with the people living in it; as their kingdoms are destroyed and their homes taken away and the fraction who remain are sent into exile in Babylon, and then return. And yet the prophets promise, again and again, that though God’s people’s are small, and weak, and at the mercy of others, nevertheless, they are the ones through whom God plans the redeem the world. And so the prophet Isaiah, rejoicing in the prospect of a return from exile, receives this message from God: “Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel; I will gather others to them.” (Isaiah 56:8) The foreigners, the Gentiles, all the nations of the world will be joined with God’s people, and “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)

Jesus sees his own life as part of this process; maybe even the central part. It’s in and through him that the good news will finally reach all the nations. And the message that he teaches prepares the way.

The first part of this Gospel reading is about Jesus’ disagreement with some of his contemporaries about the markers of Jewish identity, about the food laws and ritual practices that distinguished his people from their neighbors. Some of his contemporaries thought that the way forward was to emphasize the practices that separated them from the nations around them, the food laws and purity regulations that marked them as a distinctive people with distinctive beliefs, and even to expand them; to apply the same rules of purity to a meal at your own table, for example, that would apply to a sacrifice in the Temple.

Jesus disagrees. What really defiles you in God’s sight, he says, is not your dirty hands, but your dirty hearts. Ritual practices are markers of belonging, things that distinguish one nation from another. But when it comes to “evil intentions,” to “murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander…” these things cross every line of nation, race, or class. And if these are the true markers of purity, then there can be Gentiles who are as pure in heart as any of Jesus’ fellow Jews. People who are not among God’s chosen people and who don’t adopt their religious practices can still become a part of God’s beloved community.

Later, the apostle Paul asks whether this inclusion of the Gentiles means, in turn, the exclusion of the Jews. “I ask, then,” he writes to the Romans, “has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham!” (Romans 11:1) God has not rejected God’s chosen people, not at all. God’s grace hasn’t been moved from one set of people to another. It’s grown to include us all.

So where does this leave us, as we grapple with this strange story?

Well first: remember that Jesus knew this story of God’s universal love. If you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, then Jesus the plan and his own part in it. But even just on a human level, Jesus was a teacher who was well-read in Scripture and accustomed to interpreting it. He knew the promise that God’s kingdom would expand to include the Gentiles. He knew that God was calling this Canaanite woman. And in fact, he’d just caused a stir in the next town over by teaching that the things that separated her from him were not so important after all. It can be appealing, in a way, to see this story as a story about the Canaanite’s woman’s agency and her powers of persuasion. But it comes as a relief, at least to me, to hear that Jesus doesn’t need to be persuaded that you’re worthy of God’s love; that this was, in fact, the plan, all along.

I can’t explain Jesus’ tone, when he says these words, when he asks this woman whether he should give the children’s food to a dog like her. But I do know that human beings sometimes treat one another like something less than human. That we divide, constantly, between us and them; insiders and outsiders; the respected and the scorned. And I know that Jesus’ answer, when we make these kinds of distinctions, is that yes, it is right to take the children’s food and give it to the ones we call the “dogs.” That it’s what it is in the heart that makes the difference to him. That if there is ever a time in your life where you’ve been insulted or reviled, called a name or treated like you’re less than someone else—that Jesus condemns “false witness” and “slander,” but God promises to “gather the outcasts.” (Isaiah 56:8)

We do not need to persuade God that we are worthy, or prove that we deserve God’s love. We do not need to be born in the right place, or be a part of the right culture. The only test we need to pass is faith, the only thing we need to do is trust that God is gathering us in, whoever we are and whoever we have been—that Jesus is leading us to God’s holy mountain, “for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” (Isaiah 56:7)

^[1]Lane T. Dennis and Wayne Grudem, eds. The ESV Study Bible. Accordance electronic ed. (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2008).

[2] Richard Ward, “Commentary on Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20/commentary-on-matthew-1510-20-21-28-6

Sermon — August 13, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, I’m not usually one to jump to Saint Peter’s defense. Peter is the central disciple, the first leader of the Church after Jesus’ departure, the Rock on whom the Church is built. But of all the disciples, Peter can sometimes be the hardest to love. He has a big personality, to put it politely. Peter’s inconsistent, impulsive; he tends to make every momentous occasion about himself. Who is it who feels the need to insist that he’ll never deny Jesus, even at the point of death, and then immediately denies him three times before the cock crows? It’s Peter. Who’s the one who sees the glory of the Transfiguration and then says, “Lord, it’s good that we were here!” Peter. Who sees the risen Jesus standing on the shore, and jumps into the water with all his clothes on to swim to him, leaving the others, less dramatically, in the boat? If you guessed Peter, then you’ve won our prize: free coffee after the service!

Peter can be hard to love. But in this moment, in this story, I feel bad for him. I wonder whether Jesus is being a little unfair. Because—let’s be honest. If you were Jesus, and you saw Peter coming toward you on the water, trusting so deeply in your divine power that he would step off the side of a boat and start walking, would the first words out of your mouth really be, “O you of little faith”? (Matthew 14:31) It seems to me that must’ve taken quite a bit of faith.

