Sermons
Next before Lent
There is a late fourth century Christian text describing a pilgrimage to Jerusalem during which the pilgrims take part in glorious liturgies carried out with solemnity and with generous use of incense and bells and music. The pilgrims were astounded and describe feeling as if they were entering into the glory of God, of no longer knowing whether they were on earth or in heaven. The glory of God was revealed to them through the liturgy of the church. I have a friend who is a monk who was so struck by this story that he decided to remove his watch every time he celebrated Mass as a little sign that he was, through the celebration of the Holy Mysteries, gaining a foretaste of the glory of the heavenly kingdom. Unfortunately, the third time he did this somebody stole his watch which reminded him quite forcibly that he was carrying out his ministry in this world and not the next.
Nevertheless, encountering the glory of God is exactly what we are about when we come to the altar, when we enter again into the glory revealed in the death and resurrection of Christ. This is no memorial meal, this is the very tangible foretaste of the heavenly banquet, a glimpse into the glory of God. Which is, of course why we don’t come to the altar casually, it is why we always make a confession at the start of the service, it is why we make offerings of fine music, why we use fine materials, silver and gold, incense, why we process into the holy place rather than ambling in. We are about something glorious here, not something mundane.
The transfiguration of our Lord before his entering into the path of suffering is also a disclosure of the glory of God. Like the pilgrims at Mass, the disciples are briefly uncertain whether they are standing on this earth or not, they are briefly aware of the glory of God. They had learned at Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ that the Messiah would suffer, that his disciples would share in this suffering and that their suffering would have to be seen against the backdrop of ultimate and certain glory and at the Transfiguration they receive a vision of that glory, they are granted a glimpse of the glory of God and divine special effects are on display, and these are both supernatural and scriptural effects, reminding Luke’s readers of previous displays of divine revelation, previous divine show-pieces - so there is the favoured place of encounter with God the mountain: Moses ascended mount Sinai and Elijah ascended Mount Horeb for the people to intercede with God, to be given access to the holy. And there is the cloud, a recurring symbol of God’s presence in the Hebrew scriptures, the shekinah or glory of God, and there is the divine voice confirming the authority and identity of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him’, and there is the appearance of the prophetic figures from the past, Moses and Elijah, symbolizing perhaps the Law and the prophets who together point to the chosen one Jesus, the beloved son, the climax of Israel’s history.
The trouble with glory, though, is that it cannot be bottled, or perhaps even described, and Peter’s rushed question to Jesus to build tabernacles to contain the glorious figures indicates a misunderstanding of the ‘whatness’ of glory. It is as if Peter wishes to capture and keep this experience, he wants to contain the event, put boundaries around the holy, box in the glory. He has failed to realise that we are not to control the holy, but to respond to it.
And for Jesus himself this must have been a moment of crisis, that is a moment of decision. He has ascended to the holy mountain to prepare for the journey that lies before him, the journey that leads to the cross. And the action of Jesus in this story is very significant, it is what is occurring at the still centre of the action but you might almost miss it in the story, at the still centre of all the action Jesus is praying. However the disciples understood what was going on in and through Jesus’ prayer it is that prayer, the continual offering which affirms the unity between father and son in action and will, that is at the heart of the action.
And focussing on the action of prayer allows us to bring down from the mountain the glorious vision, it allows and demands that we see the glory revealed through the mountain, the voice, and the cloud, all around us. What is demanded of us is that we carry the light and the image with us if we hope to see the world transfigured, to see people around us transfigured, to see the possibility of God’s glory shining in places where there seems to be a total absence of special effects, no mountain, no divine voice, no enveloping and mysterious cloud of presence.
My own experience of priestly ministry is of encountering that transfiguration and glory very often in the most mundane, even squalid of environments, the places that seem quite denuded of special effects, the reality of the death bed, the horrendous effects of disease and of addiction, the varied and multiple tragedies of everyday life, often in those places glimpses of glory are all around and often in those places the chance to see the world transfigured is nearby.
The great Anglican priest and poet, George Herbert, had a great sense of the transfigured reality which is given to us when we acknowledge God’s presence in the everyday and he made a phrase to describe it; he called it ‘Heaven in ordinary’. And it is an amusing little story, and very fitting, that we don’t have any of George Herbert’s sermon’s, because Mrs Herbert, sensible woman, used her husbands scripts for lining her pie-dish, how fitting a little tale that is for the poet and priest who speaks of seeing heaven in ordinary, the mundane transfigured, the vision granted on the mountain spread across the face of God’s earth and universe. We should look out for heaven in ordinary every day of our Christian lives for when we see heaven in ordinary we see the world not as some random planet which has spawned intelligent life for no reason, but as the world God has created and loves and wishes to see transfigured. At the still centre of the scene of the Transfiguration is the image of Jesus at prayer,
let us take that image with us into his world and see it anew, the transfiguration is all around you, you need only open your eyes to the glory.