Last Sunday of Epiphany, Year B
“The Transfiguration” February 11, 2024 2 Kings 2:1-12 Ps. 50:1-6 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9 This is the last Sunday after Epiphany. We have left behind the light of the Christmas Star. The Wise Men have returned to their home country. Mary and Joseph have long ago rescued the Christ child by fleeing to Egypt, and during the past few Sundays we have experienced the grown-up Jesus, calling His disciples and teaching. We are on the verge of Lent, a darker time in our church calendar, and the lights are already being dimmed. In our worship space the Christmas trees have been packed away and the Alleluias have been buried. But as we balance on this particular precipice of the church year and descend into the shadowlands of Lent, there is a burst of blinding light,. In our texts today, the office of prophetic power from a legendary prophet of Israel, to another no less legendary—Elijah to Elisha—is accompanied by the parting of the River Jordan, a chariot of fire with horses of fire, and a “whirlwind into heaven.” Then a Psalm about God who reveals his glory accompanied by consuming flame and a raging storm, and a letter from St. Paul telling us of “the light of the Gospel” “shining out of the darkness.” Finally, the Gospel tells the dramatic story of Jesus’ “transfiguration”, in which His whole being becomes blinding white light as Elijah and Moses walk about. In my observation of clergy I have known over the years, it seems that two Sundays that the sermon was often consigned to an assistant, a student/postulant, or a guest preacher, were the Sundays featuring the Trinity or the Transfiguration. Preachers of mainline denominations don’t like texts they can’t explain or make a metaphor out of. I think that applies to most people. We are, after all, even those who immersed in the Christian faith, modern people. We don’t have much truck with the supernatural. We seek meaning in the experiences of our lives, but the experiences need to be located in logic, i.e. framed by the natural or the explainable: something which passes muster as scientific method. In that, we who are “believers,” share the same suppositions of the large majority of others in our 21st century world—at least in the Western World—when it comes to the Bible. If we can’t “make sense” of a story or event in the stories and teachings of our faith, by “common sense”, then that story or event isn’t true and we dismiss it as having any relevance for our daily lives. On the other side of the same coin, the fundamentalists, who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, believe that every story is historically and scientifically “true” because they have declared it so. “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” The Bible becomes “like a textbook or the instruction book that comes with a cordless drill.” (Mike Cosper 15) There is no room for interpretation or imagination. The “mighty works of God” are limited to what they look like on their surface, and their interpretation is limited to the bias and limited knowledge of the interpreter. (And NOBODY has unlimited knowledge!) Mystery is shut out. Intuition and experience are nullified. Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith has said, “No one is more modern than a fundamentalist.” (Cosper, p. 15) Now there are some of us who like to think that we are more “enlightened” than the fundamentalists, or the “Biblical technicians” among our liberal brothers and sisters, who use the tools of ancient language and historical, including archeological, research to identify the roots and cultural backgrounds of Biblical stories, to ferret out how much of a story is verifiably true by today’s definitions, while dismissing the “accretion” of interpretation of centuries of people who have found the courage to live, and even to die, in the reading of the stories and reinterpreting them into the events of their lives. This kind of research is valuable to us as we attempt to draw parallels between say, politics in ancient Israel, or daily life in first century Corinth, to the issues of our lives today. However, Scripture often gets taken apart, like a clockmaker disassembling a clock, and once it gets disassembled doesn’t tell time anymore! So we(“enlightened” ones) take a literary approach: What does the story mean? How does it unfold? How is an individual story part of the whole story the Bible tries to tell? We use our imaginations and retell stories in modern narrative, or make metaphors, so that the stormy sea that Peter walked on is a story about our chaotic lives, and Peter’s walk is our trust in God in the midst of our storm (i.e. life!). This is certainly where l have come to in trying to grapple, both intellectually and prayerfully, as a person, pastor, and preacher, with the Bible. It avoids seeing the Bible as a rigid book of instruction, or as a clock to be parted out or a corpse to be dissected. This approach honors the Bible as a living, breathing entity, that I can see replicated in my life and in the lives