Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A)
February 3, 2008
Mark Lloyd Taylor

 

 

He was an old man from Bengal, a widower. Devout in his Hindu faith, he had fulfilled his duties to the gods and to society. With both sons married, the old man could now leave household oversight behind and dedicate himself to spiritual liberation. One night, the old man has a vision. He sees Doya, his younger son’s new bride, transfigured before him. Her face changes. Above her beautiful eyes a dazzling third eye appears in the middle of her forehead – the eye of divine enlightenment. The old man knows exactly what the vision means; his seventeen year old daughter-in-law is nothing less than a new and living incarnation of Kali, the mother goddess.

That vision, that transfiguration, drives the plot of Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film The Goddess. Ray explores tensions between the old ways and modern times, faith and insanity, freedom and social constraint. But at its heart, the film tells the tragic story of Doya.

Before the old man’s vision, Doya was warm, generous, and nurturing. All loved her and benefited from her love. Weightless she was, dancing through the household with grace and joy.

This all changes with the vision. For the old man does what any self-respecting (wealthy) Hindu would do to greet such a divine revelation. He sets Doya up as an image of the goddess in place of a painted statue. He seats her, literally, on a stone pedestal in the courtyard of the house where she becomes the focus of worship for the entire region. The old man enlists the services of a Brahman priest who presides over chanted prayers, bells, incense, the offering and receiving of sacred food and drink. As Kali incarnate, Doya even heals a dying boy.

But the longer Doya remains on that pedestal, the more lifeless she becomes. She does nothing but sit immobile all day long passively receiving the worship of others. Members of the household begin to fear and avoid her. How tragic! The young woman who in daily life had once genuinely embodied the loving care of the mother goddess gets deformed into a statue – stiff, disconnected, unreachable. And when she proves powerless to prevent her nephew’s death, Doya goes mad and disappears suicidal into the mists of the river Ganges.

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Peter, James, and John are gifted with a vision of the divine in today’s gospel. Jesus leads the three away from the Galilean villages with their crowds, and away from the other disciples, up to a mountain top where he is transfigured before them. Jesus’ face shines like the sun and his clothes become dazzling white. Two heavenly beings, Moses and Elijah, join Jesus. Peter volunteers to do what any self-respecting Jew would do to greet such an epiphany – imitate an ancient festival practice and build dwellings, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. I suspect we might do the same in our personal, professional, and political lives. Such unambiguous revelations come so rarely, wouldn’t you want to prolong the vision, reassure yourself of its reality, capture some of its light for later use? Or, maybe, Peter wants to build mountain top dwellings in order to preserve and protect the dazzling Jesus from dark suffering down below. Would we do otherwise for a loved one?

But as Peter draws up the plans for his dwellings, God’s voice sounds from a bright cloud. Now the three disciples fall to the ground in fear. Jesus touches them, raises them up, and leads them down the mountain. Which Jesus? Which Jesus touches them? Jesus alone, unaccompanied by heavenly attendants. Not the dazzling, transfigured Jesus, but the ordinary, human Jesus Peter, James, and John already knew in daily life. “This is my Son, the Beloved,” God says; “listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5) Listen to which words of Jesus? The disturbing words he had spoken to all his disciples for the first time before leading the three up to the mountain top; words he will repeat back down in Galilee. “[I] must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (16:21). These words of Jesus, listen to them.

In Matthew’s account of the transfiguration of Jesus, the reality of the vision is never challenged, nor is Peter rebuked for wanting to build dwellings. However, both God’s voice and Jesus’ touch set the three disciples in motion, directing them down the mountain, back to the villages of Galilee with their crowds, back to the entire community of disciples. A path, not a pedestal; walking shoes, not mountain top dwellings. A path on which to follow Jesus, not a pedestal for the transfigured one. Shoes for a long human journey, not dwellings for heavenly beings.

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What dazzling things we have seen at St. Paul’s this past year. Visions of the divine in a transfigured parish. So many new faces out there in the pews; new voices above in the choir loft; new vestments up here adorning the altar and those who minister on our behalf. Financial resources generously offered beyond all expectation and budget parameters. Thoughtful momentum for renewal of this building. In small groups of discernment and conviviality, people charting new life paths and discovering human community. Expanded opportunities for daily prayer. New voices preaching at weekday masses. Just in the last three weeks, one person baptized into the death and risen life of Christ; ten people welcomed to St. Paul’s and to the Episcopal Church through Bishop Rickel’s words and touch, with a dozen others transferring church membership to St. Paul’s; an adult formation course on forgiveness integrating biblical study, theology, medical research, and readers theatre. Above all, week after week, God’s love incarnated luminously in word and sacrament.

How we might be tempted to try and construct interpersonal and institutional dwellings to protect this mountain top vision of a new St. Paul’s. How easy it would be to place the divine gift of new people, resources, and programs on a pedestal and worship our own success. And how tragic if our vision, our transfiguration, were deformed into a lifeless statue.

No Christian worked harder to keep her mountain top experiences of Jesus firmly fixed on a pedestal and locked away in dwellings than Margery Kempe, 14th-15th century Englishwoman. Her first vision of Jesus rescued twenty year old Margery from life-threatening madness following the birth of her first child. For the next forty years, she sought desperately to preserve and protect her frequent visions from an often hostile family, church, and society. But then in her sixties, Jesus’ touch sets Margery in motion down from the mountain top. After Margery’s aged husband John falls and badly injures himself, Jesus appears to Margery with a startling command: move back into John’s house and nurse him for the rest of his life. When Margery protests that this would interfere with her mystical relationship to Jesus, Christ reminds her of the many times she had begged for some more direct way to serve Jesus’ human body. Margery, Jesus says, your prayer is answered – insofar as you tend to John’s body and cook for him and wash his soiled underclothes, you visibly and tangibly care for me. A little later, Margery comes to the bedside of a woman who has descended into a violent, postpartum psychosis. There Margery adopts the same role Christ had played in her own life so many years earlier. After weeks of Margery talking with her and praying for her, the woman is restored to herself and resumes her place in household and community. Down the mountain and away from the pedestal, Margery Kempe learned to serve Christ in another and to become Christ for another.

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Today, as the season of Epiphany vision turns over into the season of Lenten journey, and as this parish gathers for its annual meeting, walking shoes await us. God’s voice and Jesus’ touch set us in motion on a path that leads down the mountain and out into the streets of Seattle and beyond. We will find ourselves jostled by the crowds, surrounded by great need and suffering, but also supported by the entire community of faith. As we lace up our walking shoes, take to heart these words of St. Augustine on today’s gospel: “Come down, Peter!...Proclaim the word! Keep at it in season and out of season. Convict. Admonish. Work. Perspire….Come down in order to work on earth, to serve on earth, to be crucified on earth. Life comes down to be killed; bread comes down to be used up; the way comes down to be exhausted underway; the spring comes down to run dry.”

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