A Vision of the Holy
Transfiguration Sunday
When I preached here last August I began the message with a question:
Why do we bother with church?
I went on to suggest that the better question might be, “Why does God want us to bother with church?” Because we might have all kinds of extraneous reasons for showing up here.
So, why does God want us to bother with church?
Well, here’s what I said last summer:
To help us align our stories with God’s story.
God wants us to align our story with their story.
Our faith, our confidence, our trust, is that God’s story, the story that God is living out through all of creation, is directed toward the fulfillment of love. God’s story is directed toward the fulfillment of love. And our intention should be to be a part of that.
We are invited into the faith/confidence/trust that God is continually at work cajoling, seducing, nudging all that is – including us – toward a culmination of divine love. We are bothering with church to more closely live out our stories as a part of that larger story of how divine love plays out in our world.
Today is Transfiguration Sunday. The Sunday that each year immediately precedes our observance of Lent, which, of course, is the 40 days that lead up to Easter.
In the gospel lesson we read an account of that event in which Jesus went up on the mountain with Peter, James, and John.
Jesus was transformed.
Shone like the sun.
Moses and Elijah appeared with him.
They heard the very voice of God saying of Jesus: This is my dearly loved child, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.
Fell on their faces, filled with awe. This was a revelation about the true nature of Jesus that was absolutely stunning.
That mountaintop experience is, in part, a vision of hope that will carry us, Jesus, and the three disciples through Lent’s valley of Jesus’ humiliation, suffering, and death.
Then we arrive at Easter with a renewed understanding of Jesus’ glory, tempered by our realization that that glory is shot through and through with that same humiliation, suffering, and death.
Life, death, abundant life. That is the threefold pattern of God’s story into which we are aligning. The Transfiguration is a foreshadowing – or better fore-spotlighting – of the abundant life.
As we move to the lesson from the 2nd Letter of Peter, I’d like us to note that as Peter is recounting the event of the transfiguration, he is emphasizing that this is not him simply passing on something he was told about. It was something he experienced, not some cleverly designed myth.
And now shift to us. For us the Transfiguration is something we have been told about. It is not a cleverly designed myth. But it is not something we have experienced.
So, finally, here’s the question for this morning: are we to simply rely on Peter’s experience of the holy and Peter’s testimony about it, or are we here to help each other cultivate our own capacity to encounter the holy?
Here’s my answer:
We are invited to be awakened and to experience/encounter the holy in our midst. To be awakened and assured that we are being drawn into the alignment of our stories with God’s story.
How does our life together awaken us to the power and reality and shining of God’s presence in our midst? How are we awakened into the abundant life of being aligned with God’s story?
Perhaps the first and most important step is to take it as a given that the presence of God is already with us and all around us. The love and mystery of the cosmos is always in the midst of us. The secret is to open our hearts to it.
When we show up here, let’s take our very showing up as an acknowledgment of, and a commitment to, the reality of God’s presence. Not in a far-off heaven, or in the experience of biblical characters, but as a reality in our lives.
Perhaps it is easier in this setting to pay attention to doing it, but the larger truth is that it is always available.
James Finley, a psychologist and teacher at the Center for Action & Contemplation, writes:
Jesus taught that we are completely drenched through and through with God’s love. In the parable of the prodigal son, in his miracles of healing, in his love for everyone he encountered, Jesus’ message rang out to one and all: a divine benevolence gives itself to you whole and complete in and as your very life. Your incremental degrees of awareness of this mystery are stages of realizing what is from all eternity the brimming-over fullness of your true and everlasting life.
That reality is always everywhere. The gap, if there is one – is our attention. We are being invited in each moment to pay attention so that its reality will rise in our hearts. When that reality arises in our hearts we become aware that we are standing on holy ground. Holy people on holy ground.