of others. It keeps the Biblical stories on a level with something I can understand and talk about with some degree of logic, albeit logic infused with imagination! If you don’t use this methodology on reading and understanding Scripture already, I highly recommend it. As bit of wisdom from the community of black preachers says, “The Bible is like condensed milk. You just need to add the water of imagination and humor!” However, what this approach lacks is the embrace of mystery. There are some stories that resist such playful or creative interpretation. Stories like our Old Testament reading today, about a prophet handing off a “double share” of his God-given power to another prophet and coming to the end of his service, and his life, not by dying, but by being taken up in a whirlwind, escorted by a chariot of fire, and horses of fire. Or the Transfiguration story, in which Jesus takes aside three of his disciples out of the daily grind of teaching and is shot through with light, a blinding light, that turn Jesus’ clothing pure bright white, while God speaks—audibly and unmistakably. Then there is the Psalm that calls people to worship a God of “consuming flame” and “a raging storm.” There are no scientific or sensible explanations here. They are out of the realm of everyday life and experience. You can’t make them into metaphors. Nor should we even try. For centuries, millennia, even, “people lived in a Cosmos that was full of mystery, a place where human knowledge had its limits and an unseen spiritual realm was constantly at work, shaping their everyday lives.” (Cosper p. 11) They lived in an “enchanted” world. “In our modern world we have tried to trade mystery for certainty, a certainty born of the delusion that we can gain understanding of things we don’t understand through methods we can control.” Because of the world we are immersed in, we unconsciously “buy” the myth that we have to prove what we believe. It becomes a world in which cynicism and pragmatism rule, and wonder and awe are for children. The world has become disenchanted, and in their disenchantment, people believe that they are alone, that it is just them against the universe, and the universe is not their friend. People long to be enchanted, to know that there is more to a life of meaning than that which can be proved or which makes sense. That there is “truth” that cannot be proved by scientific analysis or logic. That the Good will ultimately prevail. Bishop Skelton, the bishop that gave the keynote address to the convocation of the Society of Catholic Priests held here at St. Mary’s last year, said that, as Christians, “our faith is an enchanted faith.” It is. Every worship service we have here, especially the High Masses, gives thanks to, and invokes, a God that encompasses the cosmos, and yet is as close to us as our breathing: A wild God of fire and whirlwind and blinding, uncreated light; a God of consuming flame and raging storm, represented by incense, song, and organ. A God celebrated in word and sacrament as the God of steadfast and abundant love that will not let us go. A God whose glory is testified by “the heavens and the earth” in their very existence, and yet who became as one of us in Jesus, whose glory shone in the self-sacrificial love of a terrible crucifixion; that enchanted all pain and suffering and unjust power, putting an end to their triumph over us in the glory of the Resurrection. This makes no sense to a cynical world, but it is TRUE! We have been having conversations lately about how we bring more people to join us in this experience of enchanted worship. As I proffered a few weeks ago, the question is not so much how, but why?. St. Paul pointed a way forward in the letter addressed to the Church at Corinth in the First Century and read to us at 13th and Holmes in the 21st Century. “The god of this world (i.e. the glorification of cynicism and the need to provide a logical explanation for everything?) “has blinded the minds” of people “to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of God, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.” (The same God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”) “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4:3-6) God of fire and light, enchant us with your love and glory and through us enchant those who long for enchantment. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen +++ Much of my thinking on the subject of this sermon has been clarified by a book I have recently read: Recapturing the Wonder, Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World, by Mike Cosper. IVP Books, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2017. Statements in quotes are statements, or paraphrases, from this book. The conclusions I have drawn are mine alone. --The Rev. Larry A. Parrish February 11, 2024 Leave a Reply. |
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St. Mary's is a parish of the Diocese of West Missouri, The Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion.
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