Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Feast of the Transfiguration
A Lamp Shining in a Dark Place
August 6, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
From the Second Letter of Peter:
“…We (were) eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God…You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place….”
I’m at the point some days that I have to turn away from the photographs on the front page of the newspaper. Some days I just can’t look at one more picture of the wreckage left after a car bomb explodes, one more picture of a grieving woman weeping next to a shrouded body, one more picture of a man, numb, sitting on a curb, his head in his hands.
And so when Bob brings home the New York Times or the front page of one of the Seattle papers after his morning coffee shop outing, I will often peek at the front page picture the way I used to watch horror movies as a kid: wanting to know what’s going on but not wanting to know, wanting to see what’s going on but not wanting to see.
But unlike a horror movie, sadly, what you and I are seeing in the newspapers and on television are not the products of clever special effects or make up. It’s real. And while, of course, it’s not the only thing going on the world, it’s as brutal as brutal can be.
Our Collect for the Feast of the Transfiguration refers to all of this using a very restrained and understated term. Within the Collect we pray to be delivered from the disquietude of this world so that we may gaze upon the transfigured Jesus.
Some may view this Collect and the Feast of the Transfiguration itself as giving voice to a kind of escapist impulse. Within this way of interpreting the Transfiguration, we who cannot face reality need, like Peter, James and John, to withdraw to a mountaintop and, at least for a moment, live in a realm where God is not only in God’s heaven but fully here on earth in a Jesus who wears God’s glory in dazzling white clothes and whose identity is confirmed by God’s voice from heaven.
The theologian philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that the word “glory,” the word used both to describe the radiance that Moses bore and the radiance that Jesus took on at the Transfiguration, was synonymous with the beauty of God. Balthasar asserted that of the three transcendental attributes of God—truth, goodness, and beauty—that beauty was the most accessible to us and provides us with the clearest path to seeing and experiencing God. If von Balthasar was right, what Peter, John and James were knocked out by, were laid flat by in the Transfiguration was the beauty of God. What Peter was doing in his lame suggestion about building three booths was trying to hold onto the beauty of God.
We Anglo-Catholics are, of course, beauty junkies. For us, the ultimate worship experience is one in which we not only glimpse but enter into and taste something of the beauty and mystery of God. We wear vestments and light candles, we compose and rehearse music, we polish silver and wash linens, we practice moving and bowing with grace, we abide in silence all to approach, to express or to lay bare God’s beauty.
And we know that not everyone feels the same way we do about this. Some folk within the Episcopal Church scratch their heads when they see or hear about our focus on these things. Other religious traditions are suspicious of the use of the senses as a way of apprehending God. Still others are perplexed at why we would spend so much time and energy in experiences of the beauty of God when so much down-and-dirty practical work needs to done to repair the world we live in.
From the Second Letter of Peter: “…we (were) eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God…You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place….”
A lamp shining in a dark place.
Could it be that the author of this epistle who himself was in a dark time understood something that we need to understand or to be reminded of? Could it be that the Transfiguration, the disciples’ experience of the beauty of God, is not a story about escaping from the realities of the dark places we find ourselves but is about something else? Could it be that God’s beauty and the vision of a beautiful, transfigured world, inhabited by a beautiful, transfigured human community is exactly what we need right now?
At my National Training Labs workshop two weeks ago, which was all about guiding organizations gracefully through change, each participant brought in a case involving organizational change. As a part of working the case, each of us had to spend time writing a vision of the future state we would like to help bring about in our organizations. For some it was difficult to do this. For others of us, doing this and then sitting back and gazing at it as a beautiful thing was a source of great energy in that the future transfigured state we had dreamed up stirred our hearts and souls and pulled us forward towards its beauty.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu discovered this very same thing on the Feast of the Transfiguration some years ago in a dark time in South Africa. In his book God Has a Dream, he describes this discovery:
“Apartheid was in full swing as I and other church leaders were preparing for a meeting with the prime minister to discuss one of the many controversies that erupted in those days. We met at a theological college that had closed down because of the government’s racist policies. During our discussions I went into the priory garden for some quiet. There was…a large wooden cross without a corpus, but with protruding nails and a crown of thorns. It was a stark symbol of the Christian faith. It was winter: the grass was pale and dry and nobody would have believed that in a few weeks’ time it would be lush and green and beautiful again. It would be transfigured.
As I sat quietly in the garden I realized the power of transfiguration—of God’s transformation—in our world. The principle of transfiguration is at work when something so unlikely as the brown grass that covers our field in winter becomes bright green again. Or when the tree with gnarled leafless branches bursts forth with the sap flowing so that the birds sit chirping in the leafy branches. Or when the once dry streams gurgle with swift-flowing water. When winter gives way to spring and nature seems to experience its own resurrection.
The principle of transfiguration says nothing, no one and no situation, is “untransfigurable,” that the whole of creation, nature, waits expectantly for its transfiguration, when it will be released from its bondage and share in the glorious liberty of the children of God, when it will not be just dry inert matter but will be translucent with divine glory.
As I sat in the priory garden I thought of our desperate political situation in the light of this principle of transfiguration, and from that moment on, it has helped me to see with new eyes. I have witnessed time and again the improbable redemptions that are possible in our world.”
And how would Tutu say that these improbably redemptions come about? Tutu goes on to say:
“So many of us feel despair because of all the suffering in our world and in our lives…(But) God has not finished with God’s work. Creation is a work in progress. Evil is not going to have the last word. God has us as God’s collaborators, fellow-workers. And ultimately good—and those who strive for it—will prevail.
God actually needs us. We are God’s partners. When there is someone who is hungry, God wants to perform the miracle of feeding that person, but it won’t any longer be through manna falling from heaven. Normally, God can do nothing until we provide God with the means, the bread and the fish, to feed the hungry… God uses each of us to realize God’s dream.”
And so, people of God, on the Feast of Transfiguration be attentive to the vision of God’s transfigured world, be attentive to this in worship and prayer, in your daydreams and in the silence of your heart. Be attentive to its beauty as to a lamp shining in a dark place. For God means to transfigure the world through you, beautiful in your hope, beautiful in your love, beautiful in your work for justice and peace.
Works Consulted or Cited
Gregory Wolfe, Image, Editorial Statement: “The Transfiguration,” Issue #27: Summer, 2000. Online at http://www.imagejournal.org/back/027/editorial.asp
Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for our Time, 2004.