One of the ways that our participation in church helps us align our stories with God’s story is the way of prayer. Prayer, of course, has many forms and many styles. There are many varieties of prayer. But what they all have in common is an opening of the heart to God. When we pray, we are opening our hearts to God and whenever we open our hearts to God, we are at prayer.
Whatever we do with our hearts open to God is prayer.
So let us cultivate our capacity to be able to have prayerful conversations, prayerful interactions, and prayerful postures toward one another: conversations, interactions, postures that take place with open hearts and an intentional awareness of God’s presence. These prayerful encounters hold the space, open the space, for the Spirit to flow freely. Listening, speaking, and doing with hearts open to the presence of God.
Let me boldly say and hear this boldly as well:
You are holy. You are God’s temple. God lives in you.
The truth of this is not a conditional statement that if we’re good enough we will be holy. We are holy, because we were created in the image of God. Our very being makes us a participant in God’s being and goodness. And that makes us holy. Like it or not.
This place – Fairport UMC – is a place to be conscious/aware of our own and one another’s holiness. That’s what we’re living into together.
And we, here, together, are being invited to recognize ourselves, this place, this community, as an embassy of God, a sanctuary, a safe place. Not safe from disagreement, not safe from offense even, but safe for the love and mercy of God to do what it needs to do among us and through us to weave reconciliation when relationships fray or when we go astray.
So this is not about perfection or purity. It is, instead, about becoming a place where we can open our hearts without fear. A space for the Spirit to nurture us into healing and wholeness and more fully and joyfully aligned with God’s story.
And we – in this time and place in this small corner of the world, become an instance and an entry point of the Spirit. A place where we can dare to open our hearts to encounter God and to help one another experience God, encounter God in one another.
Encounter God in one another. Encounter God in one another. How might we do that.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you turn to the person next to you and look deeply into each other’s eyes. That would just be weird. Some of you might even decide that you needed to go out and see if you left your headlights on.
Instead, you might look somewhat surreptitiously, maybe even out of the corner of your eye. In some random moment here (or anywhere) glance at another person, but expectantly. Assume that there is a holy mystery in that person and see that person with reverence and compassion.
In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton tells of a revelation in downtown Louisville. As a monk living isolated in a monastery he had imagined a great gulf between himself and people living in the secular world. He writes of a day he was running errands for the monastery in Lousville,
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which God [‘s own self] became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Merton went on to write:
“…it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.”
Now maybe it’s too great a leap for us to look at everyone that way. Maybe we could start small and close to home and begin to do that here with one another and with those we encounter in our daily lives. Perhaps that might be a worthwhile Lenten intention.
Let us help one another practice opening our hearts to experience God everywhere in every moment. To live in the awareness of God’s awesome presence in one another and in all the world.
Peter says in our Bible reading this morning:
We have a most reliable prophetic word, and you would do well to pay attention to it, just as you would to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
The words and stories that we hear from the Bible are lamps to pay attention to – until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our own hearts. Until we become more practiced at recognizing the reality of God in ourselves and those around us.
So we are not about crafty myths. We are here to open our minds and hearts, Allow space. Hold space. Open space for the Spirit. Patience and gentleness and compassion are the important ingredients so that an atmosphere of trust emerges and we can have the courage to open our hearts to one another into ever closer alignment with God’s story.
Let us be a church that cultivates our capacity for prayerful conversations, prayerful interactions, and prayerful postures toward one another. These conversations, interactions, and postures hold the space, open the space, clear the space for the Spirit. And then the Spirit opens us to witness with our own eyes, the reality of God in each other and all the world.
Witness with our own eyes, the reality of God in the midst of us.
And then may we have confidence that God says to us, just as he said to Jesus in the hearing of Peter centuries ago:
This is – you are – my dearly beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.
Receive that word in trust, for it is in our trust of that word of blessing that holiness gains its fullness in us and in this place.
It is in that presence and vision of holiness that our stories are aligned with God’s story.
We are on holy ground. Here and everywhere. Whether we believe it or not. So we might as well believe it. And live it.