From the Pulpit:

If you had been a child in England , in the port city of Norwich in the thirteen hundreds, and if you had been walking home from market with your mother one drizzly day, your skinny arm heavy for carrying the cabbage for her while she carried the eggs and the potatoes, the hen and the cheese, she might have pulled you to the side of the cobblestone road and told you to bow your head and keep silence because a very odd and solemn procession was approaching.

You’d recognize the verger at the head, a scary man with a stick clearing people and animals out of the way of the line of people 
who walked towards the church. You’d recognize the crucifer and behind him a casket. You’d seen funeral processions before – people died all the time, more than ever during the plague -- but who was the young woman following the casket? The one dressed 
in a garment like a shroud? Why was she holding a prayer book and a rosary, her lips moving silently as the priest behind her recited the burial liturgy out here in the street where everyone stood aghast. Why did they pass by the graveyard and keep going to the church of St. Julian ?

Your mother tells you to hush, to save your questions for later after this most unusual ceremony is over. You watch the priest open the door to a side compartment of the church, sprinkle the woman with holy water, pronounce the words of committal that he usually says only when he begins to heap dirt over a coffin in the ground. He closes the door, bolts it, and watches as masons seal it shut with the woman inside.

Yes, you have indeed watched a funeral. The woman who would become known as Dame Julian has died to her life in the world, 
she has become an anchoress, and will spend the rest of her quite long life in that cell, with one window open to the church so she can receive communion and one open to the street so she can give spiritual counsel. She will never come out alive. It would have been a puzzling and startling sight to a child, and seems a peculiar and extreme commitment to us today.

We know of Dame Julian – we don’t know what her real name was – because when she was thirty years old she became desperately ill and had what we might call today a near death experience. She knew she was at the very precipice of death when 
the Lord Jesus appeared to her, more real than any human being she had ever seen, with his scars of suffering visible, his blood still running from his wrists, and his heart so overflowing with love that when Julian recovered she spent the rest of her life coming to 
an understanding of what that love meant to her and to all humankind.

Once her strength returned she wrote it all down, quick, in a frenzy, the way you do when you don’t want to forget a single detail. She had an urge to share this love with everyone, to let people know how immense and powerful and unimaginable it was. She wrote in English, which was most unusual. Everything was written in Latin then, and only by churchmen, not laywomen. Actually it was remarkable that she could write at all.

She spoke of herself in most humble terms as illiterate and simple minded, “lewd” is the archaic word she used, but it is clear that she could both read and write. She called her text her Shewings, and as she lived in her cell the Shewings lived in her and grew in her.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, a singular day in our liturgical year when we are perched between the two long seasons of Epiphany and Lent. It is a fine time for us to go to the mountaintop and take in the landscape from a distance that gives us some perspective on our spiritual lives, to stand with Peter and James and John – the same three whom Jesus will invite to wait with him in the Garden of Gethsemane on that last night – to accompany them up the mountain side to pray with Jesus.

In some ways they are Jesus’ Larry, Curley, and Moe. He loves them with a deep and true love in spite of the fact that he can pretty much count on them to miss the point of whatever he is trying to reveal to them, and they don’t let him down on this day. Or they do, whichever way we see it. As they watch him praying, they notice that he’s begun to shine. How odd. His face is beginning to glow and his robes are turning bright with light. And then they see two other men, and they recognize them at once as Moses and Elijah.

You can practically see them begin to dance around. Holy Moly, guys. Can you believe this? Way cool. We’ve got to build some shacks so we can hang out here with Moses and Elijah and Jesus! It was all about them, you know—Peter, James, and John --
the way we want to brush up against somebody who has brushed up against a celebrity. (The way I once said I had lunch with Lyle Lovett because he was sitting in a far corner at the Hyde Park Grill while my friend Rhoda and I ate French fries.) God bless them, these guys, so wound up in their own egos that they can’t comprehend what is before their eyes, until it is gone, lost in fog, and then the voice of God himself speaks so they can’t avoid the meaning any longer. This is my son, my beloved, listen to him. Listen to him. Listen.

I started to say we’ve all had a moment like that when somebody shakes us and makes us realize that we’ve been meandering way down the road to misunderstanding what was right before our eyes.But, no, we haven’t all had a moment like that, not with Jesus himself shining so bright it hurts our eyes and God straightening us out in a booming voice. Darn it. Listen to him! But still, we can stand in their shoes and imagine how they felt. It had to be sheer awe. Their egos had to have shriveled up to the size of a pea,
if only for a moment.

What do you do with such an experience? How do you take it down the mountain with you, back into the street where the rest
of the disciples have been trying unsuccessfully to heal a young boy with seizures, back into the room where they’ll gather at night with a sputtering oil lamp and a jug of wine? How do you tell them? You don’t. You can’t. It’s too big to get your mind around
let alone get across to them what it was like.

Once Dame Julian had written down the short text of her Shewings she got to work. Her work was prayer. Her work was study of scripture. Her work was listening with compassion and agony as heretics were burned at the stake just out of her sight in the town square, as corpses were picked up on the curb every morning during the Great Plague. Her work was offering spiritual direction
to people who came to her window with deep fears and longings and staggering questions and heartfelt loss. Her work was receiving the body and blood of Christ, the Christ who had been present to her in his body and blood. Her work was to be Christ to the world even though she had died to the world. We are told she had a cat, so I imagine her work also included feeding and petting her cat.

And as she did her work, over the course of the next twenty years she realized that she had understood her vision of the Lord Jesus only in the most superficial way, and so for twenty years she rewrote what she had written, and in the living and the pondering,
the listening, the praying, the feeding, the petting, the advising and the receiving – in the serving, she came to understand not only
what Jesus had said but who Jesus was.

She came to understand that in Christ not only did God give us an example of how to live in the knowledge of God’s love, but that Jesus was that love embodied. And that by his grace – not by our work but by his grace -- we may become that love embodied
as we live it out in our lives of service.

Yes, we do it imperfectly. We are fairly pitiful on most days, just as Peter, James, and John were -- even though they were wise enough to keep to themselves the stunning revelation of their mountaintop experience until they let it get incorporated into their lives
 -- just as they got back to the work of healing, of listening, of following.  And all along they fell short again and again. Over and over again they missed the point, but they didn’t come racing down the mountain with egos inflated.

No, they let the story of what had happened work in their lives, and often we have to do that, too. We have to trust that if we live into the work we have been given to do, if we take up our cross and follow, if we listen with compassion, if we share our earnings,
if we take time to pray, if we respond to anger with kindness, if we look into the eyes of the other and see the eyes of our Lord Jesus, maybe, just maybe in time we’ll begin to comprehend the great story we are part of, and in Dame Julian’s most famous words, we’ll understand God’s promise that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

Amen.