From the Pulpit:

 
                                                                         If you are my disciple ...
  

A couple of years ago I spent the first week of Lent at a monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Several friends of mine had been there before me so I had some idea what to expect and I was very much looking forward to the deep silence, the spiritual direction of one of the brothers, and time to read and sleep and walk along the Charles River. I was aware that the brothers worship several times a day, but I had no idea that it would be the daily offices, Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer and Compline, that would be the most meaningful element of the monastic experience.

All of these liturgies have been familiar to me since my childhood. In the Episcopal Church I grew up in Morning Prayer was what we did three Sundays a month. At my school we ended our Friday afternoons with a version of Evening Prayer. But I had never experienced the structure of an entire week in which it was the offices, in which the major portion consisted of chanting the Psaltar, that provided the skeleton to support the day, even more so than mealtimes, which seem to be how most of our days are shaped. Not only did the offices give structure to the days, they gave meaning to time itself.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration, the unique hinge day between the two lengthy seasons of Epiphany and Lent. You’ve heard me speak before of liminal spaces, liminal times. In Latin, limina is literally a threshold, the maybe five or six inches taken up by the doorway itself in which we are neither in the room we are leaving  nor the one we are entering. It is a no-man’s-land in time in which anything might happen. Today we are poised between the energy of the Feast of the Incarnation and the Feast of the Resurrection, the two great events that define us as Christians. The beginning of our story – Christmas --  and the real beginning of our story -- Easter.

We know today’s story well, how six days after Peter blurts out the truth that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, Jesus invites him and James and John to go up on the mountain with him. Up on that mountain, suddenly Jesus is transfigured. What they see is the truth of what Peter said. Jesus is no longer the itinerant preacher and healer, covered with dust and sweat from walking miles on country roads, but he shines with the God-light  that can only come from heaven, and as if that were not enough Moses and Elijah are there to back him up as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

It is all too much, of course. How on earth could one respond sensibly to such a vision? The disciples are startled, just as every year this story startles us with its illogic. And of course it is Peter who blurts again. We’ve got to hang onto this. We’ve got to stay here forever. Quick. Let’s build houses. Let’s concretize this moment, let’s don’t let it get away from us.

But of course, it is gone, just like that, swathed in a dense cloud out of which a voice, God’s own voice, speaks simply: This is my son, the beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him.

                       Listen. Listen when he says, Get up and do not be afraid. Tell no one.

Every year this story finds me in a different place. I have twelve versions of my Transfiguration sermon on my computer, and they don’t look all that much alike. Every year this story has a fresh message for me, not necessarily one I haven’t heard before or anything I’ve never said before, but something that I truly believe God needs me to hear this day. Or that God needs us to hear as a community. Apparently I need my socks knocked off at least once a year by something that is utterly inexplicable. And so this year what I’m so aware of is that it is precisely these biblical passages that I have to preach year in, year out, that, frankly, seem to come around faster and faster…it is exactly the oh-so-predictable,  the is-it-really-time-to-preach-this-again ones that give shape and meaning to all the stories that fill the gaps.

Paula D’Arcy is a woman who writes and speaks about the deeply spiritual life. Her own story is rich, painful, and glorious. She has tremendous wisdom, which she shares generously. In some talks I listened to recently she speaks
about how important it is to hold life gently, to cherish every moment for the fragile thing it is, belonging to God and
not to us. And that as we learn to hold gently everything we love and want to cling to, that is how we learn to love
God above all else.

Up on this hill, we are very aware of the fact that change is the norm. What doesn’t change dies. That doesn’t mean that all change is necessarily good. Sometimes we learn that it is not, that we have made a mistake, but fortunately few mistakes are fatal and we learn from them. One spiritual director once told me, Just go out there and fail because you’ll never soar if you are afraid of falling.

But many changes are necessitated by health and growth, even if what we are forced to give up causes us sadness and loss. We watch the weather change hour by hour, the seasons, as right now the tiniest green leaves are beginning to peek out, the doves are cooing their love songs, the bees thronging to our hummingbird feeder. I, personally, mourn our short winters because I know how long the summer will be once it sets in.

Today is the last day of the worship schedule that has been the shape of how we gather for praise, formation, and fellowship for many, many years. We’re about to try something new, responding the best we know how to the fertile work God has been doing among us. Please pray with me that this change flourishes. Because I really try to listen with all my might to what God is saying to this church. He said to the stunned disciples on the mountainside: This is my son, my beloved. Listen to him. If we do nothing but listen to Jesus, I think we are doing the work God made us to do.

And what does Jesus say to Peter…yes, the same Peter who stupidly suggests getting some two by fours and plywood and nail guns and hammering together cabins to tether to earth  people he knows full well live in heaven… yes, that same Peter…Jesus says, Do you love me? Yes, Lord, I love you. Yes? Then feed my sheep. Feeding sheep is costly.
Listening to Jesus is costly. Following him is costly. We can’t do it by clinging to what we want to keep for ourselves.

Transfiguration is a strange word. If you read or saw Harry Potter, you know that in transfiguration class the young wizards learned to turn teacups into rats, flowers into candlesticks. They turned one object into another kind of object. That is emphatically not what is happening to Jesus. In this event he is being revealed as who he truly is, the Son of God,
in whom God is well pleased, and to whom we are to listen. But it is not only the true nature of Jesus that is being revealed. It is the true nature of the disciples. And we are the disciples.

I want us to digress for a minute and go back to the scene on the bank of the river when John had just baptized Jesus. Nearly the same words were spoken by God, and no sooner were they spoken than the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness to be tested by Satan, to learn what it meant to be the Son of God. Satan puts the three tests before him, prefacing each with the words, If you are the Son of God…I think that just about the same thing is happening here.
Peter had blurted out the truth, You are the Messiah of God, and next thing he knows he is up on that mountain being tested, learning just how much freight those words hold and what difference they make to him and the other disciples, including us.

What I hear echoing in my ears this morning is an invitation and a challenge. I imagine standing before this Jesus who is so incandescent that no words are adequate for Matthew to use to describe it. I imagine all of us standing before this Jesus in stunned silence and hearing him say, with a voice as full of tenderness as it is of power, If you are my disciple…and he waits. He waits and doesn’t fill in the stunning silence because he knows we have been listening to him. He doesn’t mean In case you are my disciple…He means, Given that you are my disciple…

He knows we have taken our initial foolhardy steps on this path with not the faintest idea what we were getting into, but now we are beginning to get it. Reality is setting in. Suddenly we know that this is the way to the cross. If you are my disciples…We’ll go together back down this mountain and tell no one. And we’ll keep walking through the towns, we’ll go among Jews and Gentiles and we’ll keep healing them, because they are hurting. And we’ll keep teaching them, because they are ignorant. And we’ll keep freeing them from demons, because this world is full of demons. And every step we take is a step closer to death. But every step we take is closer to Resurrection.

Resurrection is why we are Christians. If we think that every loss is the end of the world, then we are bereft of Christian hope. If we are his disciples we’ll keep his promises close to our hearts especially when we cannot imagine what Resurrection will look like. We will go back down off our mountainside not to tell the world how cool it is that we, because we are so cool, have seen the Transfiguration, that we, because we are so special, stood this close to Moses and Elijah and heard the voice of God himself, no, but to get back to work. To feed the sheep, to tend to the lambs, to do the work God has transfigured us to do, and to trust that Resurrection is out there beyond our losses because that is what Jesus promised us, and Jesus keeps his promises.
Every single time.
For ever and ever.

Amen.