But then again, I’ve found it useful from time to time to remember that I am not in fact the Son of God. And if there’s a story in the Gospels in which my initial reaction is that Jesus is wrong and I’m right, it’s usually worth a second look. So I wonder what Jesus is actually saying here about faith, and doubt, and what they mean in practice in our lives.

There’s an old ice-breaker game called “two truths and a lie.” I might call this story “two faiths and a doubt.” It seems to me that Peter shows his faith in this story in two very different ways, and we’re left wondering: What does Jesus see as Peter’s doubt?

Peter’s first form of faith, of course, is his conviction that Jesus’ power can enable him to do more than he could do on his own. It’s late in the night, in the “fourth watch,” Matthew says, and the boat is battered by the waves, going headfirst into the wind. It’s cold and dark and rough. It’s not time for a swim. But when Peter sees a figure walking on the surface of the sea, and hears that it’s Jesus, he believes that if it really is, then Peter can walk on water too; that not only can Jesus conquer the chaos and the danger of the sea for himself, he can share that power with others, too. It’s the faith that Jesus is not a magician trying to impress us with his own skills, but a God who wants to share his blessings with us. I can’t imagine how much faith it would take to take that first step off the side of that boat.

And Peter’s first form of faith is actually backed up by a second one. Peter doesn’t only believe that Jesus will give him the miraculous ability to walk on the water. He also believes that if he falls, there will be someone to catch him. And to me, this act of faith is even more impressive than the first. It’s one thing to believe that God will give you some extraordinary blessing, because it’s a relatively low risk. The worst that can happen is that you remain ordinary. If Peter had taken a step and just splashed straight into the water, well, I guess he could just scramble back into the boat.

But to take step after step as the boat recedes behind you takes another kind of faith. That’s not the faith that you’ll succeed. It’s the faith to know that if you fail, and it will be okay. To believe that even if you start to sink, you will not disappear; that Jesus will reach out his hand to save you from the storm.

And these are the two halves of the courage that many of us need. We’re often faced with situations that seem to be too much for us, with challenges or opportunities that frighten or intimidate us, with an invitation from God that seems to be beyond us. And we have to believe, on the one hand, that by the grace of God, we can do more than we can imagine, that you are, as Christopher Robin said to Winnie the Pooh, “you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” And we have to believe, on the other hand, that if and when we inevitably reach our limits, when we reach the point beyond which we cannot go, and begin to sink, God will be there to catch us when we fall. It’s much safer to stay back in the boat.

This is the incredible faith it takes to walk on water, and yet Jesus says to him, before he says anything else, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31)

We’re accustomed to think that Jesus is talking about that moment at which Peter becomes frightened, and begins to sink, and calls out, “Lord, save me!” (14:30) He begins to sink, and Jesus immediately asks him, “why did you doubt?” as if it were a relationship of cause and effect, as if, if he were just a little more faithful, had just a little less fear or doubt about what was going on, he could have made it all the way. And that raises some complex theological questions and concerns that boil down to one problem: we can never try hard enough, believe hard enough, to earn God’s love for us. And yet, as Paul reminds us, “no one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.” (Romans 10:11; Isaiah 28:16)

So I wonder if it’s really something else. I wonder if Peter’s true lack of faith is that revealed by the fact that he didn’t stay in the boat. I wonder if his more radical moment of doubt came when he saw Jesus walking toward him, and wouldn’t just stay put, when he found himself in a storm, and he didn’t trust that God would come to him, when he was afraid that Jesus would walk on by. And as a matter of fact, the Gospel of Mark comes right out and says this: in a similar scene, Mark writes that “Jesus meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost, and cried out.” And Jesus turned aside instead and got into the boat. (Mark 6:48-49)

I wonder whether this is Peter’s doubt, whether this was Peter’s fear: not that he doubted that he could walk all the way to Jesus, but that he doubted that Jesus would walk all the way to him. That he found himself in a cold, dark boat, in the middle of the night, battered by the wind and rocked by the waves, halfway between one place and another, and he was afraid that God had left them all alone. I wonder whether this is what Jesus wanted him to believe, whether Jesus wanted him to stop being Peter for just a minute, to stop being the center of attention and the man of action, and to trust that God would keep them safe, to trust that God would act in God’s own time. I wonder, in other words, whether the lack of faith that Jesus identifies was not so much a lack of faith in Peter’s own sudden miraculous abilities, but a lack of faith that God would come to him, exactly where he was.

I don’t know. I could be wrong. Maybe it is this other kind of faith. But it seems to me that we spend most of our lives on a boat from here to there, working hard with the wind against us, battered by the waves. And it seems to me that there are moments when God is calling us out onto the water, and moments where God wants us to stay put. There are times when we need the faith and the courage to take that step out of the boat, trusting that God will strengthen us and guide us, trusting that God will not let us sink. And there are times when we need to trust that, however rough the waves, we will weather the storm, and that sometimes, the best thing to do is to endure it, for now, with faith that God will not abandon us.             It’s genuinely hard to know which of these is right, at any given moment, in any given situation. It takes discernment, and prayer. It takes the effort to slow down, and listen; to wait through the roaring noise of the wind and the earthquake and the fire and to listen for God in the “sound of sheer silence,” in the “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-12); to hear Jesus saying to us, wherever we are, and wherever we are going, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” (Matthew 14:27)

Sermon — August 6, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

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?